This dilemma is played out through the story's three protagonists, each of whom follows a very different path over the course of the film. Harvey Dent, who eventually becomes the evil Two-Face, begins the film as an upstanding officer of the law. Several characters remark that he is an idealist, an inspirational figure. It is assumed that he believes in the law and in the necessity of defending it. At several points, in fact, he displays considerable moral and physical courage in the face of the Joker's evil. But there are also hints that he is not quite what he appears to be. He is self-confident to the point of arrogance, personally vain, and extremely ambitious. More importantly, his idealism is not as pure as his admirers believe. In his most telling scene, Dent refers to the ancient Roman custom of appointing a dictator in circumstances of extreme danger, and wonders whether an enlightened tyranny may not be superior to the rule of law—indicating a secret lack of faith in the institutions he represents.

Dent's weakness leaves him vulnerable to the satanic machinations of the Joker, whose savage and purposeless cruelty finally breaks the district attorney's facade of nobility. “You had plans,” the Joker tells him. “Look where it got you. I just did what I do best: I took your plan and turned it on itself. Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair.” Convinced by the Joker that pure chance is the only real justice in the world, Dent abandons his duty to the law in favor of the random indifference of fate. He hunts down those he believes have betrayed him and decides their punishment by the flip of a defaced coin—heads, they live; tails, they die. “You thought we could be decent men in indecent times,” he tells Gordon. “But you were wrong. The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” Like many idealists, Dent is ultimately unable to reconcile his lofty beliefs with the brutal realities of the world, so he abandons his faith in favor of an equally fervent belief in nothing.

The other officer of the law, Lieutenant James Gordon, is the quintessential everyman. Unselfish, hard-working, honest to a fault, utterly lacking in personal ambition, Gordon works faithfully within the bounds of the law despite the constant frustrations of doing so. “I don't get political points for being an idealist,” he tells Dent. “I have to do the best I can with what I have.” While Gordon makes use of Batman's services in order to fight crime, he is wary of the vigilante's tendency toward extralegal violence. At one point, he even attempts to prevent Batman from brutalizing the Joker himself. Gordon realizes that his efforts may ultimately prove futile, but he nonetheless persists. Somewhere beneath his tough exterior he clearly believes in the law and his small, often thankless role in enforcing it. Indeed, to a certain extent, Gordon is the only true hero in The Dark Knight. He does not take to the shadows, disregarding the constraints of society in pursuit of personal vengeance. His normal, everyday heroism is the rule to Batman's exception.

And yet, as the German thinker Carl Schmitt—whose analysis of the state of emergency is the subject of much academic discussion today—once put it, “The exception is more interesting than the rule…. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” We are fascinated with Batman precisely because he is anything but normal and everyday. Like the Joker, he is the quintessential exception. Driven by uncontrollable, chthonic inner forces, he is fanatical in pursuit of his own sense of justice, which sometimes accords with the law and sometimes does not. He is a force unto himself who answers, ultimately, to no authority except his own personal definition of right and wrong. In many ways, he is the Joker's mirror image; but while his enemy acts only to satisfy his insane compulsions, Batman, like Gordon, is a self-sacrificing altruist: “I'm whatever Gotham needs me to be,” he says. And at the end of the film, Gordon muses that “He's the hero Gotham deserves.... Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A dark knight.”

 

This may be the most interesting aspect of The Dark Knight: its extraordinary ambivalence toward the issues it presents. While the film raises serious questions about the necessity and dangers of using extreme measures to protect society from exceptional threat, it never really answers them. This is most likely the reason for the diametrically opposed political interpretations proffered by some of the film's critics. Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal wrote that the film is fundamentally conservative and “is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times, who disliked the film in general, claimed in contrast that “the film champions the antiwar coalition's claim that, in having a war on terror, you create the conditions for more terror. We are shown that innocent people died because of Batman—and he falls for it. Here is a Batman consumed with liberal guilt and self-loathing.”

The key to The Dark Knight's success may lie in the fact that both men have a point. The film certainly seems to endorse the idea that society needs men willing to take to the shadows: to act outside of society's norms in order to save them. Indeed, Gordon openly acknowledges that he needs Batman to go beyond the law and accomplish what he cannot. And yet the film also holds that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to become the norm: At the end of the film, Batman realizes that if Dent's crimes are revealed, Gotham will lose its last vestige of faith in justice and order, thus giving the Joker his ultimate victory. In a supreme act of self-sacrifice, he tells Gordon to blame Batman for Dent's murders. “You'll hunt me,” he says. “You'll condemn me. You'll set the dogs on me. But that's what has to happen. Sometimes truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” The film ends with a sense of bleak uncertainty as Batman, now a hunted fugitive, disappears into the darkness, determined to be the city's shadow protector, its dark knight, whatever the cost.

This surprisingly desolate coda implies that Batman's sacrifice is necessary, because even if Gotham needs a dark knight, it cannot be allowed to consciously acknowledge this fact. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summed up this imperative with the observation, “What the law can never tolerate—what it feels as a threat with which it is impossible to come to terms—is the existence of a violence outside the law.” To preserve the law, people must believe that the man who works outside it is a criminal, however indispensable he may be. They must believe, as Gordon says, that “he's not a hero.”

This conclusion has some fairly dark repercussions, because it implies that, in some measure, the Joker is essentially correct: The norm is, in fact, a lie. Society needs the lie, demands the lie, if it is to survive in the face of an extraordinary threat. In turning Batman into an outlaw, and having him destroy the surveillance system he has used to stop the Joker, the film holds that for the norm to remain the norm, the exception must remain an exception, even if that exception—especially in a state of emergency—is existentially necessary for society.

In this sense, The Dark Knight is a perfect mirror of the society which is watching it: a society so divided on the issues of terror and how to fight it that, for the first time in decades, an American mainstream no longer exists. Perhaps this is why the film has struck such a responsive chord with audiences: The ambivalence it expresses is the same ambivalence with which most Americans—consciously or unconsciously—regard their current predicament. Americans want to defeat terrorism, but they want to defeat it without upsetting the basic ideals of a free society. They want terror to be fought by any means necessary, but without any of the attendant horrors and compromises of war. And The Dark Knight may well be correct in positing that the only possible resolution of such a dilemma is not to resolve it at all, but to live in a society based, in some manner, on a lie. Because society, in order to be society, needs the lie. It is a noble lie, perhaps, but a lie all the same. The alternative, the film seems to say, is to become a society of Harvey Dents or, worse still, Jokers. It is, ironically, not a particularly happy or optimistic message, but it is one which a great many Americans appear ready, and even strangely gratified, to hear. 

Benjamin Kerstein is an assistant editor of AZURE.