shirtless

The Dark Knight opens over a blue-tinted Gotham skyline, the camera hurtling toward a glass office tower. A window shatters inward as two masked men in clown masks fire a grappling line across the street from a neighboring rooftop. They zip across and crash into the upper floor of Gotham National Bank. Inside, a crew of clown-masked robbers is already herding tellers and customers to the ground. Each robber has a specific job: crack the vault, disable the alarm, subdue the guards, manage the hostages. What none of them know is that their boss — a man they have never met, referred to only as the Joker — has instructed each of them to murder the clown next to him as soon as that clown's job is complete. The math is brutal and elegant: fewer clowns means a bigger cut. One by one the robbers drop each other. The guy who cracks the vault shoots the guy who unlocked it. The guy who disabled the alarm gets shot from behind. The bank manager, a grizzled older man played by William Fichtner, pulls a shotgun from under his desk and gets one clown before being wounded himself. He lectures the surviving clown about a Gotham that used to believe in something, about criminals who had a code. The last remaining clown — wearing a rubber Joker mask under the clown mask — calmly kills his final accomplice with a school bus that comes smashing through the wall of the bank on schedule. He loads the money onto the bus, jams a live grenade into the manager's mouth with the pin tied to a string, and drives the bus out into a line of other school buses leaving at the end of the school day. The camera holds on the manager's face, and then on the Joker's retreating mask, and then pulls back to reveal the bus merging into anonymous yellow traffic. It is a statement of thesis. Gotham's old rules are over. Something new is here. Cut to nighttime, a parking garage. A squad of corrupt cops, Scarecrow in a battered hood dealing fear toxin out of the back of a van, and then the rumble of the Tumbler. Batman arrives, scatters Scarecrow's thugs, and is promptly interrupted by a pack of amateur vigilantes dressed in homemade Batman costumes carrying shotguns. They are as much a problem as the criminals — copycats who think putting on a cape gives them a license to hurt people. Batman subdues them all, zipties Scarecrow and the copycats together, and hangs them from a light pole for the GCPD to collect. When one of the copycats demands to know what makes Batman different from him, Batman answers, "I'm not wearing hockey pads." It is a joke and a declaration. Batman is singular. Batman is the exception. Batman is supposed to be temporary. Meanwhile, Jim Gordon, newly promoted to Lieutenant and running a Major Crimes Unit staffed with officers he has personally vetted, meets with Batman on the roof of police headquarters next to the newly installed Bat-signal. They have a partnership now, one built on mutual discomfort and mutual necessity. Gordon tells Batman about a new DA, Harvey Dent, who is indicting mob bosses by the carton. Harvey is clean, charismatic, handsome, and engaged to Rachel Dawes — Bruce Wayne's childhood friend, the woman Bruce still loves, the woman who told him at the end of Batman Begins that she could not be with him until Gotham no longer needed Batman. Gordon wants to know if Batman trusts Dent. Batman says he wants to. Gordon says he's checking him out anyway. We meet Harvey Dent in a courtroom, questioning a mob witness who suddenly pulls a gun on him mid-testimony. The gun jams. Harvey decks the witness with a punch that would make a boxer proud, hands him back to the bailiffs, and cracks a quip about how the mob is so desperate they will try to shoot a DA in open court. Later, at a fundraiser Bruce Wayne throws for Harvey at Wayne Tower, Bruce declares publicly that he is backing Harvey Dent, calling him the face Gotham has been waiting for. In private, Bruce tells Alfred he believes Harvey could be the hero Gotham deserves, the hero who can operate in daylight with a badge and a name, the hero who could finally let Batman hang up the cape. Rachel watches Bruce say these things and her expression is complicated. She loves Harvey. She also still loves Bruce. Bruce is telling her, without saying it, that he is trying to build a life in which he can come back to her. Across town, the mob bosses of Gotham — the Chechen, Gambol, the Maroni family — are meeting in the back of a restaurant kitchen with Lau, a Chinese accountant who has been laundering their pooled cash. Lau explains that he has already moved their money out of Gotham to Hong Kong, beyond the reach of American law, because Dent's net is closing. The bosses are furious at first and then impressed. Into this meeting walks the Joker. He is unannounced, uninvited, face painted, purple coat, greasy green hair. He lays a grenade on the table, pulls the pin, and shows them a coat full of more grenades. He tells the bosses he can kill Batman for them. He wants half the money. Gambol laughs and puts a price on the Joker's head. The Joker leaves. The meeting dissolves. Within days the Joker walks into Gambol's poker room carrying the body of a dead clown as a calling card, tells Gambol the story of how he got his scars — his father was a drinker and a fiend, one night he went off crazier than usual, Mommy got the kitchen knife to defend herself, he didn't like that, not one bit, so he took the knife to her, laughing as he did it, and turned to his little boy and asked why so serious, and stuck the blade in his mouth and said let's put a smile on that face — and proceeds to murder Gambol's men while giving a pencil trick. Ta-da. The pencil is gone. Gambol is dead. The Joker is now running the mob's protection, their money, and their fate.

