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Feb. 16, 2024 - I Don't Speak German
01:27:20
UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep11 The Dark Knight (Part 2)

Part 2 of our epic Dark Knight chat.  Since we spent the entirety of the last one moaning about the technical shortcomings of Christopher Nolan's 2008 Batman vs the Joker movie, this time we - being who we are - felt the need to spend this episode moaning about the themes and politics and ideology.  And so we did.   Originally published for patrons only Oct 26th, 2021 Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Content Warnings. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

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This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, 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 safe spaces.
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.
Okay, so this, we're going to make less of a do about what the episode number is this time, but it is episode 11.
It is.
It is, isn't it?
Episode 11.
If I got that right, it was 10.
And now it's 11.
Yeah.
OK.
I just thought I'd better check, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, Episode 11.
Bonus Episode 11, that is.
Not Episode 11.
Bonus Episode 11.
And it's the second part of our two-part bonus episode about the Dark Knight.
Yes, indeed it is.
The Batman movie.
First time we've ever felt that a subject was so important That we should spend two episodes covering it.
That's never happened before.
You know, because we've done plenty of two-parters on the main show.
But that's true.
And back in the day, we used to just we used to sit for four hours and talk about shit.
But we're old men now.
So, you know, we don't we don't do that anymore.
Yeah, I haven't got the stamina anymore.
So yeah, because as you say, back in the old days when we were doing the My My Old Solo Show, yeah, we used to release episodes that were three, four hours long, where we just talk and talk and talk about whatever.
But yeah, these days we have to break it up.
Into two parts.
But yes, last time we, I think, because we spent so long last time talking about what was just wrong with the movie on a sort of technical level, in terms of just the filmmaking, and I think then particularly just the structure of the storytelling.
We didn't really have much time to talk about the movie's themes, did we?
What the movie is actually about, which is kind of what we try to do in these is to kind of like, you know, normally we avoid talking about the movie altogether and talk about all the stuff that's around the movie.
And this time I just had so many things that I wanted to, you know, pick at.
And barely scratched the surface, and yet we still spent almost two hours, you know, at least in the raw recording, just talking about all the bullshit.
And so now we get to come back and talk about the actual stuff that we would have done in the last episode, except I just needed to, I just needed to bitch for a while.
That's what happened.
Yeah, you need to get out of your system.
But there is so much just mechanically wrong with it that It needed to be needed to be picked out for a very long time.
So, yeah.
And I feel like that's something that doesn't really get talked about a lot.
I feel like people like unlike most of the movies that we cover here, you know, people do kind of talk a little bit about the political implications of the Dark Knight.
But like the, you know, its status as this kind of like filmmaking masterpiece gets, you know, It's just accepted, you know, as just true, right?
Probably because Nolan just has that reputation.
And I think that, you know, I mean, I think that people could listen to that first episode that we did, you know, episode 10, bonus 10, and kind of say like, yeah, you're nitpicking.
Nolan's great.
None of this really affects my feeling about Nolan's expertise as a filmmaker or how I feel about his films.
That's perfectly fine.
But I think that's ultimately an aesthetic choice.
And I think we're allowed to have our critical analysis of the basic building blocks of his filmmaking, because I think it does play into the political blind spots as well.
And I think we'll get into that here in a little bit.
Sure.
I mean, you could probably do something quite like what we did last time with a lot of movies.
And I think The Dark Knight is unusually plagued.
I think Nolan films generally are unusually plagued by those sorts of problems.
But no, it's not unique.
The problem, I think, with these movies is that they have this pomposity to them and this air of, you know, announcing themselves as the serious version and the realistic version.
And so it kind of like You know, there is underlying all the quote unquote realism, et cetera, et cetera.
There is nonetheless an essential awareness of the comic book nature of what's going on in, you know, Well, we talked recently about Iron Man, you know.
Iron Man is, you know, a lot of it has a semi-comic tongue-in-cheek tone, despite the fact that it's trying to present things like, you know, rocket technology and your robot boots as being plausible, you know, in some sort of real-world scenario.
It's trying to present that in a sort of aesthetic strategy that makes you feel like You're looking at something that could kind of happen in the real world.
That's very key to these sorts of movies.
Now, even so, it's got this awareness on some level that it is a comic book movie.
Whereas, as you say, like The Dark Knight, it wants to be taken as a gangster epic that happens to feature, you know, Batman.
I feel like those movies kind of want you to imagine that you're watching them in an alternate world where there's no long history of Batman as a comic character.
It wants you to imagine like it's the Batman is something they came up with for this series of gangster movies.
Whereas, of course, all these comic characters, comic book characters are so bizarre, so fundamentally bizarre, such fundamentally relics of previous eras that They are, you know, looked at with any degree of detachment, you can see that they are anachronistic relics that have carried through into our time and have had to be crowbarred in to our modern dramatic and aesthetic sensibilities, I think.
Yeah, I mean, Iron Man has a has a scene in which I mean, like at the very beginning, you know, there's, you know, I and IED, you know, in Afghanistan, like kills a bunch of soldiers and like pretty horrifyingly, you know, realistic is a complicated term in these but realistic ways.
And then Tony Stark jumps out is shot at and then one of his bombs lands three feet next to him.
And then it explodes.
And the worst that happens to him is, you know, a the shrapnel in his body and then like a few bruises.
So, you know, there's a ton of like weird, you know, comic book physics happening.
But, you know, Iron Man, despite its kind of, you know, approach as a, you know, it's trying to be kind of like pseudo realistic in terms of its, you know, Moral attitudes and in terms of its, you know, its politics and, you know, certain aspects of it are certainly treated as realistic.
That doesn't kind of carry over into the action scenes, which are much more kind of slapstick, funny, goofy, you know, even when we get into more, you know, kind of action heavy moments, it works on comic book logic.
It isn't telling us, oh, this is a completely realistic rendition of this story, right?
And even where there are kind of direct comparisons, you know, like Iron Man, you know, Tony Stark is presented as, I'm the boy genius sitting with like super high end IT, artificial intelligence in my personal lab.
And everybody knows this about me.
And like, I'm building this on my own, because I'm the super genius, as opposed to, you know, in The Dark Knight, we get sort of a similar setup.
But it's meant to be treated as something, you know, that Morgan Freeman is just kind of figuring out because he did R&D work for the military for a few years or something.
Yeah, like, you know, it's a, that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
Because in order for In Iron Man, it just says, yeah, he just invents it in his private lab because he's a genius.
Whereas in The Dark Knight, you get it elaborately lampshaded, like, you know, it's Morgan Freeman is the only guy still working in the officially mothballed Wayne Enterprises military R&D department, which has loads of tech in the basement that nobody knows about.
And that's how Batman gets his wonderful toys.
Right.
And that's that's convincing, apparently, according to the aesthetic sensibilities of these movies, that's more realistic.
Right.
But that's that's kind of their fatal flaw, because they they take place in a world where, you know, the Pentagon develops Kevlar suits and there are such things as Rico cases, etc.
But at the same time, once you actually take the sequence of events that you see as seriously as the films kind of ask you to, they're just blatantly ridiculous, even on a just a granular level of, you know, where people go and what they're doing and why.
Right.
I mean, you know, the whole, again, you know, not to reiterate it, but the whole logic is that, you know, Iron Man feels more realistic because it isn't trying to play by, you know, the strict rules.
You know, it isn't asking us to treat this as, you know, a kind of complete narrative.
It's meant to kind of, you know, it is the boy genius character.
And, you know, if You know, again, it wouldn't take much to convince me.
I mean, you could do the goofy version of Batman.
You know, you could do, I mean, obviously you could do that.
The Adam West series is very much that.
You could do the version in which Lucius Fox was, you know, the 17-year-old boy genius who spent, you know, 60 years being unrecognized, you know.
And has built all these things and, you know, like the entire military industrial apparatus is built on him for all that time.
But like, that's not the version that we get, you know, and when you get to that extreme, it does, you know, and again, if we're being sold it as kind of realistic narrative, it's a lot easier to break that sense of verisimilitude.
But what we were, I think, going to try to do in this episode is talk about the themes of the film.
And inevitably, as a result, we're going to end up talking about ideology.
And this does actually fit into this because realism and realistic and things like this are themselves ideological propositions.
You know, when a film presents you with something and claims that this is realistic or more realistic than other versions, it's making essentially an ideological claim.
