The Dark Knight: Tomatometer 94%

[Zarathustra]

For Nolan, the villains are not wrong to believe that people are corruptible. They are wrong to believe that people are past redemption.
... [Nolan] works in shadows; he sees the world for all its darkness and duality. But he fights to show us the rich, resonating strains of worth that run through our Gotham.

Not bad. But if I were Nolan, I'd phrase it like this: Joker thinks we're fundamentally evil, that our "goodness" is merely an illusion that only takes the right stimulus to reveal. He misses the fact that we are redeemable because he mistakenly believes that the opposite of this situation is Absolute Good. The Joker is dealing in Absolutes where the middle ground is an illusion. He doesn't really believe in moral ambiguity (the middle ground). The Joker is dealing with a strawman argument, because he thinks that Batman (and most everyone else) believes in Absolute Good, and all he has to do in order to show them their error is to show people being evil.

I'm not sure if Nolan's own interpretation is that complex, but if so, then I'll concede the depth which you're claiming is in there.

The tyranny is Batman himself, a vigilante who violates every rule in the book in order to protect Gotham from Joker's limitless chaos. Some choices still stain the hands even when there are no other ready options.

I'm having a hard time thinking of Batman as "tyranny." He doesn't dictate the rules, he merely violates them. I like the Team America analysis of him better. He's a pragmatist, rather than an idealist. That doesn't mean that he doesn't have ideals/values, just that he doesn't let contradiction or simplistic idealism stop him from doing something effective.

As I said ... in the Team America interpretation, the ferry scene makes more sense to me and I can see some worth in it. However, if the choice is between the unambiguous "humans are fundamentally corruptible" (Joker's view) or "humans are basically good," (naive, idealistic) on the one hand, and total moral ambiguity on the other, then I think we're talking about a false choice and the ferry scene fails. However, if the point is that absolute Good and Evil are too simplistic, and yet we can still be unambiguously good (little "g-"), then it's a success.

I think we can still be a force for good, unambiguously, by violating the rules and being dicks. In other words, there are still values in the absence of absolute Good and Evil. Nihilism isn't the opposite of absolutism, it's just another form of absolutism. There is a middle ground where we can find a meaning, a human meaning. And that's no illusion, nor is it ambiguous. It's just messy.

If Nolan is saying that, then I'll give him credit for being profound and deep, and I simply missed it until now. If not, then I'll take all that credit for myself, and admit it's merely my own view.

I do apologize for being such a dick about it a year ago.

Eh, better than being an asshole or a pussy about it.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

I guess the crux of it comes down to whether the questions posed by the ferry sequence resonate with you or not (and I'm glad to see that perhaps they do, Z, as I've always thought of you as someone with soul and courage). To me it resonates as an existential thought experiment in ethics (much in the way you and the essayist describe), less a pledge by the director that humans are worth saving (or, more properly, that they can be construed that way existentially) than a mirror that allows us to question our own reflection -- a view that ought to leave us both haunted and heartened by the cowardice and courage an honest inventory sees there. Yeah, humanity might not be essentially courageous and good, but then again it isn't essentially craven and evil either. Not that that is the only configuration of those pairs possible, as the sequence amply demonstrates. So we -- and Batman -- can hope if we choose to.

Regarding the tyranny of Batman, I think you may be guilty of dualism yourself as you appear to presume that tyrannical acts are gratuitous or unnecessary in their nature (or perhaps conversely that they cannot be called tyranny if they are necessary acts). I think one of the main motifs of TDK is to dispute that things are ever that easy or clear cut.

PS Here's a lengthy (and admiring) analysis by a fellow screenwriter, no less. I'm not citing this as authority or anything, but I think anyone interested in analyzing the film will find this very detailed (and lengthy) analysis useful.

www.comicsbeat.com/2010/08/15/the-alcot ... rk-knight/

(I can't resist quoting the section about the ferries, even if I don't totally agree with it.)

About those ferries: setting aside any possible tricks up the Joker’s sleeve (ie, each ferry blowing itself up instead of the other), to me the morality of the situation breaks down like this: the “good” Gothamites and the “bad” Gothamites have been given the opportunity to kill each other, and who will pull the trigger? The “good” Gothamites (represented by Average Guy on the “good” ferry) all want the “bad” Gothamites dead, but they don’t have the strength of will to actually kill (which is why they need a justice system). The “bad” Gothamites, meanwhile, have killed, they’ve faced that choice and know what it means. (“Killing is making a choice,” says the Joker to Batman in the interrogation room, and the reverse is also true — when people in power make a choice (and everyone is a person in power), they are, on some level, choosing who will live and who will die. Bruce’s idealism and the Joker’s nihilism meet — half-way — in the person of Two-Face.) In the end, the “good” Gothamites don’t have the will to defend themselves (which is why they need Batman), but the “bad” Gothamites have the strength to not kill, which calls all the way back to what the bank manager says to the Joker at the end of the heist sequence — criminals in Gotham used to have honor and respect, and here we see those qualities in action. It’s not just that Big Scary-Looking Convict conveniently grows a soul when faced with the opportunity of cold-blooded murder, it’s that he, and not the “good” Gothamites, and not the National Guardsman holding the detonator, has killed, and thus understands the strength it takes to have that will — and refuse to act on it. When Big Scary-Looking Convict throws his detonator out the window, he is risking his life but saving his soul, but when Average Guy gingerly puts his detonator back in its box, he’s admitting that it is not the responsibility of a citizen to mete out justice (the breaking of which rule is what sets the narrative of The Dark Knight into motion to begin with).

Another good one:

www.musingsonmind.org/featured/Kim_Joker

So back to the life-and-death situation we first considered. As it turns out, you can breathe a sigh of relief—no one dies in this particular scene. In the end, the passengers in each ferry choose to risk their own lives instead of killing the passengers in the other, and Batman saves the day as usual so that the Joker can't detonate the bombs. However, the point of this article, if you remember, was to explore the reasons for why you breathed that sigh of relief.

Why do the scenes depicting the final decisions of the passengers evoke feelings of triumph—such as when the convict grabs the detonator from the ferry captain's hands and dramatically throws it out the window? Why do we cheer the willingness of our fellow humans—whether average citizen or alleged criminal—to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others, for a greater good?

A reasonable Kantian may argue that setting off the other bomb would be wrongly treating those on the other ferry merely as a means to one's own survival. Our universal rationality, he would say, prohibits us from giving in to the crude instinct of self-preservation. On the other hand, an emotional Humean may counter that our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of those in the other boat makes us consider self-sacrifice. Empathy may have evolved as anything from the sole motivator for increasing genetic fitness or as more of a basic building block for human morality. Or finally, a third party might chime in, defending a Rawlsian point of view, and claim that moral actions are "cold" reactions to an evolved set of moral principles (M. Hauser, personal communication, February 22, 2009).

Despite the undeniable ambiguity of morality, evolutionary theory has come a long way in attempting to explain its origins and development. However, it is also just getting started. Hauser points out that the evolutionary approach to morality is being taken more seriously and has become a hot topic as "over the last few years…several different disciplines have cross-fertilized" to find themselves debating over converging issues in the moral domain. "Interesting theories and novel methods," among those the ones discussed above, have kept the subject at the forefront of modern scientific discourse.