Nothing to Do with All Your Strength: Power, Choice, and September 11 in The Dark Knight

Ambivalent Heroics, The Dark Knight, And 9/11

Bruce Wayne is not a well man, and the city he tries nightly to save made him that way. Over a casual dinner conversation in the 2008 Warner Bros. film The Dark Knight,1 when someone doubts that corrupt and vio- lent Gotham City could be a healthy place for raising children, Wayne (Christian Bale) jokes, “I was raised here, I turned out OK.” The irony succinctly and playfully summarizes the billionaire’s evolution from child victim to adult vigilante. One among the many of Gotham’s criminals had robbed and murdered his parents as he, a mere child, stood beside them. Soon after, the young Wayne vowed vengeance by committing his life to fighting crime (Vaz 1989, xiii–xiv). His sweeping vendetta, a choice to act against all criminals in response to the violation of one, commuted his personal loss into a grander purpose: to thwart the very possibility of victimization from violence. Accordingly, it could be viewed simply as a sel ess and civic-minded approach, if not for the form “this weird figure of the dark...this avenger of evil” (xiv) later takes. Ultimately, his methods in disguise as the Batman, an incarnation of fear to intimidate vice, unsettle any reassurance that his post-traumatic endeavors fully redeem his orphan- ing or entirely forestall the injury of others. After all, his investment in perpetually re-engaging with the criminal encounter—albeit to change the outcome he could not alter in his youth—necessarily implicates him in the moral quandaries any use of force entails. For this reason, the ongoing tale of the superhero driven to make right what long ago went drastically wrong has raised lasting questions about the scope and limits of ethical power.

The 2005 film Batman Begins2 introduces director and screenplay co- writer Christopher Nolan’s conception of how these questions drive the Batman narrative while resonating with contemporary viewer concerns. This “reboot,” or updating of the at-the-time 66-year-old comic book character,3 focuses on how Bruce Wayne comes to develop a sense of jus- tice to undergird actions that began, and could still be construed, as vigi- lantism. The story follows Wayne’s maturation from frightened, vengeful boy to disciplined, principled man, with his wealthy parents’ celebrated altruism eventually superseding their fate as the legacy that haunts his behavior. In the end, Wayne decides to look to the well-being of his com- munity, rather than the settling of an individual score, as the measure of ful llment of the vow he spoke on his late parents’ behalf. However, the film concludes with the newly minted Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), Batman’s lone ally on the compromised Gotham police force, wondering after they have just narrowly averted an evil master-minded plot against the city: “What about escalation?” Pointing to the as-yet unnamed Joker’s “calling card,” Gordon speculates that Batman’s fierce and uncompro- mising assault on criminals could actually heighten the modes and the stakes of combating crime (Batman Begins). In the context of any “war on crime,” and certainly in the midst of the War on Terror, Gordon’s caution strikes a certain resonance for viewers familiar with the arguments for and against “taking a hard line” to promote security. In the context of Batman’s freelance interventions, the flnal scene throws this fllm’s resolu- tion into doubt, setting the terms for the next installment’s crises.

Indeed, the Catch-22 of escalation dominates The Dark Knight, par- ticularly in the context of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath, a con- text acutely attuned to predicaments of power and ethics. Allusions to September 11 abound in The Dark Knight. A promotional poster for the fllm’s theatrical release, which now serves as DVD cover art, featured a bat-shaped flery crash zone penetrating the upper floors of a skyscraper’s facade. The image, reminiscent of the plane-produced penetrations of the World Trade Center towers, appears nowhere in the actual fllm, fore- grounding a provocative self-consciousness in how the project invokes September 11 (Cox 2008; Dawson 2008; Dudley 2008; Moore 2008). In fact, settings and scenarios persistently echo the crises of Manhattan on that particular day and throughout its wake, which many movie review- ers acknowledged (Stevens 2008; Tyree 2009), with a few considering such references somewhat heavy-handed (Cox 2008). Specifically, some argued fervently that its themes transparently favored the Bush adminis- tration’s War on Terror in response to September 11 (Ackerman 2008; Klavan 2008), and some argued just as fervently that the fllm exposed this response’s flaws (Baker 2008; Binh 2008; Dray 2008; Orr 2008). These divergent perceptions of a single text point to the richness of a narrative that can elicit entirely opposed, yet equally committed, reactions. Importantly, for many—including myself—this richness re ects a text positioned in the unkempt middle, where patently right answers fail to reside and choices must be made without the luxury of self-righteous reassurance (Bradley 2008; Crouse 2008; Dargis 2008; Eisenberg 2008; Kerstein 2008; Rickey 2008; Schager 2008; Stevens 2008). Indeed, director and screenplay co- writer Christopher Nolan has demurred about deliberately producing an explicit September 11 text (Eisenberg 2008).4 Instead, he has portrayed the fllm as an evocative medium through which viewers can struggle with issues well-grounded in Batman’s fictionalized history yet well-suited to our own historical realities (Boucher October 27, 2008a; see also Kerstein 2008).

In effect, much like the television shows discussed earlier, references to September 11 infuse The Dark Knight’s plot so the fllm can serve as a flctional but fraught confrontation with that event as a cultural trauma that has confounded conventional moral certainties. Like the viewers of those shows, as well as the readers of Falling Man and the oral histories considered at the beginning of this study, almost all viewers of the theatri- cal release, depending on their experiences of that day, can be considered witnesses (and some might be survivors) of September 11. Accordingly, the fllm’s numerous, direct parallels with that day’s images and chal- lenges impel viewers to bring their experiences with September 11 into their encounter with the fllm’s flctional traumatic moments. However, The Dark Knight avoids offering viewers any “feel-good” or ethically sat- isfying resolutions to the troubles it dramatizes through this connection between the fllm, the viewers, and September 11. Instead, this connection incites viewers to interrogate their own moral orientations in relationship to the fllm’s staged exigencies and, by extension, their involvement in or even contributions to counterpart real-world exigencies: the kind of com- plex, ambiguous choices or even lose-lose scenarios that September 11 has occasioned. Trauma is already fundamental to the Batman story. However, this fllm features distinct elements of the cultural trauma of September 11—the violations of once-fundamental dominant cultural presump- tions about security, self-determination, and ethical action—including the depiction of The Joker as a terrorist, the protagonists as constrained by problematic choices, and the city of Gotham itself as implicated in its own vulnerability and potential for strength. In effect, the fllm openly alludes to September 11, links these allusions to Gotham’s security concerns and moral susceptibilities as well as to “good guys” Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), and Harvey Dent’s (Aaron Eckhart) repeated struggles with The Joker’s (Heath Ledger) relentless morally tax- ing scenarios—which are sustained, if not propelled, by the city’s ambiva- lences—and uses these depictions of the Gotham community’s risks and responsibilities to implicitly call on viewers to recognize their own risks and responsibilities in the analogous crisis of September 11. In this way, this popular culture text explores and involves its viewers in the cultur- ally traumatic complexities of agency and accountability in the wake of September 11.

