Gotham in the Crosshairs

"As we looked through the comics, there was this fascinating idea that Batman's presence in Gotham actually attracts criminals to Gotham, attracts lunacy …. When you're dealing with questionable notions like people taking the law into their own hands, you have to really ask, where does that lead?" — Christopher Nolan

It leads to a gigantic mother-flippin' body count. As Batman Begins wound down, Jim Gordon casually offered a near-throwaway update: Gotham's ghetto, The Narrows, had been destroyed by the invading terrorists. A staggeringly classist development, and yet the audience could feel like it was no big shakes; they lost that battle but won the war.

Obviously, with Warner Bros.' refreshed lifeline on the Batman canon, the war needed to continue, plunging Gotham deeper into the darkness before the third-film dawn. The Dark Knight furthered our education on the new math: If Batman can innovate on crime-fighting, Gotham can innovate on crime. Mob boss Carmine Falcone's bedazzling at the hands of The Scarecrow in the first movie was the ceremonial passing of the torch. From that moment on, well into The Dark Knight, numerous beats illustrate how the salt-and-pepper gangsters of Gotham's past have been swapped out for kill-frenzy maniacs who clearly get paid by the pound. For a hero-versus-villain setup, collateral damage is alarmingly front and center.

The Narrows was a subtle precursor to the level of public peril in The Dark Knight. Cops, innocents, random thugs, incarcerated felons, hospitals, and cocktail-party donors — oh, those precious donors! — are all in the crosshairs at some point, and why not? Bruce Wayne has both the funding and the staff know-how to develop infinite tools for fighting crime. Would the spectacle of the crime not increase to meet this, like a vapor filling its container?

This is Nolan's key differentiator. Deftly facilitated through the Joker, Nolan refines the hero story: The hero and villain do not cleanly cat-and-mouse it until fighting on a mountaintop (see: Man, Super; Man, Spider). The hero runs triage while the villain plies his trade, which is generally tearing shit up. A hero as well-funded as Batman begs a villain with the moral and mental latitude to test his resources; it invites the lunacy mentioned above.

The net result is that each victory Batman enjoys is at best partial: He defeats Ra's Al Ghul but loses the Narrows. He catches the Joker but loses Rachel Dawes. He saves Jim Gordon but loses Harvey Dent. This is beyond the antiseptic sacrifice-of-the-hero comics have lulled us into; this is no less comprehensive than Aeneas, tragically losing Dido when urged back to his quest. Like Aeneas, Batman runs headfirst into the underworld to rescue Gotham, his Dido. Is total victory ever going to be possible, or will Gotham spurn him (as Virgil predicts)? Given Nolan's mold-breaking to date, as well as the controversial conclusion to The Dark Knight, we don't know. What we do know is that Batman's goals and the means to attain them are in conflict, and that certainly costs Gotham a hell of a lot.