man who thinks he is above the law.
Bruce: Exactly, who appointed the Bat Man?
Dent: We did. All of us who stood by and let scum take control
of our city.
Natascha: But this is a democracy, Harvey.
Dent: When their enemies were at the gates, the Romans would
suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect the city, and
it wasn’t considered an honor, it was considered a public service.
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Rachel: Harvey, the last man that they appointed to protect the
Republic was named Caesar, and he never gave up his power.
Dent: Ok, fine. You either die a hero or you live long enough to
see yourself become the vil ain. Look, whoever the Bat Man is
he doesn’t want to do this for the rest of his life, how could he?
Batman is looking for someone to take up his mantle.
Natascha: Someone like you, Mr. Dent?
Dent: Maybe, if I’m up to it.
He is not up to it, and since both Gordon and Batman agree that Dent is Gotham’s finest, it turns out that no one is up to it. For most of The Dark Knight, Batman believes that Dent is the “real hero” that he “can never be.” Bruce sees his own fight against organized crime
as provisional, and hopes to be able to create the conditions whereby
a public official of a democratic government can take up the struggle
through more legitimate means. Rachel clearly influenced Bruce
into taking this view. Towards the opening of Batman Begins she preaches the virtues of an impartial Justice system over vigilante
vengeance, and while Bruce initial y responds that “your system
is broken” he ultimately tel s Ducard that the man he is supposed
to execute “should be tried.” Ducard replies: “By who? Corrupt
bureaucrats? Criminals mock society’s laws. You know this better
than most.” This was Bruce’s view, but he has come around to seeing things Rachel’s way.
Yet in the end, we see that Rachel makes excuses to break her
promise to Bruce, betraying him to be with Dent – whose character
she grossly misjudges as being superior to that of Batman. When
Alfred explains to her why Bruce and Dent agree that Batman
should not turn himself in, she completely misses the point of what
he means by saying that Bruce is not being a hero. She leaves a letter with him whose contents consist of an appalling betrayal of Bruce.
Alfred decides to withhold the letter and then ultimately to burn
it altogether, which Nolan shows us as one of the montages over
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Gordon’s closing narration in The Dark Knight. The juxtaposition of that image together with this narration is intended to suggest that
Rachel was just another member of the mob. Bruce blinded himself
to her true character (or lack thereof) because without his love for
her he would be so alone. Alfred burns the letter so that this sudden realization of almost total loneliness will not endanger Batman’s
compassion for the people of Gotham.
Whether or not Nolan will admit it publicly, one moral of his film
is that a Caesar is not only justified under certain circumstances, but that the suspension of democracy need not be temporary. Lucius
Fox was mistaken to believe that it is wrong for one man (or a few)
to have as much power as the sonar cel ular spying system has given
Batman, and Bruce Wayne was wrong to think that he had to delegate
this power to Fox and then allow him to destroy the machine after
only a single use. The Dark Knight explores why Democracy is a misguided political system altogether. In this closing narration,
we see the total inversion of Gordon and Wayne’s initial belief that
Dent is the true hero and Batman only a temporary stopgap. Dent’s
heroism is a lie that Batman, who is far more than a hero, decides
must be maintained for the citizens’ own good. Ras Al Ghul was
right that “theatricality and deception are powerful weapons”, and Batman learns that it is sometimes necessary to use both. Here is the
dialogue and narration of The Dark Knight’s devastating last scene: Gordon: Thank you.
Batman [after having fallen]: You don’t have to thank me.
Gordon: Yes, I do.
The Joker won. Harvey’s prosecution, everything he fought for,
undone. Whatever chance you gave us of fixing our city, dies
with Harvey’s reputation. We bet it all on him. The Joker took
the best of us and tore him down. People will lose hope.
Batman: They won’t. They must never know what he did.
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Gordon: Five dead. Two of them cops. You can’t sweep that up.
Batman: But the Joker cannot win. Gotham needs its true hero
[he turns Two Face’s head over to the Harvey side]. You either die
a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a vil ain. I
can do those things, because I’m not a hero, unlike Dent. I killed those people. That’s what I can be.
Gordon: No, you can’t, you’re not.
Batman: I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be. Call it in.
Gordon [giving a speech before Dent’s portrait]: “A hero, not the
hero we deserved, but the Hero we needed, nothing less than a
Knight, shining.”
[Gordon’s closing narration, over images of him breaking down
the Bat signal, and the cops chasing Batman…]
Gordon: They’ll hunt you.
