The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Christopher Nolan · a film · 2008 · 152 minutes · written with Jonathan Nolan · the theatrical cut
Mode
Crime epic played inside a superhero film; a chain of forced choices, each a plan or a counter-plan
Mythos
The scapegoat who carries the city’s crimes out of it; the trickster with no origin; the white knight undone by fortune; the hero and his double
Phase
One campaign of terror in one city, from a daylight bank robbery to a night pursuit, in rough thirds, the last the longest
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 152 minutes, in English; 35mm anamorphic with sequences shot on IMAX 65mm film, shown at the taller IMAX ratio in IMAX release
Register
From a heist in daylight to a burned face in a hospital bed; a single rising string note in place of a theme
Scale
A city, its institutions and two boatloads of its people
Governing Proposition
A clown with no history sets a city a chain of choices, each designed to prove that every loyalty dissolves under the right pressure, and the city’s defenders win only by breaking the law and hiding that they did. The wager of the film is that a civic order under terror is held together by what it chooses not to know, and that a summer superhero picture can end with its hero disgraced and hunted for a crime he did not commit.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a bank robbery in daylight. Men in clown masks take the vault, and as each finishes his task the next kills him, on the instruction of the man who hired them. By the end one robber is left. He lifts his mask, and the face beneath is seen for the first time. He says “Why so serious?” and leaves in a school bus that pulls out into the traffic. Before the Joker has made a speech, the film has made his: every loyalty dissolves under the right pressure, and the men who served him were the first to show it.
The city he enters is a modern one, unstylised, photographed by day as much as by night. Its defenders are three: Batman, played by Christian Bale; Gordon of the police, played by Gary Oldman, the one plain man among them; and Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, the new district attorney and the city’s hope, who means to do in daylight what Batman does in the dark. Rachel Dawes, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, stands between Batman and Dent and is loved by both. Alfred and Lucius Fox, played by Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, keep the machinery running.
Christopher Nolan directed the film from a screenplay written with his brother Jonathan Nolan, on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, as the sequel to Batman Begins. Wally Pfister photographed it on 35mm, with some sequences on IMAX 65mm film; Lee Smith edited it; Nathan Crowley designed it; Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard wrote the music. Warner Bros. released it in the United States on 18 July 2008. Heath Ledger, who plays the Joker, had died on 22 January 2008, before the film was released, and he won the Academy Award for Supporting Actor after his death; the film had eight nominations and won one more, for Sound Editing.
Movement II
The mob meets to decide what to do about its money, which has been moved through Lau, a foreign accountant, and out of reach. The Joker walks in uninvited and, to make a point, makes a pencil disappear. It is a joke with a body, and it is a hiring: the mob, short of other options, pays the clown. The film’s first third ends with Batman going abroad to extract Lau from Hong Kong and bring him back, a spectacle whose plot work a single scene could have done.
The second third is the Joker’s campaign. He announces killings and carries them out, and his demand is that Batman unmask: unmask, or watch people die. The choices he sets are not between good and evil but between two harms, and each is timed so that it cannot be thought through. Dent holds a press conference before a frightened city. Gordon appears to die and does not, one of several deceptions the film plays on its audience and its characters alike.
The second third ends in an armoured-truck chase through the city at night, and in its middle a truck is turned end over end on the street. The chase ends in the Joker’s arrest. It looks like the end of a film, and it is the hinge of this one, since every plan the Joker makes succeeds, and the plan, it will turn out, included being caught.
Movement III
In the interrogation room the light comes up on the Joker alone. Batman comes in, and force gets him nowhere, because force is the one argument the Joker has already answered. He gives up what he was always going to give up: Rachel and Dent are each held at an address in the city, at opposite ends of it, and there is time to reach only one.
Batman goes for Rachel. The film cuts between the two places, so that the viewer is in both and can save neither, and the cutting is where the knowledge lies. The Joker gave the addresses switched, and Batman arrives at the wrong one. The cut is the lie. Rachel dies. Dent survives, with half of his face burned, and the film that set him up as the city’s white knight now begins to undo him.
Dent’s coin had two heads. He used it to seem to leave things to chance while leaving nothing to chance at all. Now one face is scarred, and the coin is a true coin for the first time. Elsewhere, in a police car, the Joker leans his head out of the window into the night air, eyes half closed, a moment held without music. It is the film’s purest image of release, and it belongs to its villain.
Movement IV
The Joker visits Dent in his hospital bed, and the visit is a speech, one of several in which the film says aloud what it has already shown. Then he walks out of the hospital in a nurse’s dress, and the building explodes behind him, the blast stalling and resuming while he waits. Dent leaves with half a face and a scarred coin, and the coin becomes the judge of life and death.
To find the Joker, Batman turns to a sonar machine that makes every telephone in the city into an ear. Fox agrees to run it once, and it is destroyed on use. It is the film’s plainest disclosure given as an act: to save the city its defender must listen to all of it, and the only way to keep that power honest is to destroy it once it has served.
