an Indoor Kid

I think it’s indicative of the company I keep – nerds, mostly – that I’m the last in my social circle to see this movie. It should also be mentioned that said friends guaranteed me a trip through the wringer – to hear some people talk about it (critics, too), you half expect to be bombarded by nothing less than a giant Cthulhu. I guess this makes them not just nerds, but bébés, too. I recall sleeping soundly that night, but we’ll get to that in just a minute.

Let me start by telling you, my taste in comic books is more “Smartest Kid on Earth” than “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” In spite of these shortcomings, I’ve still got a working knowledge of superhero lore on my side. As a kid, I was an ardent follower of the well-intentioned Batman movie franchise of the 1990s. Running with geeks, even back then, I fondly recall a cappella renditions of “Kiss from a Rose” on the playground. So when I bought my ticket (a day early) and hit the theater, I was still living in the bygone days of the dynamic duo and their plastic nipple suits.

I wasn’t surprised by the fact that “The Dark Knight” was not the outré Batman of my youth. It’s not Jim Carrey bouncing around in a green jumpsuit, looking like Matthew Lesko at the Mudd Club. It’s not a doughy Adam West giving Otto Preminger the old “biff! pow!” It’s not even Jack Nicholson, rocking out to Prince on what I’m sure were leftover sets from “After Hours.” That said, seeing Christian Bale, steely and gruff, tear through Chicago on a giant bigwheel while a city’s worth of people wrestle with those Big Moral Questions seems almost totally alien to me. Naturally the film, like most examples of its genre, never lacks for cringe-inducing moments. Unfortunately, people are quick to confuse immediate discomfort with being genuinely spooked – it’s like that old Hitchcock bomb-under-the-bench scenario. Seeing a man’s mouth get split from ear to ear is graphic and effective, sure, until it’s replaced by something just as bad in the next scene.

“Dark Knight” is lauded as one of the most violent and topical “comic book” movies in recent history: cellphone bombs, wiretapping, everything but the kitchen sink of modern fearmongering! And while I consider myself to be relatively news-savvy, seeing terrorism and offshore Chinese banking get the royal treatment in a Batman movie seems a little incongruous. I suppose it’s the subtle political commentary that’s really supposed to scare us but, here, Chris Nolan and I have met halfway: I think Batman is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, and all of his serious stuff feels a little limp.

What’s strange about the whole affair is that, while attempting to inject a comic book franchise with some real seriousness, a very real, very serious thing actually happened. Sure, “The Dark Knight’s” publicity team could have treated Heath Ledger’s death like an elephant in the room  - instead, they plastered his face all over town. Taking the bait, like they do, American film critics have managed to buoy this tragedy with all sorts of praise, crying “Oscar” and all that. This untimely death is simultaneously No Big Thing and a Big Fucking Deal.

Honestly, and with all due respect, Ledger’s performance isn’t the best I’ve seen all year. Like most actors of his generation, he relied a little too heavily on tics and gestures for my taste, but he gets the job done. And with Bale giving such a prick-ish performance as Master Bruce, we needed a swell villain to round it all out. The Joker’s M.O. is making Batman look like an ineffective chump and, wouldn’t you know it, he totally does. With all the heavy-handed, half-executed CNN “world-we-live-in” trimmings, I was drawn immediately to Ledger as the comic relief. Even though our villain is a really bad egg – some of his actions, taken out of the context of cinema, are genuinely frightening – he’s still funny enough that, like the tacky “Batman” films of yore, I was spared from having to take the whole thing too seriously.