According to Batman: The Dark Night, what is the role of good and evil, How is the dualism complicated:

The role of good and evil in the Dark Night is about the preservation versus destruction of general order. The crimes that Batman commits are set aside because he is cleaning up Gotham. That he kills innocents, works without due process, and is repeatedly viewed as a vigilante all acts that could traditionally be considered evil are ignored because of his skills at crime fighting. It becomes a kind of ideological reach, where there is an attachment ot the idea of justice more then the small timers and citizens that get in the way.
What is complicated about this, is that the central villains: Joker and Two Face and to a lesser extent Batman himself are exempted from the dialectic of good and evil because they are considered mentally ill. They have internalized the idea in our culture that those who are incapable of making choices because of what could roughly be called mental illness. The Joker claims it for himself repeatedly, and has it claimed for him, that his main operative principal is one of “craziness”---from the beginning scenes with the bank robbery: “is the Joker as crazy as they say?”, or when the Joker meets with Gotham's crime leaders, and asks “Group therapy sessions" in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night. “, or his first discussion of how he got the scars, an almost parodic violation of Batman's primal scene: “Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...” 1
If the Batman is not evil because he is working on preserving the moral order (and he makes this explicit when he claims himself as an outlaw, and says “we can make the choice no one else can make” , and the Joker is not evil, because to be evil is to control one's actions, and he is incapable of doing so, then that leaves us with Harvey Dent. He begins by worrying about his morality and the morality of Gotham. He is the one who claims that the police should be doing the job that Batman is doing, and he is the one who attempts and fails at a legal, state based solution to the problem of crime in the city.
His belief that morality and good order can be achieved not through individual work, but through the police, the court, and his role as district attorney is destroyed by the violence for those who are unmoored by traditional anchors of morality, the state, or even mental health. Dent's quickly developed nihilism results from the betrayal of ordinary ideas of good and evil being successful. In the amoral badlands of Gotham, where crime is controlled by one man who is barely hanging on, and which is destroyed by another who's entire purpose is a purposeless desire to destroy everything with in reach, the only logical response is a complete lack of logic.
This is the complication then, that good and evil suggests an explicit belief structure. There are rules that should be followed in order to externalize what is good. There are rules that should be avoided in order to externalise what is evil. These externalisations function as ways to construct relationships and communities. There is nothing being done in this film, post Dent's transformation, that works for the community well being or sickness.







What is Harvey Dent's perception of the role of fate? How does he embody and subvert this understanding of fate?
Dent was low key about fate before, his use of the coin was playful, and almost seductive, the scene where he meets his lover in a bar, he flips the coin as a provocation, an almost seductive wink against his usual desires for order, good government, and the lack of randomness. He is handsome, successful, well-off, and ambitious, plus he has reason to believe that ambition will be rewarded. He has all the reason in the world to believe that he is control of his own fate, or that fate does not exist at all. Rachel, his lover, confirms this when she says over and over again, I make my own luck. What changes then, is the death of the woman he loves by someone who has no control, and who seeks randomness at all costs.
He embodies the idea of fate, in that lack of control. When Rachel dies, the only thing that can occur is for him to seek vengeance. But how he sought it before was in an attempt at making right what was wrong through his job and his political ambitions. When it was proven that he had no control over his own life, that his previous thoughts on control were taken from him, he moved into a belief that he had no control. This embodied the nihilism that he had previously had no belief in. His embodiment of fate then becomes an embodiment of loss.
The Joker never believed in fate, only believed in creating the most chaos as possible, so he is not random. Harvey Dent, being half grotesque and half human, being half rational and half random, having the id and the super ego explicitly found in his physiognomy is the opposite of the Joker, who makes stories about his scars, and his surgical grimace, and who makes himself up or the Batman who places vestments and masks on before he does his work for the night. There are two subversions then. It is almost that Two Face cannot make a choice, though the film constantly is all about choice, he did not have a choice to be marred, and for the woman he loved to be murdered. That is the first subversion, one against choices or autonomy.