And I think it's very interesting that the Nolan Batman movies ideas of what constitutes the realistic.
Nevertheless, still sort of, it's a slightly negotiated, what's the word I'm looking for?
It doesn't matter.
Slightly negotiated version of the same idea of the genius millionaire, but it's still basically the same idea of the genius saviour billionaire, I should say.
Except that this time we have We have backstory for his amazing armored suits.
They come from essentially the American military-industrial complex.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
This is very, very explicit in the Batman, particularly in, I mean, begins and particularly in the Dark Knight.
One specific thing in The Dark Knight is that like the the plan to get Lao out of Hong Kong, that sort of magic shenanigans he pulls off with the with the plane that picks him up, etc.
It's an old CIA.
It's explicitly a CIA thing, which, you know, like Morgan Freeman is just like, you know, oh, yeah, I remember back in the 60s, there was this Operation Skyhook thing.
I think I can rig something like that up.
And it just, you know, and then suddenly it just and it does.
It very much is like a 60s Bond effect, you know.
Um, we're recording this the weekend that the, that the last Daniel Craig, you know, Bond movie is released.
And so Bond is kind of all over Twitter a little bit.
And, you know, I saw, you know, some, some commentary of like, yeah, we should just, if we're going to keep doing Bond, it should just be like cold war.
We should just go back to the sixties and just Bond should just be a character in the perpetual sixties, which I think would be the only way to do Bond these days, you know, um, um, is to just forget anything happened after, after basically the Kennedy assassination is like, Yeah, do them as period pieces.
Yeah.
You know, but this is very much that.
I mean, it is like clearly Nolan.
I mean, if you look at the final sequence in Inception, you know, that's a very Bond-like, you know, we're skiing through the snow with machine guns and tackling guards and stuff.
You know, no one clearly has an obvious reference point in Bond.
And, you know, the idea of like, we're going to like that whole wow scene just seems to be like, you know, a, you know, this was kind of the beginning of like China opening up to American cinema.
And so, OK, we shoot some stuff in Hong Kong and we include some Chinese actors.
And, you know, we have a certain percentage, you know, screen time spent on that and suddenly we can release it in China and get access to that capital market.
So, you know, obviously we're going to do that.
That's clearly part of the story of like why this whole aside is even in the movie, because there's absolutely no reason that Lao could not have been.
You know, named Smith, and just be in Chicago, and they have to do the same maneuver to get him out.
You know, there's absolutely no reason for it.
But also, you know, clearly, creatively, it's just a James Bond sequence, ultimately.
Which is not even a criticism of it.
It's just, that's what it is.
It's an action sequence.
It's just plopped in there for those two reasons, as opposed to being kind of like narratively cohesive.
And then what gets left out of the movie based on that being like something that we just have to do is, you know, the stuff that is actually more like kind of directly on point for the ideas that the film is clearly trying to grapple with.
Because that's ultimately just, you know, that whole sequence, that whole character just exists to To basically be a MacGuffin for for most of the movie, you know, he doesn't do anything in particular for the movie, like as that character.
No, no, not really.
I suppose it's palatable to Chinese markets because he's a villain from or at least in Hong Kong, I suppose.
Yeah.
But that is, again, ideology.
But Nolan is very enamored with sort of glittering corporate cityscapes, and he wants to shoot it on IMAX.
So the film opens with exactly that.
Glittering skyscrapers filmed on IMAX.
And then you go to Hong Kong and you get just the same thing turned up to 11.
I mean, it's world terror, Apologia.
I mean, this is start to finish.
This is very, you know, 24 the movie, but with Batman.
Yeah, absolutely.
As much as we talk about sort of like the ending sequence in which we have the, you know, the cell phone sonar thing, you know, throughout the city.
And so like, we're listening to the calls, but it's also supposed to be the sonar technique.
And like, it doesn't, like none of this really, again, it doesn't It doesn't really make sense because when we first are shown the cell phone technology, it's A, a bomb.
B, it's not a bomb, it's like an EMP.
It takes out the electronics in the building, right?
Yeah.
It's just like a sonar pulse, right?
Yeah, it's like an echolocation system.
Right.
And so then when that man kind of shows up at the end and he's, he's got this new technology, which is supposedly based on the old technology, but it's like, well, you just have to feed it a bit of like Heath Ledger's voice and then it can track him based on that.
So they actually, you actually are listening in on the calls, which isn't actually the technology that we were presented at the beginning of the film.
No, but it also does have this kind of sonar thing built into it as well.
And so, I mean, it is, it is, it is confused in that same way that we were talking about in the last bonus episode.
In the sense of like these, it does, it almost holds together, but doesn't quite.
But, you know, the whole thing of like, when we're listening into everybody's calls, well, we're not storing it, so we're not really the bad guys.
You know, it's very clearly, I mean, it's about like the dragnets that were being done on people's phone calls in the US.
And by that measure around the world by the US military intelligence apparatus, you know, and about those whole debates, which ran for years.
And like, basically, everybody just shrugged their shoulders when Obama was elected.
It was just like, Well, I guess this is what we're doing now.
Yeah.
So yeah, that's the thing.
Obama bequeathed the expanded programs to Trump.
Yeah.
And went after whistleblowers in like a brand new way, you know, during his term, you know, in various ways.
Yeah.
I mean, really used the, you know, some of the Intelligence apparatus in ways that Bush never did.
I mean, believe me, do not let me defend George W. Bush ever for anything on this podcast or anywhere else.
That man was a fucking monster, you know, one of the worst people of the 21st century, miles worse than Bush.
But there were definitely ways in which Obama, being the liberal reformer, being the one that we liked, got to do even more heinous shit just under the cloak of likability.
Yeah, sure.
Well, this is kind of a way back into the film, because the plot and the concept is confused in the film, I think, because the ideology is confused.
What the film is actually saying about this is confused.
And I think it's what it's saying is confused, because what it's doing is it's putting a kind of liberal gloss on neoconservative ideas and neoconservative propositions.
Obviously, the basic idea of sort of mass surveillance of the population.
Justified by, essentially, to boil it right down, by, you know, the extraordinary threat of terrorism.
That's what's happening in this.
You have the extraordinary threat of the Joker.
Extraordinary times, extraordinary threats.
Extraordinary threats call for extraordinary measures.
So you have to sacrifice a little bit of freedom and liberty in return for security.
This is the neoconservative argument, you know.
Yeah, sure.
You increase the the surveillance power of the state.
And, you know, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.
That's that's the argument.
And that's essentially what what Batman is doing.
But at the same time, the text as a text is expressing and I think also trying to recuperate unease about that, because you have Lucius Fox there to raise the The unease, as I say, to raise the questions about it.
Lucius Fox says, this is wrong.
You know, it's too much power for one person to have.
I'll help you this once.
That's the key thing for me.
Just this one time.
Just this once, and then I won't have anything to do with it.
I'll kill this baby, sir.
Yeah.
Just the one.
Only one, only one Omala, are we going to be?
Exactly, that's what I was going to say.
Yeah, that immediately cedes to the neoconservative position, because it's always just this once.
There's always another We've got to do something.
And so just this once, you know, maybe last time it was a disaster, but don't live in the past.
There's this new situation.
We've got to do something.
Now it's, you know, Gaddafi on his way to Benghazi.
Okay.
Iraq was a disaster, but what about, what do we do now?
So this time we, we, we have to do it again.
And it's always, We've got to do something.
And it's always, this is an extraordinary threat.
And it's always justice once.
This is the way in which you get, essentially, this is the way in which you get liberal interventionism ideologically.
It's how you get liberal interventionism as a form of collaboration with neoconservatism, neoconservative imperialism.
Yeah.
So so the film through and I think what the film thinks it's doing, so to speak, is posing the question.
It thinks it's being sort of nuanced and complex and just posing these these naughty questions for people to ponder.
But and it does this repeatedly.
What it's actually doing is posing the question and then without realizing that it's doing it, or at least without admitting that it's doing it, it's just answering it in favor of authoritarian power.
Right.
Well, and there's there's a there's a there's a kind of I don't want to say hidden, but, you know, something that I'd like to pull on right here.
There's always this idea that, you know, it's explicitly stated in the in the film, you know, that, you know, Lucius Fox says, you know, no man should have this power.
I'm going to say no person, but it's like no man.
