The word “Batman” is omitted from the title of The Dark Knight for good reason: He’s hardly in it. His screen time pales in comparison to his adversary’s—maybe not in terms of minutes, but certainly in memorableness. To fend off comparisons to Jack Nicholson, director Christopher Nolan pulled a wild card for his Joker: the newly respectable Heath Ledger. And the late actor, with a fusillade of raw (but intricately coordinated) malice, roars past every other respectable performer in this film. It’s an epical swan song for Ledger’s career, and it’s just what Nolan must have been looking for—and it’s exactly wrong for this movie.

Ledger was a very good actor, and might have eventually become a great one, but, even at his best, he was always acting. When his lovelorn cowboy in Brokeback Mountain agonized, one could picture Ledger working up a fury in front of his mirror the morning before. Likewise, every tic, every grimace, every lick of the lips that his Joker makes in The Dark Knight seems right on schedule. Ledger was a sincere hard worker who took professional chances; he meticulously studied and scrutinized every detail of the characters he played and tried his damnedest to absorb their pathos. But, though his hard work paid off, his methods were often transparent. Watching his Joker, one can see the extent of his toils. The problem with his performance, which is a problem with Nolan’s conception, is that Ledger works too hard.

Nicholson, who grew fat on an unprecedented paycheck for his work in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, knew better than to overwork his acting muscles refining the role of a gangster who slips into a vat of acid, decides to wear clown makeup and causes mayhem thereafter. The actor relished in a hammy performance which perfectly jibed with Burton’s excessively silly, off-kilter vision. But Nolan’s no Burton. His take on the superhero franchise has gotten so dark, it’s become lights-out. In Batman Begins, as in Spider-Man II, it was personal—Bruce Wayne, Batman’s Fortune 500 alter ego, battled with his psyche and from villain to villain to villain (with Katie Holmes nestled in between). Nolan’s “darkness,” in comparison to Burton’s, lay mainly in the fact that Christian Bale brooded where Michael Keaton was wry. Batman Begins was great fun because it was given room to grow; the climaxes kept mounting, but the principals were given enough space to cultivate performances that were just funny and believable enough to make Batman’s personal crises plausible. The Dark Knight is all Ledger, all sadism—the Joker is so pumped up that we hardly remember that we’re watching the Joker.

For the role, the Aussie’s boy-next-door looks are tarnished with greasy, phlegm-colored locks, bulbous scars and makeup smeared on like an Insane Clown Posse groupie’s. This Joker’s a clown Rob Zombie would be proud of. But the writers (Nolan co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan, and the story with David S. Goyer) splatter him throughout the movie as if he were a work of genius. They feed him with little globules of Foucauldian nihilism, and Ledger delivers them menacingly. It boils down to “the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules!”—everything’s random, so let’s dynamite
everything set up to maintain order. I’m sure the writers intentionally left the discrepancy between the Joker’s hostility toward order and planning and his ability to pull off elaborate ruses glaring in order to give him a supernatural mystique. But in so doing they waive all grounding this film has in “realism.” It’s silly in the wrong way—pretentious for masquerading as profound. Nolan’s Joker is differentiated from Burton’s because this clown appears to have a Philosophy 101 textbook up his sleeve, and one’s credulousness is further taxed by this Joker’s lack of backstory. His daddy-beat-me tales are all lies; he’s just an omnipotent boogeyman—a Michael Myers—apparently the embodiment of absolute evil. How could Roger Ebert say that, with this film, “Batman is not a comic book anymore” when its bad guy is pure 2-D comic-book contrivance? His motive is to derive pleasure from dispensing pain; it doesn’t get more basic (or shallow) than that. (Critics weren’t too hip to the same shortcoming in No Country for Old Men, either.)

And most critics have struck out again: They’re catering to the worst in the movie. According to Dana Stevens in Slate, “Chris Nolan does more nuanced thinking about the war on terror than we’ve seen from the Bush administration in seven years… The use of 9/11 would be exploitive only if Nolan didn’t care about thinking through 9/11 for its own sake, as he clearly does.” I think Stevens is onto something—Nolan is trying to take a stab at making analogies. But his metaphors are dangerously reckless. If the Joker is meant to represent terrorists, then Nolan is saying that terrorists are cardboard meanies whose only desire is to make their enemies suffer. It may be a more acceptable claim if the Joker merely represents Americans’ post-9/11 insecurity (despite Stevens’ assertion that, “make no mistake, Heath Ledger’s Joker is a terrorist”) because the rottenness of Gotham is what produced him—the way American imperialism “produced” Osama bin Laden. But that’s a very general parallel, and—make no mistake—exploitative. And if Gotham’s anger at Batman after he is discredited at the end is supposed to be analogous to the low polling of our current president, then the movie’s viewpoint is deeply élitist. Even if the movie is ambiguous about vigilantism, it is so in a context in which it clearly takes a superhero to take on super-villains like the Joker. Is The Dark Knight then a defense of the rash actions taken by the Bush administration in “fighting terrorism”? Spoiler alert: Batman is only discredited because he’s taking the heat for crimes committed by Two-Face. Wait! Maybe Harvey Dent is Dick Cheney!

