Defining Justice: Vacillating between Order and Chaos in "The Dark Knight"

Christopher Nolan's take on the Batman legend seems to present the protagonist, Bruce Wayne, as a figure dealing with competing definitions of how society should function. Within the framework of the first film, Batman Begins, Wayne finds himself redefining "true justice" as he works against corruption in Gotham City. The Dark Knight branches out from defining justice to answering a larger question: Can justice and morality survive in a battle against chaotic forces? Naturally, the two figures that draw the most intriguing focus are Batman and The Joker. In the context of The Dark Knight, the definition of justice, represented by Batman and established previously in Batman Begins, is challenged by The Joker. He tests the limits of Batman's and the justice system's sense of identity and its sense of morality. This might suggest that Nolan's film series would prefer one position over another, but that is not the case. Nolan, in The Dark Knight, argues for a flexible system of justice, one that embraces order and chaos.

Before discussing the flexible societal system within The Dark Knight, a brief outline of justice and how it is defined with the Nolan's conception of Batman, specifically within Batman Begins, will be helpful. Batman Begins, through the Bruce Wayne's exploits, defines justice and how it can work in a corrupt system. Wayne and his alter ego, Batman, reinstate a very American definition of justice, where criminals--those who break the governing codes of society--are arrested and tried. Nolan, then, advocates due process and the notion of "innocent until proven guilty."As Wayne himself states when confronted with an execution: "This man should be tried" (Batman Begins). According to Wayne, the burden of proving guilt lies upon the societal system that accuses a person of a crime. Of course, in a perfect system, this would be ideal, but Gotham is not perfect. In fact, systems of order--government, police--frequently fall under the influence of corruption. Henri Ducrad himself mentions this very phenomenon when he responds to Wayne's refusal: "By whom? Corrupt bureaucrats? Criminals mock society's laws. You know this better than most" (Batman Begins). In a way, Ducard is right to question society's ability to enact justice. Corruption keeps society from being able to function properly. However, Nolan rejects Ducard's philosophy that "a purging fire is inevitable and natural" (Batman Begins). Reducing Gotham to ashes in order to build anew is not a good solution; it is not even a moral one. In order to restore balance to the justice system in Gotham, Wayne finds himself breaking the law, transforming himself into the super-vigilante known as Batman. By the end of the film, order is on its way to being restored. Batman Begins is, as the title suggests, a beginning. However, the follow up complicates the system of order Batman and company attempt to instill. Order is disrupted by the introduction of chaos.

Order is important to the Gotham of Nolan's films. Even in a corrupt system, order is necessary for the functioning of society. The system is unbalanced in Gotham City, yes, but there is still an ordered system. Crime lords, like Carmine Falcone, in Batman Begins have rigged everything so that they benefit from the exploitation of others, yet order remains. That is, until The Joker challenges the logics of the system to prove his argument that an ordered system is unnatural and inherently corrupt. For The Joker, chaos is the only true system worth following: "Introduce a little anarchy in your life, and everything becomes chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair" (Dark Knight). Indeed, The Joker lives this his philosophy in every scene. Take, for instance, the two different stories he delivers to explain the scars on his face. Both stories involve mutilation, but both differ in the source of that mutilation. In the first version of the story, the child-Joker is cut by his father in a domestic dispute; and in the second version, The Joker mutilates his face to make his wife feel better about her own scars. Oddly enough, in a way, the sources of both come from a perversion of love, both of which result in the permanent physical and mental scarring of The Joker. Although both stories are different, the result is still the same. The Joker sees familial and romantic systems of order as destructive and unsustainable. This results in the birth of his own brand of social philosophy: individual choice, regardless of the consequences. Naturally, the societal systems in place within Gotham City cannot allow such a thing to happen. Chaos, after all, is not very efficient. And so, the city becomes the battleground between two forces: order and chaos.

A key victim in this battle is Harvey Dent, whose transformation reveals that a rigid system of order does not allow for a more complicated approach to the ordering of society. The Joker's opposition--those representing order--include Batman, Commissioner Jim Gordon, and Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent. All three figures are pushed to the limits in their efforts to instill order in Gotham City, and Dent discovers that enough of a push can cause a person to descend into the same line of thinking as The Joker; at film's end, Dent transforms into the villain Two-Face. As the representative of law and order within Gotham City, Dent faces the nearly insurmountable problem of ridding the city of crime and corruption. Even before Dent was elected as the District Attorney, he was an investigator at Internal Affairs, trying to route out corrupt cops. The tension between Dent's ideals and the realities of Gotham's corruption is present during an early scene when Dent and Gordon discuss the possibility of tracking the mob's money. Dent expresses reservations because he does not trust the cops in Gordon's special task force; "I don't like that you're working with cops I investigated at Internal Affairs"; to which Gordon replies, "If I didn't work with cops you investigated while at IA I'd be working alone. I don't get political points for idealism. I have to work with what I have" (Dark Knight). Dent is clearly uncomfortable working with corrupt cops, yet he has to go along with Gordon's line of thinking. Otherwise, nothing would be accomplished. Dent even goes along with Batman's assistance in establishing order, but the focus is always on bringing order back to Gotham City. At some point, Batman will have to atone for his crimes; "The Batman will answer for his crimes... to us" (Dark Knight). Dent's eventual goal is order, the rigid kind of order that must clean up the corruption within the system; and yes, even Batman is a symptom of the city's corruption, at least in Dent's eyes.

