My thoughts:
The whole thing really captivated me: the writing, the themes, the
acting, the suspense, the action even, which I usually don’t think twice about, the setting, the depth of the characters, and on and on. It really was much more than I had expected in a great way.
There were some things that seemed far-fetched of course, or at least, difficult to fathom. The Joker’s relationship with all of his ‘helpers’ was something that would have been interesting to explore more and it makes you wonder how he had the opportunity and the means to set up all his various grandiose plots and ploys throughout the film. The same could be said for Batman too, to some degree. And, I just couldn’t buy Two-Face fully in this film. There just wasn’t enough there or maybe there was too much. It’s hard to explain, I suppose, and I don’t mean that it was forced or that his choosing was a throwaway philosophical spin or anything like that. I suppose it’s just the turn of events with him seemed too jammed in. It just didn’t flow or work fully, though I wish I could articulate more why that is.
But regardless, the film was such that all of that really didn’t matter because it worked on so many other levels and if you accepted certain things, the film was practically perfect. I’d go so far as to say beautiful in some ways. It was not the least bit camp or trite and I found the ending particularly intriguing in regards to the notion of Batman as making the decision to be a further ‘sacrificial lamb’ type for what he invisions is the greater good, risking his own reputation and other hopes, it would appear (and then the Commissioner’s compliance with that). I think it’s that, above anything else, that takes this film beyond the usual conscience dramas and into a place that transcends easy moralizing.
It would be astonishing in some ways to see Batman even evolve into a type of character that comes to wrestle with God rather than with the impersonal good vs. evil dilemma, though I don’t know if that will ever happen. Indeed, God and Truth is behind the scenes in this film.
Often, you hear “justice” with superheros or even just heros in the normal sense, but rarely Truth. I think it actually is leaning towards a new realm though, which is promising. Batman, at least going by what he said in the last scene, is not merely about justice. If it were justice only, then maybe he could justify killing the Joker for the ‘greater good’, a kind of death penalty argument ethic. And with Dent turned Two-Face, and trying to protect Gotham further for their own good despite Dent’s bad choice, Batman seemingly accepts an unjust burden. He says essentially that he must bear this cover-up and be willing to take the blame, become the ‘villain’, etc. True, this isn’t truth in the sense of telling all of the facts straightforwardly and then accepting those necessary consequences (which justice would do, I think), but rather it’s love (agape love, not eros love) isn’t it? Isn’t that at least one facet of love, to turn over the self as a ‘gift’ of sorts, transcending the normal requirements boundaries of justice?
Sure, pop-psychologists will explain Batman away with a hero or messiah complex, but just as Two-Face is not, at bottom thought merely to be a victim of psychological forces but a spiritually depraved soul, then Batman too is the other side of that coin: whereas Two-Face willed his own ‘conversion’ into the dark side and ironically enough, became a kind of champion of ‘justice’ throughout the rest of the film (he wants to get Gordon’s family as payback), Batman willed the exact opposite, and not yielding to mere justice (which would have done away with the Joker and probably alot of other problems quite easily), he choses something higher. Perhaps Batman too has become converted a bit; you get the sense when he rides off into the distance at the close of the film that he’s doing this not merely because he ‘has to’, or because it’s his ‘fate’, or that he’s doing so begrudgingly, even that it’s merely still something stemming from his childhood loss (though I don’t deny that still must be part of his own psychological makeup), but that he’s doing so because he’s choosing so.
I suppose the next film will tell more fully who Batman is now that things are as they are. If he continues on in the way I see him at the end of this film, he may finally become, truly, a hero and the prior manifestations and masks throughout his journey may be shed to show, at bottom, that he is loving, and the resolution to the problems in Gotham and all of its characters are not found in ‘cleaning up the city’ with vigilante justice, but in transcending the scene and its normal demands altogether. If there is to be a resolution to the film series, I’d like it to be that one.
you’ve got one right here with no such claims to righteousness. But the point you made was valid.-ish.