A Dark Day for Gotham
BAM! POW! WHACK! Who does
not love a good superhero? There
is nothing better than the larger than life “good guy” beating up the “bad
guys” that cause all the pain and suffering in the city. Whether it is Superman, Spiderman, the
Incredibles, or even Underdog that you love the most, they all have a few
things in common. Almost every
superhero story has the same basic story arch. Somehow the superhero has to acquire and learn how to use
their new superhuman abilities.
These new traits usually ostracize them from the rest of world either by
the hero’s own choice or because the world no longer understands them. Then the hero has to find some reason
or motivation to use their powers for the betterment of society, to uphold
justice, or to save something or someone from utter destruction at the hands of
the villain (and there is usually a beautiful, young “damsel in distress”
involved at this point). After
almost being defeated or breaking down in some way, the hero ends up saving the
girl, city, or maybe even the planet and then makes sure that all is returned
to order and the world can go on living as it was before.
What
happens when the hero is just a normal human being though? What if they cannot just fly through
the air saving people from danger and explosions? What if they cannot stop or dodge bullets? What if they cannot lift train
locomotives with their bare hands?
What happens when the hero is not superhuman? That is where Batman makes his appearance. Bruce Wayne is simply a normal human
being just like everyone else in the world (aside from the fact that he is
filthy rich). So what makes Batman
a hero? Having enough money to buy
(or make) whatever gadget or gizmo you want sure is helpful for getting things
started, but that is not what really transforms Bruce Wayne into the
Batman. As Randall Jensen put it:
Bruce Wayne doesn’t acquire superpowers
and then later discover how he ought to use them. No, he first acquires a
mission – a vocation or calling, really – and with it, a desperate need or
extraordinary abilities. Through his own Herculean efforts (and with the help
of the enormous financial empire he has inherited, of course!), he makes
himself into Batman so that he can keep the
promise he made.[1]
What
sets Batman apart from the rest of humanity is his physical training, his
ideology, and, most of all, his ironclad will for vengeance and justice.
What is it that makes Batman so fascinating? Why did Christopher Nolen’s Batman Begins and especially The Dark Night do so well it the box office? Is it the disturbingly convincing
performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker?
Is it Christian Bale’s deep and gravelly Batman voice? I believe that what some might call
Nolan’s “thinking man’s action movie” style that combines deep philosophical
questions with big explosions and special effects while being contained within
a captivating storyline is what gives Batman Begins and The Dark Knight their mass appeal. To better understand what makes these films so widely
popular, I will explore different aspects of the two films ranging from the
legitimacy of vigilantism to parallels of current events.
One of the most import things to explore when trying to better
understand these films is to take a look at just how popular they are. Partly riding on the hype of Heath
Ledger’s death, The Dark Knight’s
revenue from the three-day opening weekend alone skyrocketed to a staggering
$155.3 million, more than three quarters the $205.3 million that Nolan’s first
installment of Batman Begins
grossed during its entire time in theatres.[2] These record breaking numbers are a
testament to the hunger with which the public anticipated this motion picture.
The
critics at the time of the film’s release aided the anticipation that this film
had already generated, but many seemed shockingly taken aback by the deep
darkness that enshrouded the story as well as the acting performance of Heath
Ledger. Joe Morgenstern wrote in
his review for The Wall Street Journal
that “Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its
muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem
like a recurrent grace note.”[3] Later on Morgenstern said of Ledger:
His portrait of the Joker owes nothing
to Jack Nicholson, even though that in itself is hard to imagine. This
knife-wielding psychopath isn't jaunty, but hunched and frowzy. His mirthless
grin isn't fixed, but the lipstick smear of a crazy street lady. He moves with
Peter Lorre's furtiveness, speaks in a bright, crisp voice that seems to
channel Jack Lemmon, and licks his scarred chops with a frequency that suggests
heavy doses of anti-depressives. If the stories he tells about those scars are
contradictory, they are never less than creepily entertaining. He's the best-written
character in the script, but it's Ledger's eerie fervor that plumbs the depths
of the Joker's derangement. [4]
In
the wake of Ledger’s death, critics and fans alike were apt to come to quick
conclusions about connections between Ledger’s role as The Joker, his method
acting style, and his mysterious death.