The second subversion is made explicit when he states “ou thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” That his previously held beliefs in his vocation have been broken, and what is viewed as his central quest is perverted. The idea that the only thing that is fair, that is without prejudice is that which is beyond his control, mocks the obsessive clean streets campaign of both Bruce Wayne's soft power and Batman's hard violence.
The last subversion, unrelated to the previous two is that on at least one occasion, when he has captured the family of Commissioner Gordon, it appears that he flips his coin twice, in order to get the result he wants—to save Gordon's young son. That he is incapable of killing a child, or even Gordon himself, suggests that he still has a good side, literally and metaphorically. That he is unable to fully commit, suggests that he is more stable, more connected to the real people he can control then either Batman (who is unable to do anything but fulfil his ideological goals) and Joker (who has no central guiding principal except for spectacled violence.)
To be only random, to only be a vigilante, is to live such a singular purpose that denies the bifurcated existence that Two Face has decided to pursue. This bifurcation places him as the middle position though, the belief in fate is a belief in options. The Batman and the Joker have no such belief in options, in choice, no matter how many speeches that they both make about the ethical possiblities contained there in. Dent is the only one in the film then who has a choice, he makes the choice to flip a coin, and he makes the choice to flip that coin, every time he flips the coin he also makes the choice to follow it, or to flip it again. If he does this is up for debate, but these choices, even in their binary state are more then either the main hero or villian allow themselves.
In what ways does Batman: The Dark Knight cause us to be critical of our own (North American) culture?
I have my doubts that a film that cost 185 million dollars, was financed by the largest media conglomerate in the world, and made more then a billion2 could be truly critical of anything, in our or anyone else's culture. The pieces of the film that seem critical, including the Joker's You Complete Me speech, his burning a pile of money, Lucius Foxes nervousness about surveillance, among others can be explained away and at the end of the film, you have a tale of American exceptionalism embodied in a billionaire playboy who plays armed vigilante in the evenings., a figure that was so comfortable to the right wing in the united states that the Wall Street Journal used it as a defence of Bush's War in Iraq. 3
The You Complete Me speech is seductive, it has the radical allure of anarchic violence that seems reasonable, that makes you want to follow him. Think of it as the psychotic remake of Valerie Solenras writing the SCUM manifesto, some good points, some unhinged theatre, and enough charisma for you to be a child following the Pied Piper. But, the Joker is not a sympathetic character, his behaviour and his desires cannot be followed. Not in any moral, or social sense, but in that he is a singular creature working independently for the destruction of the human race. His monologue in the interrogation scene is not critical of the general culture, because it's intentions are outside any real rubrics of change, however utopian.
His burning the money to the ground is a similar situation. The Joker is not making a Burn, Baby, Burn outsider gesture against the luridness of late capitalism, he is a crazy person being crazy, suggesting the contempt he has for the world. As an audience we are more sympathetic to the aspirational life style porn of Bruce Wayne's expensive dinners, chicly minimal batcave, his mansions and penthouses, then we are of anything that the Joker can offer.
Speaking of Batman, he is a vigilante, and the official policy is to arrest him on site, but they call on him daily, and expect him to be there. This look one way, and do another is American foreign policy, a metonymy of Gautonomo Bay and the extraordinary rendition program where government officials tell us that America does not torture, that it has laws against torture, but that these people are so evil and so unable to be controlled that the only way to get information is to engage in what is called enhanced interrogation techniques. Batman with his physicality, his weaponry, and his lack of jurisdiction is a one man apology for the politics of American foreign policy in he first decade of the 21st century. That some of that weaponry comes from the CIA and that he feels no compunction about spying on every citizen of Gotham, and that even Fox is willing to do this, just one time, like the supposedly temporary allowances of the patriot act, hint heavily that Nolan was aware of what he was doing, that there was nothing accidental about these parallels.
