Noir’s Gone Batty; Why the Dark Knight is a Neo-Noir

Jonah Jerabek

Professor Sinowitz

Noir Film and Fiction

15 December 2017

Noir’s Gone Batty; Why the Dark Knight is a Neo-Noir

            Why so serious? Terrific question. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a neo-noir and I’m not joking around. There is a sense of impending doom in the maniacal and mysterious Joker. The opaque city is full of citizens who trust in a violent and uncontrollable vigilante more than a crime-fighting police force. Corruption has grasped Gotham so tightly, for so long, that hope of anything better appears far-fetched. While Batman is technically a superhero, he is incredibly secretive and mysterious. Most superheroes tend to inspire hope and greatness. However, in this dark film, Batman is not a shining symbol of hope but a punisher of those who deserve it.

            In “The Dark Knight”, Bruce Wayne, a billionaire playboy with deep emotional scars moonlights as Batman, a gadget-yielding, villain-fighting vigilante. Wayne’s body is covered with scars from his history of fighting crime. This visual medical history both emphasizes his mortal vulnerability and provides a clear reflection into his mental state. Christopher Nolan’s Bruce Wayne is a clearly hardboiled character. He is both tough physically, as is shown by his almost constant fighting with the criminals of Gotham, but he is also emotionally thick-skinned. When the Joker goes on a killing spree, claiming he’d stop once the Batman gave himself up, Bruce Wayne turns to his wise and trusted butler Alfred Pennyworth. Alfred tells him, “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice”.  This exchange says loads about Bruce Wayne’s hardboiled character. He is willing to protect those who hate him and fight for those who want to give him up. Surprisingly, this sentiment is repeated later in the film by the Joker as he and the Batman fight on a rooftop. “Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak, like me! They need you right now but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper!” From the insane clown to the caring butler, there seems to be little doubt that Batman is and always will be an outcast. There won’t be any parties or celebrations remembering all of his good deeds. The Batman may save people but he will never be their hero, because he is not one of them.

Another intriguing facet of Bruce Wayne’s character is that he pretends to be the careless and insensitive prick that most people would expect him to be. Because of his façade, Bruce Wayne manages to keep his identity a secret incredibly successfully. This deception only works because of the human tendency to categorize everyone else. He is playing the Spoiled Trust Fund Baby, and the Gotham society goes along for the ride. This same type of manipulation is present in many other noir films and novels. In Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl”, Amy Dunne manipulates this same tendency when convincing their society that Nick had indeed murdered her. She painted Nick as the Murderous Husband and the matter was considered closed.

Meanwhile, the beaten down citizens of Gotham don’t have a semblance of faith in the American dream. There is no hope that life will get better, even with hard work and most are afraid and desperate enough to forget about their morals completely. At one point the Joker threatens to blow up a hospital if Coleman Reese, a man who claimed to know Batman’s identity, was not killed within the hour. Huge mobs of average citizens attack the poor man while the police force, with the help of Bruce Wayne, are barely able to fend them off. Because the citizens of Gotham do not trust their government to protect the weak and injured, they are more than willing to take an innocent man’s execution into their own hands. This is no American Dream but an American Nightmare. This lack of faith is again painfully clear as Police Commissioner Jim Gordon tells District Attorney Harvey Dent, “I don’t get political points for being an idealist. I make do with what I have.” This is not the statement of a man pushing for greatness. This is the statement of a man who is just trying to stop the bleeding. As the police commissioner in a city overrun by criminals, he likely is. The police force has been enduring and losing a constant war with gang leaders such as Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Maroni for years.

            The presence and domination these gangs hold is what opened up Gotham for a vigilante like the Batman to step in and do the job that law enforcement cannot. The police force’s inability to deal with the criminals is too clear when we view their manner of dealing with the Joker. Or more accurately, their manner of not dealing with the Joker as the twisted clown manipulates them with ease. On one occasion, Bruce Wayne found the cops that were supposed to give the salute tied up in their underwear while the Joker and his fiends attempted to assassinate Mayor Anthony Garcia. In that moment, they were completely powerless. This level of embarrassment provides a ringing reflection of their ineffectiveness as a whole. Similarly, in one of the concluding scenes, the Joker decided to dress up the hostages as his henchmen while his henchmen camouflaged themselves as doctors. As a result, Batman had to spend a great deal of time fighting the confused SWAT team to protect the innocent civilians. This situation symbolizes the real threat that the ineffective police force placed upon the citizens that they were meant to protect. The gangs had flooded the police force with corrupt cops and the result is prevalent throughout the movie. A man who was supposed to be testifying pulls a gun on D.A. Harvey Dent in the courtroom. Later, Harvey Dent and his girlfriend Rachel Dawes are kidnapped by the Joker as a result of crooked cops. The Dark Knight is steeped with the thoroughly noir concept of corruption and ineffective government. Unsuccessful police forces are also seen in the Maltese Falcon through cops that are just looking for an easy conviction, in the racist, abusive police of Devil in a Blue Dress, and through Police Captain Quinlan in Touch of Evil, a man who enjoyed finding evidence almost as much as he enjoyed planting it. Noir films tend to have uninspiring police forces and the Dark Knight is certainly one of them.

