The Thing About BATMAN

What for me vampires are to the world of ghouls, Batman is to the world of comics. They are both the key to unlocking the value of their respective mythological forms, because they exist so distinctly on a foundation of human struggles. They are, in their most fundamental form, elaborate symbolic stage plays for the innately pompous but nonetheless fascinating concepts of good, evil, belief and redemption.

Chris Nolan's recent rehauling of the Batman franchise is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to comic book cinema. Reimagining the filmic introductions and conflicts of Bob Kane's magnificent creations that were first attempted by Tim Burton in the eighties, Nolan gives us, at long last, the Batman of noir, quasi-morality and metropolistic tragedy that we all need. The issues of societal and sociological complexity that are broached are, admittedly, handled with groaning heaviness, but at least they're fucking there. And there's plenty more that the latest film, The Dark Knight, does perfectly.

The foremost is, of course and no prizes for guessing, Heath Ledger. It's at once a shame that the young actor, who had only just begun to show that he had potential to be an icon of DeNiro caliber, must leave behind a comic book villain as his legacy. But, in his defense, I believe that Ledger has pretty well changed the world of film villainy forever and ever amen. His haunting and extraordinary performance as The Joker, Batman's ultimate comment on the dark side of human nature, hooks in with frightening and tragic power to the instability of The Abused Child, The Feared Leper, The Angry Anarchist, and most importantly, The Lonely Man.

Although Aaron Eckhart turns in a very nicely arced performance as Harvey Dent, who is manipulated into a horrific fall from grace (from Gotham's D.A. Angel to "Two-Face"), it is Ledger's Joker that steals the show at every turn, because he is such an intriguing dark symbol. We do not and shall never know who he really was, before his disfigurement and ensuing insanity, but that's the way it should be, because his purpose is not to show the dialectics of the human soul, as "Two Face"'s is. The Joker's only signs of humanity are the bad ones - resentment, cruelty, loneliness. He is a live wire of negative response to a cruel world, an exposed nerve of conditioned disdain and anger. He exists to show us all the kind of monster us mortals can create from one another, much the way Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter did, in his first (and only his first) film appearance.

Not only all this, but he's there to show that Batman is only a hero through the murky morals of Gotham city. They aren't so different, these two immortal characters. They walked the same miserable paths all their lives and then, as if by the flip of Two Face' mythic coin, came to different conclusions. Their "battle for the soul of Gotham", as The Joker very rightly puts it, is founded on nothing more than a conflict of beliefs... and an emblematic town that will do what its ruling giant tells them.

The thing about BATMAN is quite a simple one. Kane's vision and Nolan's synchronize with beauty in this latest feature, for they both take a distinctly gothic, tragic and metaphysical view of their seemingly pointless craft: The Dark Knight tells the tale of a lively philosophical debate, taking place far too late. The delicious ambiguity of the Batman universe created Gotham City, and it's because nobody spoke up one way or the other that it did. Batman and The Joker are taking their stands - they ask that each of their citizens do so as well. Suddenly I can't seem to stop thinking about that damn coin of Harvey's; spinning, spinning, spinning into the dark night.

*Thanks to Martin Kingsley for an editorial note on the finer points of Thom Harris.