Popular rumor was that the character of The Joker had so consumed Ledger
that he too had adopted a similar nihilistic take on life. This view is alluded to in Christopher
Orr’s review for The New Republic when
he talks about Ledger’s performance:
It’s a difficult performance to rate on
any conventional scale, a whirlwind of energy and effects, tics and tells,
Brando and Hopkins and Nicholson thrown in a blender set to “puree” and then
dynamited mid-spin. To call it compelling would be a criminal understatement,
and yet it seems less the creation of a living self than the annihilation of
one, an exercise in the center not holding. Even without Ledger’s death, this
would be a deeply discomfiting performance; as it is, it’s hard not to view it
as sign or symptom of the subsequent tragedy.[5]
It
seems that The New Republic hired a
philosopher for its entertainment column and as such, his comments demand a
little unpacking. Orr’s statement
that The Joker is more the annihilation of self rather than the creation of a
new, living self is almost as disturbing as the character he is talking
about. We would expect Ledger
would perhaps give us a performance that would provide us with more insight
into who The Joker really is, what motivates him, what he gains from killing,
or, at the very least, why he likes killing people. Rather than giving us more knowledge, Ledger’s performance
does not answer all our questions.
He leaves us scared and perhaps more than a little confused. So what does that have to do with the
annihilation of self? Anthony
Kolenic tackles just this question while identifying what it is about The Joker
that is so down right scary.
Kolenic states, “The Joker denies a narrative
or an easily identifiable defect to blame for the creation of his identity. Instead,
the film turns the conflict between order and chaos back on the audience by
keeping the Joker anonymous, and by keeping him anything but neutralized.”[6] When Orr says that The Joker is the
“annihilation of self” it is precisely this ambiguity and lack of identity that
he is referring to.
Orr’s
imagery of the blender is also important to his later phrase about “an
exercise in the center not holding.”[7] The Joker is very much a embodiment of
chaos and the mental picture that Orr creates with his use of words like
“whirlwind,” “blender,” and “dynamite” makes us envision something that is just
as chaotic and out of control as the situation in which the city of Gotham
finds itself. Upon first reading,
the phrase about a center not holding seems a bit confusing to say the
least. After a bit of reflection
on what Orr is trying to say, the phrase makes more sense when read with the
idea of a personal implosion of being.
What then might cause this implosion of The Joker’s character? For The Joker, this implosion arises
from a nothingness that reaches down to his very core. The void of being, the lack of
explanation and back story, and his nihilistic tendencies all culminate to
create a villain that exists solely to end existence itself. The Joker has no end goal in mind, no
master plan that he is trying to achieve other than bringing all forms of
order, stability, and “social norms” crashing down. The Joker states this himself while he is talking to Harvey
Dent in the hospital just before blowing it up:
Do I really
look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I
wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just . . . do
things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon’s got plans. You know,
they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a
schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control
things really are.[8]
So
if The Joker has no real plans and is just trying to prove a point, what is it
that makes The Joker so frightening, to us as well as the characters in the
film? Randolph Dreyer writes of
The Joker, “He is a bigger-than-life bad guy but with
a believable reason for being so, and we want to know more. He plays on our
empathy. Aren’t we all capable of bad things? (Except for maybe blowing up
hospitals.) If we can learn more about him, maybe we can understand or even
care about him.”[9] The Western mindset is set on
classifying, understanding, and controlling everything we come in contact
with. We believe that if we can
control it we understand it. As
Falcone rightly says in Batman Begins,
“You always fear what you don’t understand.”[10] It is the fact that we do not
understand The Joker that makes him so unnerving. Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred, sheds some light on The Joker
while describing a similar criminal when he says, “…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.”[11] The Joker confirms Alfred’s assessment
quite literally in a later scene when he actually burns millions of dollars
worth of money with Lau sitting helplessly atop it. Since The Joker is not after money and is simply trying to
send a message with all his antics, what does he want? In the hospital room where he more or
less “creates” Two-Face out of the mental wreckage of the ruined Harvey Dent,
The Joker tells his nihilistic apprentice, “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset
the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh,
and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!”[12] Once Two-Face goes on his rampage of
revenge (not too unlike what Batman himself is doing, with the primary difference
being the killing aspect), we now have two different sides of social
disestablishmentarianism: Two-Face’s idea of random chance and The Jokers love
of chaos.
