The Dark Knight at 10 Years

The Dark Knight turns 10 years old this week, and it’s time to get out the old rose colored lenses. It really was a monumental film that came at the exact right time to help shape popular culture for the next decade, and it really did help redefine the comic genre. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely has its flaws- such as “No Moah Dead Cops!!”- but the film itself, and Heath Ledger’s iconic Joker in particular, may never be topped as both a watershed comic book movie and a cultural moment that encapsulated an entire era.

I would like to write a really in-depth article about the film, and indeed Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, but I happened to come across this article in The Hollywood Reporter, which pretty much sums up my feelings almost exactly. Check it out:

The Complicated Legacy of The Dark Knight

In particular, there was a comment below the article which really stood out to me, and added the final piece that I may have been unable to articulate. Poster NextBigThing wrote:

“Ah, The Dark Knight- the defining millennial movie of the 2000s.

In retrospect, summer of 2008 was one of those summers where it seems the changing of the time was expedited. Summer of 2007 had served as an end of sorts for the dominant trends of the 2000s (for movies, this meant “finales” for Spider-man, Shrek, and Pirates). All in a short time, it seemed that new eras for politics, economics, technology, music, and movies had begun.

It was the time of Obamamania, a rapidly slowing economy and rising skepticism of insider politicians, new music acts who would become megastars (Katy Perry, Gaga, etc) , the Olympics (Bolt and Phelps became legends), the iPhone – it was a strange mix of rising optimism, rising pessimism, longing for the past and excitement for the future. Of all the summers of the 2000s, 2008 may very well be the most eventful for pop culture. Many things that would come to define the coming years would originate from this time period.

The tragic death of Ledger meant everybody knew about The Dark Knight 6 months in advance- 100% awareness so early made the marketing teams job easy. The first review leaked a few weeks before it opened from Peter Travers of Rolling Stone who first spread the word.

I still remember the midnight screening for The Dark Knight having the most insane crowd response. The Joker’s “magic trick” caused pandemonium. It was strange because Batman Begins, though popular, was not close to this level. The action felt real and was insane, the Joker was hilarious, the Wayne-Gordon-Dent dynamic compelling, and heck, they killed the hero’s love interest! Nobody had ever done that!

This movie was a colossal hit of insane levels. It’s adjusted gross to 2018 is around $680 million without including 3D or iMax surcharges. Black Panther received an estimated 12% bump from these totals. A similar bump gives The Dark Knight a modern gross of $760 million domestic, 3rd overall in the last 20 years.

Black Panther is the only film of recent years to even come close to The Dark Knight’s level of social influence, where the film becomes more than just a movie and fans use it to represent a life philosophy of sorts, but even that feels smaller than The Dark Knight did in 2008. The Dark Knight taught a rapidly maturing generation about the world and inspired so many things. Rip-offs. Heroism with soldiers posing with the logo. Evil (a mass shooter in 2012. The recent Austin package bomber even quoted the film with “I just want to watch the world burn”). A still popular Halloween look. Still used catch phrases (“Why so serious”, “hero we need/not what we deserve”)

If they make THE DARK KNIGHT 4 within the next 3-4 years with Nolan-Bale, it would be a colossal hit. Needs to happen before millennials fully move into parenthood though.”

I agree with him, for the most part. I think part of the reason Nolan really captured the particular cultural moment so deftly, was that in being a Brit, he was an outsider looking in on the situation in America. As such, he was really able to kind of encapsulate the themes of the day in a blunt (some might say dispassionate) way, that those of us too sentimental or close to the times would be unable to equivocate so starkly. We wasted time trying to overcome the trauma of 9/11 with escapist nonsense like Transformers, and then he came and confronted us with the darkness head-on using Batman as his avatar. Of course, his aesthetic also led to some really lame choices that weaken the overall movie (see the endless parade of dopey extras who can’t act for beans), and unpopular though this opinion may be, to me his pick of Bale as Bruce Wayne was a misstep that would undermine the whole series. Ledger simply wipes the floor with Bale’s acting, and he just can’t hold his own against The Joker’s tour de force maniacal performance, versus whatever film he’s off growling in by himself. But that’s a discussion for another day. It wasn’t just a cultural zeitgeist film; the culture itself was changing in 2008, all at once and possibly more rapidly than it had since the 1960s. The Dark Knight happened to hit right in the middle and came to represent all of these ideas we were feeling, coalesced, and for good or ill was a harbinger for what was to come.

To mark the occasion, here’s a small thing I’ve always wanted to note about the series that rarely gets mentioned: Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score, and how one particular piece evolves over the trilogy. Of course, everyone is familiar with Zimmer’s iconic “BWUM BWUUUMMMMMM” Batman theme, but check out the recurring “sentimental” motif that unspools over the three films. In Batman Begins, the theme is introduced whenever Thomas and Martha Wayne are in the flashbacks, and is a very sweeping and triumphal theme that gets reprised throughout:

In The Dark Knight, the theme returns- but for Harvey Dent. The arrangement is slightly different, sweeter, but with a tinge of sadness, perhaps nostalgic for what came for before (musically, the prior theme), and a precursor for Dent’s transformation into Two Face. Here it is; note the sweeping reprisal of the “Wayne family” theme at the end, recalling almost Camelot, and Arthur Pendragon and the Kennedys and how empires do not last:

Finally, here’s the last evolution of the theme in The Dark Knight Rises, played whenever Bruce Wayne appears. It is very soft, sad, hollow,  almost a shadow of what came before but with a heart of nobility, exactly like Wayne himself in the film. This is the final iteration of the motif:

So what do they represent? Well, I believe the evolving theme is supposed to be the spirit of Gotham City, and the hope and belief of good in it. In Batman Begins, that hope is in The Waynes, so it plays when they appear; in The Dark Knight, Harvey is the best chance for saving the city as the white knight, so the theme plays alongside him; and in The Dark Knight Rises, Camelot has fallen and Gotham is a shell of its former glory, but a spark of goodness still resides within Bruce that can be reignited. In other words, the soul of Gotham and the good in people will never die, as long as decent men remember to carry the torch. It’s a beautiful theme carried over the three films, and what I think of most when I reminisce about The Dark Knight Trilogy. Pretty cool stuff!