"I think you and I are destined to do this forever."

In The Dark Knight, Alfred tells Bruce a story about trying to catch a thief in Burma. The thief had stolen precious stones, and the strategy of his pursuers was to find people he had sold the stones to, and use them to find him. But, Alfred explains, they never found said customers. What they did find, eventually, was a young boy playing with a ruby - and with that discovery came the realization that the thief wasn't trading the stones at all. He was stealing them, and then discarding them. He was doing everything for the sake of nothing.

The point of Alfred's story is to explain to Bruce that for some men, there is no method, rhyme or reason to the things that they do. There is no motivation behind their actions - and this is precisely what makes them dangerous. Of course, Alfred is warning Bruce about the Joker... because the Joker is precisely this type of man; the type of man, according to Alfred, that "just likes to watch the world burn."

Batman goes on, later in the film, to tell the Joker that he only has one rule. The Joker tells him that he'll have to break that rule if he wants to be a worthy adversary.

I took a film class a few years back, and when we were getting ready to discuss John Ford's The Searchers, the professor told us, "I don't like to say that particular movies are 'Great Films.' And I don't particularly like Westerns. But this is a Great Film. It's flawed, certainly, but the things that it attempts to do and the things that it succeeds at doing constitute greatness" (Ok, so that was an epic paraphrase, but it gets the point across). Well, at the risk of sounding like a comic book geek, I'm going to go ahead and say that The Dark Knight is a great film. It's flawed, certainly, but the things it attempts to do and the things it succeeds at doing constitute greatness. It takes a well-defined pulp form, the comic book movie, and uses it to launch a thematically-rich narrative. It represents high water marks in production values. And, most importantly to me, everything in the film operates on two levels. Every action scene is visceral and popcorn-satisfying, but at the same time speaks to the core of the characters involved.

But enough gushing.

The first few paragraphs of this post were about one particular theme that caught me, and that is the tension between the incredible amounts of will-power it takes to maintain rules, and the equally incredible amounts of will-power it takes to completely abolish them.

This isn't a new idea, and I'm not even sure I have anything particularly insightful to say about it - but it's definitely worth thinking about. For me, its clear that anarchy is a fickle thing, as is utopia. But I'm curious why that is... and I think the answer has something to do with the implications regarding the state of one's heart. In order to be a complete anarchist, to fully and completely care about nothing, the heart must be completely empty. On the other hand, to live unerringly by a moral code would seem to imply that one cares only for the good of others, or for some greater good. It seems to imply that one has given himself away completely to something else.

I think both are inconceivable. And yet both are present, and real, in everyone: the superego and the id and all that Freudian stuff. I know that I could never be either, but I cannot help but respect the complete lack of weakness present in the Joker, and the complete presence of purpose in Batman.

The fact that they both have such allure is frightening.

For obvious reasons, I couldn't help but think of Heart of Darkness while watching The Dark Knight. When I think of Heart of Darkness, I can't help but think of Apocalypse Now. And when I thought of Apocalypse Now, I thought in particular of a story that Kurtz tells Willard near the end of the film. I was going to paraphrase it and compare it with Alfred's story to start this post, but when I found the transcript online, I decided I needed to include the whole thing. So I'll end with it:

"I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces... Seems a thousand centuries ago... We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile... A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead... And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters... These were men... trained cadres... these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgement... without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us. "