The Dark Knight

Last night Julie and I went to see "The Dark Knight". It was a darker movie than I tend to enjoy, and I'm not sure that I'd say I enjoyed it, but I was reminded of some important things that I tend to try to pretend don't exist.

Heath Ledger did an amazing job playing the part of The Joker. He's the kind of character that people walk out of the theater saying "I'm glad that isn't real." The scary thing is, that kind of evil is all too real. Satan's greatest deception is to get people to believe that he doesn't exist. Satan is much more evil than The Joker, but he is often more subtle than that. Satan has no motivation for his evil than just the destruction of the people God loves. There have been times and cultures where Satan could cause people to fall by making himself know, but today most of the time the best way to get people to fall is just to get people to believe that there is no God or devil. The movie was a great reminder of what real evil can look like. We have a enemy like that, though much more sly and much more evil.

Batman is always portrayed as a tormented figure. There is a sense of justice and vengence, but not as the cost of becoming that which he fights against. Where he does well as a Christ figure is that he has the position of someone much more important than a crime fighter, but he sets aside that identity to seek justice for the oppressed. He fights evil, but is not willing to compromise his own integrity to do so. He knows there is a line that separates him from good and evil, and he is not willing to step over that line even if it would make things easier.

One of the more subtle lessons I found was idolitry. We see that Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne both love Rachel. She is an object of passion for both of them. How they respond when faced with the loss of her makes the difference between love and making her an idol. When faced with the possible loss of the woman he loves, Bruce Wayne looks at the choice he has to make between the woman he loves and the man he believes can rescue Gotham from evil. Bruce makes the choice to sacrifice the woman he loves in order to bring justice to the city he loves. When Harvey loses the woman he loves, he also loses himself. He chooses to set aside his own love of justice, which was shared by the woman he loves, and seek vengence against those who took the thing he loved. When Bruce Wayne was faced with the loss, he chose goodness over the woman he loved and he never compromised who he was in order to save what he loved. When Harvey Dent faced this choice, he choose evil and compromised who he was because his idol had been taken with him. If Rachel had survived to the end of the movie, which man would she had seen as a man of character and love? Bruce was wasn't willing to compromise his goodness for what he loved, Harvey compromised who he was for the sake of what he wanted. Harvey didn't understand what love was.

Not my most coherent thoughts, but it's early on a Saturday morning.