Work of fiction · film
The Dark Knight
Is lying to people to protect them still believing in them?
Version analyzed : The 2008 film alone; neither Batman Begins nor The Dark Knight Rises is used as evidence.
A masked vigilante, an upright prosecutor and an honest cop are about to free Gotham from the mob. A new kind of criminal changes the game: he wants neither power nor fortune, he wants to prove something about the city's people. The film puts to the test two things we assume go together: trust in people, and the truth we owe them.
The problem
The common belief put to the test
We usually assume that honest people are honest through and through, and that a well-defended city has nothing to hide from its inhabitants: the truth about those who govern it is owed to all.
The problem
A city does not hold together through its laws alone: it also holds through the trust it places in a few exemplary people, and through what it knows about them. Telling it the whole truth about those it believes in risks ruining that trust. Hiding part of it means deciding on its behalf that it could not bear it, and so doubting it at the very moment one claims to protect it. The more solid we think people are, the less reason we have to lie to them; the less sure of them we are, the more protective the lie seems, and the more it treats them as minors. The film sets up this impasse; even the way out it chooses at the end does not make it go away.
Gotham is eaten away by the mob. Three men think they can free it: Batman, a masked vigilante who by day is the billionaire Bruce Wayne; Harvey Dent, the new district attorney; Jim Gordon, an honest cop in a police force that is not. Then comes the Joker, a criminal who wants neither money nor power. We usually hold two convictions together: people are better than we fear, and those who protect them owe them the truth. Step by step, the film builds a situation in which we can no longer keep both, and in which every way out costs something we took to be essential.
It all starts from a wager on what people are worth once they are pushed to the wall. The Joker has a thesis and he states it: the morals of "civilized" people only hold while things go well; at the first real blow, they will eat each other. His crimes are demonstrations. He traps his victims in rigged choices, then reads their reactions as proof of what they are. These ordeals, in his view, reveal human nature. pictured life without a common power as a war of every man against every man (the ), not because people are wicked, but because each has reason to fear the other; the Joker wants to create that state in the middle of a city, just to see. Against him, Alfred, Bruce's butler and confidant, tells a memory from Burma: a bandit who stole gemstones and threw them away. He could be neither bought nor reasoned with. Some men, Alfred concludes, just want to watch the world burn. If the Joker is right, a city's goodness rests only on what reassures it. Gotham seems half to believe it: it has placed its hope in a single man.
That man is Harvey Dent. Gotham sees in him the proof that the city can be cleaned up in the open and by the rules, where Batman works masked and in the shadows. Bruce Wayne himself counts on him to be able, one day, to hang up the cape. At a dinner, Dent recalls that in times of crisis Rome entrusted the city to a single man; Rachel Dawes, an assistant district attorney and Bruce's childhood friend, answers that the last one was Caesar, who never gave the power back. Dent replies with a line that foreshadows what follows: you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. The Joker, for his part, goes after Dent from his very first moves. He has understood that to strike a city there is no need to corrupt the crowd: it is enough to reach the one it believes in.
The characters' evolution and the fiction's inferred position are hidden (spoilers).
- Character, placed by their acts
- Main character
- Main antagonist
- What they say / what they do
Click a character to see the scenes their position rests on.
A city that lives on a symbol must also decide what it will know about it. The film raises this difficulty before anyone has fallen. Batman lies for a living: by day, Bruce Wayne plays the frivolous billionaire so that no one suspects what he does at night. When the Joker threatens to kill someone every day until Batman unmasks, Bruce decides to turn himself in, to stop the killings rather than out of love for the truth. An old question then returns: does a city hold together through the truth, or through what it believes? has the citizens of his ideal city told a about their origins, so that they love it and keep to their place in it. 's Grand Inquisitor goes further: freedom weighs too heavily on human beings, who prefer bread, miracle and authority to it; a few take it from them for their own good and keep the truth to themselves. distinguishes the occasional lie, as old as politics, from organized lying, which destroys the shared facts without which there is no common world left. The film leaves these answers hanging while it puts the city and its symbol to the test.
