Published in the PANY Bulletin 46:3; Fall, 2008
In the Summer issue of the PANY Bulletin and in InternationalPsychoanalysis in September, I wrote about the film, The Prestige, focusing on the issue of twinship dynamics in memory of Jules Glenn, who had a particular interest in twins. In that article, I pointed out that the director of The Prestige, Christopher Nolan, was not, to my knowledge, a twin, but did co-write the script for the film with his younger brother, Jonathan. The next film Nolan directed, also co-written with his brother, was The Dark Knight, making this film review a sequel.
It is not surprising that The Dark Knight was a huge box office success. It was a blockbuster about a well known comic-book superhero, not to mention that one of the stars of the film, Heath Ledger, had died in his twenties with an overdose of prescription drugs shortly after shooting for the film was completed.
What was surprising was the film’s critical acclaim. Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times (July 18, 2008), “Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to ‘Batman Begins’ goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.” According to another reviewer, Todd Gilchrist (IGN.com), the film functions “as a substantive and philosophical examination of why we need heroes, and then when we need them, what they mean.”
The reviewers appear to be captivated by the dark quality of the story. This is not the simple story of a caped hero who saves the world. It is the story of a society so corrupt and corrupted that even the hero cannot escape its moral ambiguities. There is a turn early in the film that may catch us by surprise when we discover that a discussion of an arch criminal taking over the city refers to Batman, himself. The “Caped Crusader” is, after all, a vigilante who uses violent means to scare and eliminate criminals. Bruce Wayne (Batman’s alter ego, for those of you who were born on the planet Krypton) is aware of this darker side of his alter ego. He finds hope in the new district attorney, Harvey Dent, whom he sees as a “White Knight” who may be able to accomplish through legal means what Batman does illegally.
The film is also quick to show us that the consequences of injecting the “caped crusader” into Gotham are not all good. The wealthy Bruce Wayne has put fear into the criminals of the city, but in doing so he has forced the organized criminal organizations to band together. In fact, the sudden presence of this superhero calls up his antithesis, a super anti-hero, the Joker.
Wearing clown’s makeup, with a face that is marked by a grin literally cut into his face, the Joker has no identity. His goal is not personal gain or even power, but simply to wreak chaos on society and to force people who think themselves well meaning to face the dark side of their nature. He could have been created by Samuel Beckett—if Beckett had taken an even darker turn. He is more a modern terrorist than a criminal.
With devilish powers of manipulation, the Joker is able to drive the city into chaos, overpowering the criminals as well as the police. He brings out the violence in those who think of themselves as good by forcing them into choices in which they must sacrifice one life for another. By the film’s end, he has transformed the seemingly incorruptible Harvey Dent into a crazed, vengeful killer.
The NY Times reviewer, Dargis is right that The Dark Knight was the sequential follow-up to Batman Begins, picking up where that film ended. But it is also a follow-up to The Prestige, its more immediate predecessor. The opening scenes could have been inspired by one of the themes in The Prestige.
In that film, a pair of 19th century magicians engage in internecine competition with each other, the competition revolving around a magic trick, “The Transported Man”, that requires a double. We find out eventually that one of the magicians has a double, a twin, more accurately is a set of twins since they play their roles interchangeably. The other magician, an only child, creates a series of twins using a fantastical machine that can duplicate anything. Instead of creating a twin and sharing the act with him, he sets up his trick so that with each new act, his last incarnation of himself is killed, leaving his new double to go on until the next show, the survivor remaining an only child.
The opening scenes of The Dark Knight reproduce that theme of killing off doubles. The film begins with a well planned bank robbery conducted by a group of men wearing identical clown masks. They bear names loosely taken from the seven dwarfs. As each clown completes his task, one of the others kills him, under instructions from the mastermind of the robbery, reducing the number of shares into which the takings will be divided. At the end of the sequence, the last clown takes the loot, killing the last of his hired clowns and pulling off his own clown mask to reveal that he has a painted clown face. He is the “Joker”. As in The Prestige, here in more symbolic form, we have a series of doubles who are killed off one by one, leaving the one unique and legitimate Joker.