There's a clear gender thing that always goes underneath these things.
Right.
Which we talked about a bit in the last one about Maggie Gyllenhaal being like just asked to do nothing effective Before being classically fringed.
Before being murdered, right.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, no.
But there's always this, there's this thing of like, no man should have this power.
No man can be responsible with it.
And Bruce Wayne says, well, that's why I gave it to you was just, you know, because, you know, the real men of character can, can do this properly and will know how to be limited in their use of it.
And ultimately, you know, this is not, there is not a structural problem in that we are able to build these things and we choose to build them.
We have no accountability.
To anyone around us, it's, you know, ultimately the problem with the Joker isn't that the Joker has the abilities that he does, or the problem with Batman is not that he has the abilities that he does.
The problem is that Batman isn't good enough to exercise it properly.
And the Joker is, you know, evil and chaotic and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Like the issue is always like, if we put the power in the hands of the right individual, that individual can then speak For everyone else around them and can exercise that, even when the people will make the quote unquote wrong decision, right?
And you get that, you know, kind of over and over again.
There's this, just, I mean, very briefly, the moment with Tiny Lister, who's the African American man, the convict in the ferry boat sequence, you know.
Who, you know, comes up and he's, Tiny Lister is one of my favorite, like, he's now deceased, but he's one of my favorite character actors.
He's the president of the United States, or the president of the world, in The Fifth Element, and he has a great part in, like, a small but great part in Jackie Brown.
I mean, he's just a great character actor.
So, like, he shows up and he's, you know, like, taller, a head taller than everyone around him.
And he's this tough black criminal convict who's got, you know, tattoos and a clue of the super violent man.
And, you know, you've got, you know, a minute before, you know, you've got to either blow the other boat up or else, you know, and then he says, I'm going to do the thing you should have done 10 minutes ago.
He picks it up and says, you can tell him I forced it off of you with like 300 people surrounding them.
We can all testify, but you know, you can tell him I didn't force you, whatever.
And then he like throws it out of the boat.
And so like the idea, the thing that we're supposed to get is like, you know, this convict, he looked big and black and scary, but really we're not racist.
He's a really, he was a good man.
Ultimately, he was a better man Then the, you know, liberal elitists over on the other boat who were very willing to, by a vote of three to one, were totally willing to blow up the convicts, right?
But couldn't do it for, you know.
The film is so, you know, sucking its own massive progressive cock there, isn't it?
Absolutely, absolutely.
But the whole thing is like, You know, despite what he looks like, he personally had the moral metal to make the right decision, as opposed to acknowledging that the issue here is this sort of like systemic problem that these kinds of situations don't exist in real life in this way.
And if they did, it would be because there was a structural issue that forced it to be this way.
And ultimately the way we solve the trolley problem is to not have the trolley have that capability, right?
We enforce safety standards on the trolley tracks, you know, like that's how we solve the problem and like forcing us down the road of like having to make that decision because ultimately it is the Both choices are bad because we're not thinking of it on a systemic level.
Sorry, again, not to get too deep in my own ass on that, but this is kind of the fundamental thing that we run into over and over again in a lot of these movies.
But I think it's very, very clear here that Aaron Eckhart, Harvey Dent is the great hero.
And if he had just been able to be the DA, he could have solved all of these problems because he's the golden boy.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
And the real tragedy of the film is that the Joker was so evil that he even managed to drag down this man of gold, you know?
Yeah.
And it's always about like, if you put the right person in charge, that's ultimately how you're going to solve large social problems.
And this is, you know, very common in these things.
I mean, I'm not I don't want to, you know, tar only the Dark Knight does this, but it's very, very overt here.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, some things to come back to Morgan Freeman.
The film really has its thumb on the scales casting Morgan Freeman because, you know, it's Morgan Freeman and he's got that voice and he's got that those eyes, twinkly eyes and etc, etc.
And, you know, he's cast as like the ultimate moral authority, the God, you know, ultimately, you know, he's the check on Bruce Wayne's power.
And Bruce Wayne is, because Bruce Wayne is fundamentally a good guy, he's willing to amass this gigantic authoritarian system of surveillance.
But he's also willing, you know, like Cincinnatus to give it up because he cedes to the moral argument of the even better man.
And of course, you know, Lucius Fox, The ultimate voice of moral authority and sanctity.
He is a corporate CEO.
Let's not forget that, you know.
The head of a massive corporation.
He accepted that role reluctantly, Jack.
If you remember Batman Begins, he's like, no, I can't possibly.
I just want to sit in my lab and do the thing, you know.
Again, it's the right person.
You find the person that doesn't want the job and you get them to do the job.
And then suddenly the system works beautifully.
And with the thing on the boats, you were saying, you know, these situations don't exist in real life.
And of course, situations like that don't exist in real life.
But of course, over the last year or so, we have seen a situation where we as a society hasn't been this stark and concentrated choice, like the choice that the Joker presents people with in the film.
But we have We've been faced with a choice, you know, about who do we prioritize?
And, you know, people in prison, which of course is fundamentally, sorry, disproportionately people of color because of institutionalized racism and systematic race-based inequality, they were just basically left to die.
COVID ran rampant through the prison system.
And so, you know, in the real world, there was none of this, oh, well, fundamentally people
are you know decent and good and they believe in good and so you know they know what what happened in the end and of course it's not down to people making moral decisions it's about to it's it's about entrenched systems that don't you know that they're hermetically sealed there's no way in for most people to have any sort of effect on them but in the real world what happened was that that entrenched and institutionalized system of structural violence just said yeah uh people in prison you just die
Well, you know, it's the same logic that the people, that the, you know, liberals who got on the other ferry were saying, you know, look, they made their choice.
They chose to rob and steal and murder.
And so they deserve what, you know, they deserve what they get, you know, and that's, you know, I mean, there's something, I don't want to say prophetic because it isn't really prophetic.
It's just, it's, it's baseline observation, you know, ultimately.
Um, you know, but yeah, the question of the question of Dent the good man, this is this is fascinating.
Because, yeah, I mean, it's the film is obsessed with this idea of The right person.
I mean, Bruce's whole outlook at the start of this film is, you know, pretty soon I won't need to be Batman anymore, as if he needed to be.
But pretty soon I won't need to do this anymore because here's this guy, this golden, perfect, brave, moral crusader who's going to sort the whole thing out.
Harvey Dent.
I believe in Harvey Dent.
I believe in Harvey Dent and this would mean I get to go have sex with Maggie Gyllenhaal again.
Yeah.
That's the, you know, that's very overtly what, what, you know, I mean, you know, it's framed in a more, you know, kind of romanticized way, you know, of like, you know, but I don't know, like, maybe it's because it's Christian Bale and I just really don't, See, he just has the killer behind his eyes, you know, and like, I know that I'm supposed to believe that, you know, he's actually in love with Rachel Dawes and he wants to go off and have this life.
But like, there's no indication to me that He really wants to.
And the film doesn't do anything with that.
I mean, the film treats it as like completely, you know, surface level, one note, like legitimate that he does actually want to go retire.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which it would be really it would be really interesting to do.
I mean, this is something, again, in the third movie where it would be really interesting if you if you if you genuinely interrogated, you know, Bruce Wayne's Actual feelings and actual desires as opposed to what he says he wants, and they just they just don't do it.
It doesn't help that there's very little.
I mean, I was going to say there's very little chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Bale, but there's nothing really on the page.
I mean, to be honest, Gyllenhaal plays Rachel as Pretty explicitly discouraging all the way through.
You know, she's being pretty clear that actually, Bruce, you know, I'm kind of over you.
And I think Christian Bale just sort of plays Bruce Wayne as, no, can't hear you, fingers and ears.
I mean, the one time that you get any kind of, like, real, like, you know, emotion or, you know, kind of feeling between them is, like, right after he saves her life in the scene we talked about at the end of the last episode, where, you know, they've landed on this car and she gets this kind of little, like, flutter in her eyes or whatever.
And you kind of get the sense of, you know, the physical spark, at least.
I mean, you know, but, you know, there is no, there is no sense that she really wants to go and spend her life with this guy, you know.
With Aaron Eckhart, with Harvey Dent, you get, you know, there's a very real, like, banter they have.
I mean, you know, we, again, we kind of made fun of the, you know, oh, you're, you take it, you tackle the mob and you're scared of these rich assholes, you know, kind of, you know, kind of scenes.
