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Jan. 31, 2024 - I Don't Speak German

01:40:49

UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep10 The Dark Knight (Part 1)

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	I quite like this lamp.
	Whatever.
	Sorry, my brain is fried.
	I watched The Dark Knight twice in the last two days, so, you know.
	I'm Christopher Noland out is where we are in my headspace.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I was going to say, you know, watching Dark Knight twice in a lifetime is really more than enough.
	We should get into it then.
	I think it's time.
	It's once more than you should watch it.
	We can do this as a cold open a little bit.
	This is I Don't Speak German.
	I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
	Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
	Content warnings always apply.
	So this is episode 10.
	The last one wasn't.
	No, no, it turns out this one is nine.
	The last one was 10.
	That's, you know, that's that's no one verse logic.
	I was going to say, yeah, you have a grasp of time and chronology equal to that of Christopher Nolan.
	Yeah, I think we might.
	I don't know.
	Well, how do you forget to get into that?
	But yeah, so there we go.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so there you go.
	So as I say, this is episode 10.
	It was a false alarm last time, as you know.
	Last bonus episode was not 10, but this is.
	And I think I've made that point enough now, so I'll move on to the next one.
	What was really funny for me was really listening to it where you said 10 and I went.
	Is it 10?
	Really?
	And like, I didn't know, neither of us bothered to look, you know, questioned me and I talked you into it.
	Yeah.
	No, this is 10.
	All right.
	You say it's 10.
	I'm just going to trust the voice of authority, which is also how I know ivermectin doesn't work.
	That's the those are the those are the two things.
	Yeah.
	Anyway.
	Sorry.
	Yeah.
	No, it's funny listening back to it, because you can hear you sort of going, is this 10?
	And then I show you that it is, and you sort of go, oh yeah, yeah, no, it is.
	Yeah, it is 10.
	Yeah, yeah, it's 10.
	And of course it's not.
	It's nine.
	But now it's 10, so it's fine.
	Now it's 10.
	As I say, I thought I'd made this point enough, but apparently we needed to make it some more.
	Yeah, we just needed it.
	It's amusing.
	You know, we're old men.
	We amuse ourselves.
	It's just the way this works.
	So, you know.
	This is for the paying customers, and so they will enjoy a bit of extra banter, I think.
	So I think it's fine.
	Yeah, as we remarked last week, it's something of an irony that people actually pay us to get this.
	Get the goofy relaxing stuff about comic book movies instead of the like, you know, hardcore super researched, you know, hours of prep goes into, you know, every statement version of the show.
	The more you pay us, the less seriously we take you.
	The less effort we make.
	The drunker we are when we talk to each other, etc.
	But you're paying for this.
	If you're listening to this, at least in the short term, it's because you paid for it.
	And we thank you for it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Think about it, though.
	This is the kind of thing you're encouraging, ultimately.
	Yeah.
	But this is episode 10, and it's an episode we said repeatedly, I think, in the last episode, which was 9, not 10, that we were going to, at some point, talk about the Dark Knight.
	Yeah.
	And here we are.
	That's what we're talking about this time.
	The Dark Knight.
	It's a movie, an obscure little movie.
	One of the highest grossing films of all time.
	I think even higher gross than Iron Man, ultimately.
	So, you know.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Made a lot of money.
	And it's about a little-known character called Batman, who was invented in the Paleolithic era, I believe, by cave painters who stole each other's ideas.
	And took credit for them.
	That's not that far off, given the relationship between, I think, Bob Finger.
	It's not Bob Finger, it's something Finger and Bob Kane.
	Yeah, well, that was that was the joke, Daniel.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So I'm the one who always has to elucidate the joke without remembering the first name of the person whose honor I'm trying to defend, because we do no research for these, you know.
	Actually, you know, I've rewatched this movie twice.
	I think that's enough.
	Yes, we get into what watching the movie twice meant for me.
	I think I think that might I think we might get a little bit of a, you know, it might might defend ourselves slightly.
	So, yeah.
	Anyway, moving on.
	Yeah.
	And to get serious now, you all know what The Dark Knight is.
	The second Batman film directed by Christopher Nolan.
	And it's the one with Heath Ledger as the Joker in it.
	You know, it's a bit scary for me to realize how long ago this film was released.
	Because I think, you know, I think, you know, I'm a very old man now.
	I think of this as like a recent movie.
	Right.
	It's almost 15 years old.
	Yeah.
	13 years as of the summer.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And I remember like that was soon after I started dating my now wife and like how much Heath Ledger's death meant to her at the time.
	And I mean, not that it, you know, but she really, I mean, it really hit her heart, I think, you know, and, you know, we went like on that day, I happened to be visiting because it was a long distance relationship and went to like the mall and bought like a Joker t-shirt that day.
	Um, you know, it's just like a, you know, something that, you know, would make her feel better.
	And she had that shirt until, I think it's probably still somewhere in the, you know, the deep recesses of the laundry somewhere, you know?
	Um, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's one of those things of like, I, I actually connect this film very closely in a way that I don't, like Iron Man means more to me, like as a piece of art, like I enjoy it more.
	I've revisited it more often.
	But the Dark Knight is more I'm more personally invested in it as like a part of my personal history.
	And I didn't even realize that until I was rewatching it yesterday and went like, wow, I remember like this has a very real 2008 feel to me, you know, in terms of like my own like personal history.
	That's a weird that's a weird feeling, you know.
	So you you you rewatched it twice for this bonus episode.
	I mean, what did that what did that do to your brain?
	Rewatching it twice in quick succession.
	Well, I rewatched it yesterday, like, you know, kind of start to finish, you know, as a way of I hadn't seen it.
	I had seen it three times theatrically, and we can get into that if you want to.
	But that was mostly you see it once and then you see it twice more with friends that you hadn't seen it or who wanted to rewatch it or whatever, you know.
	And then it was on Netflix briefly.
	And I think I watched, like, the first, like, not even to the end of the opening, like, heist scene, and just thought, this is fucking stupid.
	Like, just had, like, a complete disinterest in it, you know, whatsoever.
	And then once we decided to do it for this, and, you know, we decided to do this this month, as the, as catching up on our bonus episodes, I actually sat down and said, I'm going to rewatch this, like, for real.
	You know, and really try to, like, pay attention as if I'm going to prep this for notes, right?
	And then got to the end of it and went, there are still bits of this that don't make sense.
	I'm sure this is because I'm not paying enough attention.
	So then I went and re-watched the, like, specific sections that I hadn't, that I thought, like, maybe I'd missed some details on.
	And I am now convinced that there is a way in which all of this hangs together, but it still makes no fucking sense.
	Like, a third of this movie is completely unmoored from reality.
	So, not to get all CinemaSins on you, but there are big chunks of this that just do not have narrative cohesion at all, unless you are going through it, like, combing it with a fine-toothed comb.
	So that's been my experience with this movie over the last two days, is just trying to understand Basic fundamental aspects of the plot.
	I've never really worried about the plot, to be honest, myself.
	Well, we don't even have to necessarily talk about that.
	The only thing I realized was that, you know, if it doesn't bother you and it doesn't bother, you know, it made a billion dollars.
	So if it doesn't bother a billion dollars of the people, apparently I'm wrong.
	But, you know, like, it's fine.
	No, I'm sure I'm sure you're not wrong.
	Yeah, as I say, this has always been like my interest.
	I'm quite fascinated by all three of these movies, actually, but sort of in a kind of, you know, car crash sort of way and then largely to do with You know me, largely to do with the political and ideological implications and the themes and stuff like that.
	I'm not often a sort of plot guy, although I have to say, I mean, sometimes the perversions of logic that you get in Nolan's scripts Do kind of force themselves on your attention, I find.
	I think there are worse offenders, like I think the Dark Knight Rises is a worse offender for that.
	Yeah, I saw Rises once theatrically, I saw Begins once theatrically.
	Of the three, I think Begins is the one that holds up the best, although I haven't seen it since 2005.
	So, you know, don't hold me to that!
	Sorry, we can't really get started on this, but what's your feeling about the character in general?
	Did you grow up as a Batman guy, or what's your take on the character?
	Kind of.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't think I was ever a Batman fan, but Batman was just one of those things that was, you know, if you were a boy child in the world that I was a boy child in, then Batman was just there.
	There were repeats of the 60s TV show on the television and a couple of Batman toys, but it wasn't something I was into.
	It was just something that was there.
	As I said last time, I was much more, to the extent that I was into comics at all, I was much more into Spidey and Hulk.
	But it was, yeah, because they were on the telly, see?
	They had cartoons that were current or almost current at that time, whereas Batman didn't that I know of.
	And Batman, you know, was the it was the 60s TV show, which would occasionally be repeated in the Burton TV, the Burton movies.
	Eighty nine.
	You would have been a teenager at that point, right?
	Yeah.
	What was I in 89 about 13?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The movie sort of passed me by as things as things do.
	That was like.
	That period of my life, round about the age of 13, 14, that was a complex and unpleasant time.
	So I wasn't really, I wasn't really paying attention just to stuff like movies at that point.
	A co-ed, or not co-ed, but a co-hosted psychogeography of Batman is what we're doing these days, right?
	Yeah, apparently.
	So, yeah, and then I sort of got into the movie a little bit a few years later, I suppose, because I liked I liked the Joker because, yeah, everybody likes the Joker, don't they?
	Right.
	So, yeah, that's my that's my background with that's my Batman background, my background, I suppose.
	Background.
	Yeah, no, I never owned anything.
	Batman never really cared about Batman.
	I mean, the Burton movie, the first Burton movie came out when I was nine.
	And the second when I was 12.
	So I remember, I know for a fact I saw Batman Returns theatrically.
	And that is probably my all-time favorite Batman thing.
	Yeah, mine too.
	The original I haven't seen in years and years and years and years.
