Questions that I can't answer about the movie "The Dark Knight"

[Bucky]

Doesn't it seem like the Joker went to a lot of trouble just to kill Batman? It sure seems like he was counting on a whole lot of random moving parts in his scheme turning out exactly the right way just to be able to pull off... what? fucking with the guy's head?

Note to all future Batman villain: Dude, don't explain anything, just freakin' shoot him already!

[Mutley]

1. Hey, enjoy it for what it is:

A comic book action flick designed to be visually exciting and humorous in a shallow sort of way. Not every movie can, or should be, an intellectual masterpiece requiring deep thought and feeling.

[sasquatch]

2. It's because he was toying with batman while giving the appearance of trying to kill him

He never wanted to kill him, he was too much fun.

[NightWatcher]

3. enjoy the hunt, not the kill...or... the journey is the destination

[sasquatch]

5. Well the chase is always better than the catch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97phipq3HHk
So sayeth Lemmy the Lord.
:D

[derby378]

4. Try reading Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS

It portrays Joker in pretty much the same light. When reflecting on all the people he has murdered in the past, he tells Batman, "Oh, I don't keep count. But you do. And I love you for it."

[Bucky]

6. I read it years ago. It was at least self-parodic

This movie took itself far too seriously, but had an essentially dumb plot--or rather a plot that would only work if the entire police department was dumb. The first movie in this current series was quite good--it actually made Batman seem plausible in the real world. This one managed to be unrealistic without being melodramatic or campy enough to compensate for obvious plot holes.

I thought the Two Face character & story were quite well played (altho Dent probably works best if he's shown being meglomaniacal before the accident). Realistic characters don't turn from good to evil just cause they've been disfigured. That said, I think they killed off the wrong villain. I mean, for other than the obvious reason.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. Yeah, it was stupid.

For some reason they made the Joker omniscient.

That whole "Commissioner Gordon is dead" subplot was fucking ridiculous.

[jobycom]

13. He wasn't omnicscient, and Gordon wasn't the commissioner.

One of the few flaws with the script, though, was the fake Gordon death. Gordon says he wanted to protect his family when he went after the Joker, but there was no need for that, since he wasn't one of the visible opponents of the Joker yet. It was just a manipulative emotional device on the part of Nolan, or else it had a different purpose originally that got edited out. But it didn't subvert the plot, it was just gratuitous.

But nothing requires the Joker to be omniscient, aside from maybe the final result of snapping Dent's mind. Even there, he was only partially leaving it to chance, because if he had gotten Dent to shoot him in the hospital, Dent's work would still be ruined. The Joker's plans and schemes develop and change as circumstances do. Each of his plans relies on the people he has paid off, the mob's connections, and the predictable reactions of Dent and Batman to save Rachel. The one time he really reaches with his prediction, with the ferries, he's proven wrong.

The only problem with the script is that some people went in expecting a simple comic book movie, or at best something like "Ironman," and they got a Scorsese type plot they were never able to catch up to. The plot actually developed over the movie, rather than simply following a linear action movie sequence. People who weren't paying attention at first thought it was all one line from start to finish, and missed the development, so of course they failed to understand it.

We've been so dummed down by bad films that we can't follow good ones anymore.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. Oh, lord, the plot wasn't developed at all.

That's why it was so ridiculous and full of holes and non sequitors.

It wasn't that people weren't able to catch up to it. It was that it was needlessly complex to create the false allusion of depth.

"We've been so dummed down by bad films that we can't follow good ones anymore."

And that's exactly my complaint about this shitty film.

[jobycom]

16. Wasn't full of any of that. If you saw it, you must have been daydreaming.

I've heard you complain about it before, and every point you've raised was easily shown to not be valid. See it again, pay attention this time, and maybe you'll understand why it is so highly praised.

[Forkboy]

8. I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, though it's not as deep as people would like to think.

But it DID try, which is more than we can say for most of what Hollywood churns out. I think it's a great example of what the major studios can do when they hand over the reins to intelligent people with a love for the subject...and the money to bring it to life. For the record, I'm not a fan of mindless action flicks, and prefer indy or foreign films. I usually hate what Hollywood makes, but the Dark Knight is a refreshing attempt to make an action movie with a little more thought behind it than normal (hopefully a trend is starting in this area).