But, you know, there is, there is a back and forth there.
I was watching this and I'm thinking, like, Aaron Eckhart might not have been a bad choice to play Batman, you know, like, I can sort of see him in that, in that role a little bit, you know, but.
Yeah.
And it's not like he's really given that much to do with Dent because when I think it's the choice to make Harvey Dent just like this perfect figure is really weird.
I mean, I understand that it seems to be going for like a tragic fall narrative, but it doesn't show him being corrupted by power.
And it kind of that you get noises about him.
He has this nickname Two-Face at the start of the film.
Well, where does that come from?
And you think, oh, well, is there something is there some complexity to him?
No, he's got that nickname from Cops who don't like the fact that he investigated corruption inside the police department.
Right.
And then when you do get to a bit where the film kind of says, oh, Harvey Dent has a dark side that might come out.
It's in the scene where he's threatening the Joker goon to try to find out where Rachel is.
And Ultimately, you know, it's like it's doing that, oh, the problem with Harvey is that he's just too awesome.
He's just too morally outraged.
He just loves Rachel too much.
There's a detail that I missed until I re-watched it this week, and only on the second viewing.
The whole idea of him being incipiently two-faced, it just has no traction.
Right, right.
I mean, well, okay, I'll get back to the thing I was just saying.
To answer that point, I think that the issue here is that despite the fact that, like, there are long stretches of this film that don't make sense, and there's a lot going on in the movie, it's got too much happening on too many plot lines at one time yeah and what i gather from the production process is that you know original that two-faced is going to be the big villain and then decided to do the joker like they had a lot of different ideas about where to go
and then they just kind of like shoved it all into one movie and it's surprising that it works as well as it does because i think you know over like you do get i mean it does kind of go from point a to point b to point c kind of and you sort of get how the moving parts were meant to go together you know and you could put another pass or two through a script on this and make this sing a little bit more I see what they're going for here, but like the story of, you know,
Harvey Dent being, you know, this golden boy who maybe has some history, who has complexity, who then, you know, turns evil and then Batman has to go against him and then have like a less compelling kind of threat on the outside, like maybe Ra's al Ghul comes back or maybe, you know, whatever, you know, there's certainly like the opportunity to do something other than bring in the Joker at this point.
You know, especially if you're going to make him the, like, if you made the Joker almost like the secondary antagonist, and he's just the sort of like force of nature, who's, you know, the one they're all going after but like the Harvey Dent story is the real narrative.
And then the third movie you really deal with the Joker like that.
You know, you can see where I'm going with that.
You can kind of see how you can kind of build this narrative and really deal with a lot that's going on with Harvey Dent.
But, you know, Harvey Dent, you know, along with, I think, Rachel Dolls, you know, like really gets short, you know, shafted by the narrative, by the movie.
Yeah.
Because A, we've got the Joker.
We got to use him.
B, everybody, I think, early in the process, realized that Heath Ledger was going to be the revelation here.
And, you know, when you've got Heath Ledger doing that on screen, you give him as much time as you need.
I mean, you know, like you almost can't blame them at that point.
So who knows what the actual production process was?
But it makes sense.
But like on a screenwriting level, you can sort of see it seems like there are there are better ways to do this.
And it just feels like it's both Really flabby and completely overstuffed, you know, narratively.
Yeah.
And the.
The key scene in the film really is the scene between the Joker and Two-Face in the hospital.
And that is where you get a very clear instance of this thing I talked about last time, where dialogue is used to sort of crowbar things into making shape.
So you basically give characters dialogue that says, no, actually, this thing I'm doing now is in character.
So what you get in that scene is you get Two-Face's thing of sort of flipping the coin and you live, you die based on the coin cost.
Which he's been doing the entire movie for no particular reason.
No particular reason except that he's going to be Two-Face one day.
Sometimes he's got a two-headed coin and sometimes he's got an honest coin and you don't know which one he's carrying at any given time and that's something you only notice if you really watch carefully by the way.
Okay, yeah.
Because after he gets out of hospital, he goes on this killing spree.
And the killing spree, it's revenge, except that he's now got this fixed idea in his head that he has to get people to call on the toss of a coin, and they live or die based on the fall of a coin, because that's fair.
And in some way, he was denied fairness.
So it's like he's making a point, you know, you get you get fairness that I didn't get.
But that comes entirely from what, like the Joker's monologue to him about how chaos is fair.
So it, you know, it's them, it's them hammering the two bits together to, to insist that it'll make shape, it makes sense.
And, and the one thing flows from the other, I think.
Well, and the, like, just the movie would, I mean, you don't, it doesn't even have to be Two-Face, right?
Like, the movie would make sense if it was just brilliant DA, you know, Golden Boy, who Batman believes in, who Bruce Wayne believes in, who wants to, like, hang up the cowl to give him the moral authority to go off and, like, do the thing that he needs to do.
And he's dating Rachel Dawes, and then this whole situation happens, and then Rachel dies.
And then Harvey Dent seeks out revenge.
And just leave the coin-tossing thing, leave all that out of the narrative.
Everything makes perfect sense.
The whole thing is that suddenly, because it's a Batman movie, it has to be Two-Face for whatever reason.
It could just as easily have been the Riddler, you know?
The Riddler shows up and like, you know, yeah, whenever I'm like questioning a client, I like to put a little riddle in the middle there when I'm doing my depositions.
And then at the end, the Joker goes like, you just gotta keep them asking questions.
And then he's like, you know, What's red and white and red all over a newspaper die?
You know, I mean, you know, sorry, I'm writing this in my head, right?
But like, it doesn't have to be Harvey Dent is the point I'm making, you know, and so all these all the narrative around that just it's just kind of shunted in because we have to have this character be that.
And yes, I know there's a long history of the comic books.
It comes from the comics.
I don't want to hear people.
I'm right.
You know, we get to treat the movie as the movie and not as, you know, 80 years of comics or whatever.
Anyway.
Yeah.
But there's the whole thing about realism as an ideology again, because you have these are the sorts of movies that deal with like, the complexities of prosecuting the mafia, right?
It's not like, you know, a movie where the The mobsters are these grotesques in zoot suits with Tommy guns and shit like that.
They look like mobsters from real life, which actually means they look like mobsters from old episodes of Law and Order.
Or old film noir, you know, because they long, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You get you get all the Italian American actors in and they they sort of do second, you know, second hand Goodfellas stuff, you know, and you get to the the scenes with the district attorney and he's talking about the difficulties of prosecuting enterprise corruption.
It's realistic.
But of course, it's a completely ideological idea of what constitutes realism, because encoded in all of this is the idea that like Organized crime is just this alien threat that sort of grows inside cities like a cancer.
You know, for no reason, it doesn't come from anywhere.
It doesn't have any context.
It doesn't have any material basis.
It's got no similarities whatsoever to any other kind of organized capitalism, like, you know, the kind that takes place inside gigantic glittering skyscrapers, the skyscrapers that you see on IMAX cameras.
There's no establishment corruption with which it's linked.
And prosecutors are good people.
The entire complexity of who prosecutors are and what they do.
Their effect in society, their role in society is just completely elided in favour of this childish myth about, you know, heroes trying to restore public morality and law and order and make everybody safe.
It's...
We're just trying to protect the man on the street, you understand?
Yeah.
And again, I know it's a comic book movie.
I know it's a Batman movie, but the point isn't that it has a simplistic view of the world.
The point is that it has a simplistic view of the world while announcing itself as a serious movie in a hundred different ways, as a realistic movie.
It's trying to present itself with sophistication.
And it actually is, in some ways, more sophisticated than other movies of its ilk.
I think I might have mentioned this in the last one, but there's the line in which Harvey Dent is talking to the former commissioner before Gordon becomes Commissioner Gordon.
And, you know, it's like, well, the big guys are going to get away.
But, you know, hey, all these medium sized guys, we're going to get to prosecute all them.
You'll get 18 months of clean streets.
Imagine what you can do.
That is a much more realistic look at the nature of, you know, what these prosecutions are like.
Then, you know, we're going to put these guys away for life in a glass, in a plastic prison where you can't even break them out with mutant mind powers.
You know, this is You know, you know, it does have that like that slight hint of like something a little bit more sophisticated going on than you normally get out of these.
But it's it's it's a it's buried in a line of dialogue.
You know, it's not anything, you know, that's actually kind of acted upon.
