Danny ChaiAs I’ve been working my way across philosophy, I read a tiny bit of Moses Maimonides, an apparently a hugely influential medieval Jewish philosopher I had never heard of before. One of his key ideas is that the nature of God is so much higher than man, and our experience so incomparable to His, that we cannot describe how He is; we can only describe how He is not. For example, we can’t say that God is one; we can only say that God is not many. We can’t say God is wise; we can only say that He is not ignorant. And so forth. It’s a fascinating idea, but personally, I find it frustrating. Kind of for the same reasons Socrates is ultimately maddening. It’s really easy to say what is not, or to criticize. It’s much harder to say what is, and to make a stand. But I feel like that’s the essential point of striving for truth.
This comes to mind when I think about The Dark Knight, a movie I probably need to see again. My first reaction when I came out of the theater (Metreon IMAX) was that it was incredible, though not as good as Batman Begins. For some reason, it’s kind of lost esteem in my mind. And I find myself, like Maimonides, only able to assess it in comparison to something else, in this case Batman Begins. And in comparison, I liked it less. So the way in which I describe it make it seem like I didn’t like the movie, although I liked it a great deal.
I think part of the reason why I like it less is because, as Scott pointed out, the movie employs the same technique – in large part, the movie doesn’t define Batman on his own terms, but by his relationship with other characters in the movie. In the end, he embraces this, saying he will be whatever he needs to be seen as. It’s an interesting idea and valid storytelling technique. But I personally find it unsatisfying, much like Maimonides’s negative theology. Some part of me finds it more interesting when the character is self-defined, rather than externally defined, and I feel like the movie fell a little short on that.
It was more developed in Batman Begins. With most superhero movie franchises, the second movie tends to be much better. The reason why, I think, is because the first movie generally needs to deal with the origin story. And origins drag movies down. Specifically, they force the movies to concentrate on the what and the how, when the most interesting ideas are the why. The advantage of Batman Begins is that he’s not really a superhero; he has no special powers. Thus, it didn’t have to deal with the less interesting what at all, and just look at the how and the why, primarily the why. In this sense, Batman Begins was more like a second movie. And the way it dealt with the why questions were interesting, with its ideas of fear and justice.
The reason most third superhero movies are the worst of the three is, I think, because once you’ve addressed the what and the how (in the first movie) and the why (in the second), there are no fundamental questions left to answer. All you can do is look at more of the same. For these reasons – the lack of anything different to examine and the need to involve more – third superhero movies tend to suffer from excess.
The Dark Knight avoided this problem, for the most part, and executed really well. But it didn’t really address anything fundamentally different than the first movie. He is forced to consider how far he is willing to go, what sacrifices he needs to make, what he needs to be. But these issues were already raised in the first movie. TDK examines them in more detail than the first movie, and does it well. It’s just not new.
So yeah, because the central character was more externally defined, and because it didn’t deal with any fundamentally new issues, I like TDK less than Batman Begins. But I did like the movie a lot. Heath Ledger was amazing. I mean, it’s not just me that thought that his role might have contributed to his mental instability, is it? He inhabited it a little too well. And the supporting characters were well drawn.
Except for Rachel Dawes, which is another thing that bugged me. Everyone kept referring to Maggie Gyllenhaal as beautiful. This is a personal thing, but I don’t find her attractive at all. Her being beautiful was the least realistic aspect of the movie for me. Less realistic than a grown man dressing up as a bat fighting a grown man dressed as a psychotic clown who indirectly burns the face of a man so his eyeball is fully exposed yet never needs moisturizing.
It was pretty cool on IMAX, too, although for my money, less amazing than the second and third Matrix movies on IMAX. I may be crazy, but I loved the Matrix sequels, weaknesses and all, probably because they were amazing on IMAX. If you didn’t see it that way, you really missed out.
So The Dark Knight: 4 stars, but not as good as Batman Begins.