The recent release of The Batman has set me off on a Proustian reverie for a time when Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was the latest, biggest Batman revival. Like much of America, I watched it opening night, clear back in the summer of 2008, during the twilight of the Bush years. For those who were either too young or too old to have caught it at the time, it is difficult to overstate what an absolute event that film was; the reviews were rave, the anticipation deafening, no one was sure if it could possibly live up to the hype–or if Heath Ledger’s Joker could top Jack Nicholson’s–until we watched it happen before our very eyes.
It was the first comic book film to be celebrated as not just a great comic book film, but simply as a great film, period. So many lines immediately entered our pop-cultural lexicon: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” “He’s the hero we needed, not the one we deserved.” “Why so serious?” I left the theater sincerely worried that the Joker would inspire real life copy-cat crimes.
Yet though I was as blown away by The Dark Knight as anyone, even then I did not think it flawless. My main issue at the time was simply that it was just so exhausting–it ran a little too long I thought; the Harvey Dent/Two-Face arc definitely should’ve been saved for a sequal I felt; Batman’s no-kill rule, even for a burgeoning bleeding-heart liberal like myself, started to seem downright ridiculous in the face of the Joker’s psychotic mayhem; and I straight-up rolled my eyes at the whole ferry scene, which struck me (recent college grad that I was) as just the most basic and obvious sort of Philosophy 101 thought experiment.
The Joker, recall, had by then blown up a hospital, destroyed a police precinct, killed the commissioner, a judge, the assistant DA (also Bruce Wayne’s love interest), and had transformed the white knight DA Harvey Dent (so pure-hearted he was even played by a bona fide Mormon actor!) into a serial killer. He had cowed both the cops and the mob alike, prompting a mass-exodus from the city.
After hinting that he had booby-trapped the bridges and tunnels, panicked Gotham citizens crowd onto a ferry–while inmates from the local prison are put onto a different ferry, lest the Joker exploit them as well. It is then that the Joker sadistically reveals that he has rigged both boats to explode, with the detonator for each placed in the hands of the other. They are given until midnight to decide which ship will blow up the other, or the Joker will blow up them both. He does this (as he darkly hinted to Batman earlier) to prove that everyone’s supposed goodness is a facade—a joke—always dropped at the first hint of trouble.
The film had been so unremittingly grim up to that point that there was genuine doubt among the audience on opening night as to which or both of the two boats would do the dirty dead. Of course in retrospect, we needn’t have worried; after some dramatic pauses, the better angels of their natures finally kicked in, as both prisoners and citizens alike refused to blow each other up—all while Batman naturally swooped in and stopped the Joker in the nick of time.
This was the scene that my friends and I, even as we acknowledged the film’s other virtues, nevertheless laughed at the most back in the Summer of ’08–it was just trolley problems for people who had never heard of trolley problems, we said, profound only if you’ve never taken a freshman philosophy class.
Time and age have a way of softening you, however; and beginning around 2015 or 2016 thereabouts, I unexpectedly found myself honest-to-goodness weeping at the ferry scene whenever The Dark Knight appeared on TV. What started getting to me was just that scene’s sincere faith in the existence of a common core of basic human decency.
For a constant question throughout the film you see had been whether the white knight Harvey Dent or the dark knight Batman would serve as the better symbol of hope for the beleaguered people of Gotham; yet when prisoners and citizens alike refused to kill each other, it wasn’t the example of either man they were taking cues from, but simply their own innate sense of common humanity. Their base-line level of goodness came not from Batman or Harvey Dent, but themselves.
I didn’t consider this a profound insight in 2008. Somehow, even during the height of the Iraq war and the tortures and the Patriot Acts and the lies about WMDs and everything else going on at the time of The Dark Knight‘s release, I guess I still somehow took the basic decency of the human race for granted. Must be the luxury of youth, I suppose.
For needless to say, after the events of the past decade or so–the endless mass-shootings, the child prisons and intentional cruelty on the border, the police killings of unarmed citizens, the flagrant and systemic racism, the anti-immigrant hatred, the obvious corruption in high places, the callous indifference to mass-death during a pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine most recently—all of this, just all of this, the basic decency of humanity is no longer something I take for granted. Some days, like Abraham begging God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah, I despair if enough of it even exists anymore, or if it ever did in the first place.
Simply put, I no longer assume that, in real life, someone wouldn’t have flipped the trigger.
Hence why I tear up at the ferry scene nowadays, due to its stubborn insistence that, no matter how dark the night, no matter bad things get, that the vast majority of people are still better than we think–it’s become my favorite part of the movie.
Our own Book of Mormon reads: “whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God” (Ether 12:4). Moroni, you’ll recall, witnessed not only the complete destruction of his people, but their own descent into cruelty and viciousness (see: the whole of Moroni 9) that had doomed them in the first place.
Nevertheless, even after seeing all that, after witnessing all that viciousness and cruelty up close and first hand, he still dug deep into his soul and found hope that the world could be better a place, that people can be basically good, even amidst all this darkness and depravity–this is the ethos of The Dark Knight as well.
We are taught that a third of the hosts of heaven followed Satan into hell after the war in heaven–with the obvious corollary being that two-thirds, a super-majority, did not, and that everyone who walks the Earth today are the ones who stood with God and Christ in the pre-mortal councils of heaven (I am obviously going to ignore for now all the racist old folk doctrines about fence-sitters in the pre-existence and what not). And if the light of Christ “lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (D&C 93:2), that also argues that we all possess a core of common decency that can be trusted in.
The Dark Knight famously ends with Batman instructing Commissioner Gordon to tell everyone that he killed all the mobsters and crooked cops that Harvey Dent took out after his transformation into Two-Face; like Christ, he was taking upon himself the sins of the fallen so that Harvey Dent’s legacy would be redeemed, and the citizens of Gotham would have a hope, a light, to look up towards. He became despised and rejected of men. It is almost too on the nose as Christ-figures go–but, again, I’ve come to appreciate those more and more the older I’ve gotten as well. We really do need a savior, and I’ll take every Christ-figure I can get these days.
Harvey Dent of course was memorably played by LDS actor Aaron Eckhart, and his ability to play both an almost-too-good-to-be-true figure of genuine decency–as well as his heel turn into genuine sociopathic viciousness–will be familiar to anyone who is a member of the Church. But that is not so unusual; Frederick Nietzsche and CS Lewis alike have stated that one must be capable of great evil if they are to be capable of great good.
The trick is to remember that none of us are Harvey Dent the white knight, no–we are all Harvey Two-Face, the hypocrite and fallen sinner. We may all share a common core of decency, but the Joker wasn’t exactly betting the farm when he argued that we all share a fundamental viciousness, as well. The natural man is still an enemy to God. But that is really just another way of saying we all need a savior, we all need to be redeemed. Our innate goodness will not be enough to save us; but it is where we must start if we are to be saved—or be worth saving.