in defense of "The Dark Knight"

In one of the most backhanded compliments I've ever read, Corey Atad of the movie blog justAtad contends, regarding Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" (starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman), that the "film’s true strength lies in its nonsensical plotting." I'm going to argue that nothing about the Joker's machinations and actions is nonsensical. First, though, we need to review Atad's claims.

It's central to Atad's argument that the Joker, who stands at the heart of the film, accomplishes his nefarious ends in ways that make no logical sense-- that somehow stretch the bounds of credibility and plausibility beyond a thinking audience member's ability to suspend disbelief. Atad offers several examples of this purported nonsense:

1. The Joker's plot to rob the mob bank at the beginning of the movie makes no sense in its particulars and in its execution.

2. The Joker's subjection of two ferries-ful of people to his own version of the Prisoner's Dilemma contains several implausibilities.

3. The Joker's setup for his attempted assassination of Mayor Garcia, his subsequent capture, his orchestration of the capture of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes, and his escape from Gotham's Major Crimes Unit (MCU) are events that are logically unconnectable.

Essentially, Atad's argument comes down to this:

...at the end of this series of events, the Joker is right where he planned on being. How in the hell could he have foreseen Batman using that tech, or Dent taking the fall, or Gordon pretending to be dead[?] For [the Joker's] plans to work, he’d need to have built those wild card events into his plan right from the beginning, maybe even before the events of the film itself.

To respond to Atad's argument, I'll first address the specific examples he cites, and then will move into a more general discussion of the nature of the Joker, a nature that roots the Joker's plans and actions in the firm ground of plausibility. After all, I need only argue that the Joker's well-choreographed execution of his plans is plausible to make my point, since Atad's claim-- which is rather strongly worded-- is that the Joker's deeds are nonsensical. (I take "nonsensical" to refer primarily to the actions we see in the film, not the subtextual motivations of the Joker. Atad covers the Joker's motivations only cursorily.)

The Mob Bank Scene

At the beginning of "The Dark Knight," the story opens with a bank robbery. The bank is run by the Gotham mob, and is infiltrated by a party of men wearing clown masks, one of whom is the Joker himself. The other thieves are unaware that their ringleader is in their midst; they've been given their instructions before the heist begins. Two clowns tackle the phone lines on the bank's roof; three more clowns tackle the front counter area and the safe; one clown drives a school bus.

As each team member accomplishes a given task, he is killed by the other team member per the ringleader's instructions. The eliminations proceed like this:

1. Rooftop team, Clowns A and B: A kills B once B kills the phone line.

2. Front counter team, Clowns C, D, and E (the Joker): C kills D (the safe-cracker).

3. The school bus driver, Clown F, inadvertently kills C when he rams the bus into the bank. Clown E (the Joker) guns down Clown F.

Steps 1 and 2 strike me as straightforward. The Joker's instructions, given only to part of the team, would have been to kill the other team member as soon as he had accomplished his task. Fewer people to share the loot, right? That's motivation enough. Any possible implausibility has to be confined to Step 3. Atad complains:

The Joker’s plan to rob that bank makes no sense. Somehow, even with the mob controlling Gotham, he’s put together a crew of guys, none of whom have ever seen him before, organized them to rob the bank and kill each other off one by one at very specific intervals. Of course, this might all be somewhat possible, but then the next thing happens. A school bus crashes through the building, killing the last henchman at just the right time, and then the Joker gets in the bus and drives off just as a string of other buses are passing by as a way of hiding in plain sight. It makes zero sense.

Gotham is a fictional stand-in for a teeming metropolis like New York or Chicago ("The Dark Knight" was, in fact, filmed on location in Chicago), and in a city of several million, the Joker should have no trouble finding recruits without ties to the mob. The fact that the men don't know each other is immaterial; the Joker possesses enough charisma ("...the kind of mind the Joker attracts," rasps Batman later in the film) to put together as many teams-- of whatever size-- as he desires.

Atad's main complaint seems to be about the bus. It arrives with perfect deus ex machina timing, and neatly solves the problem of Clown C, who was about to shoot the Joker. This smells funny to Atad, but surely he must realize there's nothing logically impossible about this turn of events. (Plenty of people misuse the word "logic" when critiquing movie plots.) Could the Joker not have maneuvered Clown C to stand right where the bus would smash into the bank? Of course he could have! Did the Joker plan for such an event all along? Probably not, but there's no reason to call Clown C's demise logically impossible. As for the moment when the Joker drives the bus back out into traffic, slotting neatly into a line of school buses: this simply required a bit of foresight on the Joker's part. Someone as clever as the Joker would have had access to school bus schedules, and would have incorporated those schedules into his planning for the bank heist. Far from making "zero sense," there is nothing implausible or impossible about the Joker's planning and execution.