Batman: You’l hunt me. You’l condemn me. Set the dogs on me, because that’s what needs to happen. Because sometimes
Truth isn’t good enough [OVER THE IMAGE OF ALFRED
BURNING RACHEL’S LETTER], sometimes people deserve
more, sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.
Gordon’s son: Batman. Batman! Why’s he running, dad?
Gordon: Because we have to chase him...
Gordon’s son: He didn’t do anything wrong.
Gordon: ...because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the
one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him, because he can take
it, because he’s not our hero, he’s a silent Guardian, a watchful protector – a dark knight.
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Beautiful, terrible – but only the way a myth, a modern legend can
be, right? On the contrary, that is what the mob believes and what
The Cosmic Joker who manipulates them wants you to believe.
Nolan gives us a hint that he knows otherwise. The card Joker tacks
to corpses of the Batman copycats reads: “Will the real Batman
please stand up.”
In the closing narration of The Dark Knight, with its reference to the “guardian” and the noble lie, it becomes clear that Nolan is
promoting a new interpretation of the idea of Guardianship that we
find in Plato’s Republic – the most anti-democratic political text in the history of Philosophy. The basic problem of the Republic is set forth in the parable of “the Ring of Gyges”, from 358a–362b in Book
II.1 This thought experiment is provided as a means to strengthen
the argument of Thrasymachus that might makes right, with which
Republic opens in Book I before going on to counter this view for the rest of the text. Gyges is a Lydian shepherd who, in the midst of a terrible thunderstorm and earthquake, finds the subterranean tomb
of a giant in a crevice that has just cracked open the Earth. There are many marvelous things in the tomb but the gian
t himself is naked
except for a ring, which Gyges removes and slips onto his own finger
before leaving the chamber. Later, he discovers that whenever he
turns this ring inward he becomes invisible, because others discuss
him as if he is not there. He uses this power to have sex with the
Queen and murder her husband, installing himself as the King of
Lydia.
Plato asks, if there were two such rings, one being given to what
we take to be a just man and the other to an unjust man, would not
nearly everyone at least privately think of the just man as a fool if
he did not go about raping and plundering with impunity, if he did
not, in effect, behave exactly as the unjust man does (and would
do even more efficaciously with such a ring)? In an annex to the
Gyges parable, Plato sharpens the question. Putting aside the ring,
what if the state of affairs in the world were such that the man who
1 Al an Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, 1991), 36-39.
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only seems just in order to profit thereby were to be rewarded for
his veiled injustice at every turn, whereas the just man would be
taken by the many to be unjust and on that account hunted down
and subjected to every variety of torture before, in the end, being
crucified, then who could honestly say he would prefer to be a just
man rather than a man who in the eyes of the many only seems
just? Bruce Wayne’s extraordinary wealth, honored position as ‘the
Prince of Gotham’, and his cunning intellect, afford him something
like the Ring of Gyges – he could be the seemingly just man, being
celebrated as a philanthropist while getting away with all kinds of
dastardly deeds or at least living the callow life of a playboy. Instead, he chooses to be a feared, hated, hunted, vigilant guardian who
protects those who persecute him and who cannot expect a hero’s
reward.
The famous or infamous passages on the so-called ‘philosopher
king’ as Guardian of the city-state appear from 497b-503b of the
Republic.2 I say so-called ‘philosopher king’ because Plato (quite scandalously for his time) thinks that female philosophers are also
fit to be Guardians. Three main points are emphasized in these core
passages.
The first is that, Plato is ful y convinced that philosophers
cannot quietly retire from politics because they distain its
rampant corruption. Philosophers will inevitably be victimized by
unjust governments and perhaps martyred. Moreover, given that
philosophers who contemplate ideals and are purified through long
abiding in a transcendent state, if they turn their efforts to ordering the affairs of the world they would tend to reflect the archetypal
patterns within their soul in the re-structured city-state as if in
a mirror. In the absence of this, Plato is ful y convinced that men
of lesser intuition and understanding will always make themselves
miserable through bringing about one or another unjust regime as
a reflection of their own inner discord. Although the philosopher
would rather keep to himself and his peers in a life of quiet
contemplation, taken together these two facts make it incumbent
2 Ibid., 176-183.
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upon him or her to protect lesser men from their own fol y and to
temper the violence that these men suffer at each other’s hands by
taking up statecraft as a public service.
Secondly, to the contrary of the view of those who think that Plato
is naively engaging in an idle meander through the land of make-
believe, if one reads these passages one finds several times both an
insistence that such a regime should actual y be implemented and a
repeated acknowledgment that although this would be very difficult,
and would be vociferously opposed by the mob, it is nonetheless not
impossible.
