Lee's Blog

There were several points in The Dark Knight that bothered me:

The drama on the ferries

My first thought when the Joker explained the ferry setup was that the detonators wouldn’t do what he said they would. Why would anyone trust him? He was crazy and murderous. So it seemed to me that the safest thing to do was to hunker down and not touch the detonator (and then see what you could do about emptying the gasoline tanks that would be set off by the explosives). Granted, they didn’t touch the detonators, but no one said anything about that as a reason, nor was the possibility of doing something about the gasoline even discussed.

Rachel

I see no reason to believe that Rachel is actually dead. Look at the situation: Rachel and Harvey are in two separate locations. They are in communication with each other. Both are surrounded by gasoline and explosives. The Joker lies to the Batman and sends him to Harvey’s location (thinking it’s Rachel’s location), while sending the police to a different location. The Batman gets Harvey out and that location immediately explodes. The police arrive at the other location and it explodes and burns quite thoroughly before they can enter.

The assumption is that Rachel was in the second location and that the bombs were on a timer. But what proof is there? She could have been sitting in a third location, a mock-up, and the two locations were watched by people who had orders to detonate at exactly the right moment. Thus, no one gets into the second location, because if anyone did they might blurt out that Rachel wasn’t there before the bombs went off. A watcher could easily arrange to set off the bombs before anyone enters.

Why would the Joker want to keep Rachel alive? To torture her, to try to turn her against the Batman, for kicks, who knows? But nothing the Joker says can be trusted and nothing he sets up is quite what it seems.

The Batman as scapegoat

This is the key scene is the movie and it’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

What sense does it make to accuse the Batman of five murders, including two cop killings? There are several objections to it:

• The Batman has imitators, as established in an early scene. Even if Commissioner Gordon claims to have seen the murders with his own eyes (which he didn’t), all he can really say is that he saw a guy in a Batman suit.
• The Batman may have been recognizably at a different scene when some of the murders were going on. Specifically, he may have been beating up SWAT team members while Harvey was committing the murders. The story’s not going to work very well if people start comparing times (which leads back to the imitators problem).
• Why bother? Why not tell the almost complete truth: the Joker turned all sorts of deranged criminals loose on Gotham; one deranged criminal got hold of Harvey (conveniently vague story of how); that criminal killed several people and then Harvey himself, but escaped while the Batman and Commissioner Gordon were trying to stop him. We don’t have a good description of him, but rest assured that we’re looking! Oh, indeed, we’re looking! (Though we’ll never find him.)
• The cat’s out of the bag on the Batman’s identity. Oh, sure, we have the impression that the slimy lawyer decided to keep quiet after Bruce Wayne made a deliberate effort to keep him safe, but that actually doesn’t make any difference. Even if he keeps quiet, even if he gets conveniently killed, it will be easy to figure out who the Batman is.
  
  
  • Item: the Batman has lots of extremely expensive and obviously custom toys.
  • Item: the slimy lawyer was working for Wayne Enterprises just before announcing that he knows the Batman’s identity.
  • Item: Bruce Wayne sleeps through important meetings, just as if he’d been out beating up criminals with his bare hands overnight.
  • Item: when the Joker showed up at Wayne’s penthouse, Wayne disappeared and the Batman appeared soon after.

  Put those things together, and I think you can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Wayne is the Batman, hence everyone who has been harmed by the Batman — specifically the survivors of the murder victims — will immediately sue Wayne and win multi-megabucks each. End of Wayne Enterprises, and end of the Batman.

I know there’s deep meaning in the fact that the Batman has to run because the police have to chase him, but it doesn’t make sense to me in the context of the plot.