	But I know I saw it.
	I'm pretty sure I saw it theatrically, but it might have been like once it was on peak cable or whatever.
	I don't have a clear memory of having seen it theatrically, which means I probably did not see it theatrically.
	But I remember it being this omnipresent cultural force.
	If you're reading any kind of magazines, it was just this thing that just existed.
	And every kind of subsequent Batman thing, I mean, Batman Begins was definitely a, you know, you can't make the 2005 going back to Batman thing without interfacing with those four, the Burton movies, and then the two, you know, the Schumacher and Who directed Schumacher?
	Schumacher.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You can't, you can't interface with, you can't make a Batman movie in 2005 without interfacing with that legacy, right?
	Because for the goods and the bads, like Batman Begins was meant to go dark and gritty.
	we're going to get like a realistic view of this character for like the first time.
	He's going to have like this, even though it's like Himalayan ninjas or whatever, like, you know, the Batmobile is going to look like, you know, a stripped down sports car version of a Humvee.
	We're going to make it like this kind of thing.
	And it's going to be in sentence, like some version of the real world.
	And then the dark night kind of gets to like follow on from that, but be like even more deliberately about like an apology for the American war on terror, which is very explicit in like many, many occasions in this movie.
	And, you know, just for, you know, our Patreon, just for the patrons, I didn't think we were going to have to explain this, but we actually do view these films as films and not as continuations of, like, comic book history.
	Like, I don't think you have to know 80 years of comic books in order to have a conversation about one of the highest grossing films that's ever been made, you know?
	And also we do view these things as, you know, parts of a political history because when you spend $180 billion in 2008 and come away with maybe mass surveillance is necessary if you're going after a psychopath, maybe that's something that has a connection to the war on terror.
	Especially when in interviews, they deliberately talk about how they were referring to these issues.
	Anyway, not to pick on any persons who might have sent me emails in the last week in particular, but we do view these things through a political lens because there is an overtly political lens that they were made under.
	And yes, actually, if you do want to talk about how cool Batman's costume is in the Dark Knight, there are only a thousand YouTube videos that you can watch to get that kind of content.
	And that's not something we're going to discuss necessarily.
	Yeah.
	No, exactly.
	Like, if a film is made in 2021, say, based on a comic book that goes back to 1930 or 1940 or whatever, then, yeah, sure.
	The story that's being told in the movie in 2021 has that history.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	And if it's sort of if it's partly based on stories that were written in the 40s or whatever, then yeah, it's partly based on on those stories.
	And so a certain amount of The original ideas and the original intentions and the original political and cultural context of that time is going to, you know, it's going to be kind of it's going to be there in some form or another.
	But it's also going to be a thing that was itself the movie.
	This is going to be a thing that was itself created in 2021 in the context of 2021.
	So, you know, despite the fact that it is adapted from something older than 2021, it's nevertheless going to have the context, the political and social and cultural context of 2021 embedded in it, in the concerns and thoughts and ideas of the people that wrote it and the people that directed it and so on and so forth.
	So even based on an old text, Even including characters who had certain motivations in, you know, decades ago.
	It's still going to be a new product and therefore going to be interpretable within the context of now.
	Yeah.
	If they remake Night of the Living Dead in 2022, and there are long sequences of people refusing to get their anti-zombie vaccine.
	You don't get to reference the Romero original as brilliant as it is and go like, this isn't about a vaccine mandate.
	This is like, it's just.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, I think we can move on from that topic.
	And I should talk about the Dark Knight now.
	Yeah, sure.
	I don't know.
	Do you want to kind of get into like, I really don't want to do the CinemaSense thing, but I would like to spend at least a couple of minutes just kind of talking about the incoherence and like, I realized this.
	I'd love to do that.
	When I first saw the film, and I think it speaks to like... Just parenthetically, the problem with CinemaSins isn't that they talk about like plotting coherences or anything like that or continuity errors.
	The problem with CinemaSins is that they They think that that constitutes film criticism.
	And often, actually, they don't talk about things that are plot inconsistencies or incoherences.
	They talk about things that they say are or think are for some reason, but aren't because these are very lazily, quickly produced, you know, clickbait videos.
	There's a difference between like nitpicking, like nitpicking things as a way of avoiding talking about the content of the film, as opposed to saying like, I noticed this was a problem upon first viewing it.
	And then it took me a while to realize like, and then like finding the details that like don't make sense, that like alienate you from the text and talk about the way that you're alienated from the text based on those details, right?
	Yeah, it's perfectly valid as criticism to say, look, you know, this character is supposed to be such and such a person.
	And at this point in the story, they just randomly do this thing that's completely out of character for the character that they're supposed to have and stuff like that.
	That's perfectly fine criticism.
	The problem with CinemaSins is not that they do that.
	The problem with CinemaSins is that they say, this guy's got a bell on his desk.
	Who has a bell on their desk?
	That's a mistake.
	Ding!
	Right, exactly.
	Ironically, I did watch the CinemaSins Dark Knight video that they did released eight years ago.
	It's only four minutes long.
	And I sat down and there were a couple of them where I was like, ah, you're reaching, you know, but like, and also they missed like big things that I'm definitely going to mention here in this podcast.
	So Daniel Harper, worse than CinemaSins is what we should really kind of come at this with.
	So, so here's where I land on this.
	I know you kind of rewatched it, at least kind of briefly.
	Yeah, we watched it earlier today on VLC with the speed way, way up.
	Sure, sure.
	Because we are horrifyingly unprofessional.
	So like my thing is like between so spoilers for the 2008 movie, that's one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
	If you didn't know you were getting into that, then I don't know what you're doing here.
	So, in between the capture of Lao, the Chinese accountant, up to about the reappearance of Commissioner Gordon, or of Gordon who then becomes Commissioner, there are
	fundamental gaps in the connective tissue of the narrative that leave me not knowing quite where I am in the movie.
	So, I have a couple of hypotheses here.
	I tried to look into the history of, like, Like, were there additional scenes that were cut out or whatever?
	And I couldn't find a whole lot of, you know, like people kind of talking about what might have been in the movie that wasn't in there already.
	I found a couple of places that claim to have a script, but like, you know, I'm not going to sit and read four different versions of the script for this to kind of figure it out or whatever.
	But my hypothesis is like, A, It was kind of written in a way that had like, they were writing a couple different versions of the script that kind of got merged into one, and certain details got elided in the kind of like finished version.
	You know, certain scenes that were either shot and then edited out for time or for flow or that were written but never shot.
	Sorry, I just I just find the idea of, you know, scenes being cut from the dark night in order to preserve the flow and keep the running time down inherently funny.
	Sorry.
	Well, it's funny that like two hours and 38 minutes feels relatively like lean by the standards of a lot of movies these days.
	You know, Christopher Nolan would be happy to make this a three hour and 10 minute movie.
	Well, he made something that feels like a three hour.
	It's funny, like rewatching it, like specifically looking for those details.
	I did find I there were things that I admired more rewatching, like things that kind of got laid in early that just get completely not called out in the end of the film.
	You know, like that, like there are things where he's hammering this thing home.
	And then there are things that like, are mentioned once, and if you know to look for them, you're like, oh, that's an interesting bit of foreshadowing.
	It would have been nice if anything at all was done with that.
	My favorite, just as a minor example of the kind of incoherence here, is there's one of the CinemaSins thing, they point out that there's a line where, you know, towards the, like after Gordon rescues Harvey Dent, Harvey Dent says, you do keep things close to your chest.
	But like, that's not something that like Gordon ever said to Harvey Dent.
	That's something that Lucius Fox said, that's something that like Christian Bale, that Batman said to Lucius Fox earlier in the film.
	And so we remember the line, but it's not a line that those two characters ever said to each other.
	Right?
	Like, And in the moment, like, I didn't notice it until I was watching the CinemaSins video.
	And then I rewatched the movie and I went, Oh, my God, that is completely right.
	And I never noticed that.
	And all of my, like, criticism of the film, even rewatching it specifically, like, you know, to talk about, I didn't notice it.
	Yeah.
	And I think that there's like... I never noticed that either.
	Right.
	So there are a couple of things.
	There are a couple of, like, things we can say about that, right?
	A, it fits thematically, but the actors are like given the lines and they're like, it's not like it's being said as an original statement.
	It's like being said as a callback, right?
	You know, because, you know, oh, you really do keep things close to your chest.
	It's kind of like the tone of the line.
	Right.
	And so it's not like, oh, you keep things close to your chest, don't you?
	Because if it was said of that more latter way, you could say, oh, it is like a parallelism.
	And there are a lot of parallelisms in the movie, right?
	So that would sort of make sense.
	Or There were like multiple different times this was supposed to have been said during the movie.
	Yeah.
	And then a bunch of them got cut out at some point.
	Right.
	And so without like seeing the whole production process, we don't really know.
	But it's completely within the movie, just an inherent inconsistency.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	The other option is I think this is honestly like the way the film works and why it made a billion dollars is that It works on an emotional, almost avant-garde level, as opposed to being something that's meant to work within the confines of what we think is a rational narrative purpose.
	We're calling back to that line not because these two characters had any reason to call back to it, but because we, the audience, remembers the earlier line.
	And therefore, it fits on this emotional beat that Moves us forward into the next scene, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
	This is the point in a Hollywood script where somebody says something that you recognize as having been said before.
	It doesn't matter who says it to who or what the context is, as long as you hear a thing that you've heard somewhere else before, then you can move on to the next bit.
	And I honestly think, like, if we're going to extend the principle of charity to The Dark Knight, that's probably the best way to view this.
	And I think that that's, you know, regardless of what production process made this happen, like, this is the kind of, like, Like, why the film works.
	Like, I don't remember, I don't know if you remember, like in I think 2011 or 2012, there was this Vimeo video, like one of the kind of early versions of what would become like YouTube editors like examining the sequences.