The movie was trying to touch on the same themes that No Country For Old Men did, the nature and unpredictability of violence, where each person's own line is drawn, etc. Because the Dark Knight is trapped within an action/comic book setting they're forced to have scenes of action and excitement, not character development. Whereas a movie like NCFOM is entirely character driven, allowing us a deeper look into the characters and the motivations behind them. The Dark Knight doesn't have the many textures that NCFOM did, mainly because of it's genre trappings.

This is one of my big fears for Watchmen. It's another deep idea, but within the trappings of a superhero context. People expecting a thrill packed superhero movie will be disappointed, and yet I can't help but feel that they'll try to cram some in anyways, which might ruin it for the hardcore fans of the story. Their walking a razor's edge with this movie. It could be a huge hit, or a Godzilla sized flop.

[madrchsod]

9. the movie could`t figure out how to end

the absurdity of the jokers schemes to kill batman made the movie unwatchable....

[charlie and algernon]

10. he wasn't trying to kill him, just to fuck with him

he wanted to create anarchy by screwing with Batman and turning Harvey Dent into a killer

[jobycom]

14. You missed the whole thing, then. The movie was about the Joker, not Batman.

The Joker started out as a common thug and changed into a powerful thug and then by the end became an archetypal Joker, bent on creating chaos and "watching everything burn." He never made a serious effort to kill the Batman because before he could get the mob to pay him for it, he had changed his goals. All decent stories involve a lead character undergoing major transformations from start to finish--what made this one different is that the storyline followed the villain's transformation, not the hero's.

Brilliant damn film.

[jobycom]

11. Well, first he wanted to kill Batman, but before he could negotiate a price, he changed his goal.

That was pretty well explained in the "You complete me" scene.

So, here's how it laid out. First, the Joker was just robbing the mob because he could. Then he realized the mob was afraid of Batman ("I know why you hold your meetings in the daylight" remember?), and so he tried to negotiate a fee to kill Batman ("If you are good at something, don't do it for free"). The mob split over this, and one of the leaders put a price on the Joker's head, so the Joker killed him, and then the Russian dude and Eric Roberts decided that the Joker could get things done, and allied with him. But by then, Batman had captured the mob's banker and the banker had turned on the mob and gotten most of them arrested, so the Joker had to get the mob out of jail, so he went after the judge, the commissioner, and the DA, and in the process he developed a plan to get the banker out of jail.

By this point the Joker's motives are hard to read because the Joker is playing all sides against each other. The mob believes he is trying to kill the banker in jail to get rid of the witness, and trying to kill Dent and the Batman to get rid of the mob's problems. Batman thinks he is trying to kill him, since he has publicly tried to pressure Batman into giving himself up to the Joker. The Russian mobster thinks the Joker is trying to take over the mob, and allies with him, only to discover that the Joker is just trying to take over the mob. The Joker tells the Russian he just wants to prove that everything burns, and when he goes through the elaborate ruse to wind up in jail, he tells Batman the same thing, and then tells Batman that he has to choose between Rachel and Dent. The Joker claims this is all part of his nihilistic goals, to create chaos and to make the Batman break his own one rule (not killing people).

However, it's never clear what the Joker wants. His wild goose chase ends in Rachel's death and Dent's breakdown, but it also gets Batman and all the decent cops out of the jail so that the Joker can kidnap the banker, so he still seems to be working for the mob, and it's hard to tell whether the Joker's criminal ambitions or his nihilism is his main force. The Joker lies to and plays everyone, even while telling people he isn't lying to them. He uses chaos to divert attention away from him just as the cops are closing in, so either motivation could be driving the other.

That's when he burns the money and the banker and kills the Russian mobster, then breaks Harvey's mind. Eric Roberts has told the cops where to find the Joker, because even he is afraid of him, but just as the cops close in on the warehouse, the Joker calls the media and threatens to blow up a hospital unless someone kills Mr. Reese, who is about to expose the Batman and give the Joker what he at first said he wanted. This diverts the police, creating chaos, and once again getting the Joker out of trouble.