The Joker’s last test is two ferries in the night, one full of citizens and one of convicts, each loaded with explosives and each able to blow up the other: blow up the other ferry, or be blown up. On the convicts’ boat a convict takes the detonator and throws it out of the window. Neither boat acts. The city refuses the thesis the bank robbery stated. The film has made the question too hard to settle so neatly, and settles it anyway.
Movement V
Batman takes the Joker in the Prewitt building, an action climax whose geography the cutting breaks and which could be any film’s. The Joker is caught, but his last move has already been made, and it is Dent. The tragedy of the white knight, which the film has pressed into its last forty minutes, comes due at once: Dent has killed by the coin, and now he holds Gordon’s family at gunpoint, with the coin to decide on Gordon’s son.
Dent dies, and the son lives. The white knight is dead, and his crimes would undo every conviction he won. So Batman takes the murders on himself, and the truth is buried. The saint is kept a saint by laying his crimes on another, and that other agrees to carry them. The tragedy of Dent ends in a lie told for the city’s good.
Gordon’s closing words, spoken over Batman’s flight, name what the city now has: “a silent guardian”. Batman goes out of the city into the dark, hunted, and the last shot is his departure. The scapegoat leaves, carrying the crimes away. The film that began with a clown proving that every loyalty breaks ends with a man keeping one that no one will be allowed to see.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the screenplay’s economy, and most of it resists the subtractive test. The bank robbery is required: the crew kill one another on the Joker’s instruction, and that is his whole thesis, shown before he says a word. The pencil at the mob meeting, the coin, Gordon’s family and the two addresses are all planted and paid. The ferries are required, since they are the city’s answer to the thesis. The spine is compelled. What gives lies at the edges: the Hong Kong extraction does in a sequence what a scene could do, Reese’s threat to unmask Batman is raised once and dropped, Gordon’s faked death repeats a deception the film plays several times, and Two-Face’s arc is pressed into the last forty minutes.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a civic order under terror is held together by what it chooses not to know, and by men who must break the law to keep it and then hide that they did. The film gives it in acts. A sonar machine turns every telephone in the city into an ear; Lucius Fox agrees to run it once, and it is destroyed on use. Dent’s crimes are buried so that his convictions stand. Batman takes the murders on himself. The Joker’s claim that morality is a habit kept while it suits is tested and, on the ferries, refused. What holds it below the top: the film states its truths aloud, in parables and speeches, and the ferry outcome settles a hard question too neatly.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The register is dread, and it rises often. The Joker lifts his mask in the bank and speaks, and the face is seen for the first time. In the interrogation the light comes up on him alone in the room. The hospital explodes behind him as he walks out in a nurse’s dress, the blast stalling and resuming. He leans his head out of a police car window into the night air, a moment of release held without music. Grandeur comes in a truck turned end over end on a city street and in aerial views down onto the city at night, with a single rising string note given to the Joker in place of a theme. Held below by frequency: the action between these moments is loud rather than elevated, and the closing montage leans on its words.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears the load. Its structure is the scapegoat: a city that needs a saint gets one by laying the saint’s crimes on another man, who carries them out of the city into the dark, and the last shot is that departure. The plot is ordered to arrive there. Around it the film builds the trickster with no origin, who tells two different stories of his scars and is offered no third; the white knight undone by fortune, whose coin, once a fixed thing with two heads, is scarred on one face and becomes the judge of life and death; and the double, a hero and the figure who completes him. The particular stays particular. What holds it from the top: the figures come ready-made from seventy years of comics, and the film loads them more than it finds them.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the comic-book film, from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) to Nolan’s own Batman Begins (2005); Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), whose daylight robbery, city-scale crime epic and mirrored cop and criminal it takes almost whole; and the comic The Long Halloween, with its mob war and Dent’s fall. The turns are real. A superhero film is played as a crime epic in an unstylised modern city; its villain is given no history and no motive; a summer tentpole ends in its hero’s defeat and disgrace. What holds it below the gate is the stake: a costly sequel on a path Batman Begins had already opened, with much of what was new tried first in the comics. It swerved inside its genre more than out of it.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its form is the forced choice. The plot is a chain of dilemmas the Joker sets: unmask or watch people die; save Rachel or Dent; blow up the other ferry or be blown up. The cross-cutting that holds two places in one moment makes the viewer choose with the characters and learn the cost. At the two addresses, Batman arrives at the wrong one because the Joker lied, and the cut is the lie. The film knows that every rescue in it is also an abandonment, and its structure is how it knows. What holds it below the top: much of the rest is the inherited grammar of the large action thriller, interchangeable in its parts, and the climax in the Prewitt building could be any film’s.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Eighteen years of return are evidence, and the questions stay open: whether the film endorses or indicts the logic of the war on terror, its surveillance and its noble lie, which has been read both ways since release and which its own sequel reopened in 2012; whether the Joker is the film’s argument or its temptation; what the bond between him and Batman amounts to. The Joker has been studied as a figure in his own right. Three things hold the axis lowest. Much of the return is commentary on the villain and the politics rather than new yield from the form. On repeated viewing the mechanics of the plot thin rather than deepen, since the Joker’s foresight becomes impossible to credit. And eighteen years is short evidence.