	Of movies in terms of, like, criticizing them, you know, sort of thing.
	This is kind of one of those early versions of that before, like, really high quality video compression.
	And so it looks like shit if you go rewatch it these days.
	I will give you a link you can put in the show notes.
	But there was this video essay.
	It was like 11 minutes long, which took the kind of the big, like, transporting Harvey Dent sequence and analyzed it in terms of, like, as a person, like, producing films, as a video editor, As a film editor, here's how this doesn't make sense.
	And like it breaks the 180 degree rule.
	It breaks certain like kind of elements of like how action sequences work.
	Things just kind of fundamentally don't make sense.
	Like how many cars are in the convoy changes from shot to shot at times, you know?
	But when you're watching the sequence, A, you feel kind of like disconfident by the lack of narrative cohesion.
	But also this is meant to feel kind of This is meant to be a panic moment.
	Everyone in the scene is supposed to be panicked.
	I read an essay that responded to this, written more recently, I think in 2018, and it was pointing out, well, if you look at this as less of, it's meant to make sense in a three-dimensional world, and more meant to make sense in terms of You know, visual language in a 2D space.
	Like, one of the issues is, like, the direction in which Aaron Eckhart's, you know, when he's, when, like, shots are fired at the man, he moves one way or the other based on, like, where you think the shots are supposed to be coming from.
	And he's wrong in several places.
	He's supposed to be moving left and he moves right or kind of whatever.
	But if you view it as, like, left and right sides of the screen, everything makes a perfect coherent sense shot to shot.
	And so it's very possible that this was shot and edited, not as, like, extended into a three-dimensional world, but was shot and edited as in this 2D narrative space, as if it was a comic book.
	And that's just bizarre.
	Like, that's just... But It's also like, obviously the film works on an audience because it made a billion dollars.
	So, you know, who the fuck am I to argue with it on some level, right?
	Sorry, I know I'm being, I know I'm not really able to make my point because I'm not, you know, I can't like edit the video and show you the specific shots, but there's been like 13 years of people arguing about this movie, right?
	And that's just kind of one of the like, Kind of basic incoherent point.
	So sorry, please comment slightly.
	Or more than slightly, you know.
	No, Jackie, say six words so I can continue on my bullshit.
	Please say something.
	Yeah.
	OK.
	Baby shoes never worn for sale.
	You want fucking haiku?
	Batman uniform never worn for sale.
	That's the kids in the hockey pads' beginning.
	Oh my god, that is so fucking dark, right?
	Anyway, please continue.
	Yeah, OK, well, I can't I can't comment on the specific claims that these other people are making because I haven't I haven't seen these videos or read these articles and I'd have to, you know, rewatch the sequence in question, which is frankly a lot more effort, you know, and compare it and really study it.
	And that's a lot more effort than I personally feel inclined to put into it.
	But I think.
	I suspect a little bit more charity is being extended here to the film than is actually warranted.
	You mentioned Harvey Dent inside the armored vehicle, and you get Dents, funny enough, is the word that springs to mind, appear in the wall from bullet holes hitting outside.
	And as I remember it, I remember being in the theater watching this, thinking, where the fuck did those bullets come from?
	Who's firing from there?
	Because the SWAT team guy is sitting at the front of the van, whereas Harvey Dent is sitting at the rear of the van.
	But the shots are coming from the left side, the driver's side, the driver's side in the US, excuse me, left side in the direction of travel.
	And yet the dents are coming behind the SWAT team guy, meaning that the shots are supposed to be coming from the front of the convoy and not the side of the convoy by Logic, but physical logic, right.
	Yeah, because the Joker's van is, we see its left side for the most part.
	When we first see it, and apart from when we see it head on through the cab window, we tend to see it from the left side, which orients us.
	You know, what that is, I interpret that as like the view from the police convoy.
	If we were on the police convoy looking across at this gigantic van, this circus van that suddenly appeared, to our right, yeah?
	And there are plenty of internal context clues to give you that sense.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Yeah.
	And then the bullet indentations that appear on the inside of the armored cab do not come from where you would expect them to come from.
	If what we're looking at is because the camera is looking slightly up and across at Dent from his right side.
	So it's like you, the notional viewer, are positioned between Dent and the Joker.
	And you turn your head to the right and you see the Joker in the van, and then you turn your head to the left and you see Harvey Dent, as if the wall of the armored truck is not there.
	That's where you are as a notional viewer.
	That's where you're being spatially oriented.
	So far, so good.
	except that the bullet pattern does not correspond with that schema.
	Now, of course, it's perfectly possible for the camera to be anywhere you like inside the armored van compartment.
	You know, It doesn't have to make that kind of logical sense.
	But as I remember it, and again, I'd have to go back and study it to see if I was right about this, what it feels like is that the film is setting up a fairly conventional arrangement of variables in this action sequence, and then Just getting it wrong, just getting one of, you know, showing us the bullets coming from the wrong direction.
	Now, the fact that they seem to go out of their way to start setting it up in a conventional manner makes me doubt very much that they were trying for any sort of avant-garde thing involving creating 2D space like a comic book.
	I mean, the intention behind it, I suppose, is secondary.
	You can argue, I suppose, that it still has the same Aesthetic effect, even if it's unintentional.
	But what it feels like when you're watching it, and certainly, I remember the sequence as being confusing and disorienting for that reason, as well as several other reasons, actually.
	Right.
	I mean, it feels like, and for a movie, I mean, $180 million, you know, that's chump change today.
	$180 million is still a very expensive movie, but we're used to seeing $180 million movies.
	We're now upping up to like $300 million.
	I think the two Infinity War and Endgame were like half a billion dollars between them.
	So, you know, like, you know, and much of that was shot simultaneously.
	So, you know, that gives you, that's the new high, high watermark, I suppose.
	So 180 million doesn't feel like that much by comparison, but this is still a incredibly expensive movie.
	And also this was, you know, very little of this is really using CGI.
	I mean, they're mostly just kind of removing, you know, safety wires and that sort of thing.
	Like that's one of the things this movie is well recognized for.
	That is one thing I will give Nolan.
	He doesn't rely on CGI.
	I like that.
	Yeah.
	And in fact, like the big, like flipping the big rig scene, like that was all done practically.
	You know, that's why that happens.
	I mean, I understand why that's in the film, but I have no idea why that happens.
	The only thing I can say about that, particularly that part of that sequence, is he was trying to one up James Cameron's Terminator 2.
	And I know you haven't seen Terminator 2, but like, one day you will, and you will kind of go and go, I get where you're going there.
	I get where you're going there, because T2 was previously sort of the high watermark of like big rigs in action sequences in films.
	And actually, I still think is the high watermark.
	Sorry.
	Sorry, Chris Nolan and the team of talented people.
	T2, that's one that I saw at like that particular moment in my life in which like is difficult for me to find any flaws in it, despite the fact that my intellectual brain can find many, many flaws in it.
	But like it really is, it really is just one of those that just shaped me as a person in a very strong way.
	Anyway.
	Again, not to kind of dig, we spent a lot of time on this one sequence, and I'll give you both the video and the article that I read defending the sequence and against the essay, against the video essay.
	I'll give you that for the show notes so people can go and read those if they want to.
	I would like to, I mean, just to, again, to point out that this is like a synecdoche for larger problems as opposed to, like, we're nitpicking here.
	Like, the ending of that sequence is, You know, Batman falls off the bike.
	They roll him over.
	Yeah.
	So Batman refuses.
	OK, we could talk a lot about Batman's morality in this, and hopefully we will get into that at some point.
	This might be a two part bonus episode.
	There is so fucking much in this fucking movie.
	Anyway, so Batman swerves to avoid the Joker.
	Can I just say one thing?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Batman does not fall off the bike.
	No, no script stage.
	No.
	Just like, you see that and you think like, this can't be.
	Like that was some other character, right?
	There are big chunks of this where I would like see things on the rewatch specifically to do this podcast and go, let me rewatch that and make sure I just saw the thing that I thought I just saw.
	Because it's very easy to kind of, you know, I'm watching the film.
	I've seen this a few times.
	Let me check Twitter, etc.
	Glance back over and then Batman fell off the bike and then you go, hold on, rewind 45 seconds.
	Man, Batman just fell off the bike.
	You are correct.
	In defense of the film, again, just to just to give it its due, Batman is supposed to be kind of new at this at this point, you know?
	Like, I think that, like, we as an, again, the difference between we as an audience who are used to, like, Batman being this unstoppable, like, you know, crime-fighting machine versus, like, in text, I think it's pretty clear that Batman's been at this for like a year or something.
	I don't think there's a reason to assume otherwise.
	And so this could be like a marker of young Batman.
	I think that there is kind of a Batman year one element that is clearly referenced, certainly in Batman Begins.
	That's literally like Batman just got started and here it's not supposed to be that much further on, you know?
	Still, Batman literally swerves to avoid the Joker, runs into the wreckage, and then just like falls off.
	Yeah, and is knocked unconscious.
	Yeah, if not unconscious, at least sort of like he's dazed.
	And it's like, you know, Batman is... He's unconscious, Daniel.
	I don't know if you saw the trope of, if you've ever seen the trope of like good guy grenades versus bad guy grenades.
	And this is kind of referencing like 80s action movies.
	But like the idea is that like bad guy grenades are basically smoke bombs.
	They get thrown at, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger and they just create like a little bit of smoke and it's like a pop, like a cherry bomb.
	Whereas good guy grenades have the like force of like sub nuclear ordnance, right?
	But the key here is that if a bad guy gets a hold of the good guy grenade, suddenly it acts like a bad guy grenade and a good guy gets a hold of a bad guy grenade and vice versa, right?