Where
does this love of chaos and chance come from? As Morgenstern has already alluded to, it is the philosophy
of nihilism that helps us better understand The Joker and those that flock to
him. Even my idea of using
nihilism to better understand The Joker is more than a little bit ironic
because nihilism is itself often misunderstood by those who have not yet
experienced it. Once again, it is
this misunderstanding of The Joker that gives him his inexplicable intrigue and
our distinct aversion to him. James
Sire defines nihilism in the opening lines from his chapter on the nihilistic
worldview saying, “Nihilism is more a feeling than a philosophy. Strictly speaking, nihilism is not a
philosophy at all. It is a denial
of philosophy, a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything
is valuable. … In other words, nihilism is the negation of everything –
knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality.”[13] Based on the number of people he has
killed and his treatment of individuals, The Joker obviously does not value
human life - not even his own. On
several occasions, The Joker almost seems to be trying to bring death upon
himself. In the hospital scene,
The Joker puts a revolver in the hand of an extremely frustrated Dent and then
tells Dent to “upset the established order”[14]
which obviously would mean shooting The Joker. This is compounded by the fact that The Joker is holding his
head to the gun in Dent’s hand.
The Joker also starts laughing manically when Batman throws him out a
building, a fall that would assuredly kill the clown, but seems disappointed
when Batman grapples his legs and pulls him back up again. Another obvious death wish is when
Batman is speeding towards him on the Batpod and all The Joker can say is, “I
want you to do it. C’mon. C’mon. I want you to do it. Hit me. Hit me. Hit me!”[15]
Why does The Joker want to die?
Would it be part of proving his bigger point? Or does he simply want to
make Batman break his one rule?
Sire gives us some insight when he says, “The trouble is that no one can
live the examined life, if examination leads to nihilism, for nobody can live a
life consistent with nihilism. At every step, at every moment, nihilists think,
and think their thinking has substance, and thus they cheat on their
philosophy.”[16] Nihilism is not a self-fulfilling
philosophy, but rather, it is a self-defeating philosophy. A true nihilist cannot seriously stand
up and say “Nothing has value” without realizing that he has just dug himself
into a hole because what he obviously believes what he just said has value. Otherwise, he would never have said
it. Thus, no one can truly adhere
to the idea of nihilism and keep on living. If even your judgment that “nothing has value” has no value,
then why are you living?
Nihilism’s logical (and only reasonable) conclusion is the denial and
annihilation of everything, including one’s self. A nihilist’s ultimate goal is death.
And yet The Joker still lives.
He has not killed himself, and he seems to be just fine with killing
others while he is still around.
He also seems to greatly enjoy fighting the Batman, but does he have a
reason or a motivation for fighting him?
During the climactic scene of the film, Batman flings The Joker off a
tall building only to turn around, grapple him by the legs, and then pull him
back up again, to which The Joker says, “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? 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!”[17] Is this all a game to him? If he really is a nihilistic clown,
does it have any meaning at all?
Is The Joker simply an “unstoppable force” in the name of chaos and Batman
the “immovable object” of reason and order? As seems to be a theme with the character of The Joker, the
lack of an answer is infinitely more disturbing than getting any answer at
all.
Kolenic draws a blood-curdling comparison between The Joker’s
seemingly senseless violence and events that we see taking place in our own
world:
Although many
of the simultaneously waxing and waning post-9/11 anxieties cannot and should
not be thrust upon diverse works of popular culture, in this case anxiety of
the ease with which destruction can occur is hit home by the Joker’s comment
that he can create a disruption in narrative and governmentality itself with
‘‘a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets.’’ And as real as that fear may
be, and as directly as this film may point to it, primary of these post-9/11
fears and tensions is the anxiety of accountability in a world where fear of
breeches in safety and national borders by amorphous and virtually anonymous
small groups is created, carried, and extended, particularly those considered
‘‘within.’’ This includes terrorist organizations, but also domestic terrorists
and other individuals who mean to upset social order by means of violence, like
Seung-Hui Cho, for any number of reasons and, occasionally, what appears to be
a lack thereof.[18]
Kolenic continues to draw
parallels between The Joker and Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator of the Virginia Tech
shooting. Since The Dark Knight was being made during the time of the Virginia Tech
massacre, it is unclear if the production of the film was at all influenced by
the acts of Cho. As Kolenic shows in his article, The Joker uses tactics much
like the media packet that Cho sent to NBC in between his attacks.