As if to underline the point, in the next set of scenes, we see a group of faux Batmen attempting to stop a crime. When the real Batman appears, capturing criminals with more efficiency, he warns them to stop imitating him. He fears that he will inspire a rash of vigilantes. Unlike the Joker, Batman does not kill his doubles, but later the Joker kills one of them in a public demonstration, first getting him to acknowledge that he is not the real Batman. The real Joker and the real Batman each asserts his individuality, disowning and in the Joker’s case, killing his doubles. In various subtle and sometimes unsubtle ways, the film makers create a world in which, similar to the world of The Prestige, the wish to share an identity is in conflict with the wish to be unique, an only child.
The issue of double identity is, of course, intrinsic to Batman, as it is to most “superheroes”. He is, after all, two people, Batman and Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne is a leading citizen, a pillar of society. As Batman, he operates outside the law, both the law of the land and the laws of nature. He is able to do things that the entire police force cannot do. He has not only super powers, but also super rights and super responsibilities. But the film expands upon the theme. Like The Prestige, The Dark Knight is peppered with plotlines and images suggestive of the dynamics of twins.
What is most striking is the recurring images of doubles, characters who share traits, or even aspects of identity. In some instances, the resemblance is superficial, as with the bank robber clowns and the imitation Batmen. The Joker uses such a superficial doubling of identity early in the film, when, having failed to keep a promise to kill Harvey Dent because of the Batman’s intervention, he keeps his promise by killing two men, one with the last name Harvey and the other Dent. Towards the end of the film, the Joker sets up a hostage situation in which he puts clown masks and unloaded weapons on the hostages, while disguising his gunmen as abducted doctors and nurses so that the police will confuse the hostages with the terrorists, killing the innocent victims. He also kills a Batman imitator, acting as if he has confused him with the real Batman, but eliciting a confession that he is not Batman, essentially mocking the similarity.
The film provides a more serious double for Batman in the district attorney, Harvey Dent. With the Joker threatening to continue to kill citizens until Batman reveals his true identity, Bruce Wayne decides that he must end the killing by revealing himself. As Batman, he tells Dent to hold a press conference at which Batman’s identity will be revealed. Wayne attends the press conference, ready to reveal his identity as Batman, but Dent announces instead that he is Batman, making a sacrifice of himself while stealing Batman’s identity.
This is reversed at the end of the film, when Batman partly takes on the identity of Harvey Dent. The Joker’s violent manipulations have turned Dent into a psychotic killer bent on vengeance. With one side of his face deformed in a fire and the death of his fiancée imprinted in his mind, Dent goes on a killing spree against those involved in the conspiracy that resulted in her death and his disfigurement. His final act of revenge is aimed at Police Commissioner Gordon, because it was Gordon’s hand picked men and women who were bought by the Joker to carry out this crime. Dent is about to kill Gordon’s son to let him know what it is to lose a loved one, when Batman leaps at him, saving the boy but sending Dent to a deadly fall. Standing over Dent’s body, Batman tells Gordon that the public needs for Dent to remain a hero. He offers to take the blame, himself, for Dent’s crimes.
Gordon: We bet it all on him. The Joker took the best of us and tore him down. People will lose all hope.
Batman: They won’t. They must never know what he did.
Gordon: Five dead, two of them cops? You can’t sweep that under.
Batman: But the Joker cannot win. Gotham needs its true hero.
Gordon: No!
Batman: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I can do those things, because I’m not a hero, not like Dent. I killed those people. That’s what I can be.
Gordon: No, no you can’t! You’re not!
Batman: I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.