	And this is kind of like what's happening here is that Batman's abilities, Batman's ability to resist, you know, whatever is kind of going on around him definitely changes based on like who he's fighting in any particular moment.
	And at any second Any realistic depiction of who Batman is and the capabilities that he has, literally under his belt, would be able to destroy the Joker in like 30 seconds.
	And in fact, re-watching this sequence this afternoon, I was sitting and thinking, This is supposed to be the super secure route that has been cleared of all traffic, where there are cops everywhere.
	They didn't put a few snipers on a rooftop around it, so when the Joker pops out, you just expect there's a headshot any moment now, and then the Joker's gone, and you didn't need Batman to begin with.
	We didn't need Batman to kill him by running him over with a bike, which is apparently what Batman is planning before he changes his mind.
	He's just, he's just Batman, Batman real mad apparently.
	So anyway, Batman falls off the bike.
	Sorry.
	I know we've spent a lot of time on this, but it's worth like, I do actually do have somewhere I'm going with this, right?
	Really is worth emphasizing.
	Batman falls off the bike and knocks himself unconscious.
	I want, I want that clear that that happens.
	And he's built in this like electroshock thing in his mask.
	So anybody touches his mask, they get like a huge electric shock, which, man, you just hope that he doesn't have to scratch his nose at some point while he's crime fighting.
	Right.
	You know, and then Batman is out for the count or whatever.
	But so, you know, Vicky Vale tries to kiss him or anything, you know.
	Well, you don't have to worry about that in this movie.
	But anyway, So the Joker like bounces up on the guy who just got shocked and is just like in his like super crazy mode, you know, happy that he's about to get to reveal who the Batman is.
	Again, why does the Joker care?
	What is the point of any of this?
	Okay, let's not, sorry, again, this is a synecdoche for the bigger problems, okay?
	You know, but it's worth noting, like, none of this makes any sense on any level, right?
	Like, so, and then he's sitting there and he's about to lift the cowl.
	And then we find out there's a SWAT team member standing right behind him, instead of the other goon who was originally standing there.
	It's now a SWAT team guy.
	And then suddenly it turns out, oh, it's Commissioner Gordon.
	Yeah.
	Gordon was standing there, who we thought was dead for the last half hour or so.
	Now he gets to be the hero.
	And later he tells his son, his son asks him, Did the Batman save you, Daddy?
	He's like, no, this time I saved him.
	And it's like, what the fuck are you even talking about? - Yeah. - You know?
	So, there's lots we could talk about in this moment.
	we could talk about in this moment.
	Where were you going?
	The more you think about it, it unfolds into ever increasing... Firstly, we've said repeatedly now, Batman falls off the bike.
	That's not what happens.
	What happens actually is that Batman is apparently about to kill the Joker by running him over.
	Right, right.
	That seems to be what he's planning.
	And then at the last minute, he sort of has a crisis of conscience.
	He can't do it.
	So he swerves away, loses control of the bike.
	The bike skids and sort of goes sideways.
	Now, look, I'm sorry, but when you are when you are traveling at that speed and your bike goes over, OK, you're wearing body armor, so nothing's broken.
	All right.
	OK.
	But you are nonetheless thrown meters.
	You are thrown meters into the air.
	Batman sort of ends up lying like a couple of feet away from the bike.
	That's the first thing, right?
	Now, the other thing you said, you said the Joker apparently wants to find out who Batman is.
	No reason whatsoever is given for why.
	And it's so... He's a chaos agent.
	He doesn't even know what to do if he caught the car, Jack.
	That's the message of the movie.
	We will assuredly come back to this anyway.
	Yes, indeed.
	There are complexities about the Joker, but yeah, there's certainly no rationale as to why he cares about who Batman is.
	So little does it actually matter that halfway through the movie, he suddenly says, actually, I've changed my mind.
	I don't care who the Batman is.
	This is pretty standard bad screenwriter syndrome, in which you write your character as a psychopath slash sociopath, and not even in the actual what psychopaths and sociopaths are supposed to be, as opposed to you write him as generic crazy pants person screenwriter syndrome, so that you can then ascribe any motivation to him at any time.
	That's right.
	So he can do anything at any time and it's justified within his character.
	See also all the minions that he has who are shown to have similar screenwriter level mental defects like schizophrenia.
	And oh God, that's so awful.
	The Joker, his goons are all schizophrenics apparently.
	Ah, fuck you.
	My favorite, and I put those in heavy scare quotes, is the guy in the cell who has like the bomb inside him and he's like, they put, they were pretty lights, they put pretty lights inside him.
	Yeah.
	I don't, I still hear the voices.
	He said the voices would go away.
	And, you know, we as an audience are supposed to go like, yeah, buddy, whatever, you know, let me beat the shit out of you because I'm a cop, you know, and I'm the tough guy about to, you know, you're just lying.
	You're a cop killer.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	Anyway, continue, please.
	Yeah, there's I mean, there's that's a separate thing.
	But yeah, so much movie, movie mental illness.
	So lazy.
	So offensive.
	Absolutely.
	We'll bracket that.
	Maybe we'll go back to it.
	The other thing is, I think we might do multiple episodes about the Dark Knight because we haven't even begun to talk about the actual movie.
	And I'm having so much fun.
	I don't want to stop.
	Why is it Gordon that arrests him?
	Why does it have to be Gordon that arrests him?
	Why does Gordon have to pretend to be dead?
	Gordon pretending to be dead achieves absolutely nothing.
	It doesn't lure the Joker out.
	I actually have an answer to this one, and I only discovered it upon the re-rewatch, and in fact, even re-watching certain sequences in that scene, because Gordon is the one driving that van.
	We're driving that first car in the convoy, right?
	Right.
	And at the beginning of the scene, we get the guy sitting next to him, turning over to him and saying, oh, I hope you've got some really good moves.
	And then we don't hear anything else.
	And so upon rewatch, we're supposed to go, that was Gordon the whole time.
	The guy knew Gordon was going to come in and kick some fucking ass because he's Lieutenant Gordon.
	We're supposed to think that's super cool.
	We're supposed to remember that.
	But no, it only makes sense upon the sixth watch of the fucking film.
	I was literally trying to put this together.
	It doesn't mean anything anyway.
	In plot terms, nothing is achieved by Gordon pretending to be dead.
	Nothing.
	I had to protect my wife and family.
	I had to do that, otherwise the Joker was going to come after them.
	Well, they are later.
	They are later.
	Not by the Joker.
	And why would him being dead mean the Joker wouldn't attack them?
	He might attack them anyway.
	Because he's a crazy guy.
	He's a crazy person.
	Yeah.
	And, um, there is a, there is like, I can imagine, um, Gordon pretends to be dead and they have a big funeral to lure the Joker out, maybe to get him to attack the funeral.
	Okay.
	There is a big, uh, public funeral sequence.
	I have so many, I have so many thoughts about this.
	That isn't even Gordon's funeral.
	That's the current commissioner's funeral.
	That's my point.
	There is a big funeral sequence where the Joker turns up, but he's not being lured there.
	They're not doing it deliberately.
	And it's before Gordon is pretending to be dead.
	In fact, Gordon supposedly gets shot at that funeral.
	It's like they had the bits of a story and they rearrange them and then just that what they what they this is the persistent problem with them with these movies and Nolan movies generally is that they just put whatever random shit they like up on screen and then they write the dialogue to cover up the holes that you know you just get people to do whatever the fuck you like and then you get you put it in the dialogue oh well i'm going to do this because x y and z and that that's that's covered apparently that's that's fine now Right.
	But when you when you have like 2021 technology and you can like CGI, like you can shoot the like insert scene that's like three sentences long with, you know, like you just torture a bunch of CGI developers for, you know, two weeks and suddenly you've got the scene instead of having to pay the 20 million dollar actor to come and say three lines.
	You can actually like that's a big part of like modern 21st century filmmaking.
	I actually don't like that's actually large.
	I don't know, it's complicated, but at least, but they didn't use that.
	They didn't have that here and they didn't use that, right?
	And so they're just big.
	And this is the thing I'm trying to get at.
	That was all done at the script writing stage.
	They went into filming with the script in that state already.
	There's missing sinew all over the place in this film.
	Scenes keep ending before they're over in this film.
	The connective tissue just doesn't exist in the movie.
	And that's what we're trying to get at here.
	You can be a big fan of this movie.
	You can love it.
	If it works for you on an emotional level, I'm not going to, I will argue with that, but I'm not doing that here.
	But tell me that that middle third, tell me what happens and why it happens every time at every point during that sequence.
	And then who knows who and who knows what is going on at any given time.
	It fundamentally does not make sense.
	I found a way that I can make it make sense, but it is completely me interpreting onto the film as opposed to something that's inherent to the movie itself.
	Yeah, you have to do the work of it.
	As I say, scenes keep ending before they're over.
	And one of the examples is the scene we're talking about.
	It just ends with Gordon having the gun on the Joker.
	It just ends.
	Well, what happens after that?
	Batman is lying unconscious on the ground, presumably surrounded by police officers.
	Nobody thought to lift the mask, apparently.
	Literally, what happens next after it cuts?
	Well, the Joker just went easily without any problems.
	He got in the back of a squad car and they took him to Gordon's little personal fortress where he has all of his people working around a cage that he keeps the criminals that are so bad they can't be sent along to county because bad people are at the county jail who are not going to obey Gordon's personal edicts, apparently.
	Yeah, that's clearly what happened.
	And Batman, the next time you see him is in the dark in the interrogation room.
	So presumably they threw some cold water in his face, put some smelling salts under his nose, and then just told him, oh yeah, we're just going to bring the Joker there in like 45 minutes.
	Just here's a magazine hangout.
	It's going to be fine.
	Just be ready to Bang people's heads into walls.
	So that you can, yeah, so that you can engage in, uh, state sanctioned torture while we watch.