Gotham
paints the Joker as a madman, a self- proclaimed agent of chaos, and extends
this anti-, or, nonnarrative of anonymity and opacity. But it is exactly this
that major media attempted to correct in creating a narrative of a psychopathic
Cho. Cho understood the power of
brand establishment, evidenced by his sending between his attacks the
aforementioned media packet to NBC, which contained twenty-five minutes of video,
forty-three photographs in a number of violent and armed poses, as well as
twenty-three pages of writing.[19]
Since the character of The
Joker was well established by his long history in the Batman comic books, his
actions would probably not be connected to the incident at Virginia Tech, but
the shooting perhaps may have influenced the way in which The Joker was
presented. Much like Cho, The
Joker of The Dark Knight knows how to
manipulate the news outlets of Gotham.
Throughout the film he is either airing a live phone call, writing the
next day’s paper, or shown in a film clip that he submitted to the television
station. In two particularly
disturbing scenes in the film, characters are watching the news station air a
video clip of The Joker interrogating one of the Batman imitators (who we know
subsequently died soon after the video was filmed) and, in a later scene, a
kidnapped news anchor whose fate we are never told. Through these means, The Joker is not only able to voice his
demands (that Batman take off his mask and lay aside the caped crusade) he is
also able to intimidate the people of Gotham and drive them into the mindless
frenzy that he desires.
The
very interesting thing about intimidation in The Dark Knight is that it is one of the few traits that The Joker
and Batman have in common. As one
reviewer of the film observed, “Batman and The Joker
are shown as twisted reflections of one another. The one key difference between
them is that Batman won't kill. Yet in his quest to rid Gotham of crime, Batman
is often as intimidating and as violent as his adversary.”[20]
The Joker is a mirror that
shows us who Bruce Wayne really is, not because these two characters are
similar, but because they are polar opposites. As Charles Bellinger writes about The Joker and Batman
dichotomy:
The Joker's statement to
Batman--"You complete me"--is profound, perhaps more profound than
the filmmakers realize. Like the phrase from the gospels, "It is
finished," it offers the perfect summary of the entire story. The Joker is
saying that his role as the chaotic Satan is complemented by Batman's role as
the "law and order" Satan, whose good violence is supposedly casting
out the other Satan's bad violence. This is why The Joker can say with such
confidence "You have nothing to frighten me with, nothing to do with all
your strength." He realizes that Batman is actually his ally in the
satanic event. The Joker knows about satanic shape shifting, Batman does not.[21]
Perhaps
before we delve too deeply into the nature of Batman’s existence, we should
take a look at what turned Bruce Wayne into the caped crusader in the first
place. The back-story of
Batman starts when a very young Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ deaths at
the hands of an armed robber in the backstreets of Gotham. Since that day, he has vowed to fight
crime and injustice with whatever means possible, with one major distinction:
Batman will never kill. His
parents’ deaths gave him the determination to fight crime, but at the same time
made him resolve never to sink to the same level of the criminals that he is
fighting. In the mind of Bruce
Wayne, “never to sinking to the same level” seems to simply mean not directly
causing the death of any individual.
Batman, throughout both of Nolan’s films, seemingly has no problem with
burning down houses, breaking jaws and limbs, blowing up anything that might be
in his way, stealing, spying, lying and just about anything and everything you
can think of doing to stop people without directly killing them. At the climax of Batman Begins, Batman and his arch nemesis Ra’s al Ghul are
fighting is a speeding commuter train headed toward a shear drop off where the
elevated tracks have been blown away.
Once Batman has almost won the fight and could easily kill Ra’s al Ghul,
he suddenly makes a quick exit after telling Ra’s, “I won’t kill you… but I
don’t have to save you.”[22] We then watch as the train plummets
several stories before crashing through a parking garage and bursting into
flames. The irony of this is that
earlier on in the film, Bruce Wayne did in fact save Ra’s al Ghul from certain
death. The difference now being
that whereas at the beginning of the film Bruce Wayne saw Ra’s as a trainer and
ally, he now knows him to be a radical whose outlandish demands on society will
lead to nothing but death and destruction on a massive scale.
