When we left off last time, Batman had just managed to vanquish Ra’s Al Gul and his ignorant Utilitarian morality without breaking any of his Kantian-style moral imperatives…

Unfortunately, just as it appears that Batman finally has a solid, workable moral system to work with, along comes this clown:

Joker is undeniably a much cooler, wicked, and more fascinating villain than Ra’s, and one of the coolest villains in the entire pantheon of superhero adversaries. Our fascination with the Joker stems from the fact that he’s not, as he points out, all that different from Batman. To most of the outside world, like Bruce’s ever-loyal butler Alfred, the Joker is just a maniac who “wants to watch the world burn,” but he actually has an extraordinarily well defined purpose and method behind the madness. He says to Batman:

To them, you’re just a freak, like me. They need you right now. But when they don’t, they’ll cast you out, like a leper. See, their morals, their code… it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you, when the chips are down, these… these civilized people? They’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.

It’s alluded to that Nolan’s Joker, much like Bruce, caught some tough breaks early on in life (although he never nails down a consistent story). Whatever happened, it’s not implausible to think that he had to face up to the same sort of fear of death and meaninglessness that young Bruce faced. Nietzsche called the apparent meaningless of our short existence in the face of death the “nihilistic void.” He claimed that with the “death of God” (that is to say, the elimination of the need for God and divine commandments to explain the world and human behavior), there could no longer be any coherent, rational foundation for a universal morality. In response to the fact of our existence in the face of this apparent “void,” he believed that we must actively carve out our own meaning and purpose, irrespective of societal or cultural rules or “obligations” that restrict the expansive force of life and human “will to power.”

What the Joker tries to argue to Batman is that they both represent responses to the this problem of existence, and that his (the Joker’s) is just as sensible as Batman’s. Whereas Batman re-creates himself as a moral guardian aligned to infallible moral rules, the Joker concludes that the entire notion of a rational morality is incoherent and re-creates himself as a destructive and irrational force of chaos dedicated to demonstrating the irrationality of any sort of morality. What’s more, he does it because it’s fun; he finds a delicious enjoyment in murder, explosions, and….”gasoline”! What’s alarming is that his response to the world seems just as rational as Batman’s. Actually, according to Nietzsche, it seems more rational; while Batman is a slave to the moral imperatives that he lives by and is therefore limited, bound, and miserable much of the time, the Joker is liberated by his disregard for any moral standards outside of his own (he’s clearly having much more fun than Batman). All of his scheming and toying with the people of Gotham and Batman is aimed at making them realize the irrationality of their moral beliefs. While he might not be able to make Batman kill anyone directly, he succeeds in making Batman choose between the lives of two people, in effect forcing him to let one of them die. In this case, there seems to be no right answer. Even when Batman makes the choice that is “best for Gotham” and lets Rachel die, it seems (to me at least) cold and morally unsatisfying. Joker plays the same game with the people of Gotham in the boat situation. His greatest triumph over the course of the film is converting Harvey Dent to his side, formerly a staunch moral idealist and absolutist who was unwilling to tolerate any compromise or dirty means in the fight against crime. “The only sensible way to live is without rules,” he tells Batman, and all of the rules that Batman and Gotham abide by are a hilarious joke to him.

Ultimately, good triumphs and the people of Gotham show the Joker that they are “willing to believe in good,” and Commissioner Gordon gets to make a cool speech about Batman that I always forget the words to. Batman stops the Joker, but not without a price. At the beginning of the final movie, he’s somewhat of a broken bat. In order to stop the Joker, he not only had to allow his one closest friend to die, but also had to bend some of his other moral beliefs to their outer limits. Recall when he drops Sal Moroni off a roof and says he’s “counting on it” not to kill him? Or how about how he enacts his own miniature Patriot act and puts aside the privacy of Gotham’s citizens in order to find the Joker? Batman’s absolute, incorruptible commitment to moral standards (in contrast to a villain who is willing to use any necessary means to accomplish his ends) is what originally led us to consider him a hero, but in the second movie he seems more blurry around the edges. Yet, we still think he’s the good guy. It would be hard, for example to get too upset at his trivial invasion of the people of Gotham’s privacy, since without doing this he would have allowed the Joker to blow up a boatload of people (two, actually).

So what to make of this? The answer (sort of) next time when I’ll talk Bane, and why he wears the mask…

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