The Darkness

I saw The Dark Knight Monday night. Note: if you expect me to not include spoilers in this post, I expect you to be illiterate. I found this movie to be the single best movie with the central theme of vigilantism (via superhero or not) since The Boondock Saints and the best Batman movie ever. I say this because Christopher Nolen took the major conundrums always elicited by these movies and kept them from being cliché. He was able to add an extra factor to keep the scenarios fresh. It also helped that his methods fell in line with what I’ve been studying and thinking about lately.

I’ll get back to the themes and ideas that I liked in a moment, but I would like to point out quickly that the film does have its shortcomings. There are a few loose ends, a few transitions not well explained, and a few concepts not fleshed out enough to provide satisfaction. These range from the moderate problems (leaving the Joker in a room full of elites) to the minor (simply not having the time to detail Harvey’s transformation of character). The flaws in story flow seem more driven by the desire to keep the movie under three hours long rather than simply not being able to make a coherent connection between situations. However, there were times where I had flashbacks to Black Hawk Down. I wasn’t sure what was going on and had a hard time placing people in my mental tactical display¹. This was very true in some of the action scenes (particularly the scene with the copycat batman), and I almost feel sorry for people who had to watch this on an IMAX screen. I didn’t see this on IMAX, but I saw Spider-Man 3 there; it was difficult to take in everything (especially the action scenes), as a person’s range of meaningful view simply does not cover that much area at one time.

I have one more random thought before I get to the main point. I’m pleased that they killed off Rachel. She’s not necessary for the important themes of the Batman storyline, and neither Katie Holmes nor Maggie Gyllenhaal added anything substantial to either Nolen flick. It will be amazing if the third film (almost sadly assured to happen) is far enough outside the movie-chunking machine mold that it fails to succumb to my oft-stated prediction, “It’s always about a girl.”

Slowly, we get to the main themes and ideas that greatly outweighed any problems with the movie. On the surface, two main conundrums seem cliché: whether Batman would go after Rachel or Harvey and whether the passengers on the ferry would press the button, saving themselves and destroying the others. The first would be a bit too cliché for me, if it had been in a vacuum (as in the Goblin+MJ+tram car in Spider-Man). However, the Joker’s game served three² purposes other than lightly touching on the “crisis of conscience” theme. Least importantly, it drew Batman and Gordon (at least) away from the police station long enough for the Joker to escape again. It served as a defining moment of character development for Harvey (beginning his journey into becoming Two-Face) and Rachel. (I’d say the ultimate development is dead. Just to reiterate: YAY!) Most importantly, it brought into focus the influence of information on our decision-making process. This set the tone perfectly for the final not-quite-cliché ferry situation.

The ferry crisis seems straightforward enough: kill or be killed. The simple situation is interesting enough from the standpoints of morality, philosophy, psychology, and game theory that it’s no wonder similar situations have been invoked often in storytelling. As the viewer, however, we’re a point where we utterly distrust everything the Joker doesn’t elaborate on. If he’s speaking simply instead of eloquently expounding on his worldview, he must be lying. We could make a solid argument that the detonation devices are actually a tool for suicide rather than for homicide. This changes the game-theoretic setup. It allows us geeks to impose a whole new realm of mathematics to the situation in order to find an optimal solution³.

It handled those themes without falling into two major pitfalls. While lightly exploring the “should Batman hang up his cloak… people are getting killed under this rationale” idea (which, by the way, is a terrible theme to spend too much time on… see Spider-Man 2), this film refrained from getting too deep in it. Nolan quickly used it as a tool for Gordon and Harvey to plot their own deception while avoiding the public opinion factor. Often, moviemakers have the vigilante’s decision to hang up the cloak/web/axe/bottle/greenness/random-cause-of-greatness swing dependent upon public opinion. All of a sudden, the people don’t like him! Make him stop! This is the beautiful thing about Batman. The public is supposed to fear him. If they don’t fear him, things get campy and he becomes just another super-powerless cop wearing a really expensive batsuit (which looks ridiculous now that he’s running daytime ops for the cops). Other Batman renditions get campy wayyy too often. Other superheroes think, “People don’t like me. I’m going back to my mother’s basement.” Batman thinks, “Screw people. They don’t know what’s good for them. And they’re probably criminals. (what else from Gotham?)”