In Bob Kane’s inaugurating comic, “The Legend of the Batman—Who He Is and How He Came to Be,” the panel following Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murders records that their “boy’s eyes are wide with terror and shock as the horrible scene is spread before him” (qtd. in Vaz 1989, xiv). Similarly, in Batman Begins, young Bruce Wayne is stunned by his par- ents’ deaths beside him. Yet three additional factors, not presented in the original comic, intervene in the fllm between this crisis and Wayne’s con- sequent simmering impulse to battle crime: his loving relationship with a father devoted to the care of both his family and his suffering city, a murderer evidently driven by desperation, and a boy’s self-blame for his parent’s demise. After all, Wayne’s fear of bats, aggravated by the set and costumes of an opera his family attends one evening, leads him to plead for an early departure from the performance. Just after they emerge onto the deserted nighttime city street, a jumpy mugger ends up pulling his gun’s trigger when he misinterprets Thomas’s effort to shield his wife from harm as a threatening gesture. Immediately after, Martha’s frantic reaction to her husband’s shooting provokes the same panicked response from the apparently inadvertent killer (Batman Begins 2005). And so Bruce Wayne is orphaned in a robbery gone awry, by the kind of destitute man his city’s flnancial woes have created and his family’s philanthropies have striven to support, in a time and place occasioned by his own vulnerabilities.

There are no easy explanations or justi cations for this sort of mis- fortune, especially for a child. Yet Wayne flnds one way for it all to make sense: he tells the family butler Alfred (Michael Caine) it was his fault for putting them at risk. Alfred immediately corrects him, insisting, “It was him, and him alone.” However, in adulthood, Wayne admits only that his anger has since overshadowed his guilt, revealing a quali ed accep- tance of Alfred’s admonition (Batman Begins 2005). At an impression- able age, Wayne has been introduced to the murky morality of a world in which—wealthy and poor, privileged and disadvantaged—we are not entirely free actors, with options constrained often by circumstances or resources, yet in which we still must live with the consequences of the choices that we make. What kind of an impact could such a revelation have on a young boy, especially one with the means to pursue or indulge any and all forms of solace, regardless of whether they prove salutary or licit?

Interestingly, Bruce Wayne’s trajectory from child victim to adult crime flghter accords with contemporary understandings of the traumatic recovery process. Traumatic ordeals prompt within survivors a need to re-calibrate their life expectations in light of their newly intimate aware- ness of living in a world of risk. In particular, in the wake of perpetrated violence, Janoff-Bulman (1992) points out that survivors particularly con- front “a breakdown in interpersonal trust, a newfound perception of the interpersonal world as hostile and dangerous” (79). They must “suddenly confront the existence of evil...question the trustworthiness of people... and question their own role in the victimization” (78). They now recog- nize through personal involvement, however unwitting, something most stable social orders seek to manage or at least to mask: that human beings harm, and mean to harm, other human beings. From this perspective, traumatic events corrupt an individual’s sense of being and acting in an intelligible world, requiring reconstruction of that individual’s subjective coherence, productive agency, and responsible orientation toward him- or herself and others.

In the fallout of this radical uncertainty about who one is, what one can do, and what one should do or should have done, survivors and wit- nesses develop feelings of self-blame and guilt. Janoff-Bulman (1992) distinguishes between “characterological self-blame,” through which individuals attribute their traumatic harm to their own enduring, inher- ent, de cient personal qualities, and “behavioral self-blame,” through which individuals attribute their trauma to their own errant choices. While characterological self-blame reinforces individuals’ views of them- selves as helpless and therefore troubles recovery, behavioral self-blame enhances individuals’ views of themselves as autonomous and in fact— comparatively speaking—can aid their recovery (125–130). After all, a survivor might reason, what could have been avoided in the past can be avoided in the future, a vision much more encouraging than the sense that harm can happen at any time to anyone, without warning or hope of evasion. For Bruce Wayne, continually re-entering moments of dan- ger as a well-trained, well-armed combatant capable of single-handedly defeating criminals seems to offer the chance to nullify his childhood’s paradox of feeling both responsible for his parents’ fate yet also unable to prevent it.6 Yet, as The Dark Knight dramatizes, vindication through Batman’s crime flghting proves problematic for him, his friends, and the city of Gotham.

Understandably, then, Bruce Wayne’s world could be described as irrevo- cably altered by the trauma of his parents’ murders. Their deaths ensured that his family life would be materially different, and his subsequent vow to flght crime signaled the direction his radical new view of the world would take. Yet after September 11, many who were not immediately affected by the attacks reported the same stunned sense that “the world had changed.” This notion of cultural trauma invokes questions of subjec- tivity, agency, and responsibility under conditions of imposed constraints and limited, perhaps exclusively adverse, options—the very concerns that dominate Bruce Wayne’s dilemmas as Batman, albeit manifesting in The Dark Knight in forms attuned to real-world precipitating crises. This echoes what earlier chapters have discussed, with popular press oral histo- ries and both literary and televisual flction all having similarly flxated post- September 11 on mortal vulnerability and inescapable fate in the form of no-win scenarios, problematic heroism, and ambivalence about individual autonomy, even under the most critical circumstances and in relation to ethical decision-making.

Within this context, The Dark Knight engages through a particular medium— lm—concerns that were informing other kinds of representa- tions and audiences as the decade unfolded. Just as flctional representa- tion through literature seemed to take a few years to emerge in force, fllm production also took some time to develop (see Prince 2009, 1–2); the earliest movies to appear tended to adhere to documentary or docudrama forms. However, like the other texts reviewed here, as the 2000s moved forward, the increased number and range of offerings warranted critical attention to how film participates in the political discourse of the decade, with scholars taking a variety of distinct positions regarding overall trends and effects. A signi cant component of such critique has viewed the media as complicit in Bush administration characterizations of September 11 and, accordingly, its policies of response. Specifically, Duvall and Marzec (2015) focus on how “contemporary narrative can make legible a moment in US history when, in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the forces of nationalism, the media, and capital worked in con- cert to mobilize support for the notion of just wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for curtailing civil rights at home” (1). For them, “post-9/11 narratives help make visible the fantasies that supposedly necessitate the ongoing state of exception and American exceptionalism” (1). In other words—and the term “mobilize” is quite explicit about this—movies organized public endorsement of extreme measures through the guise of state-directed and state-serving wish ful llment. At the very least, though, the thematic preoccupations discussed here complicate any notion of a straightforward, unidirectional imposition of ideology by recognizing the extent to which extreme measures—state-oriented and state-driven, or not—might not have been an unfamiliar, tough, or unwelcome sell (or needed to be sold at all) to readers and viewers experiencing existential and ethical susceptibilities and uncertainties.