If
Batman has no problem with letting Ra’s al Ghul being burnt to a crisp in a
gigantic fireball in order to save countless lives in Batman Begins, why does he not kill The Joker in The Dark
Night? The Joker kills countess people and causes innumerable
atrocities in general during the course of the film, yet in the end, Batman
simply leaves him hanging on by a thread (literally) to be picked up by the S.W.A.T.
team. To the audience, the most
logical course of action would be for Batman to kill The Joker at the first
possible opportunity, but this is not what he does. Mark White writes an entire chapter on this one subject in
the book Batman and Philosophy,
in which he states:
The argument in favor of
killing the Joker is fairly straightforward – if Batman kills the Joker, he
would prevent all the murders the Joker would otherwise commit in the future.
This rationale is typical of utilitarianism,
a system of ethics that requires us to maximize the total happiness or
well-being resulting from our actions. Saving many lives at the cost of just
one would represent a net increase in well-being or utility, and while it would
certainly be a tragic choice, utilitarians would generally endorse it.[23]
So why does Batman not just go
ahead and kill him? It would be
for the greater good of Gotham, and besides, what is one little personal rule
about “never to sinking their level” if you could save countless lives by just
killing The Joker? What is one
life willingly taken when you have indirectly led to the deaths of many
others? Even from the very
beginning, Batman was always focused on justice rather than vengeance. He was perfectly fine with being the
judge, but he swore that he would never be the executioner. One writer sums it up in this manner:
Despite
the continual desire to do so, Batman never fully submits to his desire for
vengeance, even resisting the urge to kill his arch-nemesis in extreme
circumstances. He manages to transform his vengeful desire to kill into his
desire to improve his environment, including those miscreants to whom he
attempts to give the strength to overcome their own sickness. This is done by
committing them to mental institutions.[24]
At the end of The Dark Knight,
this is presumably exactly what Batman is doing. Even though he is not personally escorting The Joker to
Arkham asylum, Batman leaves him to the care of law enforcement that have long
been chasing The Joker. And this
time Police Commissioner Jim Gordon will not make the mistake of simply leaving
The Joker to his own devices in a small jail cell. In the end, Batman leaves The Joker to the authorities, who
have the right to judge him for the crimes that he has committed rather than
enacting justice himself. So, if
Batman will never kill during his crusade against crime and winds up leaving
his adversaries in the hands of the law, why do some of the citizens of Gotham
still not like or trust the Batman?
The
answer lies in the fact that Batman is not endorsed by, answerable to, or
overseen by the established institutions of justice. Since he is nothing more that a normal citizen who has taken
the law into his own hands, he is classified as a vigilante. In Travis Dumsday’s essay on
vigilantism, the term is defined as:
A
social movement giving rise to premeditated acts of force—or threatened
force—by autonomous citizens. It arises as a reaction to the transgression of
institutionalized norms by individuals or groups—or to their potential or
imputed transgression. Such acts are focused on crime control and/or social
control and aim to offer assurances (or “guarantees”) of security both to
participants and to other members of a given established order.[25]
What this basically means is
that normal citizens (like Bruce Wayne) using force to stop or suppress crime
without the authority or permission from the government are seen as
vigilantes. Thus Batman is
operating outside of the law, yet in a way he is working along side the law (or
at the very least, he is enjoying the cooperation and support of Commissioner
Gordon). “But wait!” you may say,
“If Police Commissioner Jim Gordon
supports the Batman, would that not take away the tile of ‘vigilante’ for
Batman?” Dumsday clearly states in
his article that this is not the case:
The
fact that Batman is supported by the Gotham police, or even by the Gotham
municipal government, does not take away his vigilante status. Instead the key
is that he acts independently of the police force; he takes no orders from
them, though he does voluntarily consult with them. Moreover, if in some
particular instance he acts in a manner they do not agree with, he is not
accountable to them. Batman refuses to subject himself to the reprimand of the
Gotham government. He is not willingly accountable to them, and that is what
guarantees his continued vigilante status.[26]
The fact that Batman does not
see himself as under the law is clear in scenes from both films. In Batman Begins, in order to save Rachel from a highly concentrated
dose of Scarecrow’s toxin, Batman speeds away from police cruisers, crashes
through traffic barriers, and causes quite a bit of damage as drives
recklessly. In The Dark
Knight he openly defies Gordon’s orders
when they were trying to capture The Joker and he even fights the S.W.A.T. team
that was sent in to do the job.