The Two-Ferries Scene

Atad writes:

...the ferry sequence, in which the Joker rigs two ferries to explode, one with regular passengers, one with prisoners, and then gives each one a button to detonate the other and save themselves. How did the Joker manage to set this up? How did he find the time? How could he know that people would be ferried out of the city? Who helped him? Where does he find these people to help him? Where does he have the resources and entry to stage this? Who knows. It doesn’t make sense.

At this point in the film, the Joker has broadcast a city-wide threat that has everyone thinking about leaving Gotham. He utters one caveat, though-- a dire warning for the "bridge-and-tunnel crowd" that, by the end of the movie, seems mostly to be an empty threat designed to maneuver people onto the water. Escape via ferry seems like the only viable choice, especially if the citizens need to avoid bridges and tunnels. The Joker has calculated well: the ferries are-- predictably-- filled, and at least two of them start chugging across the river, one filled with prisoners as part of a scheduled transfer. I see nothing implausible or nonsensical here. How did the Joker manage to set this up? Teamwork! I feel that this question has been asked and answered in the previous section: the Joker is charismatic enough to roust as much help as he requires from a dysfunctional, crime-ridden city of millions. How did the Joker find the time to fill the ferries full of explosives? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to the question of how the Joker was able to coordinate a bank robbery at the beginning of the movie. This requires a fuller discussion of the nature of the Joker himself. I plan to get into this later.

As for who helped the Joker, and where the Joker finds such people to help him: I think that these issues, too, have been asked and answered. Atad's question about resources, though, is worth addressing: obviously, the Joker can't realize any mayhem without purchasing power, which brings us back to the bank robbery and to the Joker's attempts at negotiating a fee with the mobsters. Note, too, that the Joker's main tools are, as he says, bullets and gasoline, both of which have the virtue of being cheap.

Have we covered everything? We've explained the Joker's solution for his manpower needs, his charismatic facility in motivating and coordinating his henchmen, and his ability to purchase the necessary materials to wreak havoc on Gotham. Questions of time and logistical detail are expository issues for the film's director either to deal with or to ignore. I'm glad Nolan ignores them: the film would have been four hours long otherwise!

Mayor Garcia's Attempted Assassination, the Joker's Capture, etc.

I need to quote Atad at length for this part.

The lack of logic in anything involving the Joker extends into every aspect of the film’s plot. Let me lead you through a crucial section of the plot, and let’s see if it makes any sense at all. So, the Joker kills a few people. At the scene of one crime, Batman finds a bullet hole in a brick. He somehow gets the idea, with some sort of magical technology, to do a series of experiments and recover a fingerprint off the bullet. This alone makes no sense, but let’s pretend that it does for the moment. So, Batman gets the fingerprint off the bullet, [which] leads him to a name and to an apartment where a cop is tied up and a rig is set up by a window overlooking a memorial service for the recently killed police commissioner. At a precise moment, when Batman happens to be looking through the window, the blinds go up, making the positioned snipers think something is happening and they start firing [into] the window. On the street, things erupt in chaos. We see that the Joker is down there, dressed as a police officer. An attempt is made on the mayor’s life, but Gordon takes the hit.

So, now everyone thinks Gordon is dead. Bruce Wayne is going to a press conference to reveal himself as Batman, but at the last second Harvey Dent pretends that he’s Batman. He gets arrested, and then when he’s being transferred in a heavily guarded convoy, the Joker shows up. There’s a chase, Batman shows up, apparently not to the Joker’s great surprise. Things happen, and just as Joker is about to get the upper hand and take Batman’s mask off, Gordon shows up, alive, and saves the day. The Joker is hauled off to prison, where he gets put in a cell with a guy, inside whom he’d planted a cellphone bomb. During that, he also reveals to Batman that he’s managed to kidnap both Dent and Rachel Dawes, and they are in two different buildings, each set to explode. I’ll stop here, just because I could go on right to the end of the film, but let’s take a look at the logical problems here.

Okay, let’s pretend for a moment that Batman using the fingerprint tech makes sense, and that Gordon would actually be able to pull off that fake death bit. Even more illogical than those things is that at the end of this series of events, the Joker is right where he planned on being. How in the hell could he have foreseen Batman using that tech, or Dent taking the fall, or Gordon pretending to be dead. For his plans to work, he’d need to have built those wild card events into his plan right from the beginning, maybe even before the events of the film itself. There’s just no way he could have known far enough ahead that he’d be in that prison where he’d have the guy with the cellphone bomb It makes no sense at all.

