No More Joking Around

It’s finally here. The ultimate comic book movie. The comic book movie that will define comic book movies for years to come. Enough with obscure superheroes like Iron Man, CGI storms like Hellboy, blasé graphic novels like “Wanted” and giant douchebags like the Hulk. This is a franchise that’s drawing on the best source material the character has to offer. This is a world without rules, a story without peers, an epic without limits.

Ladies and gentlemen, Batman’s back to steamroll summer movie season.

“This town is MINE now!”

When I first saw Batman Begins three summers ago, I simply couldn’t contain my excitement. As soon as I left the theater, I ended up calling my parents to sing its praises, but really I was speaking to anyone who’d listen as I walked down the street. It was faithful yet inventive, busy but not sloppy, dark yet optimistic. Superhero movies had waited years for a dark character to be given this kind of treatment, but Bat-fans had waited our whole lives.

Finally, Batman was placed in the hands of filmmakers responsible enough to do him justice –- most notably, director Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer. This wasn’t a degenerate spectacle with A-list villains who stole the show. This was a serious take on the character, impressively mounted and drawing heavily from Frank Miller’s graphic novel “Batman: Year One”, one of the best Batman stories ever written. Its influence could be felt as Bruce Wayne confronted the anger and fear within himself, made the commitment to clean up a crime-infested Gotham, found a symbol to wield his power, and formed an alliance with a young policeman named Jim Gordon.

This isn’t classical Batman by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s time detractors of Batman Begins understood that. Batman isn’t a childish character, so the filmmakers aren’t going to treat him like one. He’s also no longer a character who sits above us on a pedestal. He’s not a caped crusader who does battle with a group of colorful wackos. This is a raw Batman plunging into the depths of an urban hell, and he doesn’t have all the answers. When he rips up building after building evading police in the tumbler Batmobile, it’s because he’s still learning how to be Batman. When he extracts information from Detective Flass, he doesn’t do it with a stately dip in his voice. He does it with a vengeful growl, no doubt a product of Miller’s other milestone graphic novel, the ultra-gritty “The Dark Knight Returns.”

Now that Nolan and co. have claimed Gotham City on their terms, it’s time to continue the story of a man irreversibly dedicated to bringing justice to the streets.

And that means all bets are off.

“You’ve changed things…forever.”

One of the best scenes in Batman Begins is the perfect rooftop finale, during which Gary Oldman’s Lieutenant Gordon mentions “escalation” as a new problem confronting Gotham.

His explanation is simple: “We start carrying semiautomatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds. And you’re wearing a mask, and jumping off rooftops.”

Gordon’s implications are much broader. Again, this Gotham City is not rooted in the early 20th century, with old-fashioned sensibilities and a mundane class of criminal. This is a sprawling, morbidly galvanized metropolis that has no idea how to react to Batman’s sudden appearance. The good people (lawmakers, police) and bad people (mobsters, thieves) have been bleeding together for so long that the idea of an independent force trying to restore order is sheer lunacy. It’s crazy enough to drive criminals to desperation, crazy enough to give birth to a man whose sole purpose is absolute disorder (more on that later).

On a different note, it drives splinters through the good forces. As allegiances are drawn, there are now fault lines among the bureaucrats, the cops and the Batman that, if pressed, could result in the collapse of what they fight for.

This uneasy alliance is personified in the first of four components that are critical to The Dark Knight, and could ultimately make it the best comic book movie of all time.

“One day, the Batman will have to answer for the laws he’s broken…”

The three-headed monster of justice

Nolan and Goyer cite Jeph Loeb’s graphic novel “Batman: The Long Halloween” as another chief influence on their vision of the character. The story has many levels to it, but one of the most important is the deteriorating partnership between Batman, Commissioner Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, who represent three very different kinds of justice.

Batman is a shadowy vigilante whose goals benefit everyone, but whose methods benefit himself and himself alone. Gordon is an honest, dedicated public servant who does what he can within the rules, but looks the other way when Batman crosses the boundaries he can’t. Dent also operates under the rules, but sits on a glossier perch than Gordon. As the gatekeeper of Gotham’s very structure, Dent makes sure that no one is above the law, even if his intentions appear noble.

