How alone you really are
The Dark Knight (2008): written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan; directed by Christopher Nolan
NB. SPOILER ALERT – if you don't want to know what happens, don't under any circs read the last bit about Anima.
It may not be a surprise to you that Carl and I were very excited about The Dark Knight, given how much we loved Batman Begins. I don't know that we could say which we preferred, though if you ask Carl he just goes on and on about the Bat Bike so I guess that's the clincher for the dead white Austrian demographic. But here, for what it's worth, is our take on TDK and in particular, That Performance.
The Mask
The Batman franchise has made extensive use of the symbol/idea/motif of the mask. It's a cliché of modern emotional discourse that we wear masks – the only thing you're more likely to be irritatingly told by some floaty-scarfed twit is that you have low self esteem and you need to love yourself.
The first instalment of the Nolan-era Batman introduced the possibility that the distinction between a 'true' self and the mask could be blurred. As Anima, Rachel (Katie Holmes) had the job of pointing out to the love-lorn Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) that despite assuming his alter (false) ego through choice and with conscious purpose the distinction between the man and the bat was not as clear as he would like to think – the boundary between the interior truth and exterior presentation was itself a fantasy of separating from the unwanted at the same time as living the denied desire. By the end of the film Bruce Wayne's struggle to know himself has generated only performed identities, the playboy and super hero – each concealment intended to distract from the other and the ego trapped somewhere amid the struggle.
In The Dark Knight we are offered an apparent alternative. Harvey Dent's whole schtick is that he is who he is all the way through – whichever way you turn him you get the same face, unmasked. Ostentatiously heroic and with a democratic mandate that stands for his wholeness and integration (he relates to the whole city, with Gotham standing for the psyche), it is no surprise that Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is all over him – Anima, after all, has been standing for the need for the ego to relate to all the persons of the psyche instead of hiding purpose and identity through subterfuge.
In the character of Dent that Bruce Wayne sees the possibility of escape from his entrapment in false identity and masking and so of greater unity with Anima – by manipulating the rise of Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Batman can be retired; the ego can express the heroic archetype in a more open and related way that means he gets the girl. The shadowy existence, the masking are no longer necessary.
There is, to my mind, something sinister about being all front and no behind, all heads and no tails; and Dent, despite his lucky prince looks and charm, is both prattish and sinister. At an intuitive level we know that everything must carry its shadow. If you see a creature with no shadow our fur begins to prickle. Dent's purity is also ruthlessness, his lack of complication means lack of empathy and so compassion. Bruce Wayne may not want to have to wrestle with the Shadow but without it the Hero is more subtly unsettling.
The Joker
But The Dark Knight problematises these questions of truth and concealment and Heroes in a new way through the figure of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger -as if you didn't know.
The Trickster is a familiar archetype, and one whose frightening and chaotic characteristics can be too easily overlooked – indeed it is the nature of the archetype itself that motley and conjuring disguise more troubling content.
In this instance the Joker surfaces perhaps the most terrifying possibility inherent in the notion of the mask: what if there is nothing underneath? In TDK we never see the Joker without his make up; we do not learn his name or his personal history; he elaborates serial stories about himself underpinned by no truth, no meaning, no personal narrative. He is the same at the end of the film as at the beginning; he is trapped outside time and change. His cohort comprises the paranoid, the delusional, the schizophrenic, he is the master of meaningless madness in its most alienated and frightening form.
This is the terrible chaos and fear that the masks both of Batman and Two Face are intended to control and subdue. Even as a supervillain Harvey is concerned with the ongoing imposition of order, through justice and revenge. Batman is driven by the need to impose and control moral structure. One may be a grotesque reflection of the other, but they are both standing for the ego's attempt, by production of identity after identity, to contain anarchy, meaninglessness, emptiness.
Even worse, though, is the suggestion is that it is the Joker who creates and controls the masked figures and their elaborate concealing identities: we are determined by our most unconscious, unknown and denied absences. 'I think you and I will be doing this forever' the Joker observes to Batman with amusement, as he hangs upside down in a parody of the bat's pose. The Joker creates Harvey Dent; he is driven by the need to unmask Batman or to keep him unknown. We may come to unravel and expose to ourselves the deceit of our created selves; do we have the courage to consider that we have been driven to do so not to deny our internal chaos and void but by the manipulations of that same unknown reality? Our fantasies of a terrible truth about ourselves that we must mask are themselves a refusal to acknowledge a terrible absence of truth and of self.