The fact that he did these things to save Rachel and other innocent
individuals does not negate the fact that they were nonetheless breaking the
law. In taking the law into his
own hands, Batman shows that he no longer has a fear of (or perhaps respect
for) the law.
On
the flip side of things, The Joker’s complete lawlessness and denial of
everything that Batman understands and stands for, turns Bruce Wayne’s world
upside down and makes him question what his role should be as the Batman. Is he really trying to rid the world of
crime and injustice? Or does he
just get the exact same type of pleasure out of beating criminals to a bloody
pulp as The Joker gets from mindless killing and starting chaos? Batman and The Joker so perfectly
balance each other out that some have asked whether or not it could be possible
that they are the same person.[27]
As a viewer, we of course know that this is impossible, but a much more
legitimate question would be whether or not The Joker exists solely because
Batman exists.[28] Batman himself wonders if this might be
the case. So much so that at one
point in the film he is even willing to identify himself as Bruce Wayne so that
The Joker will end his rampage of slaughter, and would have done so if Harvey
Dent did not step forward so that the true identity of Batman could stay intact
and The Joker could be caught.
Dent believes not only that Batman will do the right thing but also that
Gotham needs Batman to protect them from the whims of madmen like The
Joker. At the same time Bruce
Wayne knows that he will not forever be able to be Batman. As Bruce Baum puts it:
Likewise,
at the end of The Dark Knight Batman
confronts the reality that his solitary vigilante justice will not bring
lasting civil peace and order. Therefore, he concocts a noble lie to save the
good reputation of Gotham’s District Attorney, Harvey Dent, who had been the
courageous public face of Gotham’s hopes for civil order and legal justice.[29]
The reason that vigilantes like
Batman can never bring “lasting civil peace and order” is because they are just
citizens and not agents of the established law. If everyone were to take “the law” or “justice” into his or
her own hands the outcome would only result in either an epidemic of Joker-like
anarchy or a grim reprise of the French Revolution. Thus, Bruce Wayne knows that one day he will have to lay
aside the cape and cowl so that uncorrupted officials can restore order to city
of Gotham. In The Dark Knight, it seemed that Harvey Dent would be the White
Knight to lead Gotham to uncorrupted glory, but perhaps the caped crusader will
finally be able to find a suitable successor to pass the mantle of justice to
in the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises, but for now the city of Gotham (and movie goers) need their Dark
Knight. Both groups realize that
we live in a confusing and chaotic world and Batman give us a hope that law,
truth, and justice will triumph in the end. It is this hope that good can still overcome evil that gives
this Dark Knight such popularity in the dark world that we find ourselves in.
[1] Jensen,
Randall M. “Batman’s Promise.” Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the
Soul, edited by Mark D. White, Robert Arp.
Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 86.
[2] Rich,
Joshua. "'Dark Knight' Nabs Biggest Debut Ever ", accessed 5/11/2011,
2011, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20213630,00.html.
Par. 1,3.
[3] Morgenstern,
Joe. "Ledger Dazzles in Suffocatingly Dark 'Knight'.", accessed
5/4/2011, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121632327909562803.html#printMode.
Par. 1.
[4] Morgenstern,
Joe. "Ledger Dazzles in Suffocatingly Dark 'Knight'.", accessed
5/4/2011, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121632327909562803.html#printMode.
Par. 3.
[5] Orr,
Christopher. "The Movie Review: 'the Dark Knight' ", accessed
5/4/2011, 2011, http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/the-movie-review-the-dark-knight.
[6] Kolenic,
Anthony J. "Madness in the Making: Creating and Denying Narratives from
Virginia Tech to Gotham City." Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 6 (12, 2009): 1025.
[7] Kolenic,
Anthony J. "Madness in the Making: Creating and Denying Narratives from
Virginia Tech to Gotham City." Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 6 (12, 2009): 1025.
[8] The Dark
Knight. Directed by Christopher Nolan,
Charles Roven, Emma Thomas, et al. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2008.
[9] Dreyer,
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