Batman: The Dark Knight's Nihilism
Christopher Nolan's Batman: Trend of Cynicism Infects the Box-Office
That The Dark Knight – with its all-time record setting box-office performance and superlative critical reception – is the biggest movie of the new millennium is a notion that has quickly been accepted by the public consciousness. The movie’s oppressively dark tone and moral ambiguity make this, to say the least, a surprising development. Yet, it may just be that it is this very dark tone that is the film’s claim to fame. In his review of the film, New York Press film critic Armond White accuses the film of “hip, nihilistic tendencies” – White may or may not have realized that in his negative assessment of the film, he essentially hit upon the reason for its unprecedented success.
Dark Night Exceeds Expecations
The Dark Knight’s success does beg explanation. The film is a two and a half hour crime drama with a violence and intensity factor that pushes its PG-13 rating. Although Heath Ledger’s high-profile death surely added to the curiosity for many viewers, the film does not feature any celebrities known for drawing record setting audiences. The tone is generally morbid, and “Batman” isn’t even in the title. While most experts expected the film to do extremely well, by early 2008 few anticipated that it would out-gross even Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, much less break all-time records.
A Recent Trend in Critically Lauded Films
Armond White’s dismissive blurb may prove the key to the film’s success. What were almost certainly the most critically lauded films of 2007 – No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood – hint at a thirst for cynicism in the modern film-going audience that The Dark Knight satisfactorily quenches. No Country for Old Men’s runaway success was due almost entirely to the character of Anton Chigurh, an inexplicable sociopathic killer whose destructive path cannot be swayed or dented by the forces of good, tradition, or even chance, and eventually so molds the world around him that an old-fashioned, kind-hearted Texas sheriff finds himself unable to recognize the world he grew up in. There Will Be Blood goes even further – putting its entire focus on a grotesquely amoral symbol of individualism without a hint of a redemptive quality, and completely neglecting to find in any other active character, even for the sake of contrast, any significant sign of goodness.
What were arguably 2006’s critical kings – The Departed and Pan’s Labyrinth – bend in similar thematic directions. While The Departed culminates in an almost comic massacre of all main characters, Pan’s Labyrinth concludes by heavily suggesting that the brave trials and efforts of the protagonist, which result in her death, were essentially in vain, and their meaning entirely in her head. This heavily nihilistic approach is all but borrowed in last year’s genre horror film, The Orphanage, which was arguably the most critically well-received horror film since 2005’s The Descent.
The Trend Moves to the Mainstream
In light of this recent trend, what Christopher Nolan does with The Dark Knight is transplant these themes to the most commercially viable mainstream genre today: the superhero movie. While No Country for Old Men’s and There Will Be Blood’s maddeningly inexplicable characters manage to project a sense of philosophical maturity and depth, The Dark Knight’s Joker, who clearly explains himself in lines such as “I am an agent of chaos,” is somewhat simple in comparison. This coupled with The Dark Knight’s level of success suggests that it is not only the sheer brilliance of these recent critically lauded films that earned them their status; today’s audience does seem to genuinely associate gloom and nihilism with realism, insightfulness, and overall good quality in film.
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