Dent's idealism shatters in the face of death, and the rigid system of order in which he places so much faith crashes around him, thus breaking his identity and replacing it with Two-Face. After the thrilling arrest of The Joker, Dent and Rachel Dawes--his girlfriend and Wayne's former love--are both kidnapped and placed in different warehouses filled with drums of gasoline rigged to explode. Despite the efforts of Gordon and Batman, Dawes is killed and half of Dent's face is burned away. The Joker uses this situation to push Dent into insanity, an insanity so powerful that Dent takes revenge against Gordon and Batman. Dent's insanity seeks fairness in chance, hence the two-sided coin Dent uses to determine his victims' fates, and blames Gordon and Batman for Dawes's death. The coin reflects the binary that dominated his thinking before the attack. Before he viewed reality as a binary: a choice was either right or wrong. Despite embracing The Joker's philosophy of chaos, Dent still sees the world through a binary, but one that embraces chance rather than morality. It is still a rigid system, regardless the application. Even the scene when Dent (before Two-Face) kidnaps one of The Joker's men, Dent exhibits what looks like psychotic tendencies, like he has the capacity to embrace a more fluid sense of justice. However, this scene instead reveals that Dent as an "on/off" switch when it comes to his application of justice. And as the focal point, the face, of the reformed justice system in Gotham City, Dent has to present a pure and clean face to the public. As Batman notes, "If anyone saw this, everything we have fought for would be lost" (Dark Knight). In Nolan's Gotham, justice must present a clean face to the public; in order to legitimately fight corruption and the mob, Dent must be free from corruption himself. Yet, the pressure of such a stance ends up breaking him, especially when he realizes corrupt cops had taken both him and Dawes, the same corrupt cops Dent had warned Gordon about. Dent's transformation is the result of following a binary system of justice, instead of protecting the public from criminals, he becomes one with just a little push.

So, if Dent falls because of his rigid philosophy, what kind of system is Nolan advocating in The Dark Knight? Through the characters that survive, Gordon and Batman, it is possible to detect the kind of system that works within Gotham City. Gordon and Batman together represent a fluid system of justice, a system that recognizes that judgments need to be based on context, using the law as a guide rather than dogma. Two scenes in particular bear out this idea. The first depicts Gordon's special task force in their search for Batman. On a board are all the pictures of possible "suspects." Abraham Lincoln and Bigfoot are the two most prominent figures. Obviously, Gordon's task force is not actively looking for Batman, but working with the vigilante in order to clean up the city. Dent is smart enough to recognize the duplicity of Gordon's unit, but he only uses their resources when the law fails--as it does in regard to extraditing Lau from China--and then he reverts back to the law when Lau is back in the United States. The second scene highlights highlights Batman's willingness to break principles of privacy when he asks Lucius Fox to spy on all the cell phones in Gotham in order to track down The Joker's location. Interestingly enough, this is the first and only time in the entire trilogy that Fox and Batman occupy the same space. Yes, Wayne and Fox spend quite a bit of time together, but the jarring nature of Batman's request is made even more powerful because Wayne appears as Batman. Wayne recognizes that his request is a violation of civil liberties, but the context of the situation demands a bending of moral principles. Fox recognizes the uniqueness and the dangerous potential of the situation; "I'll help you this one time. But consider this my resignation. As long as this machine is in Wayne Tower, I won't be" (Dark Knight).  During this final section of the film, Batman comes close to exhibiting tyrannical behavior--a theme touched on in The Dark Knight Rises, but never quite examined thoroughly. Batman's actions in the film's final act demonstrate his potential for villainy, but it also revels a moral response once the danger passes: the return to moral principles. Fox is rewarded in the final moments of the film when the machine is destroyed; Batman had never intended for the machine to used on a permanent basis. Both Gordon and Batman recognize that the fluidity of their system must, at some point, settle closer to order than chaos, but that moment proves elusive by the film's end.

The fluid movement from hero to villain, from order to chaos and back again, helps to illuminate the final moments of the film, which some critics find baffling. The film's final images are viewed under the rather poetic narration of Gordon: "He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now" (Dark Knight). Like the narration suggests, both Gordon and Batman must exhibit a more fluid definition of justice. This definition must bend and break rules when the situation calls for it. However, the idea, the intention that grounds their definition is that the severe bending and breaking of moral principles must come to end, must give way once order is established. Of course, as the end of the film seems to suggest, such an ending may never be quite possible, at least not completely. The complete establishment of order is impossible due to the realities of civilization. Therefore, the final moment of the film is appropriate: The Dark Knight riding his mechanical horse, forever fighting, forever rising to the light, but never quite reaching it. He and the system he represents is the system that works best, at least for now, because reality is a blend of chaos and order, which means our definitions of justice must be adaptive.