Bruce Wayne, Alfred, and Lucius Fox begin chasing Lau across the globe. They build a sonar rig that lets Batman bounce signals off cellphones; they fly to Hong Kong on a Wayne Enterprises jet; Lucius meets with Lau in a glass tower under the pretext of a hostile takeover, plants a transmitter, and gathers enough intel for Batman to launch an extraction. Batman glides off the tower during an overnight raid, is snatched up off the roof of a lower skyscraper by a modified cargo plane using a hook-and-sky-hook system left over from Cold War exfil operations, and delivers a ziptied Lau to Gordon in Gotham. Dent indicts the entire organized crime structure of the city at once — hundreds of defendants, racketeering charges, the whole machine gutted on a single morning. It is a triumphant moment. It is also the moment the Joker's counteroffensive begins. The Joker starts releasing videos. In each one he kidnaps a Gotham citizen dressed as Batman — first a man who claimed to be Batman in a late-night broadcast, then a judge, then the police commissioner. He beats them, tortures them, and declares on camera that this will keep happening every day until Batman takes off his mask and turns himself in. He leaves corpses posed like jokes. He lets one victim — a young man wearing a Batman cowl — be found dead with his eyes sewn open and a Joker card folded into his mouth. The city cracks. Reporters on rooftops shout that Batman is responsible for the bodies piling up. Ordinary Gothamites debate at dinner tables whether Batman should come forward. Bruce Wayne, in the penthouse, watches the broadcasts with his jaw clenched, and tells Alfred that he is considering giving himself up. Alfred is the one who talks him out of it, by telling him the story of a bandit in Burma whom British soldiers tried to bribe with jewels and who was instead throwing them away, scattering them in the jungle, because he was not doing it for the money. Some men, Alfred says, just want to watch the world burn. You cannot negotiate with that. You cannot surrender to that. You have to endure it. Bruce listens. Bruce does not turn himself in. Harvey Dent, however, watching Gotham come apart, steps up to a podium at a press conference and announces that he is Batman. It is a lie, of course; Harvey is trying to draw the Joker out into a public trap, to make himself the bait so the real Batman can catch the predator in motion. Rachel is furious when she learns Harvey did this without telling her. She and Harvey have a tense, loving fight in their apartment. She gives him an envelope with a letter — a letter she has written explaining that if it ever comes down to choosing between him and Bruce, she is going to choose Harvey. She tells him not to read it yet. The envelope is Chekhov's gun. It will go off. The next day, a police motorcade transports "Batman" — Harvey — out of Gotham. The Joker attacks the convoy on the lower-level expressway with a semi truck, an RPG, and a crew of mercenaries. It is one of the great action set-pieces of the decade. The Tumbler appears, shields Harvey's transport vehicle with its armored body, absorbs a rocket that would have killed Harvey, and in its dying act ejects the Batpod — a two-wheeled missile of a motorcycle that detaches from the Tumbler's front axle and fires Batman forward into the chase. Batman wheels under a passing eighteen-wheeler, fires a cable that attaches the Joker's semi to a fixed point, and the truck flips end over end, cab smashing down flat, trailer standing on its nose for a moment before collapsing. The Joker stumbles out of the cab holding a pistol and a detonator, begs Batman to "hit me, hit me, hit me," daring him to cross the one line Batman has sworn not to cross. Batman's motorcycle skids, falls, and stops inches from the Joker. Batman does not kill him. Gordon emerges from the shadows with a shotgun to the Joker's head and arrests him. Cops cheer. Gordon is promoted to Commissioner. It looks, for a short beautiful moment, like the good guys have won. They have not won. The Joker has let himself be captured because being in a cage is exactly where he needs to be. From an interrogation room in Major Crimes, while Batman lurks on the other side of the two-way mirror, the Joker explains his philosophy. He does not have a plan. He is like a dog chasing cars. He would not know what to do if he caught one. He introduces chaos, he upsets the established order, and everything becomes fair. Batman loses his patience and beats the Joker through the glass. The Joker laughs through split lips. He tells Batman that he has