And you?
0/4 answeredAnswer these questions: your point appears on the map, among the characters. Your answers stay on your device and add to your profile.
After a disaster (a flood, a huge blackout), the police are overwhelmed for several days.
In your view, what happens most often?
An ordinary person, under heavy pressure (a threat, fear for their family), commits a serious act.
In your view, what does this most often reveal?
A very useful neighborhood association rests on the trust its founder inspires. You find out that she embezzled money years ago, then secretly paid it back. Revealing it would probably force the association to close.
What do you do?
A loved one who is seriously ill asks no questions about their chances. The doctor has told you they are slim.
What do you do?
Answer on both axes to appear on the map.
The characters
- Main character
Masked vigilante, behind the identity of billionaire Bruce Wayne
Played by Christian Bale
What they embody
He will not let himself kill, and wants to believe the city can one day do without him.
Key action
After the Joker's ultimatum, he decides to reveal who he is to stop the killings.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological optimism
- The value of truthVital illusions
- Criterion of right actionConsequentialism
- Main antagonist
The Joker
A criminal with no known name or past
Played by Heath Ledger
What they embody
People's morality is only a veneer, which cracks at the first real blow.
Key action
He demands that Batman unmask, and kills every day until he does.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological pessimism
- The value of truthTruth that empowers ≠
Harvey Dent
Gotham's district attorney
Played by Aaron Eckhart
What they embody
A city can recover through clean institutions and justice done in broad daylight.
Key action
He has hundreds of mob members indicted at once.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological optimism
- The value of truthThe primacy of truth
Jim Gordon
Honest cop, Batman's ally
Played by Gary Oldman
What they embody
You can only clean up a city with what you have, imperfect allies included.
Key action
He works with officers he knows are dubious, for lack of others.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological optimism
- The value of truthVital illusions
Alfred Pennyworth
Bruce Wayne's butler and confidant
Played by Michael Caine
What they embody
Some men want nothing except to watch the world burn.
Key action
He tells Bruce the story of a bandit in Burma who stole gemstones only to throw them away.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological pessimism
- The value of truthVital illusions
Rachel Dawes
Assistant district attorney, Bruce's childhood friend
Played by Maggie Gyllenhaal
What they embody
Justice must go through the law, and we owe the truth to those we love.
Key action
She backs Harvey Dent and tells Bruce what she thinks without sparing him.
Main positions
- Vision of humanityAnthropological optimism
- The value of truthThe primacy of truth
How the work answers, in its own way
The film sides neither with the Joker nor with a naive trust: it shows people who can give way, and others who hold when pushed. It then takes seriously a more unsettling question: may those who protect a city decide what it should know?
What it leaves open
The ferry test is built by the story: two gestures are not a thesis about people. The Joker is a character, not a philosopher: his thesis is staged, not argued, and he rigs his own proofs. On release, the film was read as a defense of surveillance and post-9/11 emergency measures, and also as a critique of them; this page sticks to the story.
Other problems in the work
Questions the work raises in passing, over an episode or a subplot: they do not carry the whole work, but they are worth a pause.
The interrogation, the sonar
How far may one go to stop a man?
Batman has only one rule: do not kill. Everything else is negotiable: he abducts a mob accountant from Hong Kong, beats the Joker in the interrogation room, turns the city's phones into a sonar that sees everything. Lucius Fox, who runs Bruce's company and supplies his equipment, agrees to use it once while declaring it contrary to who he is. This is the problem of : acting well seems to require what one judges wrong.
The opening, the dinner
A vigilante, by what right?
Copycats in hockey pads play armed Batmen; one of them asks what makes him different from them; Batman answers with a quip (he isn't wearing hockey pads), which says nothing about what would ground his right. The dinner talk about Rome and Caesar asks the same question on the scale of the city: who grants an emergency power, and who takes it back?
Harvey Dent's coin
Is chance fair?
Spoiler passageThe ending
Taking the blame to keep the peace?