He is returning the favor of accepting the identity of the man who had accepted his identity earlier. In effect, they are behaving like twins, who, in Glenn’s (1974) words, “identify with and imitate each other.” (p. 373)
Bruce Wayne/Batman and Harvey Dent share many of the features of twins that Glenn has described. They share a similar role as hero and savior of Gotham. As such, they admire and respect one another. Wayne sees Dent as a possible legal successor to Batman, someone who could destroy the crime syndicate through legal means, possibly allowing him to put Batman into retirement. He refers to him at one point as Gotham’s “White Knight” in pointed comparison to Batman, the “Dark Knight” of the film’s title.
But perhaps their most important commonality is that they are in love with the same woman, Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, who has promised that if he can ever be free of the role of Batman they will be together.
Each man clearly loves Rachel, but there is no way to truly share her. After being tricked by the Joker into saving Dent instead of Rachel, one of the film’s several choices of this kind, Bruce Wayne says to his butler, Alfred, “She was going to wait for me. Dent doesn’t know. He can never know.” Alfred has a letter from Rachel that he was to give to Wayne: “… I need to be honest and clear. I’m going to marry Harvey Dent. I love him. I want to spend the rest of my life with him.” She goes on to explain that she intends to keep her promise to be together with him if Gotham no longer needs Batman, “but as a friend.” Alfred decides not to deliver the letter.
We could look at this as an Oedipal rivalry, but in the context of the film we may look to the dynamics of twins. In Glenn’s (1974) words, “But at the same time they [twins] are rivals. Their animosity originates genetically in the pre-oedipal rivalry for their mother. Each feels that the other has deprived him of his mother’s love and supplies, as indeed he often has, for the mother of twins has much more trouble feeding and caring for her two children than do mothers with several children who are born years apart.” (pp. 373-374)
The Joker contrives to force Batman to choose between Dent and Rachel by telling him where they are each trapped with explosives set to go off in minutes. Batman goes to save Rachel, the woman, the depriving mother of Glenn’s dynamics, sacrificing Dent, the twin; but, the Joker has reversed the locations so that Batman saves Dent, who is nevertheless disfigured in the ensuing fire while Rachel’s location explodes. In effect, this punishes the rivalrous twin and the depriving mother of Glenn’s dynamics.
Murderous rivalry brings us to Batman’s other “twin”, the Joker. Glenn emphasizes the struggle between twins in his analysis of Peter Shaffer’s play and film, Sleuth. In Sleuth, two men play a series of nasty, nearly deadly tricks upon one another, ostensibly concerning their rivalry over a woman. I pointed out a very similar dynamic in The Prestige in which the two rival magicians keep increasing their violence towards one another.1
In The Dark Knight, it is as if Shaffer’s characters or the two magicians from The Prestige were carrying on their private war with an entire city as their plaything, as we watch Batman and the Joker engage in their larger than life deadly game.
Going back to Jacob and Esau we know that twins are represented by contrast as well as by similarity. Batman and the Joker are at opposite poles, yet in ways more alike than like any of the other characters in the film. The others are mortals; Batman and the Joker function at a level far beyond that of humans. From the outset, they have in common that they are fantastical creations of the imagination, archetypes of good and evil, suddenly made to appear in a formerly stable society, with dramatic effects upon that society. They anticipate and manipulate the world of Gotham; the others are virtually helpless, pawns in their hands. It is as if they both come from the same place, or perhaps from two perfectly opposite places.
Much about their relationship is spelled out in their two extended face to face confrontations. In each case, one appears to be in charge, but the other controls the action.
The first is in the police station. The Joker has been captured and is being interrogated, first by Commissioner Gordon who is trying to find out where the Joker’s men have taken Harvey Dent. He leaves the interrogation room to “get a cup of coffee” and Batman suddenly appears in the room, standing behind the Joker. Batman, playing the “bad cop”, slams the Joker’s head into the table and pounds his hand, only getting quips in response. Then the dialogue really begins.
Batman: You wanted me. Here I am.
Joker: I wanted to see what you’d do. And you didn’t disappoint. (He laughs.) You let five people die. Then you let Dent take your place. Even to a guy like me, that’s cold.
Batman: Where’s Dent?
Joker: Those mob fools want you gone so they can get back to the way things were. But I know the truth. There’s no going back. You’ve changed things forever. Forever.
Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?
Joker: (Laughs) I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to rippin’ off mob dealers? No, no, no. You, you complete. me.
Batman: You’re garbage who kills for money.
Joker: Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not, even if you’d like to be. To them you’re just a freak like me. They need you right now. When they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. See, their morals, their code—it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these, these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.
At this point Batman grabs the Joker and holding him up, demands that he tell him where Dent is. There’s an exchange about rules and breaking rules, and then the Joker plays his trump card.
Joker: There’s only minutes left. You’re gonna have to play my little game if you want to save one of them.
Batman: Them?
Joker: For a while I thought you really were Dent, the way you threw yourself after her.
At this point, Batman appears to be losing control of his rage, pulling a chair out of it’s bolts and placing it against the doorknob to keep out any interference, then manhandling and beating the Joker, who doesn’t stop talking.
Joker: Look at you go … does Harvey know about you and his little girl?
Batman smashes him against the wall, yelling, “Where are they?”
Joker: Killing is making a choice.
Batman punches him and repeats his demand.
Joker: A choice between one life or the other, your friend or his blushing bride-to-be.
Batman hits him again and the Joker laughs wildly.
Joker: You have nothing. Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength. Don’t worry! I’m going to tell you where they are. Both of them, and that’s the point—you’ll have to choose.
Early in the film, the Joker has told someone how he got the scars on his face, saying that his father, brutalizing his mother, looked at him, saying “Why so serious?” and cut the corners of his mouth to give him a permanent grin. He later gives other explanations for his face, suggesting that there is no one real truth to his life. But in this scene we see something akin to domestic violence, and what is most striking is that the Joker is in control and enjoys it, as he taunts the abusive Batman, “You have nothing. Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.” This is pure sadomasochism, and it emphasizes the pleasure of the controlling maso-chist, the victim turned sadist.
The words are also very revealing in another way, as well. The Joker tells Batman, “You’re not one of them. You’re a freak like me.” He is emphasizing a point that reverberates through the film, that they are related by their similarities, brothers in their fantastic abilities and freakish devotion to their beliefs. He also connects them in another way. Batman is incorruptible, always seeking good and justice, and the Joker is chaotic, always seeking to undermine what Batman hopes to build. It is in this context that the Joker tells Batman, “You complete me.” He sees himself and Batman as parts of a whole, incomplete without each other.
We see more about this in their next and final face to face confrontation. This time, it is the Joker who appears to be in control. In a re-enactment of what he did earlier with Rachel and Dent, he has rigged two ferries with explosives, one filled with convicts and the other with ordinary citizens attempting to flee the city. Each boat has a detonator switch with which the other boat can be blown up. The Joker has told them that if one boat blows up the other, they will be spared, but if both are still intact, he’ll blow them up at midnight. This is part of the Joker’s promise to show Batman how civilized people behave when the chips are down. (His other proof is his corruption of Dent.)
The Joker has set up the two outwardly identical ferries, one of which must be blown up so that the other can survive, like twins fighting for survival. One of the ferries holds convicts, the dark side, while the other holds ordinary citizens, the innocents; but, the parable reveals that they are not so different. There is selfishness and murderous impulse in the “innocents” and noble intentions in the convicts, one of whom throws the detonator into the water.
Batman finds the Joker in an abandoned building overlooking the harbor, gets through his men with the help of a SWAT team, but is attacked by a pack of Rotweilers guarding the Joker. As he throws off the last of the dogs, the Joker stabs him and manages to get him down under a heavy window frame, hanging over the edge of the building. As midnight strikes, the Joker is surprised and disappointed that neither ferry has been blown up.
Batman: What were you trying to prove? That deep down, we’re all as ugly as you? You’re alone.
Joker: (He shows Batman the remote to blow up the two ferries.) Ya gotta do everything yourself. I always have—and it’s not always easy. You know how I got these scars?
Batman: No. But I know how you got these.