What Atad refers to as the Batman's "magical technology" is none other than a souped-up version of the sort of equipment used by law enforcement agencies for forensic ballistics. There's nothing magical (if by "magical" Atad means "implausible/nonsensical/illogical") about the Batman's methods (see this Guardian article, published in 2008-- the same year "The Dark Knight" came out-- for more information on fingerprint retrieval from fired bullets). Once again, we can dismiss Atad's claims that something about the film "makes no sense."

As we move from Atad's digression about Batman back to his meditations on the Joker, we confront the issue of the "wild-card events" that the Joker could not possibly have anticipated. Could the Joker have known that Bruce Wayne would be standing at the window whose blinds snapped up at the appointed moment? No, but then again, the Joker's plan wasn't contingent on Wayne's presence: the snapping-up of the blinds would have done its job of distracting the snipers regardless of whether Wayne was in that apartment at that time. Could the Joker have known that Gordon was still alive? I don't think so, but he could easily have anticipated being caught and being placed in MCU holding. Having prepared for this contingency, the Joker would have readied his Plan B: the Exploding Fat Guy.

Atad gets it wrong when he writes, "The Joker is hauled off to prison, where he gets put in a cell with a guy, inside whom he’d planted a cellphone bomb." The Joker is actually sequestered in an interrogation room. At first he's worked over by Batman ("Never start with the head!"), then he's left with an angry cop, six of whose friends the Joker has killed. The Joker overpowers this cop and brings him out of the interrogation room at knifepoint, demanding his one phone call. This is the call to Exploding Fat Guy, who obligingly explodes, tearing apart the MCU and allowing the Joker to escape. How was Exploding Fat Guy maneuvered into getting caught and being placed into the MCU? Again, it comes down to the Joker's charisma in dealing with criminals. Fat Guy was given a sacred mission after he had undergone a bit of surgery to implant the phone bomb. But I have to say that spelling all of these details out for the viewer... well, it ruins the joke. As I mentioned before, I'm glad that Nolan didn't waste time on exposition.

The Nature of the Joker

Atad isn't entirely wrong in his assessment of who and what the Joker is. Atad sees the Joker as a force for chaos whose motivations remain largely opaque to the viewer. This is at least partially true: at the end of the film, the Joker speaks of himself and Batman in terms of the unstoppable force and the immovable object, destined to be in eternal conflict with each other. The Joker also offers us a glimpse into what makes him tick, such as when he describes himself to Harvey Dent as a dog chasing cars, but because he is inherently a liar (hints of the demonic here), we can't trust that the Joker is revealing his essential self. He calls himself an agent of chaos, for example, but his methods are ruthlessly methodical and, in the final analysis, obsessively repetitive: his constant modus operandi is to maneuver the people around him into harming each other. The Joker's character demonstrates, if nothing else, that insanity and rationality are not mutually exclusive. For all the Joker's railing against people with "a plan," the Joker is the consummate planner.

The Joker is also paradoxical in the sense that he has a disturbingly accurate understanding of human psychology, which allows him both to map out his projects and to recruit his henchmen, but he seems to be missing one important insight about the power of human charity and compassion. This is the significance of the ferry scene: ultimately, the Joker's self-blinding narcissism is unmasked by Batman, who accuses his enemy of assuming that all the citizens of Gotham are just as base and vile as he, the Joker, is.

Trying to get at the Joker's innermost motivations may be an impossible task. Perhaps Alfred, Bruce Wayne's faithful, skilled homme à tout faire, comes closest to an accurate assessment of the Joker when he tells Bruce Wayne that "some men just want to watch the world burn." There may be no deeper explanation for psychopathy than psychopathy itself. If there is any sense in which the Joker represents something implausible or illogical, it's that he seems gleefully unburdened by any need to be truthful or sensible. As in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, Christopher Nolan's Joker has a multiple-choice past (cf. the two origin stories about the Joker's facial scars), and while he seems to be out to prove a point, it's unclear just what point the Joker is trying to prove.

Although I think Corey Atad's article is thoughtfully written, I find myself in fundamental disagreement with his assessment of the story's plot. Far from being a string of nonsensical contrivances, the story of "The Dark Knight" makes perfect sense to the extent that every action the Joker takes can be rationally explained, at least at the logistical level, if not always at the motivational level. Far from being illogical or nonsensical-- an extreme claim if ever I've heard one-- the story's twists and turns follow a plausible, sensible path from beginning to end. My own reading of "The Dark Knight" is that it is a study in two forms of insanity that, together, straddle a blurry ethical divide. Bruce Wayne isn't the most likable character, either; Rachel Dawes senses this about him and stays away. "The Dark Knight," a bit like Harvey "Two-Face" Dent, presents us with two sides of the same ethical/psychological coin.


_