A shining example of the movie’s brand of intellectual discourse is its misplaced commentary on FISA. Wayne has rigged up all of Gotham’s cell phones to detect the Joker’s whereabouts without the consent of the phone’s owners. Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne’s technology czar and staid civil-libertarian conscience, agrees to use this invasive technology, but only this once. The scenario is equivalent to that old right-wing philosophical farce where a bomb is ticking at a crowded shopping mall and you’re Jack Bauer with the terrorist who planted the explosive right in front of you. Is it just to torture him if he knows how to defuse it? Perhaps, in that case, torture is just. But the probability of that scenario happening is about as high as the probability that a demonic super-clown will threaten to blow up some ferries. Nolan, one might argue, at least raises the issue. Sure, but Wayne’s detection system does save the day…

Iron Man also had a clear political subtext: American corporations selling munitions to rogues is a no-no. But that movie was at its worst in a scene where monstrous terrorists were attacking poor, innocent civilians. The black-and-white, good-versus-evil palette necessary for this brand of heightened comic-book “realism” smears everywhere when dealing with the evils of the real world. Iron Man worked because it was daffy and aware of its own genre, and its message was incontiguous to its fantasy elements. Likewise, the X-Men were an open symbol for all outsiders, rather than representations of real people. But when movies like The Dark Knight—with its pretensions of realism—try to pull the politics of the real world into their fluky fantasy contexts, things get sticky. How can it not be manipulative? It’s like a divorced mother telling her child at bedtime that she’s Snow White and the Wicked Witch represents her ex-husband; reducing real people into archetypes is a shifty, dangerous business.

Despite its philosophical shortcomings, however, The Dark Knight keeps you going. It’s gripping and its two-and-a-half hours warp on by. The editing is so zippy that the movie is, in a way, perfect escapism: You can’t fit your own thoughts in edgewise. (That also makes for perfect propaganda.) The only introductory scenes are for Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Gotham’s new “White Knight” of a district attorney—and the boyfriend of Bruce Wayne’s ex (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Holmes). Dent has convicted a big chunk of the city’s underworld, which has recently found a new, uneasy ally: the Joker. Eckhart is, perhaps, the only actor in the movie who shows some range; the lawyer’s façade breaks down when he becomes a pawn of the super-villain. Bam-bam-boom—the virtuous Dent, courtesy of the Joker, becomes the vengeful Two-Face. There’s too little time spent between these two Batman nemeses, and it seems a bit contrived that Two-Face lets the Joker off the hook so flippantly (even though with his new status as super-villain, we knew he would), and decides to go after his former allies instead.

But notice how I’ve not mentioned Batman? Bruce Wayne has his longing for his ex-girlfriend, Rachel, and the Joker makes an ultimatum that he’ll keep killing until Batman is unmasked. Wayne’s decision-making process here is not badly played, but, in the long run, it doesn’t affect the plot all too much. Bale and Michael Caine, as Wayne’s butler and confidante Alfred, have a few zingy lines, but both seem crusty and stiff—and neglected. Gary Oldman, like Ledger, is a workhorse, and the neurotic anxiety of Lt. Gordon is a little fun. The prestigious Freeman, as Fox, is assured and smooth until he transitions to pedantic. But this is Ledger’s show, and nobody stands in his way. He’s a funky clown, and a funny one, too—Ledger’s triumphant pearls of humor account for most of the movie’s best moments and place it in its proper genre. But Nolan places his flaky construction in the foreground of everything, and the Joker’s wily inhuman-ness gets to be oppressive—particularly when the faux-realistic Gotham City (read: Chicago) around him is nothing much to look at.

One may take issue with The Dark Knight because Nolan is making sadism glamorous by making the Joker its most appealing character. I wouldn’t make the claim; the violence is de rigueur and the director’s faith in the goodness in mankind is what ultimately thwarts the Joker. But it is a tad pretentious and extremely soft-headed for the filmmakers to pass off their comic-book fantasy as realism or their pyrotechnics as poetry. The moral soup Nolan has devised for The Dark Knight isn’t dumb, but it’s the kind of stuff that has been built into the “Batman” material since the beginning. These filmmakers have exposed that material in a fairly intelligent way, and I like how Bruce Wayne wants to drop his self-appointed street-fighter persona and cede the heroic mantle to Dent, the legitimate crime fighter. Perhaps one reviewer was apt in comparing Wayne to Hamlet—but I never bought Hamlet’s change of heart, and I don’t like this movie’s fascistic determination that the criminal justice system is not enough, that we need incorruptible supermen to fight our wholly corrupt super-foes. (In the end, legal-system corruption is shouldered by the vigilante who doesn’t get any credit for his heroism.)

The makers of the camp-classic 1960s television show had Adam West’s caped crusader praise the banal virtues of the American way with his tongue craftily planted in his cheek; those responsible for The Dark Knight aren’t nearly so clever. In trying to be so realistic and in trying to be so profound, it’s possible the filmmakers lost touch with their insinuations. They’ve presented a vision of the world, all right, but it’s one tainted by reading too many comic books.