Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the meaning of heroism (Part Two)

Each one of Christopher Nolan’s films is about much more than it seems to be about on the surface. After Memento, the studios were still thinking of it as a flash in the pan. They showed little interest in offering him a remake of a Norwegian original they had in their sights and which he was pitching. Eventually, with the help of Steven Soderberg and George Clooney, they relented and he got the job, which involved the intimidating challenge of directing Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank – all of whom had already won Oscars. The result was Insomnia. On the surface it is a thriller about hunting down the killer of a teenage girl in Alaska. But under the surface, it is a probing examination of the troubled conscience of the cop (Pacino) whose tragedy is the heart of the story. The sleepless condition of the cop in “the land of the midnight sun” has all the echoes of Macbeth’s troubled soul as he cries out for a merciful sleep now denied him.

After Insomnia there was no more hesitation in Hollywood. He tells it like this: “I got one of those calls, like ‘You wouldn’t be interested in this, but, you know, nobody can figure out what to do with Batman,’” he recalls. But he was interested and immediately pitched to them what he could do with Batman. Batman Begins was born in that moment and changed the fortunes of the superhero genre forever – well for at least two decades.

“I didn’t want to treat it as a comic book movie. Everything we did was about being in massive denial that there was such a thing. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight go to massive lengths to do that. By the time we got to The Dark Knight Rises, there indeed was a superhero genre – The Avengers came out the same summer and then it grew and grew after that.

“The superhero genre as it exists now, that’s just a given. At the time, we were simply making action films that aspired to stand alongside any kind of action film. We were trying to make epics.”

The trilogy is not part of the superhero genre as we now know it – and perhaps loathe it – but it created the space for it to happen, for better or worse.

I have found no comments by Nolan about Todd Phillips’ The Joker. I think that figures. Phillips’ The Joker is the character’s origin story. Nolan’s Joker has no explicit origin story. We just know that he is a “Lord of Misrule” and master of Chaos giving us echoes straight from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Nolan is very personal when he talks about the character. “He’s just ‘I’m just going to tear it down because f**k it.’ He doesn’t even care about why he’s doing it. He’s that out there. It’s a very real force of human nature, and it’s not one that I have. I’m afraid of that in myself. I’m afraid of that side of human nature.

“The Joker is what I’m afraid of more than anything, more than any of the villains, these days particularly, when you feel civilization is very thinly lined. All three films, we did with a real truthfulness of our intentions. What do we worry about? What am I actually afraid of? What’s the worst thing the villain could be doing? I don’t have that anarchic impulse, I really don’t. I’m much more controlled. I’m afraid of that in myself. I feel like I carefully used it as the engine of the movie, but I was afraid of it the whole time I was making the film.”

Nolan is very conscious of mankind’s capacity for corruption and has talked about how heroes can easily turn into villains. “Watching Lawrence of Arabia with the kids at the weekend, and it absolutely presents Lawrence as this vain, false icon, but what people take away is the iconography. That scene where he goes back for the guy in the desert, it’s an amazingly rousing moment. Afterward, they give him the robes and he becomes this icon. That moment feels sincere but afterward you see him admiring his reflection in the blade of his dagger.”

In this Nolan clearly sees the seed of pride and vanity seeping into the soul of a character who might have been a great man but ends up being corrupted by the first of all the deadly sins, the sin of Satan himself. “A lot of great films are like this. The Dark Knight films absolutely believe in heroism, but what they say is, true heroism is invisible. That’s the kind of heroism that people aspire to but almost never live up to, in my experience.”

Nolan emphatically does not want to be read ideologically. But that does not mean that he is someone sitting on a fence. “I’ve had conversations with friends of mine and am asked about why I don’t make a film about the things I care about politically and I always say, ‘Well, because it doesn’t work.’ You can’t use narrative to tell people what to think. It never works. People just react against it … It doesn’t mean you don’t care about something, or that it doesn’t mean anything to you, but you have to be neutral or objective in your approach. You can’t tell people what to think; you can only invite them to feel something.”

We come back here to Nolan’s instincts.  Benign humanitarian instincts are the underlying framework for the values in all his films. The trilogy ends with a quotation read over the tombstone of Bruce Wayne. Alfred reads the last words of Sidney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities of which The Dark Knight Rises is essentially a retelling.

The self-sacrifice of Carton, one of the most inspiring acts of heroism in literature, is an image of the heroism of a flawed Bruce Wayne. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

Ross Douthat of The New York Times wrote: “Across the entire trilogy, what separates Bruce Wayne from his mentors in the League of Shadows isn’t a belief in Gotham’s goodness; it’s a belief that a compromised order can still be worth defending, and that darker things than corruption and inequality will follow from putting that order to the torch. This is a conservative message, but not a triumphalist, chest-thumping, rah-rah-capitalism one: It reflects a ‘quiet toryism’ rather than a noisy Americanism, and it owes much more to Edmund Burke than to Sean Hannity.”

Released on July 18, 2008, The Dark Knight took in $238 million in its first week, $112 million in its second, $64 million in its third, before receiving boosts from overseas as it opened in England, Australia, and the Far East, so that by October, it was closing in on $1 billion. Then it levelled out, but slowly playing in theatres right through until March of the following year, when it received the further boost of eight Oscar nominations. The Dark Knight Rises also topped $1 billion.

Which all goes to show that a mass audience is not necessarily an alien arena for ideas and serious exploration of values when a team of artists and competent technicians – very competent – present them to us. Nolan’s ensemble is just such a team.