Overdue - Thoughts on Dark Knight

I wrote this for my blog a looong while back, but it never got around to seeing daylight. Just rummaging through some old saved posts and found it again. Oh well, time for its' resurrection :)


It’s kinda scary when freaks start philosophizing.

Most of the time, it is because we are afraid that, this time, they might have gotten us really figured out.

Maybe it really takes someone out of our little system to see what’s wrong.

Maybe the joker really knows the truth.

I like Dark Knight. Not for the storyline, the characters, the things that blow up, the things that are better off blown up, nor the Christian Bale whom everyone gushed about on their MSN personal message. Not even the witty exchange between Wayne and Alfred, although I’m usually a sucker for these things.

I like Dark Knight because it isn’t as corny as its name. I like the questions it posed; the open challenge to our beliefs of heroes, of truth, of loneliness, of freaks.

And I like this Joker. A being not in control of his tongue, let alone his mind. A mind so brilliant that it could only burst out of its skull; an outlook on life so blunt that it could only made him laugh. Personally, I believe the Joker killed Heath Ledger. The character was too surreal, too disturbing, that perhaps the only way to be it is to put on the make-up, and in a way, put on its mind.

Dark Knight stripped humanity bare, seemingly to humiliate it, but in actual fact to test it.

Remember the whole scene of which-ship-will-bomb-which-ship-first? In the spur of the moment when morality, ethics, and humanity lay in the mercy of a single button, my breath dangled before the abyss. And when the bulky inmate threw out the bomb detonator and chose not to kill anyone, not even when he himself could be killed, I felt a wash of relief and felt my inner devil strangled. A feeling incomprehensible to people who haven’t just watched that scene.

“Just do it” is a myth – sometimes the right thing to say is actually “just don’t do it”.

As one wrestler in Tony Parson’s novel said, sometimes you just gotta do the human thing.

Every good movie has A Moment. The whole scene of who-will-push-the-button-first is The Moment in Dark Knight.

I’m glad humans disappointed the joker, so he could not have his last laugh.