hidden Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes in two separate locations, each rigged to explode. Batman has time to save only one. He gives Batman two addresses. Batman chooses Rachel and tears out of the building on the Batpod. Gordon mobilizes every officer the city has and races toward Harvey. Batman arrives first at his address and breaks through the wall, only to find Harvey Dent strapped to a chair, surrounded by oil drums and a countdown. The Joker lied about which address was which. Gordon's team arrives at the other location and blasts inside to find Rachel. Rachel, tied to her own chair, is on the phone with Harvey. They are telling each other they love each other. Rachel is calm. She tells Harvey that her answer to his proposal is yes. Then her timer hits zero and her building detonates. Harvey's half of the building explodes a split second later — but Batman, carrying Harvey out, has already crossed most of the perimeter. Harvey lands face-down in a puddle of oil and flame. Rachel is gone. Harvey's face is ruined on one side, peeled down to muscle and bone, the eye socket visible. Batman carries what remains of Harvey out through the smoke. Alfred, in the Wayne manor, burns the letter Rachel left for Bruce without reading it to him — the letter that would have told Bruce she had chosen Harvey — and tells Bruce that she was waiting for him. Alfred's lie is a mercy. It is also a wound that will ache later.

Harvey Dent wakes up in a Gotham hospital with half his face destroyed. Painkillers burn through his system. He overhears a nurse whispering about him. He sees in his reflection what the fire has done. He is no longer the golden DA of Gotham. He is a horror movie. The Joker visits him in the hospital dressed as a nurse, sits on the edge of his bed, and explains his philosophy of chaos one more time. It is not the system that is broken, the Joker says; the system is the broken thing. Everything goes according to plan, that is the problem. Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes fair. Harvey is primed to listen. The Joker hands Harvey the two-headed coin Harvey has carried his whole career as DA, the coin Harvey flipped to psych out perps, the coin that used to always come up the same because it had two identical faces — except this coin, in the fire, got scorched on one side. Now one face is clean and one is black. Now when Harvey flips it, the outcome is actually random. Harvey accepts the coin. The Joker wheels himself out of the hospital while Harvey, alone, decides that chance is the only fair thing left in the universe. He walks out of that hospital as Two-Face. The Joker detonates the hospital behind him as he goes, giggling as floor after floor collapses into concrete dust, because he has a detonator that sometimes works on the first try and sometimes requires a second smack. He boards a school bus full of hostages and drives away with them as human cargo. The escalation is total. Meanwhile the Joker is no longer alone. He has been on television. He has issued a new ultimatum. Anyone still in Gotham in one hour will be on his list, he says; he is blowing up a hospital was only the opening act. He tells the city that the person accountant named Reese, who was about to reveal Batman's identity on live television, should be killed by a concerned citizen within sixty minutes, or the Joker will blow up a hospital. He follows through. The city is in panic. Cars jam the bridges out of Gotham. Commissioner Gordon authorizes mass evacuations by ferry, because the bridges and tunnels are considered compromised targets. Two ferries launch into the bay at dusk. One is loaded with ordinary Gotham civilians. The other is loaded with the inmates of Gotham's prison system — the very people Harvey Dent indicted weeks ago. In the middle of their voyage both ferries lose engine power simultaneously. Lights on a timer come up in their holds. Each ferry has been rigged with explosives. Each ferry's captain finds a detonator — for the other ferry. The Joker, via radio, explains the game. Whichever ferry blows up the other first gets to live. At midnight, both ferries go up. The social experiment, he promises, proves what he has always believed: under pressure, these civilized people will eat each other. Anarchy is everyone's true face. Humanity is one bad day away from becoming him. Bruce and Lucius, meanwhile, have activated the sonar system Bruce built — the one that turns every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone and mapping sensor. Lucius is horrified when he sees the array light up Lucius's monitor bank at