It’s been almost two months since I initially watched The Dark Knight. Since then a quote toward the end of the film from has been bouncing around in the back of my mind.
“It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”
This comes at a crucial point in the film when Harvey Dent, with the help and prodding of The Joker, begins to assume his alter-ego of Two Face. But I’m not really interested in that as much as I am the implicit critique of the established Order; not order in a sense of complete lawlessness and immorality, but Order in the sense of coercion and the artificial creation of consent to the violence of power.
This sort of oppression of the plan and colonization of the public mind is interesting. When I saw the movie the second time I immediately made the connection between the blind submission to the established plan and the events that transpired immediately following 9/11. A plan was made and set into motion. And nobody questioned it. Partly because everyone was in shock that such an act could happen inside the empire instead of on behalf of the empire elsewhere. But an even larger — and much more destructive — reason is because we had all been conditioned to go along with “the plan,” even if, as The Joker notes, the plan is horrifying. The plan was indeed horrifying, but most everyone went right along with it because the establishment said so and had, in effect, manufactured the consent of the masses beforehand.
It seems to me that unless this hegemony of thought is somehow subverted, not necessarily by complete chaos, but by intentional anarchic acts of liberative resistance and inquiry, the established Order will continue to see that everything goes according to plan.
Now that I think about it, maybe Jesus has more in common with the Joker than we are willing to admit. Indeed, perhaps Jesus goes even further than the Joker by actually taking on the violence of the established Order and unmasking it for what it is — and the best part is that he, unlike the Joker, refuses to play by the rules of the Order, that is, by participating in violence. Thus, Jesus is the ultimate villian of the established Order.
Posts RSS
Subscribe to Posts via Email
7 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation and subscribe to the comments on this post via an RSS feed
I haven’t seen the movie yet but that’s very profound and I would say, ultimately, very true…in an existential sense anyway. Human order really is an illusion - not that the illusion is always bad/wrong mind you.
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
I love that speech in the movie because it very clearly (and cleverly) asks, “I plan to kill one, you plan to kill thousands, and I’M the crazy one?!”
The whole thing makes me think of Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Is there/can there be an order (economic, social, or whatever you prefer) that does not include the obedience of those who observe it? Perhaps more importantly, is there/can there be an order in which a Joker/Christ will feel at home?
andrew - i agree. i haven’t watching many substantive films as of late, but i think that scene of dialogue was some of the best i’ve seen in a long time.
those are good questions. i haven’t had a lot of time to flesh out my ideas lately and to that end i’m not sure i could even offer acceptable answers even if i had the time.
but i will say this: generally speaking i am becoming more and more convinced that any sort of order — and i use the word very loosely as i’m somewhat uncomfortable with it — that is worth being pursued or termed as being normative in the sense that it perpetuates the least amount of oppression, domination, etc. possible, must be situated as local and contextual as feasibly possible.
as such, i tend to agree with lyotard and other postmoderns and poststructuralists in that i am suspicious and altogether antagonistic toward the hegemony of the metanarrative and the coercive, unilateral, and unregulated use of power by the establishment for the sake of artificial “order.”
there is a certain tension in there somewhere. and i’m not sure what to do with it.
Sometimes I’m better at posing questions than I am at providing answers. I guess that comes from being an editor. For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts from the last few days.
I feel that I’m unable to have a fully fleshed out concept of Jesus as Christ, so I’m going to attempt to borrow yours. It’s one that I’m fond of and is the most relevant to this discourse.
I do see the good in have an established order. Any establishment is going to be good for somebody, and a very good establishment is probably going to be very good for a lot of people. Coupled with that, though, must be the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch. In simplified form, if my life is better for having more resources, I must be aware that somewhere there are now fewer resources for other people. That is a pretty basic concept, and it would be condescending to belabor the point.
The gist of my feeling is that no established order is going to be perfect, and that’s why I think the tension between what we want and what we can achieve is so important. That tension is at least part of what drives the evolution of social structures. This driven change is good, in my opinion, because it helps to avoid that unchecked consolidation of power that you refer to.
In the interest of saving Jesus from supervillain status, I think there are probably many ways of going about the kind of revolt we’re talking about. Jesus seems to have inspired more people than he might have if he had resorted to The Joker’s methods.
And now they (Washington) are presenting us with another “plan”. This time the fear that is being instilled is about a financial armageddon. Intuitively, we know the plan is insane, but since it’s the only one that is being articulated, it will most likely be accepted. It’s so true….all part of the plan. And that is how empires fall, lives go to ruin, and generations are saddled with the fallout.
I found this post immeadiately after watching the movie by typing into google “the joker had it right”… there is so much truth in that movie, and in most everything that happens in front of our faces everyday… but we will not see it in time to prevent this chaos that will consume all soon enough… but its all a part of the plan…..