It doesn't have any larger knock on effects in the narrative.
And it's just weak sauce, ultimately, you know?
Yeah.
And it covers stuff.
It covers up the reality of what people like Harvey Dent actually do, which is, you know, sending poor people to prison for decades for breaking windows.
Just ones I'd love to see a Batman movie that actually deals with, you know, like broken windows policing, you know?
No, we go after the small level guy.
He broke a window.
He jumped a turnstile.
And it's just Batman chasing after turnstile jumpers while the Joker is off, like, burning the city down.
Because the Joker won't do that if we just arrest enough of the turnstile jumpers.
Yeah, yeah.
The other thing I always want to know, people come, when you talk like this about movies like this, people always say, oh just relax and enjoy it.
I just, I would love somebody one day to explain to me why it is that so often just relaxing and enjoying it entails accepting at face value the ideological claims of the ruling class.
I, you know, it's just, It's just a coincidence that when you relax and you just take it easy and you just enjoy things, it means acceding to this sort of ideology.
It's weird that, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, if the movie were Stolen the Values of Stalin, You know, but it had some cool action scenes.
No one would ask, no one would say like, oh, come on.
It was just it was just a gulag.
It's nothing.
Just let it go.
Except the gulag, cool action sequences.
That's all we need in a movie, right?
Again, as I've said elsewhere, if these movies were, you know, their equivalent were coming out of North Korea, And they were presenting the authorities in North Korea in similar ways, or you know, even more so, Dark Knight Rises, if you had something like the equivalent translate.
You know, nobody would be in any doubt that you were looking at propaganda.
It would just be obvious.
But of course, in this context, it's invisible to people.
Right.
I mean, you know, I mean, the North Korean version would be, you know, well, yes, those dissidents actually were doing terrible things.
There was a terrorist out there.
He's burning peasants down.
So we just have to do something to get at him.
And the state repression is just a necessary artifact of that.
You know, that's that's that would be the that would be what that narrative would look like, you know, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I just want to make sure we hit this in before, you know, I just want to make sure we cover this.
And I just, I want to present to you a thesis on The Dark Knight, the film, and that is Harvey Dent did nothing wrong.
And the reason that I'm presenting this, tongue-in-cheek of course, before that gets clipped or whatever, but if you remember, I think we mentioned the scene in the last episode where Batman and Harvey Dent and Gordon are like standing on the rooftop and they're having like the conversation.
And there's this like, there's this back and forth that Dent and Gordon have about like, you know, Gordon has got some people that Dent, you know, prosecuted when he was in internal affairs and like, he's got dirty cops, dirty cops, quote unquote.
And you really need to get rid of those people because they're bad people and you shouldn't have them around you.
And the two names that he gives are literally the two names of the cops who end up being the dirty ones on the role of Marina, of Eric Roberts.
So like, actually, Gordon, all of this is your fucking fault.
Yeah, you were told.
You were told that these two particular people were the problem.
If you had fired them now, when he told you, none of this would have happened.
you Yeah, that's right.
It's true.
I mean, you know, and so like, I mean, there is a sense of which Harvey Dent has a, you know, when he's like, when he's sitting there, and he's got, you know, garden on the ground, and he's threatening him and, you know, ask for an apology.
Now, of course, threatening the man's son.
I mean, that, Of course, we're not justifying that in any way.
That's not the point here, but he has a right to his righteous anger at this point, you know?
I told you, Harvey Dent was completely correct, which only goes to make him even more the golden boy, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, if you put entirely aside the fact that he is a ridiculously heroic, sanctified portrait of prosecutors and DAs, there is a sense in which this is a fundamentally decent guy, you know, a guy who...
Who does want to clean up police corruption, for instance, who is just monumentally shat on by this society that he tried to help.
Even before he gets into like this situation and like he's got to deal with the fucking Batman.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, there is the line where he's talking to Michael Caine at the party and he's like, you know, oh, you've known Rachel like her entire life.
Yes, sir, I have.
And it's well, you know, do you any any any old psycho ex boyfriends I should know about?
It's like you have no idea.
Yeah, that actually makes it into the trailer.
Yeah, it's it's a great line, right?
I mean, it's just it's a yeah, Michael Caine, you know, can.
I think we said this last time, it's what's so frustrating is that there is a lot of good stuff in all these films.
They're good enough that you wish you could get into them and save them, you know?
Save them from Christopher Nolan.
Like, just direct Nolan.
Well, and hire a better action choreographer.
That would be the thing.
Yeah.
I mean, my I think the best thing in all of the best thing definitely in this film, and I think the best thing in all of these movies, all three of them is the Joker himself.
And it's not just because Heath Ledger gives a brilliant performance and he does.
It is genuinely a brilliant performance.
We said that last time, and it's true.
It's also that the Joker is genuinely cleverly written.
And, you know, I've talked about this elsewhere, and I am genuinely less than 100% sure how deliberate this was and how conscious the writers and producers and so on were of what they were doing.
But I think it has to have been deliberate, at least to a great extent, which is that the Joker is the exact opposite of what he claims for himself.
The Joker claims himself to be this completely planless, random, you know, he says, I'm just a dog chasing cars, etc.
I don't have a plan, etc.
And his professed biggest hatred is of schemers and planners and so on.
You know, as I've said, you know, he never does anything without planning it for effect three weeks in advance.
Everything he does is meticulously planned.
It's actually... It's plans within plans within plans, yeah.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
I mean, we laughed last time about how it appears that Like, you know, overturning the big rig and crashing the bike and Batman being knocked unconscious is all part of the police plan.
Well, by the same logic, it would appear that them doing that and the Joker fooling them into thinking that he's fallen for it is all part of his plan as well.
Right?
So then Batman is going to get knocked unconscious, and then I'm going to let the one guy go forward first, and he's going to get shocked, and I'm going to play a little game, and then Gordon's going to go up behind me, and then I end up in jail.
And then you think, like, okay, so assuming that's not true, then he's got... How many minions are out there, like, executing how many different versions of plans that get, like, knocked into motion, given, like, whatever?
And so I was like, if I am captured at 6 23 p.m.
on this day, Execute this plan.
If it's at 627, move across town and do the other one.
It's got to be, to any degree of taking this remotely seriously, that's the level of planning that has to be happening at any given time.
Because the Joker is literally in jail.
He has no ability to communicate outside of himself at that point.
And it's also where It's so much easier when you can just say like, well, then the Joker has supernatural powers, like he can communicate with his mind to his minions or whatever.
Like that would be the way you get out of it on a typical movie like this, right?
You couldn't have anything like that in these Batman movies.
You couldn't have anything like the magic resurrection pits, you know, where people come back to life, which is in the comics, you know, in these Batman movies, because these Batman movies are serious and realistic.
Certainly, Batman certainly couldn't climb out of it with a broken back, you know, that's... No, that's ridiculous.
You couldn't possibly... No, but as you said last time, what's actually happening, of course, is that the characters have seen the script, which is a way of saying that the script is incredibly contrived.
But yeah, the Joker plans everything he does.
He is the biggest planner and he projects Um, that onto other people.
Um, so the idea, you know, his own account of himself, which is that he's this ultimate anarchist is, is untrue.
He is the opposite of that.
But what you end up, I mean, that's, it's very cleverly done because it's even down to little things like in the opening sequence, he manipulates one of the guys into the position where he gets run over by the school bus.
By moving around and thus getting the guy to move around into the path of the bus, like it's everywhere in the film.
Everything he does is calculated and planned, you know, and.
Which he knows that guy is going to confront him and refuse to be shot by the like.
Well, I think that could be improvisation.
I'll give them that.
But yeah, it's right the way through, this irony.
And I like that they also don't call it out.
Like, I'm actually kind of surprised that they managed to be subtle enough that there's no point at which any of the characters says this to him.
It's just there for you to notice if you notice.
Like, another thing I like is that it's pretty clear to me that the people on the boats have their own detonators.
But again, it's never actually said in the dialogue.
You know, it might not be.
Nobody discovers that and says, hey, we got our own detonator.
But I think based on everything else the Joker does throughout the movie, they must have, mustn't they?
Surely?
No, clearly.
The thing about that is the way it complicates this picture of the Joker as kind of like an anarchist urban terrorist.
Well, I mean, there's nothing more more frightening to a to a proto-fascist reactionary than an anarchist.
