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Despite the interest The Dark Knight has evoked on the left and across the spectrum, I think it's a step backward into the cultural morass we've been hoping to escape.
For me, the film was only interesting when Heath Ledger or Maggie Gyllanhaal were on screen--two wonderful performances. Ledger will probably live in my memory forever--such a frail little man making the whole city turn upside down. Ledger didn't make the Joker larger than life, as Nicholson did. He seemed smaller and more vulnerable than anyone else, well acquainted with pain and eager to inflict it on others. After that performance, no wonder Ledger had trouble sleeping. The aura of his death hangs over his performance and the movie, but the performance would have been just as good, though slightly different, slightly less autobiographical and more constructed-seeming, if he had lived. The part was well written too, until the ending, when the character explained his nihilism in too much detail. I think Gyllanhaal gave the film's overlooked performance, savvy, charming, and touching in a part that could have been a throwaway--just another high-paying, no-effort job for a name actress reaching a certain age. But she made it more. In a way, her subjectivity held the movie together.
But the rest was a downer. All that ambivalence about things one shouldn't be ambivalent about--torture, surveillance, the rule of law. And the ending, stressing the need to lie to the people for their own good. Doesn't that sound like what we've had for the last eight years? Obama is preaching transparency, whereas McCain is selling lies. So many, he can't even keep them straight anymore--e.g., the football team he claims to have named in lieu of real soldiers when he was being interrogated. So many of the dynamics of this film are straight from the rightist playbook--the endorsement of national lies, the belief (as Rosenberg recently said) that a great nation can only be destroyed from within (Jews, Communists, gays, and Gypsies in Nazi Germany, Com symps and gays in Cold War America, Islamofascists now, ethnically marked mobsters in this film), the Girardian desire to sacrifice the riff-raff in order to strengthen the communal ties of the rest, the positing of a condition of perpetual cultural crisis.
This is self-evidently a movie from a very troubled country--confused, guilt-feeling, and using reactionary frames to understand itself and face the future. I think it's the opposite of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, or Greengrass's The Bourne Ultimatum, which may have been ham-handed (Spielberg) but had their hearts in the right place. The Dark Knight is ambivalent about Fascism. I know that it may play powerfully as a nightmare, but I think ultimately it is part of the problem, not the solution. It's sort of a bullshit diagnosis in the spirit of Giuliani. Stay afraid, it says. You're cornered, but you're dangerous and crazy enough to survive. Isn't that McCain's "bomb bomb bomb Iran" song, his idea of a hundred year war?
I see this film as continuous with a torture imaginary that arose after 9/11 and includes the TV show 24 and such film series as The Saw and Hostel. We want to see blood flow--theirs (consciously) but our own too. We talk about "Islamofascism," but that peculiar frame is a projection of our own angry feelings, our unconscious yearning for Judeo-Christian Fascism, the terror we ourselves wish to instill in others. This movie is shock and awe brought into the cineplex.
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