More nuanced approaches have perceived tensions in post-Septem- ber 11 cinema between nationalism, political critique, and attempts to negotiate between the two (Westwell 2014, 16). Markert (2011) traces through fllm a trajectory of public support for the Bush administration and the War on Terror, from a high immediately after September 11, to a period of uncertainty, to increasing resistance. Kellner (2010) contends that a movie’s politics could be liberal, conservative, radical, layered, or “incoherent” and that “contemporary Hollywood cinema can be read as a contest of representations and a contested terrain that reproduces exist- ing social struggles and transcends the political discourses of the era” (2). For example, Nair’s (2013) study of the fllm Spider-Man points to how, as early as 2002, the pervasive phenomenon of falling bodies registered mainstream cinema’s grappling with the non-heroic component horrors of September 11. Additionally, Pollard (2011) writes, “post-9/11 noir emphasizes emotionally flawed, depressed protagonists trapped in threat- ening, potentially deadly situations, dark settings, and social dislocations.” He adds, “The post-9/11 genre exudes violence, cynicism, and paranoia about disturbing, violent events, often including various forms of terror- ism” (4). Ultimately, he argues, this wave of movies “reveals an increasing ambivalence about traditional concepts of good and evil” (183). Kellner (2010) characterizes movies as “an especially illuminating social indica- tor of the realities of a historical era, as a tremendous amount of capital is invested in researching, producing, and marketing the product. Film creators tap into the events, fears, fantasies, and hopes of an era and give cinematic expression to social experiences and realities.” (4). Such per- sistently revisited tropes point to a troubling psychic disruption among viewers, for whom such portrayals are sufficiently relevant that they spend time and money watching them as entertainment, even when they offer neither clear nor easy resolution to the dilemmas pressing on them from the world beyond the fiction.

Moreover, like the oral history accounts, DeLillo’s writings, and the television shows explored earlier, The Dark Knight (2008) situates its crises in relationship to a particular originating event whose component features reverberate horror and helplessness throughout the story. Resonances with September 11 permeate The Dark Knight from the start. The fllm begins outside of time and place with a frame-consuming, slow-motion, blue-tinted and melancholy chiaroscuro of dense, roiling flreballs. We have seen this before, in the telltale flames bursting from the sides of of ce towers con rming the impact of passenger planes. We could not see what we knew they obliterated: the whole bodies of human lives, vanishing in an unexpected instant. Even in that day’s replayed video coverage, the planes perhaps travel too inconceivably for our minds to register what they are doing as they are doing it, with disbelief and fear inciting our mental resistance as they seem to, but surely could not, be heading for a colli- sion with occupied skyscrapers. But the flreballs mark the undeniable and irreversible moments from which the post-September 11 world starts to unfold. They form the threshold between what possibly could have been averted and what can now never be undone. In The Dark Knight, balls of flame, accompanied by a faint, asynchronous, apprehensive undertone of a sustained note, introduce the subsequent action. Rather than disappearing through a straightforward fade-out or dissolve, the flames seem to push toward viewers, displaced in the montage by a dark void at the center of the frame as it expands into the familiar Bat Symbol, the gloomy emblem of a haunted hero flying forward and looming larger until viewers see only black (The Dark Knight 2008). It is a bleak beginning with its oblique ref- erence to a September 11 context of foregone doom and foreclosed hope, with the flreballs having suspended us within the instance of awareness that sometimes we have fear and few, if any, options.

Yet such references become increasingly more direct. The fllm jump- cuts from the almost ethereal hushed blaze to an IMAX—and in appro- priately equipped theaters, an engul ng—aerial shot steadily zooming in on the upper floors of one among a cluster of skyscrapers in a dense cityscape. As the continuous undertone crescendos—now clearly audible and supplemented by brisk percussive beats that intensify anticipatory ten- sion, as well as distant street noises that ground events in their contem- porary urban setting—the building fllls the frame, its windows re ecting the city skyline until one of them explodes outward. Indoors, from the opening of the blown window, two men soon launch and secure a cable to another building. The camera, situated behind the men as each latches onto the cable, pursues them with a swift tracking shot as they jump into the air to glide toward the neighboring rooftop. However, at the ledge, instead of following the men as they slide forward along the cable, the shot abruptly becomes a tilt down to show the street traf c several stories below, creating a point of view that enables viewers to feel as though they have followed the men out the window and into their own freefall. These images are also not new; we have seen people clustered at blown-open of ce windows and some jumping out of them. Yet there is one differ- ence: the IMAX fllming and the camera’s positioning draw viewers into a perspective they did not have on September 11, one located within the building that drives outward into a stomach-sinking plunge (The Dark Knight 2008). Associations can be made between what we have seen on the news and what we see in the theater, with the act of witnessing in the theater intensi ed through the IMAX effect of immersing its viewers in the staged action. We have been invited to experience ourselves as more than just passive observers, who can watch from afar without connection or consequence.7 With this invitation, the fllm occasions for viewers the opportunity to recognize within the September 11-related predicaments it dramatizes our own susceptibilities, complicities, and responsibilities.

Details throughout the fllm promote further correlations between Gotham, New York City, and September 11.8 When The Joker is guarded in jail by a veteran cop, he taunts the of cer, “How many of your friends have I killed?” The question chills, coming from someone other characters have termed a “terrorist” (The Dark Knight 2008). In the aftermath of September 11, the staggeringly high casualties to close-knit communities like the New York City police and flre departments were evident in the hardships of survivors who lost multiple colleagues and friends in a single morning, who afterward would attend an almost endless progression of funerals and memorial services. Indeed, the police commissioner’s funeral, set in Gotham but fllmed near Ground Zero in Manhattan (Tyree 2009, 32)—while other city scenes were fllmed in Hong Kong, Chicago, and London (The Dark Knight Production Notes)—features marching rows of solemn uniformed of cers to the mournful sounds of bagpipes as a som- ber echo of real-life commemorations. Later, during the car chase among The Joker, an armored police van transporting Dent, and Batman, a burn- ing flre engine blocks the van’s route, detouring them to more danger- ous streets (The Dark Knight 2008). The now-recognizable image, a flre truck crushed and ablaze, poses a warning far exceeding in its portentous overtones any signi cations independent of September 11 (Tyree 2009, 32). Additionally, when Batman returns to the site where Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was killed, he hangs his head in the foreground of a smoldering pile of debris, with flre ghters in the background sending arcs of water over collapsed steel beams, a scene evocative of Ground Zero (Tyree 2009, 32). Moreover, Gotham is overtly connected to Manhattan when The Joker addresses the “bridge-and-tunnel crowd,” a reference to those who commute to the island from the city’s other boroughs and New Jersey (The Dark Knight 2008). Indeed, when Gordon must call the National Guard to assist throngs of people gathering at the water for ferries toward safety, memories of the unprecedented “like a movie” evacuation of Lower Manhattan might surface. Such allusions, integrated seamlessly throughout the narrative, create a context for the story that couches interpretative possibilities for the fllm’s staged exigencies in terms of a particular exigency, September 11, in viewers’ own recent past.