So I think, you know, I think that that really comes down to, you know, Nolan and his crew were kind of like, you know, we wanted to be the scariest thing imaginable.
OK, having a murderous clown, murderous anarchist clown, you know, and so like he pushes that way, you know, as you know, it's like it has to be kind of deliberately that it can't You know, it can't be crazy.
It can't be.
It has to be.
I'm an anarchist, you know, like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's always it's always the way with revolutionary characters or characters who challenge the status quo in any way.
And these sorts of stories are always simultaneously, you know, crazy fanatics and manipulative Machiavellian schemers because they have to be both at once.
Always, always, always.
Like, you know, Bane is another example.
And it's a very, very old literary trope.
It goes back right the way back to the beginning of texts in class society.
But the interesting thing is that what it makes the Joker look like to me, I mean, yeah, the text thinks of him as like the anarchist with the evil plan to overthrow the world and and, you know, through through bombs and terrorism, et cetera, which, you know, is a hair's breadth away from like being joined up with the the Elders of Zion and all that in the traditional propaganda.
The anarchists are being funded by somebody, you know, and we all know who that turns out to be.
But the interesting thing is that what he looks like to me It's, it's, you know, the Joker project his own pathology onto other people.
What I see is like the reactionary ideas behind the film projecting themselves onto him, because what he actually is, is a reactionary conservative.
And you can see that in the fact that he thinks
the thing with the boats will work because he'll he'll pit people against them each other and people will prove to be sort of squalid and cynical and selfish and and out for themselves and incapable of self-sacrifice etc every single time so he's got that quintessential reactionary cynicism and pessimism about people um as well as well as loads of other um trays you know so he looks i mean he's he's a he's a reactionary conservative who thinks he's an anarchist i mean
This is a species that you and I have a certain familiarity with.
He's a libertarian.
Yeah, exactly.
He's a paleo-libertarian.
He's a narco-capitalist.
Who nonetheless doesn't want money because, you know, all he cares about is knives and dynamite and gasoline.
You know what they have in common?
They're cheap.
Not a bad sequence.
No, again, there's lots of good stuff in it.
There are good lines.
There are great lines.
But yeah, it's but he does want the money.
You know, he says, I don't want the money.
Well, you do.
You've got the money.
Okay.
What you wanted to do with it was set it on fire.
But you still wanted it so that you could do that with it.
Right.
You have still accumulated it and consumed it.
You know, like, like any other capitalist accumulating wealth and then just burning it.
Yeah.
I mean, just to, I mean, just to rewind slightly.
I mean, one of the, one of the things that we see over and over again in the film is, you know, the database and, you know, there's, there's this, you know, everybody's, everybody's got their DNA on file.
Everybody's got their fingerprints on file over and over and over again.
And the one thing that we really learned about the Joker is, He's wearing custom clothes, there's no DNA, there's no print matches, there's no, like, nobody knows anything about him.
And that makes him even more of a mystery, right?
This is ultimately, again, kind of like, in this society, in this, you know, police state, beset by, you know, mob violence, you know, by all of these things, you know, there's no, like, it seems, it's like horribly implausible that, like, he's literally that far off the grid, that they have no idea who he is or where he came from, you know?
Yeah.
Um, and, uh, you know, it's, it's again, one of those like screenwriters conceits of, you know, like this way we don't have to give him a real, he's scarier if we don't get a real backstory.
Okay.
I agree with that, you know, but like, once you've like put him in this world, you then have to explain why he doesn't have a backstory that, or you have to give like some kind of like, Coherence to that.
You have to, you at least have to confront that, you know, in my mind.
But the film doesn't, the film doesn't, doesn't want to because that would mean telling you something about, about the Joker and it would mean making him something more than kind of, you know, pure symbol at that point.
Yeah.
This is interesting, isn't it?
Because it is, in many ways, it is dramatically more powerful to have him as just this creature, this sort of sui generis creature that emerges out of nowhere with no name and no backstory and nobody knows who he is, etc.
That's that's, of course, how it works in the comics.
And it does have a charge to it.
It does have a sinister charge to it.
But at the same time, it kind of totally removes him from any, you know, the absence of an origin story for the Joker removes him entirely from any kind of material or social context.
You know, he's he's he's like the perfect emblem for How crime, quote, you know, in inverted commas, crime, capital C, is this just this this alien force in these in these stories, how it works in these sorts of stories, because in these sorts of stories, crime is just, as I say, it's like this invading alien force that just comes out of nowhere.
It doesn't have any social roots in poverty or injustice or inequality.
It's just this sort of Badness that is just there, that needs to be stamped out by the proper forces of law and order.
And to make the Joker this completely originless, identity-less person, it really is a reification of that idea.
And it's, I think, as a reaction against that, you have the extreme reaction of then the Joker movie in 2019, the Joaquin Phoenix one, where you spend an entire movie saying, yeah, no, actually, this stems from poverty and mental illness.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, you know, there is, which just tells you, you can tell, you know, you can tell valid stories either way, or, you know, some mix of which.
He doesn't have to be this, but they chose to make him this so that you could, you could just make him this, this kind of, again, almost an idealist, an idealist force.
You know, he doesn't have a material reality or a social history.
You said that, I mean, you said, you used those words, you know, but like, no, that's, you put your finger on it, you know, exactly.
He exists outside of material reality.
He is a force of pure malevolence that comes from nowhere and then disappears into nowhere, because the actor ceased to exist at the end of the film.
But, you know, it's very clear, I think, at the end of the film that he's being set up to come back in the threequel.
But, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Tragically, that couldn't happen.
The interesting thing is that, you know, again, And I kind of resent having to give this film any credit because so much about it annoys me.
But it's kind of implying that he is the opposite of how he presents himself because he presents himself as sort of this scruffy insurgent force from below, you know, this force of destruction against established order.
I mean, in the scene in the hospital, the famous speech about, you know, if A car full of soldiers get blown up or gang members get killed.
Nobody cares because it's all part of the plan.
But I kill one little mayor and everybody loses, you know, the famous speech, everybody loses their minds.
What that is, filtered through his pathology, it's a bang on the money critique of structural violence and how people are blind to it.
And it's a critique of the fact that the ruling class have a monopoly on violence, and there is structural violence built into poverty and war, etc.
And we've normalized it ideologically, we've manufactured consent to it.
Whereas the forces that are outside the ruling class, outside the established power structure, are then considered outrageous and terrible for doing things that are at least no worse than, and very often Very often, nowhere near as bad as the things that go on within the confines of the status quo.
You know, in a nutshell, it's actually a completely correct and on point critique of those things.
Which again is an old screenwriter's trick is, you know, you give the truth, you give the speech about the truth to the worst person in the room, you know, as opposed to, as opposed to giving Superman that speech, you give it to, you know, you give it to Lex Luthor.
That's just a little more effective.
Yeah.
Yeah, you invalidate the critique by putting it in the mouth of a character who is just existentially evil beyond the pale.
And of course, you know, people will come back at this and say, well, he's not being sincere.
Well, that doesn't help because that's part of the representation.
That's part of how the critique is invalidated.
The person who mouths it is always insincere, you know, like Bain.
The revolutionary politics that Bain espouses is invalidated by the fact that Bain is himself not sincere.
He's not doing it sincerely.
So that's not an excuse.
That's not an excuse.
That's part of the problem.
Oh God, I forgot where I was going with this.
Yeah, no, that's part of how the Joker presents himself as like this insurgent force.
And it's part of how he's depicted as like an anarchist, urban terrorist, etc.
And yet, at the same time, kind of almost behind its own back, almost without realizing what it's doing, the film seems to be putting contrary notes in because he used to say his clothes appear to be custom made.
Well, that's something that wealthy people have.
That's a sign of the bourgeoisie.
That's a very nice suit.
He's also like the one person in the movie other than Maggie Gyllenhaal in the party.
He's the one person allowed to wear color.
Everyone else is wearing a gray or black or some other very drab color.
The Joker is the only person who's allowed to, which, you know, you could read all into, you know, there's some there's some racialized stuff that goes along with that and like queer coding, et cetera, et cetera.
Which, you know, we don't have to get into, but like he, you know, that purple suit is the one thing that anybody's allowed to wear that actually, you know, it actually draws your attention at all.
He is one of the least queer-coded jokers there's ever been, this version of the Joker.