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a superhero picture could carry a crime epic’s scale and a political argument, and could end in defeat. That is a real reorganisation of what the genre was permitted, if less of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dark, grounded reboot became a studio template for a decade, in franchises far from comics; IMAX photography for narrative features spread from it; and its Joker set the terms for every later one, including Joker (2019). The limit stands: the genre’s dominant course after 2008 went another way, through the shared universe Iron Man opened the same summer, and much of the imitation took the darkness as a surface.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: one cut, surviving as released, with no lost or altered version; the IMAX and 35mm presentations are two showings of the same film. Presence across eighteen years is of the widest kind a film of its decade has had: IMAX re-releases, constant television and streaming, lasting places in popular polls and in the teaching of the genre, quotation in common speech. Widest presence earns its credit, and it is given. Eighteen years are still eighteen years, and survival is credited only for what they have shown. The surface is charged a little: the telephones, the surveillance anxieties and the imagery of the years after 2001 fix it to its time, and its standing is partly bound to a franchise.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight in several departments. Wally Pfister’s IMAX photography gives the city a scale no studio set could. The stunts are practical, the overturned truck among them. Richard King’s sound and the score of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, with its drones and its single note, make one design. Heath Ledger’s Joker, in voice, posture and timing, is the film’s centre; Aaron Eckhart makes Dent credible as the city’s hope; Gary Oldman’s Gordon is the one plain man. The charges fall where it counts: the geography of the truck chase and the Prewitt building is hard to follow, Bale’s rasping voice strains belief, the dialogue announces its theme, and Rachel is written as a prize between two men.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the pencil trick at the mob meeting, a joke with a body, and Gordon’s elegy over Batman’s flight. One law governs both: every person is put to a choice that shows what they will do when the rules are gone, and the order of the city is what is left after the choice. The comedy of the Joker’s entrances and the tragedy of Dent obey the same law, and the range, from heist film to civic tragedy, is wide. The strain is real. The film’s realism, a modern city by daylight, sits uneasily with comic-book licence, the sonar machine, the voice, a half-burned face on real streets; and the Joker’s claim to have no plans sits against a plot in which every plan of his succeeds.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held are many, and the plot integrates them. The state, in a district attorney, a police force riddled with informers, a mayor and the courts; the economy of crime, mob money moved through a foreign accountant; the media, in a press conference and a televised ultimatum; technology and surveillance; and the civic body, in two ferries of citizens and convicts who decide the city’s question themselves. The mob’s money brings in the Joker, and his campaign tests every institution in turn. What holds the axis: consciousness stays on the surface, since Bruce Wayne’s inner life is thin and the Joker is opaque by design; the family appears only as Gordon’s, held at gunpoint; labour, the sacred and the natural order are absent.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 and The Made at 8.5. A superhero picture that carried a crime epic’s scale and a political argument and ended in defeat, and set the template for a decade; a scapegoat structure that orders the whole plot toward its last shot; and a making in which IMAX photography, practical stunts, sound and Ledger’s Joker bear weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Bottomless Well at 8.1: much of eighteen years’ return is commentary on the villain and the politics rather than yield from the form, and on repeated viewing the mechanics of the Joker’s plan thin. Just above it, The Inevitable, The Swerve, The Living Form and The Encompassed at 8.2, where Hong Kong, Reese and the faked death give at the edges, the stake was a sequel on a proven path, much of the form is inherited thriller grammar, and consciousness, the family and the sacred are barely held.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, The Living Form at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on two of five: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5; The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Imperishable at 8.3 two tenths short, and The Swerve at 8.2 three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.1, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. The work is held below the summit by three unmet parts of the Epochal Gate, and by its aggregate, 8.4 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Dark Knight as released by Warner Bros. in the United States on 18 July 2008, the theatrical cut of about 152 minutes, from the bank robbery to the last shot: directed by Christopher Nolan from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, from characters of DC Comics; produced by Warner Bros., Legendary Pictures and Syncopy; photographed by Wally Pfister, edited by Lee Smith, designed by Nathan Crowley, with music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. There is one cut, and no director’s or extended version. The versions differ only in presentation: the IMAX release shows the sequences shot on IMAX 65mm film at the taller IMAX ratio, 35mm prints run at 2.39:1 throughout, and home video keeps the shifting ratio. The film is judged on the theatrical cut with its IMAX sequences as its intended form. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Figures and claims that could not be verified are not given, among them the running time of the IMAX sequences, the box-office returns and their place in any record, the cities where the film was shot, the methods behind particular stunts and explosions, the scene count and screen times, and any reason the Academy gave for later widening its Best Picture field.