Or: Holy plaisire du texte, Barthes-Man!
The plot of The Dark Knight, like that of Batman Begins, is honestly kind of shapeless and waffle-y. And yet, as Memento proves, Nolan is capable of writing narratives that are drum-taught and mongoose-agile. Why is he churning out these behemoths? Why, despite the wafflage, are they so dang good?
To answer this, I’d like to take a minute to consider Batman as a piece of storytelling, to consider the properties of the tale as it’s told. You’re probably taking it as given that there are spoilers for The Dark Knight ahead. But I should warn you that there are also spoilers for Batman Begins, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, the Superman comic books, and The Hunt For Red October. Be warned.
In his famous – for a certain value of “fame” – book S/Z, Roland Barthes strip-mines Balzac’s Sarrasine, wringing every scrap of meaning out of the text and classifying his findings into five narrative codes: Hermeneutic, Semic, Proairetic, Symbolic, and Cultural. The wikipedia definitions of these codes are pretty solid as of this writing (I mean, they could be “Taco! Taco! Taco!” by tomorrow), but they’re easier to understand when you see them in action. Like after the jump! Convenience!
The Hermeneutic code (henceforth HER) is composed of mysteries and enigmas: the questions that we keep reading to learn the answers to. At the beginning of Citizen Kane, the Hermeneutic code is activated with the question “What is Rosebud?” Throughout the film, whenever the reporter asks someone about Rosebud, the code is activated again, whetting our appetite for an answer. Finally, at the very end, it’s activated one more time when the mystery is solved (although this is optional). Or take this example, from The Hunt for Red October.
Ramius looked aft at the bluffs of the Kola Fjord. They had been carved to this shape millenia before by the remorseless pressure of towering glaciers. How many times in his twenty years of service with the Red Banner Northern Fleet had he looked at the wide, flat U-shape? This would be the last. One way or another, he’d never go back.
HER is activated by the statement “One way or another, he’d never go back.” Why won’t he go back? Inquiring minds want to know! But of course, we don’t really want to know, because that would make the book stupid. Imagine if the passage ended like this: “One way or another, he’d never go back. The reason he’d never go back was that he was planning to defect to Alec Baldwin.” Way suckier, am I right? What’s interesting is that it’s still suckier even for people who have already read the book. The reading mind likes to encounter “mysteries,” even when it already knows the answer.
The Proairetic Code (PRO) is composed of actions, the mechanical details of how the events in the story take place. (Note that the Proairetic and Hermeneutic codes, together, constitute the entirety of the plot.) A great example of a proairetic scene in a film is the heist sequence from Mission Impossible. It’s all actions, one after another, meticulously shot, and following a more or less causal logic. Of course, almost any scene has proairetic elements, but it’s not usual to have them placed so strongly in the foreground. In the Red October passage above, all you really get for PRO is “He looked aft at the bluffs.”
The Semic and Symbolic codes (SEM and SYM), are both about connotation. It can be very hard to tell them apart – even Barthes gets confused sometimes, in my opinion – and honestly when you’re looking at a text, there’s usually not that much to be gained from telling them apart. In The Godfather, oranges are a Symbolic code for death and violence, while guns (and less direct but still non-arbitrary signs, like Michael’s army uniform) are Semic codes for the same thing. Seems pretty straightforward, right? But what about the “Sicilian message” that Sonny recieves about Lucca Brazzi’s death? The association of fish with death is pretty arbitrary, but then again the fish is actually dead, and kind of grisly looking… more often than not, things will fall into this grey area. This particular instance is also a reference to Mafia traditions, bringing up:
The Cultural code (which Barthes abbreviates as REF, probably because CUL, in French, is Not Okay), is found in aspects of the text that refer to a preexisting body of knowledge. Any episode of CSI disgorges massive chunks of REF, both in the dialogue (“Using luminol, we found blood and semen on the Tilt-o-Whirl!”) and in the flashy montages of the actors doing Important Scientific Things in the crime lab to the haunting strains of Sasha and John Digweed. The references in both of these cases are to scientific knowledge, but the show is also heavy on REF connected to the hobbies of the victim and/or murderer of the week. For instance, if the killer is a hangglider, you can bet they’ll throw in some information about thermals, or the difference between rigid-wing and fixed-wing, or whatever it is that hanggliders care about. Interestingly enough, the body of knowledge that is referenced doesn’t have to be accurate, or even really exist. The technobabble on Star Trek is REF. So are all the references to elvish folklore in Lord of the Rings. Barthes found this to be the least interesting of all the codes, but it turns out to be crucial when we talk about The Dark Knight.