And I'm not sure how I feel about that, because queer-coding is, of course, this incredibly complicated issue.
Yeah, not something you and I need to get into at this stage.
I would like to briefly talk about Bat-tifa, you know, Antifa Batman.
I mean, you know, A, you know, we're going after mobsters, we're going after, you know, which is, you know, Complicated within the realms of, you know, kind of political economy, you know, because ultimately, you know, who cares if a bunch of mobsters start ripping off big banks?
Like, let them fight each other.
Fine with me.
You know, it's it's the people in the middle who get hurt.
It's really the big problem, the big problem on my end.
Also, like, you know, you know, black market economies often worked more efficiently and were actually better at, you know, giving spoils to the working class than the kind of traditional economies historically.
Yeah.
And the mainstream moralistic establishment critiques of black market economies are completely hypocritical because capitalism literally couldn't survive without them.
Right.
And, you know, ultimately, I mean, one thing that gets, you know, name checked, but really doesn't really ever go anywhere is that, you know, of course, the, you know, the black market economies, the mob economies were often, you know, funded by and then like co funded, you know, actual, you know, legitimate political projects.
And that's something that, you know, many other, many other films and TV shows and books, etc, etc, have had much more interesting things to say.
And so, Ultimately, you know, if we're going to talk about, you know, the, you know, going after the mob through, you know, quote-unquote Antifa tactics or whatever, that's just kind of a non-starter to begin with.
Like, it's just hard to even imagine that being, like, a valid critique.
But if we imagine, you know, sort of, like, masked vigilante in black, Engaging in acts which are meant to protect working people.
There is a direct line between Batman and Black Block, for instance.
Ironically, the thing that separates this version of Batman from that is that he actually has copycats who are going out there and doing his work, who are doing the work that he does.
As imperfectly as they are, you know, who are actually like putting their, putting their fucking asses on the line.
Like one of these, at least two of these guys, like, Oh no, at least one of these guys get dies a terrible death at the hands of the Joker, you know, trying to do the thing that Batman does.
And Batman has no time for these guys whatsoever.
And when like, he's confronted with that fact, like very aptly, like what's the difference between you and me?
I'm not wearing hockey pads.
And it's like, oh, because you're a billionaire, that makes it okay when you do it and not when we do it.
Yeah, great.
Yeah.
It's one of the most infuriating things about these movies.
Bruce Wayne repeatedly says, I'm doing this to inspire people.
The minute he actually inspires people, he shuts them down and he says they shouldn't be doing it.
And as you say, his argument is, you know, the thing at the end of the third movie, I wanted to show that anybody could be Batman.
You mean anybody with a billion dollars?
Yeah, right.
When the people who were actually doing it in the previous movie, you gave them, like, there's an argument to be made for, you know, Batman should have, like, corrected these guys, should have, like, said, you know, like, thrown on some armor or something, you know, like that, you know, like, that's one of the big things that, like, Spider-Man works better as sort of an antifest superhero, because he actually does have, like, the support and then supports in
Yeah, absolutely.
Also, Batman doesn't do much, at least in the narrative of the film, against the kind of big bad guys.
So, if we are assuming the mob are the kind of evil players that should be gone after, which I'll accept for the sake of argument.
Batman does almost nothing against these guys.
He is completely ineffective because he gets distracted dealing with the Joker.
You know who does the big damage against the mob?
It's the fucking Joker!
The Joker does way more damage to these guys than anybody else in the film.
So again, the Joker did nothing wrong.
That's the lesson here.
Sorry, again, my contrary take there, please.
You had something intelligent to say, I'm sure.
Please continue.
No, I agree completely.
I think it's, yeah, it stems, I think, from the fact that the Joker is being, I mean, on a good day, I credit the Joker in this film as being this complex depiction where, you know, he says he's one thing and he's actually another, etc.
And I think that's true as far as it goes.
On another day, I think, yeah, they just they just didn't make their minds up.
They just couldn't decide.
And he ends up confused because one of the notes about the joke, like he does kind of destroy the mob as well.
And it's like he he destroys everything.
He just indiscriminately destroys everything.
And it's it's because of the and again, this this movie very came out in 2008, sort of the height of the it's the same year as Iron Man came out, isn't it? 2008.
Within two months of each other, yeah.
Iron Man was like May 8th or something and this was end of July or like early July.
So it's the same era that we talked about in the Iron Man bonus episode, which is the era where the war on terror is still going on.
It's still kind of at its height, but the sheen is off and people are anxious about all sorts of things that have quote unquote gone wrong.
You know, so, and as a product of that moment, one of the words that sort of haunts this movie, I don't think anybody actually says it, but the word sort of, to me, runs through this movie like a stick of rock is nihilism.
I don't know if you remember, like back in the day, all the chatter about, you know, Islam, you know, radical Islam and why you had stuff like Al-Qaeda and why you had bin Laden and so on and all that sort of stuff.
The whole thing, one of the things anyway that people went on and on and on about was that they were nihilistic, like terrorism, Islamic terrorism was nihilistic.
Right.
Like, make your minds up.
Are they doing it because they're medieval fanatics or are they doing it because they literally have no belief system or they believe, we are nihilists, we believe in nothing.
Pick one, you know, it can't be both.
So, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.
At least it's an ethos!
Yeah, but I think that's part of what goes into the Joker.
The way they conceive of the Joker is that he's just completely nihilistic.
So, like, you know, he will attack anything, literally anything.
I think that's why he sort of burns the mob down as well as everything else, that he's just like this This corrosive force of utter rejection, utter, you know, and it's like he rejects everything in the civilized Western world, you know?
So that's another instance in which he is definitely an echo of the paranoid racist idea of the, you know, Islamofascism and so on and so forth.
Well, this is the, some men just want to watch the world merge.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
So, they don't use the word nihilism, but that's clearly, you know, I mean, that's clearly explicated, I think, you know.
Exactly.
And again, regardless of how we have previously commented on how that makes no sense in the context of that particular narrative, it's clearly the lesson that the film wants us to take about the Joker.
Oh yeah, that monologue from Alfred, that has real authority behind it.
That is, you know, because it's Alfred correcting Bruce.
That's how we know that it's correct.
Because, you know, Bruce has an inaccurate... And it happens again in the third movie, actually.
Alfred has to come along and explain the baddies' real motivation to Bruce.
You know, Bruce thinks Bane is just a thug.
Alfred comes along and says, no, he's a fanatic.
And in this one, it's kind of the opposite, you know.
He's got to want something.
No, he doesn't want anything.
He just wants to watch the world burn.
And Alfred gets that specifically from his worldview, which is the worldview that he acquired as a mercenary working on behalf of, you know, imperialism in Burma and authoritarianism in Burma, where he's putting down what sounds like a people's rebellion.
Very much so.
Yeah.
It's like I did.
I did let go.
I did.
I did do the Wikipedia thing of like, well, what would have been going on in Burma at that time?
And you go, oh, right.
Military dictatorship.
Yeah.
You were working for the military dictatorship in what is now Myanmar, you know?
And he can't say those lines, you know?
Yes, Mr. Bruce, back when I was working for the military dictatorship in what is now Myanmar, there was a people's rebellion and I was there to put it put it down because you and I are not so different.
It reminds me of that bit in Die Hard where, you know, the villainous evil terrorist who, of course, is... Die Hard's another interesting text because, of course, the terrorist turns out to actually be just a corporate raider of a different type, you know.
Hans Gruber did nothing wrong.
Hans Gruber did nothing wrong, forthcoming from IDSG.
But there's a line where he's talking to Mr... I can't remember the name of the character, but he's the CEO of the company that owns the Oh, it's the Yamamoto or something.
Something like that.
It's a Japanese.
Nakatomi.
It's Nakatomi Plaza.
Yeah.
He's talking to Mr. Nakatomi.
Whatever.
And he says, there's a model or something in the boardroom of this great big motorway or something or other.
And the CEO says, is that what this is about?
Our project in Indonesia?
And I'm like, oh, hang on a minute.
I'm supposed to be worried about these terrorists here.
You people are in business with General Suharto.
Responsible for literally the biggest genocide since the Second World War in East Timor.
Right.
Exactly.