	And they just sit and watch like there's so much, there's so much here.
	All right, good.
	Good.
	Yep.
	What was the, what was the fucking plan?
	They're waiting to arrest the Joker.
	Is it their plan that Batman is going to come off his bike and be knocked unconscious?
	And the Joker is then going to be distracted by trying to get his mask off?
	There's nothing else that makes any sense!
	They're waiting in that specific spot, apparently, for the Joker to be out of the truck, walking around.
	So apparently they knew that Batman was going to upend the rig, and the Joker was going to survive that, and walk out of the wreckage, and Batman was then going to fall off his bike, and the Joker would then be distracted by his cowl, and then they could arrest him.
	That was the plan, apparently.
	There's a whole lot of really convenient, like people just knew that things were going to happen at any given point in this movie.
	You know, another one from that same sequence is they downed the helicopter, the Joker's goons downed the helicopter by placing two wires very specifically in space.
	How did they know to hang out on those particular buildings and get there?
	How did they know the helicopter was going to go there?
	Exactly.
	Yeah, they don't.
	They read the script ahead of time.
	And there's a lot of they read the script ahead of time in this movie.
	And meanwhile, we've got these sequences where, like, these people who've been, presumably the people who owned or were driving the circus truck, they've been kidnapped.
	And like Batman and the cop convoy and the Joker are, you know, pancaking cars in the in the tunnel and blowing people up and helicopters are being knocked down and exploding and presumably the pilots roasting alive in the wreckage.
	Yeah.
	And we cut to two little kids in a car making finger guns.
	And isn't that funny?
	Right, and then Batman comes along and, like, destroys some cars, which, because he's a pretty naturally observant Batman, he knows that no one is in those cars, and so it's safe to destroy them.
	And he destroys them just to save himself the 30 seconds it would take to, like, drive around them, apparently.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	And because it looks really cool like that's the whole thing.
	I actually give that sequence a slight I'm going to I'm going to grant it a slight forbearance just because it's the one moment that feels fun and that there are two kids who get to see Batman and Batman is cool.
	Like this is the one moment in the film in which anyone shows any bit of joy.
	Sure.
	But it's totally jarring.
	Oh, right.
	Exactly.
	No, I mean, I agree.
	It makes no sense.
	I'm giving it like the one percent extra.
	Forbearance.
	You know, you can't do dark and gritty Batman and then occasionally stick some cute stuff with kids in it.
	Which all three of these movies do, by the way.
	Especially when your climax is going to be, and then Harvey Dent is going to threaten Commissioner Gordon's son with death by coin flip.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	The other cute little Moppet in the movie.
	Yeah.
	Like there's going to be a gun to his head at the end.
	For sure.
	Yeah.
	No question.
	We haven't even scratched the surface of this.
	Like it's like, again, I hate to, I hate to be like this, like negative and this, like, again, it's very easy to criticize us as just nitpicking stuff, but this is like fundamental, like internal logic of the film that just doesn't make sense.
	And again, you could do this to almost any action sequence.
	You could do this over and over and over again.
	Take any like three minute section of this movie.
	And so here's what doesn't make sense in the moment, right?
	Like it just, it just, it constantly does this.
	Another, another example, if you're okay with me kind of moving away from this slightly, there's a moment in which like Batman, so Harvey Dent, we have learned that Harvey Dent did not die, which was in question after the party sequence.
	Right?
	Where Batman dives out the window to save Maggie Gyllenhaal.
	Another scene that ends before it's over.
	They're on the ground and it cuts.
	What about the people in the penthouse?
	This is everybody's favorite plot hole.
	And so I wanted to just avoid it so that we didn't, we weren't like treading over the obvious ground that everyone's done as opposed to like actually finding all the other stuff around it.
	The defense of that, I read a blog, I was Googling this, and if you Google, like, Dark Knight Plot Hole, you run into, like, four blogs that were written in, like, 20... It's like, well, actually, in the novelization of The Dark Knight, it is revealed that there was an SUV that was supposed to, like, drive out right afterwards, and then Batman says, oh, that must be the Joker, and then we cut to inside the thing, and then the Joker is driving away.
	So, actually, we know exactly what happened because the novelization told us that.
	That's literally the answer.
	That's literally the answer.
	The Joker just walks out of that room.
	Once Batman is no longer there, not having found Harvey Dent, he doesn't do anything else to any of the other billionaires who are in that room.
	He just wanders off.
	Yeah.
	Later, guys.
	See ya.
	And there are no cops around.
	There's nobody else kind of comes, you know, even in the sequence, which is an impressive sequence.
	I mean, I'm going to say that, like the the the dinner party sequence, the cocktail party.
	One of the better sequences in the film.
	I mean, Heath Ledger is legitimately terrifying in the movie.
	I mean, yeah, I mean, that's brilliant performance.
	I mean, you know, we can, you know, I often say this is a third rate mob movie with a genius performance at the center of it is kind of the way I think of this movie.
	You know, it's everything it's cracked up to be.
	He is brilliant.
	He is absolutely hypnotic in I mean, just the way he handles those knives in the movie and the way that like, he does it twice.
	He does it with Michael J. White when he's describing how he gets the scars.
	And then he does a different version of how he got the scars with Maggie Gyllenhaal.
	And like the way he uses his knife and just the way Heath Ledger holds it.
	And like the, I mean, it's just absolutely like, I mean, it's true like horror movie shit, right?
	Oh yeah.
	Heath Ledger, pretty good.
	He was pretty good.
	Bloody good actor.
	So Batman saves Rachel Dawes meets Maggie Gyllenhaal, not by doing anything in particular, except by diving after her and then like spinning down and landing on the car before she lands on it.
	Which, you know, just one example of how, like, ordinary human beings have, like, superhuman tendon strength in this movie, you know?
	Anyway, so he uses his magic Batman powers, apparently.
	Yeah.
	And then the Joker runs away because the Joker runs away.
	And nobody knows what happened to Harvey Dent.
	Maybe something you should have thought about before you jumped out the window to save your, not even your girlfriend anymore, you know, white knight.
	That's terrible.
	Anyway, there's there are a whole there's a whole conversation we can have about the romantic relationships in this film.
	And the way that really, I think Batman and Harvey Dent are just corny for each other.
	Much of this much of this movie.
	Anyway.
	So Harvey Dent then shows up later like a few minutes later as like the crusader who's like going off and he wants to you know do things and find the Joker etc etc and people are kind of surprised he's alive and around so okay like it seems like people do have cell phones in this movie.
	There should be that lack of communication.
	They have cell phones because otherwise I would back into them and spy on everybody in the city.
	Oh, we might get to that.
	We might get to that or we might again.
	I think we're going to have to do a two parter.
	So so Harvey then shows up.
	And he's doing things in the movie.
	And then a few minutes later, Batman is standing on the top of a building and listening to, I guess, police scanners or something through his magic Batman electronic powers or something.
	I think that's meant to be him testing the, you know, the phone hacking thing.
	OK.
	I think that's foreshadowing of his of his big phone spy system, like him standing on top of the building, listening to loads of voices whispering in his ear.
	I think that's what that is.
	I am perfectly willing to accept that.
	I'm willing to give the movie that much credit.
	It would be nice if there was some kind of indication that that was happening, even after the fact.
	But okay, willing to accept that.
	That's what Batman is doing.
	And here's I've captured Harvey Dent.
	If you want to find Harvey Dent, go to such and such address or whatever.
	Like the Joker is saying something.
	Okay.
	So now we're, now that I see it that way, it may be there were sequences of like Batman, like doing like early, like phone call, like phone spread spectrum checking of things.
	And then he like, here's something of like the Joker saying something.
	And there may be like an entire like hour missing from this movie that actually fills in a lot of these plot points.
	And I really suspect that's the case.
	I really suspect that there's a bigger movie that's just that we're getting like 10% of this because suddenly he's running.
	So suddenly he's running off into this location and then he wanders in where Gordon, he's already there when like the cops show up and he's just hiding in the shadows.
	It's just crazy.
	That's just what Batman does.
	He's waiting.
	He needed to get there first.
	So he can make the big entrance.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Cause he's a dick.
	And he's like, check the, check the names.
	And it's like, Oh, it's somebody hard.
	It's Harvey, somebody, and then somebody dead.
	So it's Harvey Dent.
	Okay, okay, okay.
	We haven't, this is just, this is just, okay.
	So, the Joker's playing games again.
	Great.
	All right.
	Then he says, give me a few minutes to Gordon.
	He says, give me a few minutes.
	I don't want your people contaminating the scene.
	Yeah.
	Which is supposed to be this kind of dark and gritty, like Batman is setting himself above like the police because the police are the ones who would normally say these things.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And so it's supposed to be like an element of like the corruption of the system or whatever.
	Right.
	But.
	There are, like, several, like, ordinary, like, uniformed police officers, like, standing around watching this happen.
	And especially, again, later, we already mentioned, like, where Batman is, like, beating the shit out of the Joker.
	And, like, a whole bunch of, like, ordinary cops are watching.
	Like, everybody knows that Gordon is corrupt as fuck, right?
	Like, you know?
	This is a problem that goes on and on.
	The more you think about the number of people who must have known everything that was going on in this movie, the more nothing makes sense at all.
	Half of Gotham knows exactly this thing.
	Jordan is like, oh, I need to be super quiet.
	Let me wander up to the rooftop and light the giant spotlight on and say, oh, yeah, that must be a facility's problem.
	They've got a broken light.
	That's not my problem.
	That's literally a line.
	Anyway, so Batman says.
	It is a line.
	It is.
	So Batman says, let me let me have a few minutes with the scene.
	And Gordon's like, OK, we'll give you five minutes or whatever.
	And then he goes and he cuts out the brick with one of the bullets in it from this gun.
	Yeah, that has been.