Third and final y, one finds that Plato recognizes that the
implementation of such a regime cannot be accomplished through
reformist half-measures, but will require a radical revolution that
wipes out the prevailing corruption before supplanting it with a
more just social order. Like a master craftsman, the Guardian is a
“painter of regimes” who will not accept anything less than a blank
canvas or “a tablet…which, in the first place, they would wipe clean.”
They “would rub out one thing and draw in another…mixing and
blending…ingredients” for a new “image of man.”
Needless to say, such a revolution will be resisted by the mob
who are incapable of understanding that it is for their own good, and
that even those of them who are killed in the course of it will benefit by being reincarnated into a more just society. Therefore, a certain
measure of deception will be necessary in order for the Guardians to
forward their noble-minded project. This is the aspect of the doctrine of Guardianship in the Republic that is most evidently al uded to in Nolan’s use of the Batman mythos to critique democracy. In the
course of the Republic, Plato offers us two principal examples of the role that a “noble lie” might play in establishing a just social order.
The concept is introduced at the core of the so-called ‘myth of
the metals’ recounted from 413a–417b, with the key passage being at
414c: “Could we…somehow contrive one of those lies that come into
being in case of need, of which we were just now speaking, someone
noble lie to persuade, in the best case, even the rulers, but if not
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them, the rest of the city?”3 The second reference comes at 457a–462c
in the context of proposals as to how to coerce compliance with
controversial Eugenics and population control policies, with this
striking pronouncement as its fulcrum at 459d: “Its likely that our
rulers will have to use a throng of lies and deceptions for the benefit of the ruled. And, of course, we said that everything of this sort is
useful as a form of remedy.”4
The content of these noble lies might not seem to have much
in common with the noble lie that Batman decides to have
Commissioner Gordon tell the people of Gotham, but their form is
the same. In all cases, the noble lie is real y about using deception
or trickery as a way to fool people into becoming something that
they would not otherwise have been capable of becoming. It is a way
of crossing over and redefining the boundaries of the possible, like
pretending to hold a child who is just learning to tread water in the
deep end of the pool but holding him so lightly that he is already
real y keeping himself afloat but would still drown if he were made
aware of this. Or, in a more sinister example, it is like forcing people you want to protect to face a false enemy so that they will build their strength in earnest and be more prepared for a real enemy that you
know will arrive later.
The message of Hermes, the Trickster, may bring new
boundaries decreed by Heaven, but only because he already crossed
the old ones or brought people to cross them.5 He is the god of the
threshold.6 Although he upsets
the established social order, Hermes
is most decidedly not the god of democracy; he will align himself with any number of different (and even opposed) political systems
for strategic reasons.7 He is known to play both sides, perhaps to
provoke them into a generative strife. It appears that the Hermes 3 Ibid., 93.
4 Ibid., 138.
5 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), 7.
6 Ibid., 7-8.
7 Ibid., 215.
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archetype is not only at work in The Joker, but also in the response
that The Joker’s apparent victory elicits from the Dark Knight. In
fact, the Batman and the Joker are an alchemical conjunction of
opposites with tremendous transformative potential. A majority
of New Yorkers and most of the police force want to go back to a
time before Batman, and the city’s organized criminals think that
the “craziness” the Joker has unleashed is just too much. Yet, as
Alfred explains to Bruce, he “crossed the line first” and as The Joker explains to Batman, “there is no going back.” Hermes has crossed
the boundaries and cal s forth a new order out of Chaos.
A good student of Plato recognizes that “do not unto others
as you would not want others to do unto you” is a principle as
necessary for maintaining the cohesion of a gang of criminals as
it is for governing a city-state. It is based on the lowest common
denominator of self-interest, not on any contemplation of a moral
ideal. Furthermore, it falsely assumes that most people are able to
make a contract of their own free wil , and to recognize each other
as equal partners in such a contract.
When Batman decides that he must tell a Platonic noble lie,
when he realizes that his proper role is as a republican Guardian and
not as the hero of a democracy sustained through a social contract,
something of the Trickster’s dynamism has transformatively
insinuated itself into his character as wel . To recognize this, in the compelling context of Nolan’s films, is to better discern the esoteric Hermetic dimension of the Platonic project. Truth lies beyond the
limits of the possible, such that the instauration of Justice makes
impossible demands of allegedly ‘conservative’ but unprincipled
hypocrites. “You must be joking,” they say – to which the only
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