And of course, you know, John McTiernan, another another director, you know, it's just like it gets buried in so many of these movies, like, again, the ideology, like I didn't say this last time I was I was kind of in the back of my head, but I feel like this is a good place to wrap up is that, you know,
I feel like when I watch The Dark Knight, I feel like it's such like, it's just built out of the same structural blocks of all these like 80s movies of like the Stallone and Schwarzenegger and, you know, the diehards and all those sorts of, you know, like things.
And it's just kind of like turning it on its head and being like that more sophisticated, Version of that, you know, and so it so it has to have like, you know, the long, you know, dialogue about, you know, nihilism and anarchism and whatever.
But ultimately, it's kind of selling the same vision of the world.
It hasn't fundamentally changed since the 80s, which is, you know, it's it's it's, you know, which is weird that it is like kind of talking about, you know, the war on terror.
We we didn't really get into that.
But, you know, like it's so it's so on surface that I'm glad we didn't spend a lot of time on it.
But You know, it's so it has to kind of reference that because it has to be a serious movie made in the year 2008, but you know, it's fundamentally The worldview hasn't changed since 1991.
It might as well be like Soviet terrorists.
Yeah, it's just kind of got an extra layer of liberal anxiety and hand wringing on top of it, but it's basically the same worldview.
That's what I feel like it is.
It's like the same worldview, as you say, from those 80s movies, but kind of reproduced by people who are You know, worried by it ever so slightly.
And their response is to try to make it make sense, you know?
Like the fan who loves it and so wants it to not have reactionary messages, they will work and work and work and work until they've managed to find a way to interpret it so that it doesn't say things that they don't like.
Well, I feel like the filmmakers are doing that, too.
Because one of the things all these movies have is this horrible tendency where, because it's made by filmmakers who are very aware of themes and subtexts, etc., and love those in their writing, you know, they've learned media literacy and so on, and they want their own films to have themes and subtexts.
And they want you to understand that their films have themes and subtexts.
And so they very consciously write the themes and subtexts in and they want to make sure that you don't miss them.
So what they do is they have the characters explain the themes and subtexts to each other in the dialogue so that you definitely don't miss them.
It's a bit like that.
I feel like just like the fan that's trying to find the reading of the film that allows them to like it with a good conscience, you know, sort of the progressive fan that wants to love it and doesn't want it to be a war on terror thing.
I feel like the filmmakers are kind of doing exactly the same thing where you do have this fundamentally neoconservative worldview.
But, you know, in true sort of liberal style, they're trying to make sense of it.
So what you get is this liberal gloss on the top.
Yeah, no, very much so.
Yeah, no.
It's like, yeah, I mean, you literally get the 24 style, you know, torture scene, you know, you get the scene where Bruce comes up and is like, you can't be seen doing this.
Not, you're the good guy.
You're not supposed to be doing this, right?
No, if they see you doing this, it's going to ruin your reputation.
Yeah.
And then your work as a district attorney, putting poor people behind bars is no, they're all going to get out now.
And then everything's lost.
Yeah, it'll tarnish your reputation as a golden boy.
Which again, you know, God, the other the other kind of big narrative.
The birth of the Obama era right there.
You know, the charismatic good looking guy that talks the talk.
Yeah.
And it's okay as long as nobody sees the rot underneath.
Yeah, and the other big thing is, we are strong men, and we are tough, and we have the moral authority inside us to take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and to accept being shit upon by our society, because we know we've ultimately done the right thing, and if you are strong enough, Man, and it's always a man.
If you are strong enough in your convictions, then you will do what's right, even when you are forced into moral degradation.
Even if you're not the good guy, you're something more than a hero.
The ends ultimately justify the means.
I mean, that's so explicit in this movie.
But yeah, like the torture scene I was thinking of actually was the scene in the police cell where Batman is torturing the Joker.
Oh, right.
And it is the 24 style, you know, torturing the terrorist for information because it's a Sam Harris scenario.
There's even a ticking clock, you know.
What's happening there?
Like, the anxiety about it is creeping in because another part of the same reactionary ideology is the sort of inhuman nihilism, the complete failure to make sense within any sort of civilized, moral, Western context, to the point where the Joker doesn't, like, beating him up doesn't work.
You know, he just laughs.
The more you hurt him, the more he laughs.
So it's like, you know, it's still doing the same neoconservative propaganda, but it's doing us doing doing it with this gloss of anxiety about, well, what if what if they're so nihilistic and and so evil that that these things don't work?
What do we do then?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
That's what it feels like.
Well, and of course, what happens right after that?
A, the Joker gives them wrong information.
Actually, accurate to the way torture actually works you know exactly agreeing with chris nolan for all the wrong reasons okay got that but yeah as soon as like batman and gordon aren't around anymore you know you get like the one guy standing standing guard on the door who the other thing that we didn't get into
is that like the joker like given the fact that batman beats like everybody else in the world up like with his like equipment and with his super strong martial arts prowess And then the Joker can just stand there in his suit and a knife and And, like, stand toe-to-toe with Batman indicates that, like, there is, like, he is the greatest fighter in human existence, right?
Like, you understand that people can fight at the speed of thought, you know, but, like, so, so anyway, so there's no way this guy could actually take on the Joker if the Joker weren't deciding to be there, right?
But then the Joker starts taunting him, and, like, at first, it's not even like, no, I actually don't beat suspects because that's wrong.
It's, No, I've been here for 20 years and I know there are two types of people.
The people that just need to be taught a lesson and the sick fucks are actually going to enjoy it.
So I'm not going to give you the satisfaction.
The idea of like cops don't beat people because cops shouldn't do that.
Not even on the table here.
Again, agreeing with Chris Nolan.
This is completely accurate.
But Chris Nolan thinks this is a good thing.
This is what has to happen, right?
Yeah.
And then the Joker taunts him by like going like, you know, do you want to know which of your friends were cowards?
And then immediately, you know, the next scene is, you know, the Joker is completely taken over this situation and is taking the guy hostage, et cetera, et cetera.
Again, we just, the man just wasn't strong enough.
If we had a strong enough person standing at that door, we wouldn't have these problems.
And it's not a systemic critique of anything that's happening in the situation.
There's not a sense that like maybe more than one person should have been standing guard.
There's no sense of that.
No, it's just, you know, if that man had just been a little bit stronger, more moral certitude and turpitude.
Joker would not have been able to do this.
But you know, that's just how that's just how it works.
We need strong men who can make the right decisions, even when they are going to be treated badly by society.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the central incoherence of the movie is encapsulated in the dinner party scene where they're talking about They're talking about Caesar, you know, Rachel brings up Caesar, you know, they're talking about how, you know, maybe what you need is a strong man.
And she says, well, yeah, Rome had one of those.
And he took, I mean, I mean, firstly, that the actual history is a bit more complicated than that.
But this isn't the time or place to get into this.
But yeah.
Like, it's another famous line, isn't it?
You know, you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I mean, firstly, that's a tragic, that's a classic liberal, tragic, pessimistic kind of, there's nothing to be done, try as you might, you know.
But it's, yeah, it's... That's why we just kind of keep voting for Joe Manchin.
That's the, you know... You just need the right guy, the guy who won't become Caesar.
That's what you need.
And of course, the film's proposition for that is Harvey Dent.
Because he's perfect.
Right.
But who ultimately, I mean, again, even in the in the narrative of the film has shown us like, no, he was not able to actually withstand that.
And, you know, yeah, we're going in circles a little bit here.
We are.
I think we're done now.
Yeah, I think I think I think we've we've covered it.
Four hours is what it took, you know, to cover this.
And there's so much more.
But that's enough.
That's enough.
Okay.
So we're finally going to escape the gravitational pull of the Dark Knight.
Great.
Okay.
Wind up episode 11.
Bonus episode 11.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, thanks for listening, everybody.
This was your bonus bonus.
Bonus bonus.
Part of this was us apologizing for not doing one in September.
So you get three in October, and we will still do one in December as well.
Yeah.
It's just this weird compulsion to talk about this, despite the fact that, you know, we both sort of kind of didn't really want to, but we got to say it.
Once we were here and talking about it, you know, we just had to.
Had to keep going, that's just how it was.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I've now talked about this film for much, much longer than I ever should have done.
So I'm hoping never have to talk about this ever again.
This is the end of me not only talking, but thinking about The Dark Knight.
Yeah, and it's the end of you listening to it, because it's the end of the episode, as I say.
So, see you back in the same place.
Patrons, lovely patrons, for episode 12, which will be about something else.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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