Wayne Enterprises with a full-city surveillance grid. He tells Bruce this is too much power for one person, that this is the line Bruce has always claimed he would not cross, and that he will help him operate it this once, but if the machine still exists when the night is over, Lucius will resign. Bruce agrees. The sonar finds the Joker at the top floor of a half-constructed skyscraper, surrounded by hostages wearing clown masks — a trap designed so that a SWAT assault team will kill the hostages thinking they are the clowns, and the real clowns, tied up, will be mistaken for hostages and freed. Batman arrives in time to stop the SWAT snipers from shooting the wrong people. He subdues the Joker's dogs, the Joker's henchmen, and finally the Joker himself — dangling the Joker off the unfinished edge of the skyscraper by his ankle, every line of Batman's training screaming at him to let go. He does not let go. He hauls the Joker back up onto solid concrete and leaves him for the cops. But the Joker is laughing, because the ferries still have not blown each other up. Humanity, the Joker's experiment, has refused to become him. On the civilian ferry, a Black inmate in cuffs walks up to the warden, takes the detonator out of his hand, and throws it out the window into the water, saying simply that the warden should have done it ten minutes ago. On the prisoner ferry, a random commuter who had been volunteering to push the button finds he cannot push the button. Both detonators go unused. The minute runs out. The Joker, realizing he has lost his thesis, reaches for his own detonator to blow up both ferries himself — and Batman, without hesitation, fires a cable around his wrist, yanks him off the tower, and lets him dangle upside down from the Bat-cable like a Christmas ornament, close enough to the glass for the Joker to laugh himself hoarse about the fact that he and Batman are now locked in a dance that will continue forever. Neither of them can kill the other. Neither of them wants to. Each makes the other real. Batman learns, from the Joker's triumphant giggling, that the Joker still has one card to play. The Joker tells Batman that Harvey Dent is loose. The Joker tells Batman that he took Gotham's white knight and brought him down to their level, and that is the real prize of the evening. Batman races to the remains of the warehouse where Rachel died. Harvey Dent — Two-Face — has Jim Gordon's family hostage at gunpoint, a two-headed coin in his palm, flipping to decide whether they live or die. He flips for Maroni, the mob boss who set up the ambush — Maroni goes bad side, Harvey shoots him. He flips for Gordon's son — Harvey is ready to let chance decide whether a child lives. Batman arrives and tackles Harvey off the ledge of the ruined building. Harvey falls to his death on the debris below. Batman survives, broken but alive. Gordon is left looking at the body of the DA who was supposed to be Gotham's daylight hero, the man whose triumph was going to let Batman finally hang up the cape, now dead and publicly a murderer of cops and of Maroni. If Gotham learns what Harvey did in his last hours — that its white knight fell further than any villain — the despair will undo everything they just fought to save. And so Batman, bleeding, asks Gordon to let him take the fall. Pin Harvey's killings on Batman. Tell the city Batman killed those cops, killed Maroni, killed Harvey. Preserve the myth of Harvey Dent the incorruptible, because Gotham needs a hero with a face and a name, not a man in a mask. Gordon refuses at first, then accepts, because Batman is right. He tells his son, who asks why Batman is running from the cops, that Batman is the hero Gotham deserves but not the one it needs right now. He is a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight. The camera tracks Batman on the Batpod, riding hard through steam-filled alleys, police sirens rising behind him, Hans Zimmer's strings climbing up a single unresolved note, and then it cuts to black on Christopher Nolan's name, and the credits roll, and everyone in every theater sat for a long moment without speaking because they had just watched a superhero movie decide to be a tragedy about the price of incorruptibility in a city that does not deserve the people who suffer for it. The Dark Knight ends there. The Joker is alive in a cage. Harvey is dead. Rachel is dead. Bruce is more alone than when the movie started. Gotham has a lie that will hold it together for a while. And Batman is the scapegoat of his own victory, riding into the dark because the alternative is letting the chaos win.