For me, the troubling and troublesome writer of the archetypal, chaotic absence that has been articulated by Heath Ledger's joker is Jacques Lacan. Yes, I know, heavy sigh. But he indicates to us, more than Freud or Jung were able to, not only our division from ourselves but the possibility of a hole, a gap at the heart of what we think of as ourselves, a gap that everything else about us is an attempt to heal and conceal.
Fortunately The Dark Knight is a good deal more fun than anything Lacan ever wrote, and much less like hard work.
Postscript: Anima
SPOILER ALERT
It wouldn't be me if I didn't have something to say about this. As a character, Rachel is difficult to regret. She's boring and she's sanctimonious and she went for the wrong guy. And archetypally it may not be a bad thing she's gone; the relationship with the ego had become stuck – they couldn't be together but she would always be waiting, and judging. Perhaps she is a version of the Anima belonging to a child in thrall to his god-like father (see Batman Begins) rather than the ego-reflection of an adult. Anima can shape shift like Doctor Who and by returning in another form, like the regenerated Doctor she permits new possibilities. So let's hope there's another one, let's hope it's Nolan and Bale, and let's hope there's some snogging.
NB. SPOILER ALERT – if you don't want to know what happens, don't under any circs read the last bit about Anima.
It may not be a surprise to you that Carl and I were very excited about The Dark Knight, given how much we loved Batman Begins. I don't know that we could say which we preferred, though if you ask Carl he just goes on and on about the Bat Bike so I guess that's the clincher for the dead white Austrian demographic. But here, for what it's worth, is our take on TDK and in particular, That Performance.
The Mask
The Batman franchise has made extensive use of the symbol/idea/motif of the mask. It's a cliché of modern emotional discourse that we wear masks – the only thing you're more likely to be irritatingly told by some floaty-scarfed twit is that you have low self esteem and you need to love yourself.
The first instalment of the Nolan-era Batman introduced the possibility that the distinction between a 'true' self and the mask could be blurred. As Anima, Rachel (Katie Holmes) had the job of pointing out to the love-lorn Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) that despite assuming his alter (false) ego through choice and with conscious purpose the distinction between the man and the bat was not as clear as he would like to think – the boundary between the interior truth and exterior presentation was itself a fantasy of separating from the unwanted at the same time as living the denied desire. By the end of the film Bruce Wayne's struggle to know himself has generated only performed identities, the playboy and super hero – each concealment intended to distract from the other and the ego trapped somewhere amid the struggle.
In The Dark Knight we are offered an apparent alternative. Harvey Dent's whole schtick is that he is who he is all the way through – whichever way you turn him you get the same face, unmasked. Ostentatiously heroic and with a democratic mandate that stands for his wholeness and integration (he relates to the whole city, with Gotham standing for the psyche), it is no surprise that Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is all over him – Anima, after all, has been standing for the need for the ego to relate to all the persons of the psyche instead of hiding purpose and identity through subterfuge.
In the character of Dent that Bruce Wayne sees the possibility of escape from his entrapment in false identity and masking and so of greater unity with Anima – by manipulating the rise of Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Batman can be retired; the ego can express the heroic archetype in a more open and related way that means he gets the girl. The shadowy existence, the masking are no longer necessary.
There is, to my mind, something sinister about being all front and no behind, all heads and no tails; and Dent, despite his lucky prince looks and charm, is both prattish and sinister. At an intuitive level we know that everything must carry its shadow. If you see a creature with no shadow our fur begins to prickle. Dent's purity is also ruthlessness, his lack of complication means lack of empathy and so compassion. Bruce Wayne may not want to have to wrestle with the Shadow but without it the Hero is more subtly unsettling.
The Joker
But The Dark Knight problematises these questions of truth and concealment and Heroes in a new way through the figure of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger -as if you didn't know.
The Trickster is a familiar archetype, and one whose frightening and chaotic characteristics can be too easily overlooked – indeed it is the nature of the archetype itself that motley and conjuring disguise more troubling content.
