Dr. Hibbs is a Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University, and the author of “Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption.”
Dr. Hibbs, It’s not too often that a film captures the attention of critics and fans, as well as philosophers and theologians, but The Dark Knight has done just exactly that. What makes it the subject of your own interest?
It fits very nicely with the topic that I was investigating for… Arts of Darkness, because it is… as everyone has noticed who’s reviewed it, a very dark film. It’s dark, especially in terms of its subject matter and its characters, and yet I think viewers sense that there’s something more than mere darkness and violence in the film. There are serious questions being asked in the film about the nature of evil, with the remarkable performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker, a character whom I think exceeds any previous villain in any superhero film ever made, in terms of the seriousness with which we are to take the evil that he pursues and unleashes upon Gotham. And then it raises questions about the pursuit of justice in the midst of a world that seems taken over and easily dominated by evil. There are characters we have questions about because of the evil they pursue, but there are also good questions, good characters, whom we sympathize with, a number of them members of the police force... and Batman himself is a sort of question mark as to his exact character, but I think ends up in the film as a kind of admirable character.
As a Catholic, and as someone who thinks about these things, do you think this film tells the truth about evil?
It doesn’t tell the whole truth about evil, but it certainly… forces us to reckon with the reality of evil. One of the reasons… that the Joker character is a more serious embodiment of evil is because typically in superhero films, the bad guys, the villains, are motivated by a kind of petty jealousy, or they’ve had some kind of freakish accident happen to them in the laboratory when they’ve been doing weird scientific experiments, and suddenly they’re turned against the good guys… but what’s interesting about the Joker is that we’re given no account of the origins or the cause of the evil that he pursues. In fact, in a couple cases, he begins to tell stories about how he got his scars, and we realize after the second story that he’s simply making these up. I think... in the modern world we keep wanting through science or criminality or through psychology to say that something must have happened to this person to make him or her evil, and I think in this case it is a kind of freely chosen evil that the Joker pursues. So we’re left with a question mark about the reality of evil. The seeming love of destruction and mayhem, and especially in this case, the love of tearing down those who seem good- the kind of deepest evil is simply that [which] wants to destroy goodness because it can’t be in the same room with goodness and take it seriously. And so in that sense, I think it goes a certain measure in the direction of taking evil quite seriously.
I’m kind of reminded of the anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s book “The Man Who Was Thursday, who only valued civilization as an object of destruction.
I think that’s exactly right in this case. I think that indicates… that this sort of evil, this pursuit of nothingness, which is really what the Joker is trying to be about, is in a sense parasitic. It presupposes that there is goodness there, that there is a kind of order there that the Joker can try to erode. We’re easily transfixed by the character of the Joker in this film, but I think that says something about the priority of goodness over evil. As he says at one point, “I’m like the dog chasing the car; I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught it." What he wants to do is to simply chase and disrupt. He has no notion of setting up something positive as a rival, and so evil in this case is actually parasitic on goodness. It presupposes goodness as something that it can work upon and try and destroy.
Well, that’s how we understand the created order anyway. As Catholics, we understand that good predates evil, and evil cannot exist unless it serves as a parasite on the good. At one point, the Joker tells Batman, “you complete me,” and he says it in a joking sense, but in another sense, it’s actually the case, because there is no opportunity for evil to exist independently of good. It’s always a perversion; it’s always a distortion.
Exactly.
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