Similarly, throughout The Dark Knight, interiors feature floor-to- ceiling windows, reminiscent of the World Trade Center’s design, which permit the uninterrupted presence of Gotham. These settings foster suggestively porous boundaries between a city’s interiors and exteriors, which September 11 frighteningly showcased when planes rent open enclosed spaces, around which of ce workers crowded for air and relief. Notably, when Batman pushes The Joker over the ledge of a construction site, he uses a grappling hook to retrieve the villain (adhering to his rule never to kill) and suspend him in mid-air upside down, a precarious posi- tion from which The Joker reveals his anticipated victory in spite of his capture and his ferry plan’s failure. He explains, “I took Gotham’s white knight. And I brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard—see, mad- ness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push” (The Dark Knight 2008).9 His characterization of Dent’s devastation as a downfall while he himself hangs in the air facing downward (although the camera vertically rotates, ultimately positioning viewers with him in head- rst sus- pended freefall) eerily summons and preserves the moments of descent of those who jumped from the World Trade Center, moments frozen in time by, among other records, the “Falling Man” photograph by AP photog- rapher Richard Drew. They were fearful moments to witness, embodying our shared ultimate vulnerability in their evidence of utter despair and powerlessness and in their prelude to a horri c end. And The Joker has put his flnger precisely on this shared vulnerability: that madness, like gravity, takes only the right push. Cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ (1997) concept of “structure of feeling” signals speci cities in the variables of shared experience (128–135). The Dark Knight’s historical associations with the context of September 11 evoke a structure of feeling of contem- porary angst as the fllm’s conundrums unfold before viewers immersed in their own lived experiences of perceived threats and moral uncertainties.

Insinuations of causal connections between Gotham’s populace and the city’s perpetual troubles in the context of these historical associations afford viewers the opportunity to re ect on their own relationships to September 11 and its aftermath. In the fllm’s middle pivot (unrelenting, staccato-paced action disrupts any sense of a narrative arc), Gotham’s brash, idealistic District Attorney Harvey Dent reluctantly presides over a press conference he has convened at Batman’s insistence. In front of a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, he stands behind a microphone-packed podium situated in the corner of a room with wall-to-wall windows exposing the city outside, a setting that flguratively suggests through framing his cornering by Gotham’s norms. The Joker has been ful lling his promise to kill Gothamites until Batman reveals his secret identity, and the masked crime flghter has decided to meet this demand to attempt to forestall the further murder of innocents. Dent, angered by what he perceives as “giv- ing in,” proceeds with the media event but tries to use the opportunity to boost public morale and enlist the city’s support in resisting The Joker’s ultimatum. However, a reporter (Sophia Hinshelwood) characterizes Dent’s reluctance to expose Batman as protecting “an outlaw vigilante” over “citizens,” with which the crowd agrees. Soon after, a heckler (Keith Kupferer) yells that because of Batman, “Things are worse than ever.” After Dent pleads for calmer re ection about the fate of Batman and of Gotham, a police of cer (Joseph Luis Caballero) shouts, “No more dead cops,” an invocation of legitimated authority, supposedly endangered by Batman, which fully divests Dent of any power to win over the assembly on his behalf (The Dark Knight 2008). These voices for Gotham have clearly deemed Batman the root cause of, and certainly not the solution to, the city’s worsening violence, demarcating the public as hapless suffer- ers and Batman as irresponsible adventurer.10 Given this characterization of Gothamites as blameless victims uninvolved in the crises that threaten them, Dent can expect little participation from them in their city’s salva- tion; corrective action, like the threats it strives to counteract, seemingly must occur without them. This detaching of accountability for corrective action from those for whom it is purportedly taken not only limits Dent’s options but also, given the fllm’s allusions to September 11 and its after- math, poses real-world challenges as well.

However, Dent’s comments in this scene make clear, as he tries to dis- suade public opinion from pushing the Batman into The Joker’s hands, that Batman’s behavior does not occur in a vacuum of reckless self-indulgence, and The Joker’s cunning does not occur in a void of freewheeling aggres- sion, from which Gotham can free itself by scapegoating someone already risking himself on their behalf. After all, as he points out, Batman’s activi- ties are not the proximate reason for the public’s turn against him. He says, “We’re doing it because we’re scared. We’ve been happy to let the Batman clean up our streets for us until now.” Indeed, earlier in the fllm, over dinner with Wayne, Dent, and their (not fully known to Dent) shared love interest Rachel Dawes, Wayne’s date Natascha (Beatrice Rosen) refers to Gotham as “the kind of city that idolizes a masked vigilante,” to which Dent responds, “Gotham City is proud of an ordinary citizen standing up for what’s right.” At this point, it would seem from their comments that the average man and woman have welcomed Batman’s arrival. Yet Natascha counters, “Gotham needs heroes like you—elected of cials, not a man who thinks he’s above the law,” with which Wayne concurs, ask- ing, “Who appointed the Batman?” Dent’s answer, “We did. All of us who stood by and let scum take control of our city,” catches Wayne’s attention (The Dark Knight 2008). For him, a new prospect unfolds: the possibility that Gotham could render Batman obsolete by accepting some answerability for—and accordingly, some risk to—itself rather than allow- ing a shadowy flgure to shoulder the entire burden of rescuing a commu- nity gone awry. Dent’s perspective fosters an alternative vision, one that encourages citizens to recognize their own responsibility for their com- munity’s well-being.11 In this view, effective citizenship involves actively cultivating democratic principles throughout daily public life, rather than just through an occasional vote. Such a view raises useful questions about the contours and implications of explicit consent, implicit acquiescence, hesitant resistance, and flrm opposition in a post-September 11 environ- ment of hard choices, a disconcerted populace, and a federal government willing to act audaciously.

Indeed, the urgency for Gothamites to accept some accountability and participate more fully and directly in their own governance becomes progressively clearer throughout the fllm. After all, while Gotham is not a perfect city, neither are its most devoted caretakers. The violent and disturbed Batman works closely with Lieutenant Gordon, the solitary man of integrity embedded in a crooked police force, and eventually with District Attorney Dent, a fresh-faced, charismatic, but cocky legal crusader whose reservations about police corruption put him at odds with Gordon about how to handle the police department. When they flrst meet, Gordon warns Dent, “In this town, the fewer people know something, the safer the operation,” evidencing a customary, general wariness about who can be trusted around him. But Dent tells Gordon pointedly, “I don’t like that you’ve got your own special unit, and I don’t like that it’s full of cops I investigated at internal affairs,” placing the dishonesty within intimate range of Gordon’s daily work. Gordon replies, “If I didn’t work with cops you’d investigated while you were making your name at I.A., I’d be working alone. I don’t get political points for being an idealist. I have to do the best I can with what I have” (The Dark Knight 2008). Gordon’s comments duck the possibility Dent has raised of his reliance on bad cops by characterizing Dent’s interest in his closest colleagues as mere political gamesmanship, on the one hand glossing over possible wrongdoing he himself might have overlooked and on the other hand construing Dent as an opportunist. At the same time, though, these comments indicate Gordon’s sense of vulnerability as the lone law enforcer with an unadulterated commitment to justice. He indirectly admits some truth to Dent’s suspicions by suggesting that his isolation in virtue requires him to compromise in his actions; if he did not attempt to enforce the law with the help of those less committed, he would likely achieve no justice at all. From Gordon’s experience, the luxury of idealism, of flnding for the problems at hand faultless means toward perfect solutions—actions that lead to desired, foreseeable, wieldy outcomes—has no place in Gotham.12 Lacking Batman’s super- heroic skills, his reaction, like everyone else’s in Gotham, must remain more mundane and therefore less readily disentangled from the inertial city’s ethical mire.