In this instance the Joker surfaces perhaps the most terrifying possibility inherent in the notion of the mask: what if there is nothing underneath? In TDK we never see the Joker without his make up; we do not learn his name or his personal history; he elaborates serial stories about himself underpinned by no truth, no meaning, no personal narrative. He is the same at the end of the film as at the beginning; he is trapped outside time and change. His cohort comprises the paranoid, the delusional, the schizophrenic, he is the master of meaningless madness in its most alienated and frightening form.
This is the terrible chaos and fear that the masks both of Batman and Two Face are intended to control and subdue. Even as a supervillain Harvey is concerned with the ongoing imposition of order, through justice and revenge. Batman is driven by the need to impose and control moral structure. One may be a grotesque reflection of the other, but they are both standing for the ego's attempt, by production of identity after identity, to contain anarchy, meaninglessness, emptiness.
Even worse, though, is the suggestion is that it is the Joker who creates and controls the masked figures and their elaborate concealing identities: we are determined by our most unconscious, unknown and denied absences. 'I think you and I will be doing this forever' the Joker observes to Batman with amusement, as he hangs upside down in a parody of the bat's pose. The Joker creates Harvey Dent; he is driven by the need to unmask Batman or to keep him unknown. We may come to unravel and expose to ourselves the deceit of our created selves; do we have the courage to consider that we have been driven to do so not to deny our internal chaos and void but by the manipulations of that same unknown reality? Our fantasies of a terrible truth about ourselves that we must mask are themselves a refusal to acknowledge a terrible absence of truth and of self.
For me, the troubling and troublesome writer of the archetypal, chaotic absence that has been articulated by Heath Ledger's joker is Jacques Lacan. Yes, I know, heavy sigh. But he indicates to us, more than Freud or Jung were able to, not only our division from ourselves but the possibility of a hole, a gap at the heart of what we think of as ourselves, a gap that everything else about us is an attempt to heal and conceal.
Fortunately The Dark Knight is a good deal more fun than anything Lacan ever wrote, and much less like hard work.
Postscript: Anima
SPOILER ALERT
It wouldn't be me if I didn't have something to say about this. As a character, Rachel is difficult to regret. She's boring and she's sanctimonious and she went for the wrong guy. And archetypally it may not be a bad thing she's gone; the relationship with the ego had become stuck – they couldn't be together but she would always be waiting, and judging. Perhaps she is a version of the Anima belonging to a child in thrall to his god-like father (see Batman Begins) rather than the ego-reflection of an adult. Anima can shape shift like Doctor Who and by returning in another form, like the regenerated Doctor she permits new possibilities. So let's hope there's another one, let's hope it's Nolan and Bale, and let's hope there's some snogging.
posted by Ask my Animus at 9:00 AM
2 Comments:
I was looking for a good analysis of archetypes in The Dark Knight and am glad to have found your blog. I also felt like I learned quite a bit more about archetypes from your overview in another post.
One quibble I would bring up is that we actually do see the Joker without his makeup once in the film; at the funeral procession for Commissioner Loeb, the Joker is not wearing makeup when he attempts to assassinate the Mayor. He disguises himself and his cohorts as armed guards giving a 3 volley salute. I'm not sure how this can be interpreted, but it added another layer of unpredictability to his character. I feel like another whole article could be written about the Joker as a trickster figure, his message and means, the costumes he wears (frowny clown mask, lavish purple suit and clashing patterns, police officer outfit, female nurse, corpse in trash bag etc).
I also thought of Gordon's overview of the Joker quite fitting to your comments. "No D.N.A., dental, clothing is custom, no labels, no prints, no name, no other alias . . . " He has no real backstory and our first glimpse of him is on a sidewalk in broad daylight while everyone goes about their business in the background. I think there's plenty more interesting material worth mining here.
Hey, thanks for your comment! I was so convinced no one was reading I had stopped checking for them, and then such a good one comes along! You are quite right about seeing the Joker in the parade, that simply got by me... I guess you could argue that even then he is in costume, however. I will give it some thought. I think you're right about there being plenty more on this in the movie; he's one of the richest archetypes in this franchise (no doubt not true of the comics, about which I know next to nothing)
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