In this capacity Batman is an American project. The people who are not fully assimilated Americans from the villains that Joker meets with, to the Hong Kong Bankers are ethnic or social others. With one important exceptions. Alfred the Butler, who convinces Batman after his small moral breakdown, that he is the only one who can save the entire city, that his business is one of saving lives. In this way, he becomes the supporter for an untenable policy. In fact, there are few people of colour in this film, few women who work as anything but a love interest. No queer voices, no voices of people who make under 6 figures, it is a movie that continues the idea that American idealism is a gift for the upper classes, and especially the white upper classes.
To make a movie that truly challenges the status qou is impossible when the ruling elite is funding it, and it expects that funding to result in some serious return on capital, even the joker masks, t-shirts, and other accessories are a cynical marketing ploy, encouraging especially adolescent males to capitalize on this sort of spectacle.
Do you find the two ferries scene realisitc:
The film is about what it means to make a choice, and whether making choices are even possible. The Joker has created a series of set pieces, that are increasingly spectacular. The two ferries scenes are not to be judged by the standard of verisimilitude in another kind of film, they are not intended to be be hyper realistic, it is intended to be over the top, to eschew realism for awesome special effects. To have a large scale prisoners dilemma, is in the rubric, theme and structure of the film. The dialouge, and the choices that the prisoners make, that they chose not to blow anything or anyone up, allows for Batman to argue for the essential goodness of every day citizens, which is important later on, because it gives him a moral ground to debate the Joker about the essential nature of humanity, which gives the audience an out, allowing them to enjoy the movie and still think of the psychotic Batman as someone who still protects everyone he can, while portraying the Joker once again, as someone who refuses the basic contract of what makes us human.
In this sense, it also states explicitly what has been implied from the beginning, that it takes someone outside the usual status to do what is nessecary. Ordinary people are unwilling or perhaps unable, even people who have killed before, to “get their hands dirty” to make the difficult choices, and they require strong leaders to make those choices for them. The Joker then mocks both Batman and the prisoners/good citizens as weak and unable to control their lives. The scene then, in it's obsessions with power, control, desire for a strong leader, and the critical attention to preventing chaos by any means necessary is both textually and subtextually realistic to the structure of the film, and Nolan's outstanding goals.



What does the Joker mean when he tells Batman you complete me?
The Batman commits violence in the dark, at night, in costume and a mask. The Joker commits violence in the dark, at all hours, in costume and a mask. Batman only commits violence against those who he thinks deserve it. The Joker commits violence against everyone. The Batman's essential goal is to perserve order. The Joker's essential goal is to destroy order. They work in conjunction, one without ideology and one with ideolgy. Without Batman, Joker would have no reason to live, and without the Joker (and the other, more florid villians) Batman would have no reason to live. Their existence depends on each other. They are the yin/yang of Gotham. If the Joker stops, then Batman loses his reason for living.
There are also issues of Normality. Batman, and not Wayne is closeted, he attempts to be normal on his days off, his role as a costumed superhero only happens in the off hours. His ordianriness and his power allow him to cosset the strangeness of the Joker. Joker does not remove the mask, does not live in the corridors of power, and refuses the obsession with normality, with fitting in that Wayne holds onto as an example of his superiority to the other scum. In that scene, Batman says that the Joker is “garbarge that kills for money” but the Joker kills for reasons that are his own, just as Batman began the quest for justice for reasons that are personal and are slightly cryptic.
In this sense, that not only is the Joker saying you and I have the costuming, the masking, the personal quest that cannot be contained, that are broken forever and no matter how much justice seeking or chaos making that we do, we will forever keep doing it, if Batman loses that thin veneer of civiliazation, if he loses the excuse for going out and killing people, even if he stops feeling bad about it, then he will be the Joker. The Joker is a complete Batman in the sense that he is the logical extension of Batman's obsessive quest, or at least he is Batman with out any of Bruce Wayne's morals, status, position in society, power, or self control.