Through most of the fllm, Gotham’s principled yet pragmatic district attorney presents an alternative to Batman’s freelance crime flghting: an aboveboard, legally sanctioned, and therefore legitimate approach to the city’s rehabilitation. Similarly lacking superhero capabilities, Dent never- theless behaves with a bold abandon evidencing full con dence in his pub- lic, flrm battle against crime, earning him the nickname “Gotham’s White Knight,” a critical comparison to Batman considering the fllm’s title. Such courage is remarkable in a criminal justice system known for its risks and compromises, but his valor borders on swagger. At critical junctures, he flips a coin to choose his course of action, claiming every time that he actu- ally makes his own luck. The coin is rigged, with a head on each side, cor- roborating his claim that he neither believes in nor succumbs to chance. However, when Dent and Rachel are kidnapped by corrupt cops and hid- den in separate parts of the city, they are each bound to explosives with timers and provided with speakerphone access to one another. As a result, when Batman reaches Dent just in time, they both hear Rachel die with- out being able to do anything to stop it. For Batman, this is understand- ably excruciating; he has known and loved Rachel for most of their lives. However, this mortal helplessness, the kind that flrst propelled Wayne’s development into Batman, devastates Dent. Having suffered burns on half of his face when his own building exploded, Dent’s very features now manifest his own post-trauma adoption of a new persona, a “Two-Face,” someone who eschews ideals and determines murderous action according to the toss of an unpredictable coin (The Dark Knight 2008).

Although Dent flrst targets those directly culpable for his maiming and Rachel’s death—their abductors Detectives Wuertz (Ron Dean) and Ramirez (Monique Gabriela Curnen) and the ma a don Maroni (Eric Roberts), whom The Joker terms the plan’s organizer—he especially tar- gets his former ally Gordon, whom he considers ultimately responsible. Dent had doubted the advisability of keeping the gangsters’ money laun- derer Lau (Chin Han) in custody at the Major Crimes Unit (MCU), but Gordon had insisted, regarding the county jail alternative as even less secure. Yet The Joker later takes Lau with him when he himself escapes MCU, proving Gordon wrong and undercutting their single grand vic- tory against crime since only Lau’s testimony could have enabled convic- tions against his associates. Most importantly, when Dent had flrst warned Gordon about Wuertz and Ramirez, Gordon refused to believe they had links to Maroni, instead blaming the district attorney’s of ce for leaking information (The Dark Knight 2008). But Gordon’s good-faith inten- tions coupled with an inability (or refusal, according to Dent) to operate independently of Gotham’s flawed legal order lead to dire results for his friends.

Dent is determined to force Gordon to confront intimately the hor- ror his mistakes have permitted. Dent kidnaps Gordon’s wife (Melinda McGraw) and two young children (Nathan Gamble and Hannah Gunn) and holds them hostage on the site of Rachel’s murder, ready to use his family to punish him. The punishment crystallizes into a single concept, one not unfamiliar to those who recall from September 11 how those trapped on the hijacked planes and in the World Trade Center towers had connected to loved ones through last phone conversations and messages. Dent had flrst alluded to this particular pain when he found Maroni, refer- ring to the mobster’s wife when he asked, “Can you imagine what it would be like to listen to her die?” When he faces Gordon, he elaborates, “Have you ever had to talk to the person you love most, wondering if you’re about to listen to them die? You ever had to lie to that person? Tell them it’s going to be all right when you know it’s not? Well, you’re about to flnd out what that feels like. Then you’ll be able to look me in the eye and tell me you’re sorry” (The Dark Knight 2008). For Dent, being present to a loved one’s last moments without being able to alter them constitutes a catalyzing harm, an experience of utter helplessness that marks the pivot on which he turns from aggressive but earnest law enforcer to reckless and amoral avenger. His transformation, embodied in the grotesque exposure of bone and muscle on half of his face, crystallizes physically the unsightly variations of “gloves-off” retribution that offered to those disconcerted by the tragedies of September 11 the dubious comfort of a deceptively facile forceful response.

Of course, since this is a superhero flction, Batman intervenes. At this critical moment when the incorruptible vigilante comes face-to-face with the now-corrupted civil servant, Dent accuses his former counterpart of advocating what he once also believed but now regards as insidious folly, that “we could be decent men in an indecent time.” Gotham’s cycle of violence afforded abundant occasions for compromised values in return for questionable gains in safety and stability, occasions The Joker exploited by manufacturing lose-lose scenarios that showcased to what acts of des- perate brutality the most fearful and vulnerable might succumb. By the end of the fllm, it is a toss-up indeed between virtue and infamy, between the White Knight’s fatal disillusionment with the rules of law and the Dark Knight’s survival in the shadows of an improvised moral code. When Dent articulates his newfound belief in the dominance of chance, especially as the cause of Rachel’s death, Batman corrects him, “What happened to Rachel wasn’t chance. We decided to act. We three. We knew the risks and we acted as one. We are all responsible for the consequences.” Here Batman voices the dilemma that has plagued his own efforts throughout the fllm, that even necessary actions can produce unwanted outcomes, for which the actor nevertheless remains responsible. With Dent holding a gun to the head of Gordon’s son, Batman adds, “you’re fooling yourself if you think you’re letting chance decide. You’re the one pointing the gun, Harvey.” His admonition underscores his own realization that the impact of chance does not provide an excuse from personal accountability. In the end, the standoff comes to a bleak resolution: Gordon and his family are spared, but Dent is killed and, given his crime spree, potentially disgraced. Both Batman and Gordon realize that, should the public become aware of his escapades as Two-Face, Dent’s work as an inspiring and effective district attorney will unravel, as will Gotham’s hope for real and lasting change. Consequently, the fllm ends with Batman taking the blame for Two-Face’s misdeeds, preferring a flction that rouses a city to the possibil- ity of good to the disheartening truth of fallible heroes operating within an imperfect world (The Dark Knight 2008). The city must be saved from itself.

Given such scenes, The Joker’s and the Batman’s antics seem to occur in the conditions of a community whose long-term welfare and principles yield to the short-term demands of exigency and expediency. Accordingly, plot developments depend on how expectedly the general public responds to The Joker’s exploitation of a guiding dynamic to Gotham’s social structure: the belief that dirty work is necessary and that somebody else should be doing it. Such a belief forms the core enticement for The Joker’s manipulations, a chance to test investments in individual interest, the common good, and the social order. Such a belief rings familiar in a post-September 11 world, in which viewers themselves have wondered what is necessary and what is right, what threatens them and how they can respond, in the aftermath of a calamity that has showcased the high stakes of these very questions.