	So there's a spray bullet that this is a really impressive round.
	It penetrated like a couple of inches deep into this brick.
	So he takes like this entire chunk of brick And then uses like super high tech CSI technology to extract a fingerprint from that round is given an address, which he then like finds.
	The round, by the way, is in fragments and he virtually reassembles it.
	Right.
	This is like magic CSI technology.
	This is like Batman detectives.
	Like, you know, I'm almost just willing to grant like, OK, he's got like super high technology, although we spend a shitload of time on it because it can't just be I've got like magic piece of like bullet technology.
	Let's just move on from this.
	It's we have to have the minigun that rises from the pedestal and fires into five bricks and then like one of them Batman, like, walks around and, like, figures out which brick it most resembles, and then picks that one, and they analyze that one, and then compare it to... I don't know exactly what's supposed to be happening here, but it looks really cool on screen, and that's what matters, right?
	Clinical techno-fetishism, that's what's happening.
	Exactly, exactly.
	It's supposed to be, like, Batman has a lot of money.
	That's the answer here, you know?
	Batman is, as we all know, the greatest detective.
	We all know the world's greatest detective.
	That's that's integral to the character.
	And this film's attempt to put that on screen is he's got a shitload of money and magic tech.
	He doesn't even solve it himself.
	He like has to extract the he has to extract the thing and then he brings it to Morgan Freeman and Morgan Freeman goes like, oh, I can analyze this for you.
	It's like it's not even like oh it's like can't you just maybe Lucy is fine maybe there's somebody else who can run your company and you can get Morgan Freeman to come and like work more directly with you and like save the steps because apparently you're constantly 15 seconds behind whatever terrible thing is about to happen you know so that they extract a fingerprint And they find that that fingerprint is connected to a guy who happens to be living in some spot that's right along the parade route.
	And so then...
	Batman can't dress up as Batman and go in his Batman gear, so he rides his motorcycle to the spot where he happens to get there, and thankfully all the cops that they had taken the uniforms from were blindfolded, otherwise they would have just seen Batman's face.
	You're Bruce Wayne.
	It's like Peter Thiel shows up in the middle of this thing, and a bunch of these cops suddenly go like, what is Peter Thiel doing here?
	That's the, you know, like, thankfully, they were all blindfolded.
	Otherwise, yeah.
	And then he almost gets shot because like, he finds the thing and there's a telescope that's like, it's all like, just so contrived, right?
	It's all just this completely contrived- Convoluted doesn't even begin to do it justice.
	Couldn't you just say, I, like, if you're worried, I mean, like, couldn't you just say, we heard chatter that there was a guy, or like, we found a fingerprint any other way.
	Like, nobody found any fingerprints from anything that any of these guys have ever done anywhere.
	You had to, like, track it down off of this bullet casing this one time.
	That's the only way to do this.
	It just violates so many economies of how you tell a story, right?
	For no reason, except you get the cool scene with the minigun and whatever.
	Well, that's the point, isn't it?
	They want the techno-detective CSI work stuff, so they create a skeleton of something that vaguely resembles plot so that they can put it in.
	Two things.
	It's implied to be a trap.
	At least that's how I read it.
	Like, because the window flies open and Bruce Wayne nearly gets shot by one of the snipers who's watching for windows suddenly opening.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	That's one of the things I always remember from JFK, Donald Sutherland saying, Oh no, if this had been a regular thing, we would have had snipers all over the place.
	And we would have, nobody would have opened a window on the parade route without us doing something about it.
	But so, Oh, was that a cop?
	Yeah, that was a sniper cop.
	Maybe they could have had one of those along the route where they were moving the Joker later down the line.
	They could have tried it.
	But it's implied to be a trap.
	So again, is all this planned?
	Like digging the bullet out and reassembling it and finding the fingerprint and thus going to that specific apartment?
	Well, there's an even better example of that, you know, where like they find like the, the Joker card and it has, um, you know, three people's, it has exactly three people's DNA on them.
	Right.
	And those three people are like the, they immediately go, these are the next targets because it's like the current police commissioner, the judge who was on the case and, uh, Harvey Dent.
	And so these are the three next targets.
	So a, you found one card in some location.
	You sent it to DNA analysis immediately.
	It comes back 10 minutes later.
	Yeah.
	And you have DNA samples for these three particular people on file already.
	Yeah.
	And then you immediately figured out, like, these are the next victims.
	Like it's, it's taking like the seven phenomena of like, you know, like putting, you know, the killer is like setting up the like crazy clues and, you know, this must be something that's deeply investigated and just taking all of the like nuance and investigation and just turning it into, you know, you just immediately reached the conclusion and suddenly like, these are the three next victims.
	Well, Hey, Hey, the fact that like they suddenly have DNA on like everybody in Gotham apparently put a pin in that Put a pin in that.
	Yeah.
	But like, it again fits that same kind of logic.
	Like, what if they just didn't test that card that day?
	What if it sat down there for two weeks?
	Suddenly, the Joker's whole plan just falls apart.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But it's like you were just saying, instead of that whole Slog through, you know, digging the bullet out of the wall and testing the different guns, etc, etc.
	They could have just had a line of dialogue and gotten to the scene at the parade route at the funeral much more economically.
	With the other thing, that's kind of what they're doing.
	You know, you see the card and then you get a line of dialogue.
	Oh, there's three people's DNA on the card.
	But yeah, you could have gotten there through something much more convincing.
	It's like the film thinks there's two alternatives.
	There's, you know, oh, yes, in a line of dialogue.
	Oh, yes, this completely ridiculous, implausible series of results has been obtained.
	So on with it.
	Or you have to spend half an hour like Batman steals the card and subjects it to some ultra high tech computer, you know, DNA sweep or something.
	Right.
	And I don't mind, I don't mind, I don't mind either like technique.
	I just like, and, you know, again, I feel like people are going to complain that we're like nitpicking stuff.
	We're like, we're not really talking about like the themes of the movie and kind of like what's going on in the narrative.
	And we're kind of like, but it is of these like connective tissues.
	It's like, you know, I spend, I think it's very easy to kind of watch this movie and watch it fairly diligently and spit about, 50% of it, not really knowing what's going on in any given moment.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	There are several bits where I had no idea what was happening when I first saw it.
	Like, let me think of an example.
	Actually, one of the examples is in the scene you were just talking about where Batman goes to the crime scene and he says, you know, let me dig the bullets out.
	It's because they find a newspaper there on the table, which has an obituary for the mayor in it.
	What?
	What?
	Where did that come from?
	Apparently the Joker just like, you know, broke into a print shop and he's got like, print, you know, printed printers sitting there.
	You know, it's, it's very, it's very lucky that it's very lucky that that was discovered at that particular moment.
	It's either that.
	It's either sort of he printed his own dummy newspaper somehow, or he actually sort of sent it to a newspaper and paid them to print it.
	Like a Gotham City newspaper would just get that and say, well, he paid us, sure, let's print it in the classified section.
	Yeah, surely this is not this Joker character, you know?
	No one would do that, you know?
	Yeah, literally.
	And at the same time, they're saying, you know, this guy's called Harvey and this guy's called... I had no idea what was going on in that scene, first time I watched it.
	And there are several other instances like that.
	I can't think of them off the top of my head, but there were several instances.
	But, you know, the film just strides confidently through it.
	There's a line of dialogue where somebody refers to a line of dialogue you've heard before, doesn't matter if it's the same person talking to the same person, then there you are, you're in the next bit!
	Because this is how filmmaking works, apparently.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah, we could we could do a lot more of this.
	Like if we if we if we chose to.
	Yeah.
	People are going to hate this episode.
	It's OK.
	It's OK.
	I'm having fun.
	I feel like we should we should talk at least a little bit about some of the themes I do.
	I do think we should come back to this and kind of talk in more and more serious detail.
	I think it's worth Kind of pointing out the other kind of like baseline incoherence.
	But, you know, I think that there is, you know, clearly this is a film... Oh, I know, I know!
	In the bit where Rachel and Dent have been kidnapped, right?
	Okay, yep.
	And Batman gets the Joker to tell him where they are.
	Or rather, the Joker calculates that he's used up enough time and decides, right now I tell him.
	So much wrong with that sequence as well.
	But yeah.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	As he's running out, he's got the addresses for both of them.
	And as he's running out, Gordon says to him, which one are you going for?
	And he says, Rachel.
	And then he turns up at the Dent location.
	Now, I think what's supposed to have happened is that the Joker switched the addresses?
	Yeah, the Joker lied.
	Yeah, that's the implication there.
	But in the moment, I had no fucking idea what had just happened.
	Yeah, no, certainly on first viewing, it's very confusing because you think like, I mean, and originally this is shot.
	There's some really fascinating.
	We could do this like frame by frame, honestly, because like you really have to watch this in order to kind of get at it.
	And this is why I rewatched this twice.
	So my apologies for.
	I also love, by the way, I just I love the idea that even in that moment of absolute extremist, in the moment of terror, when the woman he loved has been kidnapped by a murdering psychopath and he thinks she's about to be blown up, he nevertheless remembers to do his silly voice.
	Well, that's that's how you stay in character, Jack.
	You know, I know you wouldn't understand that, but no, because that sequence when like Dent wakes up, He's surrounded in cans of gas.
	And then you hear, diegetically on the soundtrack, you hear Maggie Gyllenhaal, you hear Rachel Dawes talking.
	And you think they're in the same space.
	And then it cuts to her and she's talking and you hear it the same way.
	But then it turns out that she's talking over a speaker.
	yeah then so they're talking to each other in two different locations and then you kind of realize what's going on and it's intercut so that like dent is going for dawes and batman is going for or well you think that batman is going for rachel dawes and you think that dent is going for uh gordon was going for dent but it turns out that like the joker gave him the wrong location because that's what the joker does i mean that's I mean, that's a neat moment, right?
