Saint Batman?
Father Raymond J. de Souza
Heath Ledger is mesmerizing in The Dark Knight, the latest Batman film. Here in his Australian homeland, his posthumous appearance as the Joker has been a major news story for two weeks.
It’s an extraordinary film, even if you are, inexplicably, unmoved by the addition of futuristic gadgets to the most reliable blockbuster combination in cinema: explosions, firearms, car chases and more explosions. This Batman comes with the bonus of some of the more combustible questions in philosophy. What is evil? Is there a moral order built into our world, or is to speak of such a moral design delusional?
This Joker does not permit us to dismiss him as delusional; he comes with an argument. This is not the maniacal buffoon of Jack Nicholson’s star turn nearly 20 years ago. This Joker is diabolical.
“I choose chaos,” the Joker confesses. There is no order built into human nature, no moral law written on the heart. There are rules of common agreement. But they are only manufactured rules, entirely arbitrary, without enduring value. They do not correspond to any truth–and they cannot, for there is no order or design at the heart of reality. There is only chaos, and the Joker embraces it. In an act of perverse integrity, he sets a mountain of cash alight, lest the impurity of his motives be corrupted by some logic or reason.
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical,” explains Alfred, played by Michael Caine. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Classical philosophy defined evil as not being real in itself, but the lack of something real — just as darkness is not real in itself, but rather the lack of light. If evil is a privation, as this view suggests, then what is real has some order and goodness to it: Light is good, and it is possible to conclude that it is better than darkness.