Recognizing these contradictions in Gotham’s mores and reveling in their fecundity for engineering mayhem, The Joker excels at tailoring interven- tions that maximize dissension and hopelessness and expose the delicate perforations separating the upstanding from the prone. Connections of every well-intentioned crime- ghting effort to disastrous, unintended consequences drive the plot, causing Gordon’s anxiety about escalation as voiced in Batman Begins to proliferate among its sequel’s characters. Batman’s intense vigilance practically incapacitates conventional gang- sters, convincing them that drastic measures require drastic resistance. As a result, they hire a literal and flgurative stranger, The Joker, to kill the Batman. A wild card—unpredictable, of obscure origins, prone to cruel pranking, and fond of using playing cards as cryptic dispatches—The Joker immediately follows his own skewed interests, outstripping his co- conspirators’ control and expectations for contained action and eluding rationalizing behavioral explanations. His delight in fomenting chaos, dis- rupting business as usual among Gotham’s law offenders and enforcers, is unexplained in terms of either bene t or back-story.13 He embodies an extremity that the gangsters, the police department, and the people of Gotham—but not Batman—lack. In fact, the gangsters’ turn to an extreme response out of frustration with a threatening climate mirrors Batman’s own development, albeit in an opposite direction. In effect, The Joker counterbalances the Batman, a lone, mysterious actor committed to doing wrong as forcefully as Batman has committed to doing right (The Dark Knight 2008). As a result, The Joker and others come to see the two as important, if not necessary, to one another’s evolution in actions and purposes (Reynolds 1992, 67–68, 103; Kaveney 2008, 109–110), leaving bystanders, innocent and guilty alike, caught in the cross re.

Repeatedly, this engagement manifests in his fabrication of no-win scenarios that test others’ resourcefulness and resolve. When Dent and Rachel disappear immediately after The Joker’s arrest, Batman grills him for their whereabouts in a monitored police interrogation room. The Joker goads Batman doggedly, relishing and fueling the anger that drives Batman further along the flne line of torture as he slams the prisoner into a table, the wall, and the two-way mirror, then delivers successive blows to the face. In the end, these assaults prove gratuitous, since The Joker wants to reveal the captives’ locations. “That’s the point,” he explains, “You’ll have to choose.” He has told Batman, “Killing is making a choice...you choose between one life or the other. Your friend, the district attorney, or his blushing bride-to-be” (The Dark Knight 2008). With Dent and Rachel in distant parts of the city, Batman can rescue only one of them, knowing that the police, who cannot move as decisively, will likely fail to save the other. Hence, The Joker’s taunt that “killing is making a choice”: Batman must choose at all in order to save at least one of them, but by choosing to save one, he by default has “chosen” to kill the other. Christopher Nolan has characterized this interrogation scene as crucial (Boucher October 28, 2008b). After all, the quandary it dramatizes, that even formidable power can be hamstrung and sabotaged and choice can sometimes lead only and inevitably to problematic outcomes, permeates the entire fllm. The Joker tells Batman, “You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength,” savoring how well his design to incapacitate the dominant has worked (The Dark Knight 2008). In The Joker’s terms, even as Batman uses all of his strength, he can accomplish nothing, and in fact it is speci cally by using all of his strength that Batman generates futile results. The ability of a determined few to expose the powerful as vulner- able, and therefore to incite ever more desperate reactions, resonates with other references to the fllm’s September 11 context.

Interestingly, then, both Dent and Wayne’s butler Alfred (Michael Caine) expressly call The Joker a “terrorist,” an attribution unique among cinematic incarnations of the oft-nicknamed character. Is he? He intro- duced his flrst demands for Batman’s unmasking via the broadcast of a tortured, eventually murdered, copycat vigilante (Andy Luther) whose dead body he hung outside the mayor’s (Nestor Carbonell) of ce win- dow. He holds a city hostage by ful lling his promise to kill until Batman surrenders, starting with a judge and the police commissioner, as well as with unsuccessful attempts on the district attorney’s and the mayor’s lives. He blows up a hospital when the general public fails to ful ll his request that they assassinate a lawyer (Joshua Harto) who knows Batman’s iden- tity (The Dark Knight 2008). Although formally de ning “terrorism” launches a loaded task far too exhaustive for this particular chapter,14 for most people’s comfort levels, perhaps he flts the bill insofar as he targets the unsuspecting and unarmed so fear can amplify his efforts to tilt power relations in his favor.

But if so, what kind of a terrorist is he? De ning terrorism frequently stalls at the point when one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “insurgent,” “rebel,” or even government (Banks et al. 2008, 5–9). In cases of insur- gency and rebellion, the reasoning goes, on a playing fleld where the motives and means of the dominant players are suspect, why should the rogue contestant be singled out for reprobation (5–6)? In this sense, cor- rupt Gotham City could represent the kind of failed system that needs replacing, and the extremity of its opposition is the measure of its failure. Yet this approach presumes actors with political aims: even if some such actors use reprehensible methods to achieve their ends, ends still matter, actions are undertaken toward the achievement of something. On these terms, there is a certain logic to these actors’ deeds, according to which meaningful outcomes can be imagined and effective interventions can be calibrated (8–9). On these terms, an interested public can sense some kind of stable foundation for whatever policies they endorse or reject.

However, some have contended in real-world debates over terrorism that for certain groups, there is no end in sight, neither legitimate purpose nor feasible cessation (Juergensmeyer 2003, 148–166). Indeed, regard- less of what we might infer about possible motivations given US politi- cal and economic involvements overseas, no messages and no demands accompanied the suicide plane crashes on September 11 taking thousands of lives. At the time, there were no strings attached. The event occurred as an end in itself, massive destruction as self-suf cient spectacle, rather than as overt advancement of a speci c cause or interest. In such cases, the argument goes, modes and drives lie outside reason, refusing negotia- tion and confounding ordinary forms of counteraction (Juergensmeyer 2003, 148–166). If so, all the old rules of engagement, principles that might be effective and justi able against, say, criminals or combatants with decipherable operating principles of their own, would seem no longer to apply. In their absence loom alternatives with burgeoning and disquiet- ing practical and moral implications (Stern 2003, 288–296). Under such circumstances, for those interested in a way forward that offers both peace and justice, no clear and easy path readily presents itself. As The Joker would say, “Nothing to do with all your strength” (The Dark Knight 2008). In this sense, The Joker surpasses the threat that any individual terrorist might pose, which can be delimited within calculable estima- tions of goals, damage, and containment. Instead, he embodies the kind of peril terrorism writ large poses, which menaces a perpetual state of untold danger undermining the premises of any functional community by propagating pro igate and exploitable uncertainties and fears, the kinds of uncertainties and fears that can amplify distrust and soften receptivity to extreme responses.