            Another important element in a noir film is a sense of impending doom. The Dark Knight’s imminent doom is flaunted across the screen through Heath Ledger’s Joker. The audience is never given a real name or even an alias. He is only seen without his makeup for a brief moment when camouflaged as a cop, but otherwise his face is constantly covered with a thick coating of white clown makeup. His eyes are messily ringed with black paint and red makeup stretches across his lips, up the scars that start at both corners of his mouth, creating a constant gruesome smile. There is no back story or any concept of where he might have come from. The only trace of an origin story occurs as he holds a knife inside the mouth of a gangster who threatened him. The Joker whispers in his ear, “Wanna know how I got these scars?”. He tells of an abusive father forcing a blade into his mouth as a young child, concluding with his trademark “Why so serious?” as we hear the gangster’s slain body smack into the wooden floor. Later, while threatening Harvey Dent’s girlfriend, Rachel Dawes, the Joker decides to share his tale with her. “Wanna know how I got these scars?” he hisses while holding a knife to her cheek. This time he rambles about his wife, a beautiful woman who got in deep with some loan sharks and got her face cut up as punishment. The Joker is distraught. “I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars!” cries his broken testimony. He tells of his decision to cut up his own mouth for her. And he describes how she left him, disgusted by the scars he had made. As an audience, we never find out definitively if either story has any merit, but he tells each with a rabid, heartbroken conviction.

The Joker’s lack of backstory, leads even more into his seemingly inhuman character. He does not act out of greed or a personal want, but out of a complete dedication to chaos and unpredictability. At one point, he demands half of the gangs of Gotham’s money to take down the Batman but then burns his share for no reason at all. Later, when Batman is speeding towards him on the Batcycle, a high speed, high tech motorcycle, the Joker mutters “Come on, hit me. Come on, come on. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on.” His voice gets louder and louder until he is bellowing, “Do it! Hit me! Hit me!”. The Joker did not yell this out of self-loathing but out of total dedication to destroying the Batman’s morals and submerging the city of Gotham into complete anarchy. Batman seems to struggle understanding the Joker’s motivations and again turns to Alfred, his astute butler. Alfred tells Bruce of a bandit he dealt with many years earlier when working in Burma. The bandit constantly raided caravans filled with precious jewels and disappeared. Months later, Alfred learned why they’d never found the jewels. The bandit had been throwing them away. Alfred concluded, “Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” The Joker, like the bandit in Burma, could not be controlled like an ordinary man could. The Joker is a darkness. He is an insanity. He is a menace. He is the sense of impending doom.

            The Dark Knight is certainly a noir, but I do not believe it should be included in our syllabus if there is a week added to this semester. I believe it should be included regardless. The Dark Knight makes an incredibly modern and exciting neo-noir full of suspense, spectacularly memorable quotes, and non-stop excitement. I would place the Dark Knight immediately after the class reads Gone Girl. Bruce Wayne and Amy Dunne’s easy manipulation of public opinion could easily be tied together with Judith Butler’s theory that identity is a performance. The class can learn a lot from the Dark Knight because the film has achieved such fame and so few people realize that it is a noir. Outside of this class, most people that I talk to about noir seem to believe that noir is dead, a style of the past. Including the Dark Knight shows both how relevant noir is in the twenty-first century and how much fun it can be. Who doesn’t feel a slight chill as the Joker gleefully yips, “Let’s put a smile on that face” or when an insane Harvey Dent screams, “You thought we could be decent men in an indecent time!”? The Dark Knight is fun, exciting, and surprisingly deep. It deserves to be a part of the Noir Film and Fiction syllabus.