	In which, you know, there is this kind of subplot of, like, this kind of, like, love triangle that I don't know.
	It's okay.
	There's some interesting stuff there.
	I don't think it's the best element of the film.
	I think Christian Bale just is not able to sell that at all.
	I have a theory about Christian Bale.
	I think Christian Bale is fundamentally a comic actor.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I was thinking about this as I was watching the movie and I'm like, the only real time that I really liked Christian Bale is in the big short.
	And that's him, like, kind of playing to, you know, the schlubby comedic, you know, version of his performance.
	You know, that's the only time I've ever really liked Christian Bale in a movie.
	Yeah.
	I like him in American Psycho, but what I like about him in American Psycho is that he plays it as a comedy.
	He plays Patrick Bateman as a funny character.
	Right.
	Yeah, I haven't seen that in a long time.
	And I'm not a big fan of the film.
	So, you know, well, the film is better than the book.
	I've read the book.
	And I agree.
	Whatever, whatever level in which Brady Stiles meant that as a satire, and he has claimed in many, many times over the last 30 years and change that this is meant to be a complete satire.
	Man.
	That is a whole long sequence of, you know, descriptions of people being murdered.
	Yeah, I believe him.
	I believe him that when he says it's intended as a satire, I just I think it nonetheless reveals more about him than he necessarily wanted to reveal.
	To be honest, there's a great David Foster Wallace short story, which in which completely takes the piss out of that style.
	And I'll have to look it up.
	I think I can find it online and I can, I can show it to you.
	I forget the title, but there's a brilliant David Foster Wallace short story.
	And what she basically does is Brady Stanellis in that, in that version.
	And in like eight pages, it's like, well, Brady Stanellis, you know, want to see a body.
	Whatever, whatever feelings you have about David Foster Wallace, you know, he knew what was up.
	And they kind of came up together and kind of various, they were contemporaries in a way.
	So we, the wrong, the wrong one.
	Yeah, we redacted, redacted.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The Dark Knight.
	I feel like we should talk a little bit about the what else is going on in the movie.
	I'm sorry to spend so much time talking about the about the kind of narrative incoherence and the kind of like the plot details.
	But this this is the stuff that doesn't really get talked about.
	I feel like this film and this is weird because I feel like The Dark Knight got like it made so much money and it was the.
	Like the, like it was going to bring comic movies to a more like serious audience.
	It was kind of like, you know, it was like, it was supposed to be that.
	And like people that I respected at the time talked about it in those terms because like we hadn't seen a comic movie that was really like trying to be, you know, like this kind of story.
	But I feel like the more distance we get from it, Thinking about it this afternoon and re-watching it, the more I think, this just kind of feels like a Law & Order episode in a lot of ways.
	Like it's a Law & Order episode with Batman, except like, it's kind of a dumb, it's a Law & Order rip-off, you know?
	Like, there's a scene, I'm sorry, I'm going to keep doing this.
	We're not going to talk about anything.
	We need to come back to this and talk about the themes of it.
	Let's let's spend this episode nitpicking the plot.
	Yeah, let's do it.
	We will do another bonus this month and do like more about the Dark Knight.
	Like I have a lot to say about the themes of this movie, but I also really needed to get this off my chest.
	I love this.
	I love this.
	There's a there's a scene where so they just got the bank, the account of the Chinese accountant Lou Lau.
	So he's in an interrogation room with Maggie Gyllenhaal.
	Oh, is that a scene where the two lawyers, including a district attorney, explain to each other what RICO is?
	Hold on, let's set this up properly, okay?
	So first of all, Megan Gyllenhaal, completely thankless role in this film.
	As I remember, Katie Holmes did absolutely nothing in Batman Begins.
	I can't imagine she wanted to come back for the sequel.
	Megan Gyllenhaal at least didn't have to suffer the indignity of having to refuse to come back for the Dark Knight Returns.
	I love Maggie Gyllenhaal.
	I think she's great.
	I think she does perfectly well in this.
	She does as well as she can.
	She is giving almost nothing to do.
	This is like the one moment in which she actually gets to do something other than be horny for Aaron Eckhart, right?
	Apart from Heath Ledger, she is the bright spark in the acting because she gets to look at and talk to Bruce Wayne in the way that I want to.
	Yeah.
	Which is with sort of weary contempt.
	Right.
	And you would think that Michael Caine and, you know, like Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman should be able to do that.
	But they get all the like lines that are, you know, you're the hero that Gotham needs right now.
	Yeah.
	You need to go and be dark so that The world around you can worship you.
	That's right.
	You're not a hero, you're something more.
	You're the tough guy.
	You're something more than a hero.
	Definitely want to at some point talk about the some men just want to watch the world burn sequence because There's a detail that gets left out of that.
	Anyway, so Maggie Gyllenhaal is standing there and she's interrogating Lau.
	And then suddenly Lau goes like, it's all in one bucket, all the money's in one bucket.
	And then she walks out of the interrogation room, leaves the door open.
	Walks into the next room and Aaron Eckhart goes, we got him.
	We got him.
	We're going to do a RICO case.
	And then he explains to Gordon what RICO means, right?
	And then turns to his, after Maggie Gyllenhaal walks in and goes, we're going to do a RICO case.
	Oh, I never thought of that.
	I know we've been prosecuting the highest levels of mob involvement in the most mob infested city in human history, but I never thought that a RICO case might've been an option for us.
	It's like, literally, it's like you're halfway up Everest, and one mountaineer turns to the other mountaineer and says, hey, how about we use crampons?
	Hey, what about a pickaxe?
	Don't you think we should have a pickaxe?
	Oh, a pickaxe!
	That sounds like a good plan!
	A pickaxe, that's a brilliant idea.
	With a pickaxe, you can chip away.
	Have a, shouldn't we have baby safety ropes?
	Oh gross!
	Never thought, oh man, genius.
	You know what else would have been a good idea?
	Jackets.
	It's like, it's like dumb and dumber, like DAs.
	What this is?
	And it's a little, like, I understand, like, look, if you've ever tried to write, like, a screenplay or you ever, like, read, like, you know, this kind of, like, where one person who's an expert in something explains a very simple thing to someone else who's supposed to be an expert in something, this happens all the time, right?
	But, like, It's just so like clunky and this dialogue problem happens over and over again in this in which you know you just have like very basic explanations like how many times does Harvey Dent at the party kind of go like like Rachel Dawes is like You've been taking on mobsters for the last year and a half and you're scared of these high society fucks, you know?
	And he's like, yeah, no, they're more scary.
	They're just totally more scary.
	Yeah.
	And he's practically like pulling on his necktie and, you know, like sweating through it and everything.
	And it's like three times they have that almost identical exchange.
	It's yeah, it's constant.
	This is a guy that punched a mobster out in court just the day before, you know?
	This is the guy who got a gun pointed at him.
	Okay.
	And another CinemaSins thing is like, if you look at the details on that, like, A, how did the guy get the gun into the court in the first place?
	Okay.
	B, he's clearly just got it on his lap based on the way he pulls it out, you know?
	So he's just sitting there with like a pistol on his lap with the judge sitting like right there, you know?
	Um, anyway, you know, again, not to not to give CinemaSins any credit but like, you know, sometimes they do sometimes they do hit one out of the park on that like yeah no there and there's, again, all of this can be like kind of like, like that kind of stuff you can just kind of say look, this is, It's meant for dramatic effect.
	It's meant to, because that's a really cool moment in which, like, the mobster pulls out the gun and Aaron Eckhart, like, disarms him and punches him.
	And then, like, the line of, like, I haven't finished my questioning.
	Like, that is super fucking cool.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Look, that's that thing with the gun in the court.
	That's the sort of thing where I would be perfectly fine saying, yeah, fine, whatever.
	It's movie stupid, but it's a great moment.
	We'll let it go.
	If literally every scene didn't have something in it like that.
	Right, and literally every scene does.
	It's constant, running through this film and just finding all of the details that just don't add up at all.
	Like, you know, we can do this, we can, again, we can do this over and over again throughout like the rest of the plot, you know?
	Yeah.
	One sequence I did admire just to kind of give it, just to give us like some positive here at the end, there is something that I really enjoyed.
	And that is the kind of the final action sequence.
	I've always enjoyed that sequence.
	We're through the magic sonar technology, which is not nearly as invasive as the actual things the FBI does and the CIA does in the 21st century.
	Oh, you mean like blasting protesters with high-frequency sounds that makes their brains boil inside their skulls, which is literally a thing.
	Right.
	Well, the surveillance program that Lucius Fox is like, you know, as long as this is just Wayne Enterprises, I won't be here.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	We will talk about that in the next episode.
	We'll do that next time.
	They use the like magic sonar thing to find the Joker and suddenly it's like, Oh, he's in such and such building.
	And then the Joker has like set up this, I don't see anything that forces him to stand up and be in one place.
	are wearing the clown masks and the, and they're carrying guns, like fake guns that have been like taped onto their hands.
	So they appear to be dangerous, you know, people.
	Yeah.
	I don't see anything that forces them to stand up and be in one place.
	Like apparently, I don't know, you know, that's let's just assume that they're like wired somewhere.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Whatever.
	Or they were threatened.
	Stand there or, you know, we'll shoot you.
	So whatever.
	I'll let that go.
	We'll let that go because it becomes a really cool.
	This is the sequence I actually really like where.
	So the SWAT team shows up and Batman shows up.
	So Batman apparently told Gordon where to find or Gordon discovered independently, in which case we didn't need the magic sonar thing.
	OK, we're just going to let this go.
	It leads to a cool scene.
	Batman.
	Is given, like, two minutes to, like, ahead of the SWAT teams, and the SWAT teams are, like, closing in, right?
	Good luck explaining that when somebody asks you about probable cause, by the way.