Bait and Switch
Which we will do. Eventually. But not yet. First we need to talk about how movies in general, and Nolan’s movies in particular, usually put these codes into play, so that we’ll be able to see what makes The Dark Knight special. Figure and ground, people, figure and ground.
Your typical blockbuster depends heavily on HER and PRO codes. It’s very important that there be an overarching question that pretty much everything in the movie develops from (Will Bruce Willis stop the terrorists in time? Who is killing teenagers at Camp Misty Lake?), and it’s just as important that the little mechanical details of each event in the plot are clear, exciting, and easily understood. Every once and a while you get a film where HER is kind of weak: In Forrest Gump, for instance, the only real mystery is whether or not Forrest and Jenny are going to get together, which doesn’t have much to do with anything that’s actually going on in the film. Also, in some of the more frenetic examples of the Michael Bay school of filmmaking, the Proairetic code begins to break down. (If you can honestly tell who is beating up who at the end of S.W.A.T., I’ll mail you five dollars.) Still, these are exceptions to the general rule: in Hollywood, plot is king. The other codes operate too, of course, but they’re somewhat less important. Citizen Kane is full of SEM codes for wealth (to name a few: giant banners, parties, statues, opera, contracts, bank vaults). Rocky IV is full of SYM codes for the conflict between the industrial (Drago shooting steroids) and the agrarian (Rocky dragging logs through the snow). Or alternately, if you feel like making everything all about sex, between being the penetratee (Drago shooting steroids) and being the penetrator (Rocky dragging logs through the snow). The second interpretation is a stretch, I know, but the whole point of the symbolic code, for Barthes, is that the reader can connect anything to everything. REF comes up too, especially in procedurals (including CSI, but also any courtroom drama) and in comedies, where jokes often trade on stereotypes. For Hollywood, SYM, SEM, and REF are usually like gravy or icing. They’re a definite value-add, but they aren’t the main attraction.
Now let’s talk Nolan. His breakthrough movie, Memento, is almost entirely HER. A huge mystery is presented in the opening credits, elaborated upon throughout the film, and finally resolved just as the movie ends. Interestingly, the Proairetic code breaks down quite a bit, but this is justified by the character’s mental condition. After all, he often doesn’t know himself what causes a particular sequence of actions, so the fact that the audience sometimes doesn’t know either isn’t a big problem. It’s also interesting to note that some of the hermeneutic “questions” that the film asks never get satisfying “answers.” (What did happen to his wife, anyhow?)
The Prestige is also heavily slanted towards the Hermeneutic code. How did Christian Bale do that trick? How did Hugh Jackman do that trick? Which of them is going to win, in the long run? But once again, certain issues are left unresolved. (Did Bale use an unorthodox knot in the trick that caused Jackman’s girlfriend’s death?) And once again, the PRO is somewhat disturbed: a number of scenes involving the magic teleporting machine are so oblique that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. Most of the confusion is eventually cleared up by the end of the film, and it often turns out that the shot was deliberately confusing in order to set up a plot twist (in a sense, the breakdown of PRO creates additional HER). Still, for a glossy hollywood product, it had a surprising number of scenes that are kind of hard to parse.
Batman would seem to be the perfect character for a filmmaker so obsessed with secrets and mysteries. There’s the whole secret identity thing, obviously. He’s often thought of as the greatest detective in the world of comics. And several of his most recognizable villains have gimmicks based on the unknown: the Riddler’s the most obvious example, but I would include the Joker (a wild card, which can have any value), and Two-Face (to say that someone is “two-faced” is to say that they hide a part of their character). But surprisingly enough, Nolan’s Bat-plots are nowhere near as twisty and HER-laden as his regular plots. This is because Batman, first and foremost, is a comic book superhero, which changes the rules of the game.
At this point, Barthes’ codes start to overlap with genre theory. For Barthes, REF just points out areas of a text which draw their authority from outside sources, or which activate certain bodies of knowledge. A description of a woman that talks about her clavicle is going to feel different from one that talks about her collar bone, and for him, that’s as far as it goes. However, the text that talks about the clavicle is going to have some special significance – positive or negative, depending on a lot of factors – to a reader who knows something about medicine. And when it comes to Batman, we are all doctors.