In “Batman: The Long Halloween”, these three perceptions of law and order come into conflict when a mysterious killer begins eliminating underworld figures on holidays. The rest of the book had a marginal influence on Batman Begins, but this triumvirate will show up big time in The Dark Knight when hell is unleashed on Gotham, forcing them to compromise what they believe to prevent the city from tearing itself apart.

This journey won’t be without casualties, either. It’s been revealed that over the course of the film, Dent will become Two-Face, another major player in “Batman: The Long Halloween” (more on that later). It’s likely this transformation will result from battling The Dark Knight’s primary antagonist, an interpretation both old and new of the most famous villain in comics.

“I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you?!”

The REAL Joker

Over the years, the public’s conception of the Joker has become laughable, because his two most popular portrayals have been all kinds of wrong. Cesar Romero played him as a campy prankster on the old Adam West television series, and Jack Nicholson’s domineering depiction in Tim Burton’s Batman was 10 percent Joker and 90 percent wacky Jack.

Compared to that, Heath Ledger’s portrayal will be like a bullhorn in a library. His performance is already eliciting whispers of a posthumous Oscar nomination, and before his unfortunate passing, Ledger described his take as a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.”

It’s no accident, either. Nolan and Goyer gave Ledger the richest source material to study, including the first two appearances of the Joker in the comics, which found him more low-key than flamboyant and emphasized his “burning, hate-filled eyes.” Ledger also read a pair of graphic novels, Grant Morrison’s wildly opulent and existential “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth” and Alan Moore’s seminal book “The Killing Joke”, regarded by many as the best Batman story ever written (all the more ironic because Batman is an incidental character).

Transplanted into Nolan and Goyer’s Gotham, the Joker is the spawn of Batman’s crusade, a violently unpredictable, theatrically inclined super-criminal whose only use for order is to rally the nervous denizens into complete anarchy. He’s not given a backstory, because he doesn’t need one, and giving him one would be a pathetic sacrifice to moviegoing imbeciles. All that’s ever mattered is that the Joker is white to Batman’s black, the complete opposite of everything Batman stands for.

His appearance is suitably disturbing. With a nod to Sid Vicious and A Clockwork Orange, Ledger is thoroughly unrecognizable under the charred face paint and hideously scarred smile. His hair is grungy and his clothes are unkempt, which is emblematic of his goal to annihilate Gotham’s order and makes it seem eerily plausible that he simply materialized in a storm drain. Instead of boasting like an insane showman, Ledger’s voice is slight, implying that madness and ferocity are always around the corner.

To quote Paul Dini, one of the minds behind the excellent Batman: The Animated Series: “This Joker doesn’t split sides, he splits skulls.”

And as mentioned before, his scourge claims at least one significant casualty.

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

The destruction of Harvey Dent

Of all the villains in Batman’s peerless rogues gallery, none are more dramatically satisfying than Two-Face. The Joker is blatant, the Riddler is gimmicky, Catwoman is stupid and the Penguin, interestingly enough, is the only one that’s totally sane.

But the crown jewel in this set is Two-Face, who has more complexities than Poison Ivy has plants. He starts out as Harvey Dent, Gotham’s dashing and deft district attorney whose campaign against crime eventually corrals Sal “Boss” Maroni. During the trial, Maroni hurls acid on Dent’s face, which permanently scars him both physically and psychologically and turns him into Two-Face.

Early on, Two-Face’s crimes were usually harmless contraptions involving the number 2, but he was still too gruesome for younger readers and didn’t survive the Comics Code. Later stories -– among them, “Batman: The Long Halloween” –- retained the principles of his origin while adding layers of subtext and playing up the sense of tragedy.

Nolan and Goyer are taking a similar approach to Harvey Dent. Known for his all-American looks and ability to play good guys gone bad, Aaron Eckhart portrays Dent as the white knight of Gotham City, whose crusade ultimately leads to his disgusting transformation. He’s driven to the brink by all the elements in play: the war against the Joker, the anxious alliance with Batman, his growing relationship with co-worker Rachel Dawes (a character, by the way, who gains 100,000 brownie points in the hands of Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Once he reaches that brink, Dent will endure his physical transformation, and unlike most incarnations of the character, there won’t be anything glamorous about Two-Face. Nolan and Goyer are explicitly following his appearance in “Batman: The Long Halloween”, which finds his face eaten and decayed instead of colorful and grandiose. They’re also adapting the idea of Dent as a twisted vigilante, someone who’s “not a bad guy, not purely.”