The final two situations--the panic on the ferries and the final snapping of Dent's mind--seem to finally conclude that the real goal of the Joker has become creating panic and chaos, and the final scene of the Joker dangling from a wire demonstrates this. It also shows Batman refusing to break his one rule by saving the Joker, and it affirms his faith in the people of Gotham, so Batman seems to have defeated the Joker in all his possible schemes, until the results of Harvey Dent's insanity becomes obvious. Batman kills Dent--finally breaking his rule, though not completely, since it was self-defense--and then to prevent all of Dent's work being undone by Dent's clear insanity, Batman takes the blame for the deaths and lets Harvey die a hero.

It's a complicated plot which makes complete internal sense even if it takes a couple of viewings to figure out all the angles. We're so used to single-message scripts with plots created for nothing more than car chases or explosions or gratuitous and unrealistic sex scenes that it's hard to follow a genuine plot when we encounter one.

[charlie and algernon]

12. wow, great description

In a way, the joker's biggest joke was making you think you had him figured out. It's the ultimate slight of hand, as soon as they thought they figured him out, he'd come at you from another angle and you were screwed. Batman gets him hanging upside down off a skyscraper with the ferry situation resolved, thinking it's finally over. Nope, guess what, while you were running around after me thinking I was after you; I went after Dent and got him to go insane, I win!

[sasquatch]

19. He said it himself: "I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one"

[jobycom]

20. I'm not convinced he meant that, though. He was trying to convince Dent

to hate Batman and the mob bosses, and to hate himself, for Rachel's death, because all of their scheming and planning had led to her death. So he was claiming he didn't kill Rachel, that he was in jail when it happened, and that he didn't have a plan. However, we saw from the beginning how intricately he planned everything, from the opening jail heist (even the little scene where he manuevers his henchman into the path of the bus, then escapes in a row of buses he knew would be there) to his hit on the judge and the commissioner. He also claimed he didn't lie, but he lied to Batman about where Rachel was being held.

His denial of a plan was part of his plan to destroy Dent, by convincing Dent to go after the cops and the mobsters who (he claimed) had killed Rachel. Dent's vigilante murders would then undermine Dent as a prosecutor, which would tarnish all the evidence he had used to lock up the mobsters, so they would all be freed, and Gotham would once again be without hope.

Notice, too, the whole interplay of chance and plan, of chaos and order, in that whole scene. Harvey had made his own luck, using a rigged coin to give the appearance of chance, and the Joker convinced him that everyone trying to control chance had led to Rachel's death, and that chaos and anarchy were preferable. So Dent snapped, and truly began letting his coin decide his violent actions (exactly like Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men") to remove his own planning from the process. So chance and chaos won. But the Joker had laid an extravagant plan to snap Dent and to create anarchy. So was he really a nihilist? Dent's anarchy was the result of the Joker's plans, even though Dent had been the planner and the Joker claimed he was the anarchist.

It's a freaking cool film, even if it sailed over a lot of heads. The funny thing is that even a lot of people who didn't follow the plot and the themes still loved the film, because it had enough intrique and action to satisfy most casual viewers, too.

[sasquatch]

21. Hell if people are still talking about this months after the damned thing was released

It had to definatly be something that was more than the sum of its own parts.

[DarkTirade]

17. The Joker in that movie is really just a human embodiment of the Trickster god archetype from

mythology. He does what he does because when he sees a machine his primary instinct is to reach for the nearest monkey wrench. He's not a villain in the traditional sense. He is just someone who likes to poke holes in the machinery that makes up our world. That can be on a personal level, as he does with Batman, or on a larger scale, as he does with the rest of the city. The Trickster in mythology does not always have a reason for doing the things he does, other than exposing the weak points in individuals and society as a whole.

In African mythology Eshu once started a fight between two farmers by simply painting one side of his hat red and the other side black, then walking between the two farmers' fields. Later when the farmers were talking and one mentioned the man who'd walked between their fields, they got into a fight over what color his hat was. There was really no grand reason for him doing so, he simply saw two neighbors who were quite capable of being turned against each other by something so simple as a different point of view. In this case, literally. So he did. Because that's what a trickster archetype does. He sees a weak spot and he pokes at it. He sees a machine and he throws a monkey wrench into it.

And most of the time he has fun doing it.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

18. The Joker does not want to kill Batman

He's the only adversary he respects, and wants to drive him crazy.

I thought he actually stated this in the film?