At first, though, Bruce Wayne regards The Joker as no different from the gangsters driven by greed whom he battles nightly in the guise of Batman. As he tells his butler Alfred, “Criminals aren’t complicated.... We just need to flgure out what he’s after.” In his experience, it is a straightforward matter: once you know what an adversary wants—and they all want something—counter them at that point. But Alfred consid- ers The Joker of a different sort altogether. He cautions Wayne, “perhaps this is a man you don’t fully understand.” He explains, “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.” Later, The Joker himself effectively corroborates this assessment, telling Dent, “I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.... I’m not a schemer, I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are” (The Dark Knight 2008). His ability to frustrate others’ plans with the intricate strategizing of a chess match belies his denial of scheming. Nevertheless, his inten- tion, to provoke disorder rather than erect an alternative form of order, as might be the goal of an insurgent or rebel, lays bare a thoroughgoing nihilism.

However, in spite of his quip about being “ahead of the curve,” The Joker is not of the Übermensch. He is not about mastering human potential as a model to supersede the nihilist condition and regenerate a humanity bogged down by its inauthentic values. The Joker is only about subver- sion, about instigating an equalizing chaos by exploiting those inauthentic values to expose human potential itself as a fragile flction. As he announces early in the fllm, “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger” (The Dark Knight 2008). This twist on Nietzsche’s famous proclamation, citing the bizarre rather than empowerment as the outcome of mortal struggle, trumps the nineteenth-century philosopher in its twenty- rst- century vision of absolute futility.

Perhaps, then, The Joker stands for something more than just a ter- rorist, just as—according to Alfred—Batman stands for something more than just a hero, in keeping with the tendency throughout Batman’s flc- tional life for his exploits to match, if not generate, the enemies he flghts (Kaveney 2008, 109–110; Reynolds 1992, 67–68, 103). In this fllm, when Wayne complains that the Mob has “crossed a line,” Alfred corrects him, “You crossed a line flrst, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.” The Joker himself con rms this dynamic of escalation, telling Batman, “I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off Mob dealers? No...you com- plete me.” Batman’s successful targeting of more traditional gangsters has upped the ante, his theatric heroics have produced adversaries up to the challenge rather than eliminated opposition altogether (The Dark Knight 2008). For this reason, according to this mutually constituting framework within which the notions of “villain” and “hero” become meaningless in isolation, I must also address the nature and responsibilities of the heroism that correlates with Gotham’s villainy.

Wayne had developed his alter ego Batman to combat out-of-control crime, with an anonymous theatricality that could symbolize incorrupt- ibility in a way not possible for a recognizable individual, who could be directly identi ed with personal interests and susceptibilities. Alfred proj- ects the possibilities of this role when The Joker makes his flrst demand for Batman’s unmasking; he tells Wayne to resist, explaining, “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.” Similarly, when Dent’s impos- ture as Batman maintains Wayne’s anonymity, Alfred tells longtime friend Rachel Dawes, “Batman stands for something more important than the whims of a terrorist...even if everyone hates him for it. That’s the sacri ce he’s making. He’s not being a hero. He’s being something more” (The Dark Knight 2008). In this formulation, sel ess, good-faith work to serve justice and save others does constitute heroism; heroism is about doing what is both necessary and right, as illustrated by the fruits of his labors: arrested mobsters, deterred criminals, and district attorneys emboldened to enforce the law. But Alfred asserts that sometimes performing these feats of necessity and right does not appear heroic, does not garner the praise, and acclaims that we typically shower over our celebrated heroes. Essentially, being perceived as a hero is a little different than doing heroic deeds, because that perception signi es the endorsement of those on whose behalf the hero is acting. And sometimes those people would rather not be associated with what they nevertheless are asking him—implicitly by their own inaction—to do. In this sense, then, heroics, terrorism, and escalating violence remain incompletely understood without considering the city itself. And so we return, once more, to Gotham.

Ultimately, The Joker attempts to fully sabotage any remnant of Gotham’s civic virtue. Early in the fllm, after Batman has had to wade through vigi- lantes—including some in Batman-like costumes—to flnish a flght with drug dealers, Wayne tells Alfred unhappily that the “copycats” are grow- ing in number. “This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said I wanted to inspire people,” he explains, disappointed that they are the only Gothamites who seem to be contributing at all to their city’s protection.16 However, The Joker readily understands them as rudimentary but impor- tant examples of the evolving potential of Batman’s relationship with Gotham. After all, when The Joker announces his ultimatum to unmask the Batman, he starts by broadcasting his taunting of a now bruised and terri ed impersonator and then by hanging the dead man’s body out- side the mayor’s of ce (The Dark Knight 2008). Accordingly, The Joker focuses not only on those like Dent and Gordon who directly work with Batman but also on the city dwellers for whom Batman flghts and from whom he draws either support or rejection. The Joker recognizes that Batman might seem to work alone, but he does not operate in isolation; Gotham has the power either to enable or to deter his efforts, and he has the power either to embolden or to discourage Gotham’s better inclina- tions. Yet, until now, rather than act on their own behalf, which would require direct accountability and therefore personal consideration of the possibilities, limits, and ethics of any action, Gotham has permitted some- one else, the Batman, to shoulder the burden and worry about the details, thereby never themselves confronting the incompatibilities between what they expect in terms of public safety and what they are willing to avow openly in terms of security measures.

During the interrogation scene between him and Batman, The Joker tells Batman, “They need you right now. But when they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. You see, their morals, their code—it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the flrst sign of trouble.... I’ll show you: when the chips are down, these—these civilized people, they’ll eat each other.” He later makes good on this threat by creating a no-win scenario involving two ferries, the Liberty and the Spirit (perhaps the Spirit of Liberty?), whereby one ship carrying prisoners and another carrying assorted others leaving the city are both rigged to explode by midnight, with passengers able to save themselves only if they detonate the other ship. When the free passen- gers vote to blow up the ship of prisoners, seemingly proving The Joker right, no one actually moves to activate the detonator. So a white, appar- ently straight (a close-up shot provides a full view of his wedding ring, which tends to signify a legally sanctioned union, and this fllm predates legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the United States), middle- aged, middle-class businessman (Doug Ballard)—the flgure of relative privilege in the Western world—steps up to take the detonator, irritated that “No one wants to get their hands dirty” (The Dark Knight 2008). Yet, when he holds it in his hands, he feels the weight of the decision that only direct action can convey. It is one thing to vote for others to kill on your behalf; it is another to become a killer yourself and live your life as such. The Joker has touched on a danger of democracy, the temptation for individuals to vote their own interests at the expense of others. It is this vulnerability that has permitted his escalating antics, halted only when the democratically minded fully value the lives and the interests of others as commensurate with their own.