I didn’t see THAT coming.
When we go to see a superhero movie, we come in with tons of generic expectations. Some of these are specific. Batman has a secret identity as Bruce Wayne. Batman has a batcave and a batmobile. Alfred is Batman’s butler. Others are general. The superhero will have an origin story. The superhero will fight a supervillain. The superhero will have a secret identity to conceal. In Barthes’ terms, movies like this are stuffed to overflowing with REF. Every time Christian Bale throws a batarang at someone, the audience gets a little *ping* in the back of their mind, where the Cultural Code whispers “This is one of the things that Batman is known to do.” If he were to draw a gun and shoot Maggie Gyllenhaal in the face, REF would still activate, only this time we’d be thinking about how this is not part of our recieved knowledge about how Batman behaves. Either response can be good or bad, depending on how it’s handled, but the activation of the code is inescapable. If you made a Batman movie where Bruce Wayne abandoned Gotham City and joined the cast of High School Musical 2, REF would keep pinging away, reminding us that this is Batman doing these things. The importance and power of this shared body of knowledge is attested to by Umberto Eco, who writes:
There are people who deny that Jesus was the son of God, others who doubt his historical existence, others who claim he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and still others who believe that the Messiah is yet to come, and however we might think about such questions, we treat these opinions with respect. But there is little respect for those who claim that Hamlet married Ophelia, or that Superman is not Clark Kent.
Finally, I can try to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this post. Why are Nolan’s Batman movies so shabbily plotted (and why doesn’t it matter)? I suspect it’s because Nolan understands the burden of generic expectations. Personally, I wouldn’t have cared if the plot of the Batman Begins was as tightly wound as an air traffic controller going through meth withdrawal. All I wanted to know – and judging from the world’s response to that frankly overstuffed movie, all anyone wanted to know – is how well the Nolan/Bale Bat-iverse would play with our preexisting body of Bat-knowledge. And this is true of any superhero movie. The key mystery is not textual, but metatextual. We don’t tune in to see how Batman will handle the badguys, we want to know how the filmmakers will handle Batman. The Hermeneutic code and the Cultural code conflate and double back on the text; the key narrative mystery is inscribed on the narrative itself. A snake devouring its own tail. (I will now take a moment to pause and stroke my awesome beard.)
This is why there has never been a really successful superhero franchise. Oh, there are plenty of financially successful ones… but none where the quality of the second movie really lives up to the first. The reason is this: once the filmmakers have shown us how they’re going to treat the character, you walk into the film with the Hermeneutic code already closed. And all that REF, so valuable in the first film, ends up just sitting there, and frankly bogging things down. Character development – usually a major aspect of HER – is also kind of stalled: Batman’s parents were murdered in front of him, because of this, he fights crime. The End. Once you’ve got his origin story out of the way in the first movie, you’ve got nowhere left to go.
Therefore, the fact that The Dark Knight is not only as good as Batman Begins, but substantially better, can be firmly attributed to the film’s focus on the Joker. He’s one of only a tiny handful of comic book villains who are as well known (as loaded with REF, that is) as the heroes. No one would get excited for movie where the Hermeneutic code was focused on why Lex Luthor hates Superman (which if the comics are to be believed, has to do with male pattern baldness). But the Joker? That’s a guy you can hang a film on. That makes him an incredible cinematic resource.
Take the famous pencil scene. It would be entertaining in any case just as a little piece of stylish ultraviolence, but the kick, the juice of the scene comes from the fact that the Joker is doing it. Ledger walks into the room, facing down a collection of mobsters. In our minds, the Cultural code *pings* and we think “The Joker is known to be totally badass. The Joker is known to be insane.” Then HER takes over. “How will they demonstrate that he is badass and insane?” Events transpire. It rocks our worlds. Imagine that scene stuck into, say, a random gangster movie, with some random psychopath in the Joker’s role. Not quite as fun, right? Now imagine it in a specific gangster movie, The Departed, with Jack Nicholson doing the stabbing. Awesome again? I think so… but that’s just because Jack Nicholson has developed a library of REF expectations as a screen presence that are just as pervasive as the Joker’s own. (Feel free to repeat this thought experiment with the following actors for hilarious results: Christopher Walken, Vincent Price, Neal Patrick Harris, Tom Hanks, John Goodman.) Generic expectation is a powerful thing.