Batman unleashes blades that cut into the Joker and throw him back. Having seen the remote, Batman kicks the Joker over the edge of the building, grabbing the remote. As the Joker falls, he is cackling, seeming to enjoy the ride, but Batman shoots a grapple hook and pulls him back up, hanging upside down.
Joker: You. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren’t you? (The Joker is laughing as the Batman secures him upside down.) You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.
Batman: You’ll be in a padded cell forever.
Joker: Maybe we can share one. They’ll be doubling up, the rate this city’s inhabitants are losing their minds.
Once again, we see the intense sadomasochism, the Joker seemingly enjoying his own pain, telling Batman that he won’t kill him because he’s too much fun. Once again, the Joker expresses the wish for them to remain forever playing with each other in this way. I’ll go back to another of Glenn’s (1974) descriptions of the dynamics of twins. I have italicized the features that seem to particularly apply to Batman and the Joker.
“Twins are generally brought up close to each other and develop extremely close relationships. The mother-child dyad is complicated by the fact that two children of similar appearance go through the developmental stages concurrently. The two infants coo to each other, watch and touch each other, play with each other, and later frequently develop a secret language together. As they grow older they engage in intimate, ambivalent games. They get to understand and react to the whims and moods of their siblings with much greater empathy and accuracy than is generally the case with brothers and sisters, often to the point that they become convinced that telepathic communication occurs. As Maenchen (1968) has so aptly put it, in some cases ‘the twin symbiosis drains or replaces entirely the mother-child symbiosis’ (p. 454). The intense affectionate ties between the twins are such that they love each other narcissistically as they consider themselves part of a complete person. They strive to be with the other in actuality or in fantasy, often through the presence of a substitute. They identify with and imitate each other. Sexual acting out of the libidinal attachment may indeed occur, leading to homosexual activity.” (p. 373)
It can be argued that the only sexuality in this film is the homosexual sadomasochistic violence between Batman and the Joker. In the Joker’s words, the fantasy is that they will be together, forever in sadomasochistic play, well above and removed from the society of mere mortals. And then, we get the sealing image.
“We’re going to do this forever.”
“You’ll be in a padded cell forever.”
“Maybe we can share it. They’ll be doubling up … .”
For a moment, we can imagine Batman and the Joker locked together in a padded cell, like two brothers together in the womb.
The Joker has come out of nowhere. When he is imprisoned, it is reported that his fingerprints match nothing in the files. It is as if he arrived in Gotham with no past. To my mind, there is the clear suggestion that the Joker arose in response to Batman. The Joker is his antithesis, and in that sense the missing twin that makes him whole.
I suspect that this is actually the film makers’ intention, that as a pure, incorruptible hero, Batman is not a whole person. The evil and chaotic violence must be somewhere. The film displaces it to Batman’s doubles, Harvey Dent and the Joker, essentially engaging in “splitting”. It is as if the film is pulling in two directions, trying to set up an all good and an all bad twin, Batman and the Joker, but continually finding that that dichotomy does not work.
The film’s ending conflates these diverging impulses. Batman takes upon himself the responsibility for Dent’s crimes so that he will be hunted by the police as a murderer; but, at the same time, we, the viewers see him as the good twin, the innocent.
The Nolan brothers have once again given us a dark tale with the underlying form of twins, or brothers, who share between them good and evil, heroism and villainy, with just a touch of ambiguity about where the innocence really resides. These are lessons learned, perhaps, in the making of The Prestige, or perhaps in their own relationship as brothers.
1. In The Prestige, the violence between the magicians begins when one of them believes that his wife’s death was caused by the other’s recklessness, essentially over his depriving him of his woman.
Dargis, Manohla “Showdown in Gotham Town”. New York Times, July 18, 2008.
Gilchrist, Todd “Review of ‘The Dark Knight’”. IGN.Com, June 30, 2008.
Glenn, J. (1974 ) Twins in disguise II: Content, form and style in plays by Anthony and Peter Shaffer. International Review of Psychoanalysis 1:373-381.