They’re doing this because it’s a deeply involving arc, offering a caustic reminder that heroes are never too far from seeing themselves become the villain.

The movie’s success depends on another character who toes that line. You may have heard of him.

“I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop men like him.”

It's about Batman

Do you know why Batman Forever was the best of the first four Batman movies? Because it’s the only one that was about Batman! Do you know why the other three spiraled toward an eight-year hiatus? Because they weren’t about Batman! You can make all the arguments you want about the villains stealing the show (which definitely have merit), but charismatic enemies aren’t a problem as long as you’ve got your priorities in order. By and large, Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher didn’t have them in order. Christopher Nolan and David Goyer do.

No matter how much terror the Joker inflicts, no matter how hard Harvey Dent crashes, no matter what else happens, this film is GOING TO BE ABOUT BATMAN –- which is great, because there’s a world of fascinating stuff going on with him.

The conflict that resident Dark Knight Christian Bale finds the most interesting is the end of Batman’s crusade. When will it come? How will it come? Will it ever come? As we’ve seen in trailers, Bruce Wayne is already talking about a Gotham that doesn’t need Batman, and whenever he does that, you know things are about to get good. His point remains: how much can one man really do? How much is he obligated to do? Now that there are fewer criminals and more men like Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon, can Bruce Wayne finally return to a normal life?

The answer, of course, is no. He’s on the outs with Rachel Dawes, who doesn’t want to be dragged back into his pain. He’s a billionaire with all the women in the world, but as long as he’s Batman, he can never get close to anyone other than his butler Alfred and Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox (played with veteran vigor by Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, respectively). As long as he’s Batman, the normal life he hopes for can never be. As the Joker asks him, “Does it depress you, how alone you really are?”

Once the Ace of Knaves shows up and goes right at Batman, Bruce Wayne is forced to confront his values, the very fiber of why he chose to become Batman in the first place. He now has the power to extinguish crime, but that doesn’t mean it will bring him relief. He stretches how far he’s willing to go to stop the Joker until, as he puts it, “Batman has no limits.” Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, that obliteration of rules is exactly what the Joker is looking for.

Even if the Joker dies and Batman lives, neither of them really survives. That’s a major message of “The Killing Joke”, and I strongly suspect that’s how it’s going to go in The Dark Knight. This is not going to end pleasantly. At the beginning, Batman will look out the window at a promising Gotham, finally controlled by responsible authority figures and no longer in need of his efforts. At the end, Batman will be physically and emotionally destroyed, having watched the Joker plunge Gotham back into hell and deform the virtuous Harvey Dent in the process.

It would be a brave ending, to be sure, especially given the mass summer audience. But Nolan and Goyer are daring enough to do it. There won’t be a blissfully rewarding twist that sends everyone home happy, like Mary Jane’s runaway bride that stained the otherwise brilliant Spider-Man 2. There will only be Batman, a broken and battered hero who’s more alone than ever just as Gotham needs him the most.

That’s the stuff of legend. That’s the stuff that will lift The Dark Knight above all the other comic book fluff.

"I promise you, the dawn is coming..."

If The Dark Knight lives up to its considerable expectations, Christopher Nolan and David Goyer will never again pay for a meal in a comic book fan’s presence.

What they’re doing is something only we can truly appreciate. It’s not about duplicating the comics frame-for-freakin’-frame on screen. It’s about incorporating what made the comics popular in the first place and treating them with respect. Ra’s Al Ghul was not the same man as Henri Ducard, but that didn’t mean Nolan and Goyer couldn’t pull that wonderful misdirection trick in Batman Begins.

My buddy Colin from Chicago (location shoot shoutout!) has a theory that Harvey Dent is actually the one delivering a line attributed to the Joker in the first teaser trailer, and that twist could very well be true. As long as these liberties work, and as long as faithfulness isn’t thrown to the wind, it doesn’t matter.

What Nolan and Goyer are doing works, and as far as I’m concerned, they have free reign on Gotham.

Consider it a world without rules.