Epilogue thoughts on The Dark Knight as a piece of cinema. Heath Ledger's Joker is the pivot point of the film and of the entire superhero genre in the 2000s — a performance that treats menace as improvisation, that finds humor in the worst lines, that carries every encounter on the knife's edge between stand-up routine and massacre. The smacking of the lips, the fingers dancing at the air, the two-tone laugh that starts like a cough. The way he licks the scar tissue at the corners of his mouth when he is pleased with himself. Ledger reportedly holed up in a hotel room for weeks building a diary in character, filling it with ticket stubs and jokes about AIDS and sketches of hyenas, assembling the Joker brick by brick so that by the time cameras rolled the character had a personal gravity of his own. He dies six months before the film is released, of an accidental prescription drug overdose, and the movie lands on a grieving industry that suddenly understands it is watching something final. He wins the Oscar posthumously. The film grosses a billion dollars. It re-teaches Hollywood that comic book movies can be capital-S Serious. Christopher Nolan's direction across the film is architecture as much as staging. The Hong Kong extraction sequence shot on IMAX cameras that had never been used for a feature before. The truck flip in the expressway chase done for real with a stunt rig and no CGI seam. The opening bank heist playing as a thesis statement about the whole film: the robbers eating each other, the old code (the manager's code) being literally unable to stop the new chaos, the Joker appearing only in the last frame as the man who stayed. The rejection of cuts during action — Nolan holds wide masters of Batman fighting whole rooms because he wants the audience to see the competence and the weight. Hans Zimmer's score is built around a single rising cello note that never resolves, on purpose, because the Joker is a chord that never lands. The score for Harvey Dent's fall uses a three-note motif that sounds like a coin rolling on its edge. And then there is the film's moral backbone, which is what makes the movie last. The ferry scene is the thesis. The Joker, with every lever he has pulled, cannot prove his axiom that civilization is a thin veneer over animal cruelty. Two boats full of ordinary people refuse to murder the other boat full of ordinary people even when the alternative is dying themselves. The people the Joker despises most — inmates, commuters — turn out to be the heroes of the moral test. The movie does not allow the Joker his nihilism. It is the rare Hollywood blockbuster that takes the trolley problem and decides that the answer is no, actually, people can choose not to pull levers. Batman's arc mirrors that decision: he does not kill the Joker, he does not kill Harvey (Harvey dies in a fall Batman caused saving a child), he accepts public disgrace to protect a hero that is already dead because the city needs the story more than it needs the truth. The Dark Knight ends on a paradox — the law triumphs by lying, the hero wins by being called a villain, the chaos agent loses by staying alive in custody. It is unresolvable, which is why it is great.

A final coda: the film's closing monologue from Commissioner Gordon, delivered over images of Batman riding into the night on the Batpod, police sirens closing in behind him, is one of the great voice-over endings of modern cinema. He is the hero Gotham deserves but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him, because he can take it. He's a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A dark knight. End credits. End of burn.