Critically, on both ships, individuals choose not to kill others in full awareness that such a choice would lead to their own deaths (The Dark Knight 2008). Gothamites have, for the flrst time in the fllm, accepted the predicament that Batman has shouldered on their behalf, the some- time incompatibility between ideal and action that well-meaning people should perceive as not precluding responsibility for the consequences of their behavior. In this instance, to The Joker’s dismay, they opt for self- sacri ce over self-preservation, flnally putting a brake to the violence that has continued to escalate when no one else had been willing to take such a stand. Their decision halts The Joker’s devastating run as effectively as Batman’s coincident hand-to-hand combat with the villain. The pas- sengers and Batman prove mutually indispensable to one another, with the passengers’ intervention in their own fates offering mundane, risky, but recognizable hope for stable civic virtue rather than a further call for the kinds of extraordinary measures that tend to lead to uncontainable outcomes. Although, in the end, the ships do not explode since Batman successfully defeats The Joker before he can trigger the explosives, the decisions on the ferries are made in ignorance of any way out. As a result, they serve as an unenviable but powerful model of the modes, the stakes, and the negotiations of living as a free—that is, safe, autonomous, and responsible—individual.

In this context, allusions to the War on Terror, the historical but not inevitable consequence of September 11, resonate as real-world parallels to the fllm’s staged no-win situations. Batman’s abduction of Lau from Hong Kong to Gotham to deliver him to law enforcement invokes the notion of extraordinary rendition, with Batman circumventing laws the police can- not. Moreover, Lau’s use as the center of a RICO case against the city’s mobsters calls to mind the legal means that might successfully combat ordinary crime, but perhaps falter when targeting adversaries with more complex motives, means, and resources. Similarly, Batman’s construction of a city-wide surveillance system, which he enlists Lucius Fox’s (Morgan Freeman) help to operate to locate The Joker, immediately appalls Fox, who sees the system as “unethical...dangerous...wrong.” However, in this case, its one-time-only deployment, since Batman arranges its implosion once The Joker is captured, evades any resolution of ethical dilemmas. At the same time, the video-taped torture and killing of the vigilante Batman impersonator reminds us of similar images of ill-fated security contrac- tors in Iraq, while The Joker’s cell-phone activation of a bomb, a kind of improvised explosive device (IED), likewise draws on once-alien tac- tics and concepts that have become, only through the War on Terror’s progression, commonplace. In the concluding scenes, when both Batman and police SWAT teams seek to rescue hostages at a construction site, only Batman realizes quickly that the victims have been disguised as their victimizers and vice versa. The ensuing tangle, with Batman trying to free the real hostages, unmask and defeat the real hostage-takers, and prevent the SWAT teams from accidentally killing the innocent, instantiates the troubles contemporary, especially non-conventional, con ict causes when distinctions between civilians and non-combatants cannot be clari ed (The Dark Knight 2008). In each instance, the fllm evokes the terrain of con- temporary dilemmas that, in their action- lm setting, duck direct com- mentary on real-world solutions.18 Instead, these performances of viewers’ current landscape’s pressures and constraints occasion our consideration of how to weigh and reconcile our own risks and duties in a post-September 11 world.

This chapter provided a close reading of the Batman legacy and its adap- tation in The Dark Knight to address September 11-related cultural fractures around notions of meaningful and ethical choice. Rooted in anxieties provoked by that morning’s horrors, I have shown here how this fllm documents and involves its viewers in confronting the cultur- ally traumatic persistence of doubts about the possibility of effectively balancing public and personal safety with justice and civil rights. One of the fllm’s most evocative moments in summoning these doubts occurs in the scene of Dent’s press conference. In his attempt to foster hope among frightened and disillusioned Gothamites and rally them to resist The Joker in a city where, they protest, “things are worse than ever,” Dent tells his audience, “the night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming” (The Dark Knight 2008). The six- teenth-century Spanish, Roman Catholic Saint John of the Cross (2002) originated the term “the dark night of the soul” to characterize the fraught paradox af icting the most committed of spiritual devotees: the closer they get to God, the more they feel his absence. This concep- tion emerged in contemporary headlines with the revelation of Mother Teresa’s decades-long crisis of faith, during which she performed world- celebrated acts of social service in the name of Jesus, all the while suffer- ing secretly from an acute sense of his abandonment (Van Biema 2007). According to John of the Cross and contemporary theologians, this dark night signals the sacred process by which God’s love puri es souls and draws them to him, an encounter between divine in nity and human fln- itude of such overwhelming disproportion that the unfathomable con- nection is experienced as a lack. For those in the throes of such an ordeal, perseverance in benevolent action evidences the faith they doubt within themselves. According to skeptics, however, the experience of lack is, quite simply, only that: a realization that in fact nothing does lie beyond the material world to defend the belief in something more (Van Biema 2007). Either way, the dark night of the soul marks a turning point for those who operate on the edges of human possibility. After all, who but the exceptional will stake their very souls on doing the right thing, even when doing that right thing offers no reward, neither material nor spiri- tual bene t, and especially at times when “the right thing” itself seems too precarious a concept to justify obligation?

In its immediate aftermath, September 11 was perceived as a social purgation, with the day’s horror and its aftermath’s uncertainties sud- denly (and ultimately only temporarily) rendering obsolete arbitrary preoccupations, such as the preceding summer’s media obsession with shark attacks and Congressman Gary Condit’s illicit and, as ceaselessly surmised but later disproved, possibly criminal relationship with the missing Chandra Levy (Rutenberg 2002). Yet as the aftermath con- tinued to unfold, attention to serious concerns ended up raising more questions than answers, with controversial War on Terror measures at sites like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay perceived as belying any notion of the United States as a nation that holds itself to a higher stan- dard. The dark night of the September 11 world has been one in which threats showcased by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon persist, but also one in which both effective and just response have seemed to many at best elusive, at worst impossible. What we can do and what we should do have seemed to pose often incompatible options, obscuring the substance of perseverance through action in lieu of belief that sustains those who muscle through more traditionally spiritual crises.

In The Dark Knight (2008), The Joker capitalizes on such a crisis of faith, his villainy manifesting in opportunistic leveraging of desper- ate moments. In Batman Begins (2005), the fllm that launched Nolan’s Batman narrative, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) tells her long-time friend Bruce Wayne, as he struggles as an adult to flnd the right response to his parents’ murders in his childhood, that “it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that de nes you.” Her admonishment focalizes Wayne’s iterations of his alter ego, Batman, who combats criminals according to a moral code superseding personal interests and prohibiting killing that Wayne believes separates him from common vigilantes. In other words, he commits to the principle that his actions must speak for themselves, and they must speak for a better alternative than the forces he is battling. Even before Rachel’s corrective, he articulates this conviction to the mentor, Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who has trained him to flght in the name of justice but then requires him to kill an untried prisoner, also in the name of justice. Ducard rebukes, “Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share,” to which Wayne replies, “That’s why it’s so important. It separates us from them” (Batman Begins 2005). In this way, Wayne demarcates a dividing line, not only between hero and villain but also between hero and vigilante. However tenuous the thread, it is the one he holds onto. Whether a weakness in fact or a survivors’ sustaining strength, it is a thread of choice as well for those have been wearied and troubled in the wake of September 11.