Spoiler passage
What the fiction seems to defend
Distinct from what the characters think: where the narrative seems to lean, judging by what it confirms or refutes, what it stages and what it values. This is an inferred, debatable reading, not its authors' opinion. On each axis, the diamond ◆ marks where the narrative appears to lean.
- Inferred reading on “Vision of humanity” (reveals plot turns)
- Inferred reading on “The value of truth” (reveals plot turns)
- Inferred reading on “Criterion of right action” (reveals plot turns)
The concepts it sheds light on
- Hobbes imagined life without a common power to show why we need one. The Joker does the reverse: he tries to produce that state in the middle of an organized city, to prove that order was only a veneer.
- The film stages a modern version of the noble lie: a fable kept alive so that the city keeps faith in its institutions.
- Batman will not let himself kill, yet he abducts, beats and spies on a whole city to stop the Joker. The film raises the problem of dirty hands: can one act well in politics without committing acts one judges wrong oneself?
In the corpus
The question the work raises, and where it meets the framework: the problems, thought experiments, arguments and thinkers that shed light on it.
The question
Is lying to people to protect them still believing in them?
The framework's problems at stake
- Vision of humanityWhere does evil in humans come from?If humans do evil, is that bent in them from the start, a drive or a fallen nature, or does it arise from without, from social comparison and inequality? Depending on the answer, wickedness is our depth or our product.
- The value of truthThe city and the lieMany common orders rest on unverifiable narratives, from founding myth to official fiction: does a society owe its members the truth, or can it live on shared myths?
- The value of truthIllusion for another's sakeWithholding a diagnosis, embellishing a situation: deciding that someone will live better without a truth means judging in their place what it is worth to them; who has that right?
Thought experiments
Arguments
- The crooked timber of humanityWhat resurfaces at every collapse of order, pillage and cruelty, is no accident; even our best conduct is undermined by amour-propre. Institutions do not cure this nature, they contain it: a livable common life must reckon with this depth.
- It is circumstances, not naturePessimism reads an evil nature into our crimes. But our conduct varies enormously with circumstances, and mass evil often owes more to ordinary functionaries than to monsters; history knows real retreats of cruelty. What changes so is not a fixed depth but a plasticity.
- Man is good, society corrupts himIn the state of nature, man has only self-love and pity, neither of which makes him wicked. Wickedness presupposes comparison, amour-propre, which arises with social life and inequality: what is taken for an evil nature is the effect of a history.
- The lie that infantilizes
- The lie comes back
- Never a mere meansPersons are worth something as ends in themselves, never reducible to their usefulness; to use someone 'for the good' denies this dignity, and no gain redeems that denial. Some acts are therefore unjust in themselves.
Close thinkers
- PhilosopherHobbesThe Joker wants to recreate in the middle of a city the state of nature Hobbes imagined to justify a common power.
- PhilosopherPlatoThe noble lie of the Republic: a fable useful to the city, told by those who govern it.
- PhilosopherDostoevskyThe Grand Inquisitor holds that human beings cannot bear the truth and that someone must carry it for them.
- PhilosopherHannah ArendtFor her, political lying destroys the common world: the most direct answer to the film's final choice.
- PhilosopherMichael WalzerThe problem of dirty hands: acting well in politics may require acts one judges wrong.
Going further
Readings
- Plato, , Book III, 414b-415d : The noble lie: the fable rulers tell so that the city holds together.
- Hobbes, , Chapter 13 : The state of nature the Joker wants to recreate, and the reason we leave it.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, "The Grand Inquisitor", Book V, chapter 5 : The strongest defense of the idea that human beings must be spared the truth.
- Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics : Why political lying ruins the common world: the counterpoint to the final choice.
- Michael Walzer, Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands : Can one govern without getting one's hands dirty? The article that named Batman's problem.
Other fictions
- The Matrix contests : The same problem of the truth owed to people, seen from the other side: The Matrix leans toward the truth that frees, while The Dark Knight seems to accept a protective illusion, this once. Setting them side by side sheds light on both.