The Dark Knight: Chaos, Order, and the Problem of Vigilante Justice

The explosion-filled summer action flick and the comic book-turned-blockbuster are models that too often lead to look-alike films filled with predictable plotlines and rife with tired clichés. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But The Dark Knight, the most anticipated movie of the year and the newest installment in the Batman saga, manages to break this mold and weave all the glitz and extravagance demanded by the genre together with themes worthy of serious thought.

(Warning: major spoilers ahead)

Any discussion of The Dark Knight would be incomplete without a contemplation of the chief villain, Heath Ledger’s Joker. The Joker, of course, is a representation of chaos, and chaos in its purest form. The visually disturbing scars and makeup and the spine-tingling tone of his voice practically beg for a foray into the Joker’s past. But to construct such a story would bring understanding and order to a character that strives primarily to deprive us of both, and so instead we hear the Joker give several conflicting accounts of his downfall, none of which come across as a stronger candidate for the truth than the others.

Chaos abounds even when he is locked up. His fingerprints are unidentifiable, and even his clothes lack labels from which we could extrapolate even a far-fetched explanatory narrative. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you…stranger” says the Joker, adopting a Nietzschean dictum to fit a twisted brand of nihilism that is so deeply ingrained in him that he sets his own piles of money aflame. As Alfred tells us, the Joker is not motivated by any external force; he simply wants to watch the world burn.

Interestingly enough, the foil for the Joker is not so much Batman as it is Harvey Dent, Gotham’s hard-hitting District Attorney. Dent, by relentlessly prosecuting criminals and throwing his personal safety to the wind, becomes the public face of safety and social order. For all the failings of the mob-infiltrated police bureaucracy around him, Dent presses on in pursuit of justice and in defense of the common good.

Though distressed by Dent’s relationship with his beloved Rachel, Bruce Wayne recognizes the particular quality in Dent that is paramount to the achievement of peace for Gotham. As the “White Knight” in the eyes of the citizens, Dent can bring about something that the vigilante Batman never can – a Gotham that accepts the justice that Batman has been fighting for all along.

But Harvey Dent is also a flawed character. Thanks to one of the Joker’s cruel games, Dent finds himself communicating with his love Rachel while both are in remote warehouses about to be blown to smithereens. Knowing that Batman only has time to save one of them, Dent assumes that Rachel will be the one spared. But Batman has been given the wrong address for each victim, and so it is Dent that survives. In the moments before Rachel dies, Dent tells her that everything will be alright.

This lie and the episode surrounding it haunt him for the rest of the movie, leading him to conclude that his fight for justice was meaningless and futile, as it was always subject to chance. Dent cannot accept the presence of tragedy in the world, and so instead he accepts the Joker’s chaos as a natural component of life. Dent, then, becomes a living representation of Machiavelli’s conception of Fortuna. As Two-Face, Dent’s will is only half in control.

Seeking revenge upon Police Commissioner Gordon, whom he blames for Rachel’s death, Two-Face captures the Gordon family and holds a gun to the head of Gordon’s son, demanding that Gordon tell his son that everything will be alright. Gordon complies, implicitly acknowledging what Two-Face cannot: there is virtue in what Edmund Burke called pleasing illusions. Sometimes, an inspiring and well-intentioned half truth is better than the full story. Thus, when Batman comes to the rescue and Two-Face is presumably killed, Batman and Gordon decide that Gotham must never know the true fate of Harvey Dent. To tell the truth in this case would be to destroy the hope that the city’s citizens had for establishing peace. To maintain the public faith in public officials and thereby maintain social order, Gordon eulogizes Dent as though he died a brave and just man. The now falsified image of Harvey Dent as a noble hero is, as Burke would say, “necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature.”

But whither Batman? He is, as the Joker reminds him, a freak. As one reviewer noted, the denizens of Gotham refer to him impersonally as the Batman. He is an outsider, swooping in when the skylight calls him. But in the process, he interferes in the affairs of the civil government, dangles SWAT teams off the sides of tall buildings, and breaks all kinds of laws. As such, Batman, while sharing a conception of justice with Dent, can never hold the public confidence in the way that Dent can, and thus the justice of Batman is necessarily chaotic. The administration of justice requires order, and so the evils of the Joker can never be destroyed while the vigilante Batman enforces the good. For the good of the community of Gotham, Batman must be hunted down by the civil authorities, even though, as noted by Gordon’s young son, he did no wrong.

Therein lies the profound tragedy of The Dark Knight. While wholly just and good in his actions, Batman must, for the foreseeable future, be among the furiously pursued. The Dark Knight is, true to the words of Gordon’s epilogue, “the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.”