	Right, exactly.
	You know, I mean, you know, the legal necessities of, like, kind of what goes on in the scene of a furnace, you know?
	You know, this is actually one of the more realistic things, in which case, you know, like, cops just get to kind of do what they want and defend it in retrospect.
	This is actually something where I'd actually like defend the certain elements of this film, you know, where like, the cops aren't following probable cause.
	It's like, well, no, that's actually realistic.
	I mean, you know, Chris Nolan, you know, unironically, you know, something real, you know, accidentally, accidentally, you know, agreeing with Chris Nolan for the wrong reasons.
	Yeah.
	So Batman comes in, discovers that, you know, Anthony Michael Hall, who just leads to the, this feels like television to me, is that Anthony Michael Hall is a third tier role.
	Anyway, you know, he's the news anchor and he's the one underneath the mask.
	And then, you know, we recognize him and it was like, oh no, the hostages are the ones in the clown masks.
	And so then Batman has to... Oh, I'd literally never clocked that the guy under the mask is the news reporter from earlier.
	I'd never got that.
	Yeah, you apparently didn't watch as many John Hughes movies in the 80s.
	I don't believe I watched a single one.
	Oh, well, you know, we will not be covering those in the series.
	Another thing that is very much a part of my teenage years that I'm very happy to leave in my teenage years, if we can leave it at that.
	So, he uncovers the mask, realizes what's going on, that the Joker is set up like the snipers are gonna kill the hostages instead of the bad guys, right?
	And then suddenly, Batman, you know, like, The prohibition against killing and the prohibition against wanting to save every life that he can actually suddenly makes sense.
	This is the first time that Batman, that he's actually given a goal in his action that makes sense to me.
	And the reason that I really like this is that suddenly Batman has to Fight both the SWAT team and the bad guys, the, you know, sort of the, the, the Joker sentiment and save all the hostages without ever being able to actually sit down and explain this, you know, to anyone.
	Right.
	And so like, he suddenly has to like save the, save the hostages in the clown masks and like, kind of like Put them aside and then take on all these SWAT teams.
	And I really love when our protagonists in these superhero movies and these kinds of things have to sort of work against both sides, where one of them might agree with him, but they don't have all the information.
	I really kind of like being in that predicament.
	I really like that kind of fighting.
	Yeah.
	You mean like in Man of Steel, where Superman is being attacked by the Kryptonians and the US Army?
	Right, right.
	And just decides to destroy a town in Kansas.
	You know, that's the, you know, yeah, let's just let's just destroy New York.
	You know, that's the that's the way to solve this problem.
	No, like, and I find it I find it like it's it's actually just like a well executed seed.
	I mean, it kind of leans into the sonar technology a little bit more heavily than I would like it to.
	But it's kind of a cool effect and it sort of makes sense.
	It's like, you know, Lucius Fox is like feeding him information and you can kind of see the SWAT teams are coming after him and he's constantly having to kind of do all this stuff.
	And again, if we complained about one earlier action scene, this is one action scene that really worked for me.
	Now, I'm sure we could point out various bits of the logic that don't work the same way we have before, but this actually, it was at least compelling enough that I enjoyed the sequence.
	I've got to disagree with you strongly.
	I do like the scenario you just described where he's got to fight the criminals and the SWAT team to save the hostages.
	And, you know, it's kind of, again, it's a bit movie stupid, but the thing he pulls off where he kind of knocks all the SWAT guys off the edge of the building, but of course, you know, he's got them by the ankle.
	Dislocating ankles and knees all over the place.
	The number of people who end up in traction at the end of this movie is astounding.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, that's kind of good.
	But the sequence as a whole, I just find the editing is incomprehensible.
	I just find it almost impossible to follow what's happening.
	But partly because the editing is bad, partly because just You know, there just seems to be no awareness of how space works in that scene, like no awareness of how you get from one place to another or how long it takes you to get from one place to another.
	Just, you know, just bodies in space seems to be something that stops functioning in that sequence.
	And it's also very, very dark.
	So it's hard to see what's happening.
	There's very little visual distinction between any of the people involved in it.
	And it's constantly intercut with the with the sonar sequences, which are Just I they are impossible to pass.
	I cannot make out what's happening in those in those sonar sequences.
	You know, after a while, you kind of start to get it when it gets very explicit and you start to see kind of outlines of dogs and shit like that.
	But by that point, it's it's almost over.
	I find that I find that entire sequence almost impossible to cope with.
	And also, I feel like I liked the concept enough to just kind of go with I don't want to come over like a precious comic book nerd, but if somebody's in Batman's ear during an operation feeding him information, it should be Alfred.
	That's Alfred's job, not Lucius Fox.
	Right.
	Well, Lucius Fox was the only one, you know, you can't trust Alfred with this, because, you know, like, what the fuck does he know?
	Yes, you can.
	Yeah, right.
	Agreed.
	Agreed.
	Sorry.
	Except that Alfred in this is a war criminal, apparently, but we'll get into that next week.
	I feel like we should wrap up with that.
	Just, I feel like that's, we've teased that.
	I don't really want to make the audience, like, wait for that.
	But so, The scene I want to some men just want to watch the world burn like that comes at the end of a sequence in which he's like, you know, I don't know.
	I can't do I can't do the Alfred the Alfred the Michael Caine voice.
	So my apologies, but you know, he says to the effect of you just want to watch the world burn.
	It appears that you also don't understand this man, Mr. Mr. Mr. Wayne.
	And, you know, it's like, you know, what's going on is like, Basically he says, I was doing some wet work for the military dictatorship in Myanmar.
	We were going after a bandit who was stealing rubies from rich people.
	And we thought we, I was part of a team that went after the guy.
	And then we found out he was just throwing the things away because we found a small child was playing with one.
	And clearly he wouldn't just give it to a small child for any particular reason.
	And later it's revealed, yeah, we burned the forest down.
	Yeah, we just murdered a bunch of peasants to get at this one bandit to get is completely reasonable to think that the bandit was actually like funding, you know, poor peasants being able to like feed themselves with these like jewel, jewel thief, you know, like, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	As I have said in another podcast, which I will link to.
	Okay, Alfred.
	You know, some men want to watch the world burn.
	He did it because he thought it was good sport.
	That's your interpretation.
	There are other possible interpretations about why somebody would take wealth from rich people and distribute it among the poor.
	I can think of other possibilities.
	And also, some men just want to watch the world burn.
	Well, you burned the fucking forest.
	You burned the forest.
	Yeah.
	And the movie has, like, there's no commentary about that in this film.
	No, well, this is it.
	That is not ironic.
	That's not dramatic irony.
	The movie is not.
	The movie takes Alfred's take on that completely at face value, as far as I can tell, that is that is almost the authorial voice.
	And this is, again, something we might talk about with these movies.
	It's the authorial voice intruding in the dialogue to tell you what the story means.
	Right.
	It is it is by Fiat, the author telling you, this is what's happening.
	And, you know, Alfred's perspective is it's not questioned.
	And, you know, it is not conscious of the irony of a man who then goes on to say, we burn down the forest.
	Also saying, you know, oh, this guy was a was a nihilistic psychopath.
	He just wanted to burn everything.
	It's a perfect illustration of the psychosis of reactionary thinking.
	Right.
	And it doesn't know it.
	And it's so like, I mean, again, if they had meant to do that, I mean, and I think like I would This film is not as bad as The Dark Knight Returns in terms of fashy Batman.
	I think this film is interrogating some of these things to some degree.
	And I would grant it some leeway.
	And we will talk about that in the second bonus episode about this terrible film, which has some really great stuff in it.
	There is great stuff in this.
	We have praised elements of this, particularly Heath Ledger's performance and Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance.
	And there's a lot to like in this film.
	I like the music.
	I'm sorry, but there it is.
	I like the music.
	It's fine.
	I'm no Hans Zimmer fan, I think is my problem.
	I don't sit down and listen to Hans Zimmer music.
	It's a thing for me.
	Maybe I'll sit down and we'll listen to it one day, but I tend to like the more dissonant, I really like the Johnny Greenwood stuff.
	It's kind of like where I go when I'm looking for Soundtracks to listen to while I'm doing other work.
	But, you know, it's a thing.
	You know, lots of things to like about these about this film and these films in general.
	This is but it's not good.
	It's just not good.
	There's just so much.
	And I mean, I promise you, again, we have scratched the surface on this.
	Like I could we could pick apart almost any scene to this.
	There's stuff that doesn't make sense on this level all over the place in this movie.
	But Made a billion dollars, so who are we to say?
	Ultimately, money talks.
	That's the answer.
	Okay, well, there you go.
	Turns out this is going to be a two-part episode.
	A two-part bonus episode.
	On a Batman movie.
	On a Batman movie.
	We really are showing you who we are lately, aren't we guys?
	And girls, and everybody else.
	We just really, really didn't want to talk about James Lindsay some more apparently.
	That's where we are.
	But we only give you, we missed, we missed a bonus episode in September.
	So I guess you get three in October.
	It's going to be fine.
	Looks like it.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	All right.
	That was episode 10.
	The Dark Knight.
	Episode 10.
	Next one will be 10.
	We'll do 10 and a half.
	I think will be the next one.
	No, no, no.
	I'm not doing that.
	All right.
	Next one is number 11.
	I'm not getting into halves and B's and no.
	Fair enough.
	I'm with you.
	I'm with you.
	Okay.
	Thanks for listening.
	Yeah.
	Thanks for listening.
	Thanks for the support.
	Please send us messages, even negative ones about all of our bonus episodes.
	We do read them and we do take them seriously, even if we disagree.
	So thank you so much.
	And we'll see you in the next one.
	Cheers.
	Yeah.
	That was I Don't Speak German.
	Thanks for listening.
	If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
	If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
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