This also sheds some interesting light on the whole “lying about his scars” thing. One small HER/REF code attached to any new version of the Joker is the question “Are they going with ‘makeup Joker,’ or ‘deformed Joker’?” Production stills answered this question for us long before the movie came out, leading to the inevitable follow up questions of “How did he get deformed?” and, although we can pretty much guess the answer, “Is he wilding out because of his deformity?” When we get to that first speech about the scars, then, it’s not just a pretty piece of scripting and a masterful piece of acting, it’s the closure of one of the film’s most compelling HER mysteries (incidentally, one that operates both within the text and metatextually). It’s quite a good resolution. It’s suitably creepy for one thing. More importantly, it reveals some without revealing too much: that is, the hermeneutic code is somewhat sustained, not finished and tossed aside. We feel primed for a third-act confrontation with Batman where we find out some crucial detail about the Joker’s abusive father that really explains his deviant behavior. The resolution of the mystery seems to be following an arc that is as pleasant as it is predictable. Or so we think. When we hear a second, completely contradictory explanation for the scars, the Hermeneutic code reactivates almost convulsively. We were curious about the scars before, now we have Got. To. Know. It’s an incredibly savvy piece of storytelling. What’s more, it changes the rules of the game (by showing that Ledger’s Joker is not abiding by the unwritten rules of villainhood). Typically, we would be annoyed with a film that didn’t explain the villain’s motivations: that’s one HER enigma that we expect to be closed, and we’ll usually get angry if it’s left open. But when it became apparent that Nolan had no intention of letting us in on the Joker’s real motivations, I found myself feeling almost gleeful at the bucking of the narrative trend. I didn’t want the Joker to escape from Batman’s detective work… but I’m glad he got away from mine. Much as I’m dying to know how he got his scars, if they explain it now it’ll feel like dropping a Monarch butterfly into a kill jar and pinning it’s corpse to a board. (In my fanboyish heart of hearts, though, my preferred theory is that the Joker’s scars are latex fakes. That when he’s carving people up and speechifying, not only is he lying about how he got the scars, he’s lying about having scars to begin with. That would be pretty boss.)
So there you have it. I probably could have saved a lot of your time by just writing “The Dark Knight is awesome because the Joker is awesome,” which, while less than nuanced, sums up my argument pretty accurately. Unfortunately, this leaves me a touch concerned for the future of the Bale/Nolan Batman franchise. There’s not another character in Batman’s rogues gallery that’s as compelling as the Joker. Two-Face would have come in second, but that character is dead (just like The Author!). Oh, they could do a little handwaving and bring him back, but it couldn’t make for a compelling movie, becayse we already know how these filmmakers are going to portray Two-Face. They did a great job with the character, nevertheless, the territory has been consumed. So who’s left? The Penguin worked pretty well for Tim Burton, but the demented camp sensibility of the Burton films is miles away from Nolan’s high-minded solemnity. The Riddler? Maybe. Mr. Freeze? Ech. Poison Ivy?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
By the way, I should at least mention that the symbolic and semiotic codes get quite a workout in this film as well. I won’t bother trying to describe these at length (or even to parse out whether the codes I’m mentioning are SYM or SEM), but briefly, there are two big issues that the film keeps bringing up. First, terrorism/counterterrorism: we’re confronted with torture, extraordinary rendition, bombs, insane criminals, foreign criminals, talk of burning the world, criminals who send the police videotapes of them torturing and killing hostages, etc. etc. Second, the fluidity of identity (something of a thematic obsession for Nolan). We get an entire gang of Jokers at the beginning, and a couple of counterfeit Batmen. Batman is equated with the Joker (by the Joker) and with Dent (by Batman). Dawes is equated with Dent (in that they were “exchanged” by the Joker in a crucial scene), and also with the random Joker henchman that we see wearing a Rachel Dawes nametag. Dent, as Two-Face, is also equated with the Joker (by the Joker). And the Joker is even equated with his own victims (by the filmmakers) in his final appearance, where the idiosyncratic camerawork, which has him hanging upside down but framed so that he seems rightside up, is the same that he used on his torture tapes. I still think the main reason I’m so jazzed about the film is the whole HER/REF complex I described at such length above, but all this connotative stuff sure helps to keep things interesting.