The potential for campiness was going to be my second major pitfall… but I guess I already introduced it. I’ll instead make quick mention that they could have gotten closer to breaking the one rule every last superhero vigilante must abide by: don’t kill people. To this day, The Boondock Saints is the only movie that I know of which adequately discusses lethality in vigilantism (and for this I will commend it. Forever.)

Now… The characters. Christian Bale was everything we needed from Batman and nothing more. People seem to hate his often stoic and almost flat mannerism in comparison to the Joker. But that’s what Batman is. Stoic. Scary.
The Joker. Perfect selection of a villain for a movie this dark. Quirky, intriguing, and never dull portrayal by Heath Ledger. He said, “You complete me” to Batman… and the Joker definitely completed this movie. His character single-handedly allowed the themes I spoke about to mesh together. Any more traditional villain simply wouldn’t have made it acceptable. The best thing about this character was that he was HILARIOUS… but you were often too scared to laugh.

I have one last geek statement before I finally make myself quit talking and actually do something with my time. Do you have ANY idea how much raw computing power it would take to process all the data from Lucius’ sonar system? Or the algorithm complexity necessary to do things like find a specific voice from the masses? We’re not talking polynomial time computation here. I just wouldn’t be me if I didn’t simultaneously love this concept (and that of constructing the fingerprint from bullet shards) and hate the fact that it’s so inconceivably impossible.

I could continue to talk forever on my thoughts the past few days [about this movie (mostly those few main themes I mentioned) and about my research (which sometimes relates to the movie)]⁴, but we all have better things to do. Go do them.

1. While this was just perfect for Black Hawk Down (the viewer really shouldn’t be able to put together an all-encompassing vision of what’s going on everywhere… not even the commanders on the ground knew what was going down everywhere simultaneously), it did hurt the watchability of this movie a bit.
2. A fourth may be that it directly expanded on the ‘crisis of conscience’ situation. What does Batman do after saving Harvey? Does he say, “Hey dude, you know I didn’t really mean to save you. The Joker lied to me. You’re really worth peanuts to me or anyone else.”
3. I’ve been doing a bit too much research into intransitivity lately. I ended up googling “insanity of intransitivity” simply because I wanted to see if anybody else thought that the implications of intransitivity are simply beyond comprehension. I found this page which gives me yet another view that is shockingly relevant to themes in this movie.
4. Record for terrible use of parenthetical statements! I knew I had it in me.

You Know This Happened To Me

On Wet Wheels and False Dichotomies

Apparently, a while back I made a decision.  I would check Weather.com in the morning.  If the chance of rain was 30% or below, it was low enough that I’d skate into campus.  If it was 40% or higher, I’d walk.  There are more factors, but that’s how it generally goes.  I don’t like the mess of wet sand and mud along the way getting into my bearings and making them any worse than they already are.

Sometime since then, my mind took the statistics out of it.  I know 20% chance of rain COULD mean I should get rained on one time out of five (the technical meaning of weather-based statistics is different and weird.. whatever).  However, when it started raining on me this morning after I was part of the way into campus (after seeing a 20% chance of rain), I thought to myself, “Grrr.  Weather.com lied to me.”  I shouldn’t do that to Weather.com.  They don’t claim binary logic, and I shouldn’t impute it to them.

Economics Quote of the Day

Does anyone remember the movie “A Beautiful Mind” from back in ’01? I liked it when I saw it. I especially liked when Nash and his ‘friend’ defenestrated a desk. If you haven’t seen it, I’d still recommend watching it. It provides an intriguing insight into torturing genius.

In economics class today, we were taking a break from our study of classical microeconomics to touch on game theory. It was interesting, but I’d unfortunately learned most all of it previously during other research. Anyways, my teacher showed us a few clips from the movie and also gave us a copy of this article.  I found it to be a worthwhile critique of the movie’s poor presentation of Nash’s ideas.  I always knew I didn’t understand his ideas in a solid, rigorous manner, but I didn’t realize how skewed the movie depicted them.

Completely independently, several of my friends and I had often made jokes about “making money so I could buy myself a wife”, usually in reference to the often offered advice that young women “make sure he’s got a good job.”  Well, it just so happened that the movie set Nash’s brilliant flash in a bar while checking out a girl.  And it just so happened that they failed to present his ideas correctly there.  All this leads to the quote of the day by Mr. Landsburg, “…mating competitions can turn out badly because mates are not allocated through a competitive price system.”  One can only imagine if they were.