Me and my shadow

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.  —C.G. Jung, Phenomenology of the Self

It is strange watching a movie with a recently deceased actor in it. Especially if the actor was young, said to possess special talent, and “troubled” to boot. This is surely what many people will focus on, watching The Dark Knight: Heath Ledger’s macabre, nearly possessed performance as The Joker. You are reminded of Jason Lee in The Crow — the crude pancake makeup a death mask; the face alive on the screen a chilling message from beyond.

But Ledger, as surely and eagerly as he inhabits the role of an amoral psychopath, an “agent of chaos” unleashed on Gotham City, is really only part of what makes Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins sequel (co-written with brother Jonathan Nolan) tick, and for once in a blue moon, we are forced to think — think hard — while watching a summer movie.

Billionaire Bruce Wayne (a very gaunt Christian Bale), troubled by his crimefighting alter ego, decides to curtail his nighttime activities, placing his hope in new district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). He licks his wounds, knowing that former gal pal Rachel Dawes (morphing from Katie Holmes in the first movie to lanky Maggie Gyllenhaal), the one woman who knows his true identity as Batman, is now dating Dent.

Batman’s woes include a Gotham gone wild, with criminals emboldened after the caped crusader goes after their money (with the help of Police Lt. Jim Gordon, played by Gary Oldman), and a populace who think they can simply don rubber masks and suits and become vigilantes. Lawlessness eats away at Gotham. And Batman is fed up with the fight.

Pace-wise, The Dark Knight suffers from the imbalance: except for a tour-de-force bank heist, the first hour drags, depicting a grim, humorless Gotham populated by grim, humorless “straights” — those tasked with upholding the law, like Gordon, Dent and Wayne. It’s a welcome ray of demented sunshine when The Joker steps up to the plate, the last man standing in a bloody bank robbery. He warps a line by Nietzsche before capping the bank’s president: “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you… stranger!”

Once the crazy clown makeup and stooped gait of Ledger start working their magic, The Dark Knight is off into deeper Jungian waters. We are given hints of the Jung connection in Gordon’s epitaph for Batman at the end of the movie: “He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the hero Gotham needs right now.” Psychologist Jung believed the ego projects its inner “shadow” qualities onto others to avoid facing the darkness within itself. Gotham is, in a sense, a negative projection of Batman’s shadow — just as he is the kind of deeply disturbed vigilante that their “straight” but fearful lives cry out for.

Traces of 9/11 flash through The Dark Knight, not least in the sonar system that billionaire Wayne manages to rig up by tapping into every Gotham resident’s cell phone. Wayne takes a hard, Bush-era line on the need to know exactly what’s going on out there among the citizenry.

And of course, Ledger’s Joker is the perfect manifestation of Batman’s Jungian shadow, just as Batman is Wayne’s shadow: a man who kills and destroys simply because it entertains him. A man who has rearranged his own face (or so goes one version) to allow himself to always carry a smile, however twisted and hideous. He plays up the duality with Batman in one delicious line: “I don’t want to kill you; you complete me.” He’s the funhouse mirror reflection of the crimefighting Batman, and he’s allowed to have much more fun in his societal role.

And of Ledger’s unhinged performance, what can one say? He delivers his lines in an unnerving Midwestern twang, suggesting wholesome common sense gone round the bend. Licking his lips, darting and flicking his tongue wildly, he would be considered over the top if The Joker, by definition, wasn’t already way over the top. Ledger has giddy fun, posing in white nurse garb, blowing up hospitals, burning stacks of money, YouTubing his own antics. A dark role, taken to its crazy-diamond conclusion. Surely, Ledger deserves an Oscar nod for livening up the party.

Nolan deserves much credit, too, for rendering Gotham (Chicago, actually) in hues darker than even Tim Burton imagined. Gotham here has a pulse, a real sense of something gone wrong with its insides. And the gadgets — prototyped by dapper butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) and engineer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) — extend the Batman ethos to high-tech levels. Because, after all, Batman is simply a man, not a superhero, albeit with great fighting skills and “smart clothes.” There’s the sonar device he uses to navigate Gotham, much like a bat; the ever-awesome Batmobile; and a new kick, the Batpod, which the crimefighter handles like a gnarly BMX-er.

Much is made of Batman’s escalation of mob violence in Gotham. By going after the mob, he pokes a stick into a scorpions’ nest; of course they retaliate. This, too, ties in to the moral imperatives every country — every Gotham, every individual — must face when confronting evil. The Nolan script plays on dualities — cause/effect, Ego/Shadow, yin/yang — to the point where you feel you’re reading a novel, not watching a summer action flick. But to its credit, the script never dumbs down — or slows down — the story.

Watching The Dark Knight, I was also reminded of our limitless curiosity about the nature of evil, and the clever ways that Hollywood manages to serve up evil plans in interesting new packages. In an uncomfortable sense, Hollywood’s fascination with evil bears an obverse relationship to the way terrorists think up new ways to terrorize. The difference is, terrorists usually package their evil in an attempt to “send a message”; whereas Hollywood more often explores evil for sheer exploitation purposes. The Dark Knight manages to make us think about evil, and while we are entertained, and sent a message, we are never merely allowed to go along for the ride.