AWARD KNIGHT
In mid-November 2008, the executive commitee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences music branch disqualified the score of The Dark Knight from Oscar contention—just as Batman Begins had been disqualified in 2005— because five names were listed as composers on the music cue sheet, an official studio document that lists every piece of music in the film, along with its duration and copyright owners. Hans Zimmer told Daily Variety’s Jon Burlingame that listing the multiple names on the cue sheet was a way of making sure that everyone who contributed to the score would share in the financial rewards, since performing rights societies like ASCAP and BMI use the cue sheets to distribute royalties to composers.261 Besides Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, the cue sheets also listed music editor Alex Gibson, ambient music designer Mel Wesson and composer Lorne Balfe. Gibson, Wesson and Balfe reportedly signed an affidavit stating that the score was primarily the work of Zimmer and Howard, but that wasn’t enough to sway the committee’s decision.262 At least not until December when, after he and Howard had written a pointed letter to Academy executive director Bruce Davis, Zimmer appeared at the music branch’s executive committee meeting to make his case in person. The Academy reversed its decision.263
When Golden Globe nominations were announced on December 10, 2008, Heath Ledger was nominated in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role category for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight.264 The following month, Christopher Nolan was nominated for the 61st annual Directors Guild of America award, the first time a director of a superhero movie had received such recognition from the DGA. By that time, The Dark Knight had already earned nominations from the Producers Guild of America, the American Society of Cinematographers and the Writers Guild of America. Commenting on the DGA honor, announced just one day after The Dark Knight swept the People’s Choice Awards, winning for Favorite Action Movie, Favorite Cast, Favorite Movie, Favorite On-Screen Match-Up (for Christian Bale and Heath Ledger), and Favorite Superhero, Nolan said, “It’s been a good week for us. I have always felt that the grand-scale blockbuster is the thing that Hollywood does best, and that was one of the reasons I was excited to take it on. It was really enjoyable to look at the iconography and the concept of who Batman is and who the Joker is and try to immerse yourself in their world.”265
On January 23, 2009, one year to the day after his death, Heath Ledger earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as the Joker. Ledger’s performance had already won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, a Critic’s Choice Award, and a Golden Globe (as Best Screen Match-Up with Christian Bale). He was also nominated for Screen Actor’s Guild and BAFTA Awards—both of which he would eventually win.266The Dark Knight was nominated for a total of 8 Academy Awards; besides Ledger’s nomination, it nabbed honors for Film Editing, Sound Editing, Art Direction, Cinematography, Makeup, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects. On awards night, Richard King took home the statuette for Sound Editing, and Ledger won Best Supporting Actor. His father, Kim Ledger, mother, Sally Bell, and sister Kate Ledger jointly ascended the stage to accept the Oscar statuette, while the audience joined in a standing ovation. “This award tonight would have humbly validated Heath’s quiet determination to be truly accepted by you all here, his peers, within an industry he so loved,” said Kim Ledger. Kate Ledger said the family was accepting the award on behalf of Heath Ledger’s 3-year-old daughter, “beautiful Matilda.”267 Betsy Sharkey in The Los Angeles Times commented, “Though it may be, it should not be said that Ledger’s death last year at 28 won him the Oscar. His passing added layers of emotion, yes, but his is a performance that stands alone in its power and humility, a brilliant interior piece for a character who could have been little more than a series of vaporous expressions.”268
For the following year’s 2009 Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences expanded the Best Picture category from five nominees to ten. Some industry observers felt that one of the reasons behind the move was because The Dark Knight failed to get a Best Picture nomination. Allowing for ten nominees, it was thought, would widen the field so that worthy blockbusters might get nominated along with the usual array of art-house films. Some in the industry called the expansion “The Dark Knight Rule.”269
AFTERMATH
Long after its release, The Dark Knight continued to generate controversy. The success of the film was attributed to interest generated by the studios highlighting of the late Heath Ledger in almost all of the publicity, Ledger’s mesmerizing performance, and the way that the film went beyond being just another superhero adventure to exploring the ethical issues of America’s war on terror. In the online Slate magazine, Dana Stevens wrote, “Nolan turns the Manichean morality of comic books—pure good vs. pure evil—into a bleak post-9/11 allegory about how terror (and, make no mistake, Ledger’s Joker is a terrorist) breaks down those reassuring moral categories.” In Time magazine, Richard Corliss called the Joker “the Bin Laden of movie villains”.270
Some bloggers saw The Dark Knight as a commentary on President George W. Bush’s war on terror. As The New York Times pointed out, the Joker was a terrorist in the Osama Bin Laden tradition who damaged the free society of Gotham by instilling fear in the public. The Gotham Police Department represented conventional law enforcement. Batman was the dark response to the threat, perhaps going overboard by using people’s cell phones to create a form of domestic surveillance and using torture to uncover details of an ongoing plot. But while the film seemed sympathetic to the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorist approach, Lucius Fox is presented as the voice of reason, arguing against the intrusion on citizens’ civil liberties. And in the end, Batman’s methods make him almost as much a villain as the bad guys.271
In The Wall Street Journal, conservative novelist Andrew Klavan wrote, “There seems to me no question that The Dark Knight is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war...Like W., Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W., Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re- establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”272
However, the way the film explored the issues was ambivalent enough that not only conservatives but also liberals claimed that it validated their beliefs. For instance, in The New York Post, film critic Kyle Smith wrote, “Batman is not charming. He isn’t popular, partly because he’s a zealot and partly because he doesn’t bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night...And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn’t it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair.”273
On the liberal website AlterNet, Michael Dudley of the Institute of Urban Studies wrote that The Dark Knight “takes the viewer on a sometimes traumatic but ultimately redemptive and humanistic journey towards a post-9/11 ethic.” Dudley noted that most of Batman’s extra-legal actions—like beating up the Joker in jail in what the CIA might have called an “enhanced interrogation technique,” or using a computerized tracking system to plug into every Gotham City citizen’s cell phone, similar to Bush’s proposed “Total Information Awareness” system—backfired on him and Gotham City, the metropolis he was trying to protect. Dudley concluded that the film “warns against abandoning our principles out of fear, grief and hatred, as well as abdicating our moral agency to external authorities—both of which comprised the hallmark moral syndrome of the years following 9/11...What Batman is doing is heroic, but it can be seen as vigilantism, as a dark force outside the law. That’s a very, very dangerous road to go down. He’s always riding a knife edge in moral terms.”274
Christopher Goodwin in The Times of London wrote that Nolan touched a raw nerve in all of us by co
nfronting his own deepest fears, quoting the director as saying, “Anarchy and chaos—even the threat of anarchy and chaos—are the most frightening things society faces, especially in this day and age.” Goodwin continued, “it’s possible that, with the Joker, Nolan is exploring his own most radical fear (and, it seems from the film’s success, ours, too): the fear of psychological chaos, of madness, the unraveling of firm mental grounding, the complete loss of psychological control. Read in this way, the Joker represents nothing as banal as Bin Laden, but the id, ‘the dark, inaccessible part of our personality,’ as Freud put it, the base human instincts, unconscious, amoral and utterly selfish.”275The Dark Knight was used to comment on other political issues besides the lingering debate on appropriate responses to terror after 9/11. In September of 2008, when TV and newspapers were filled with news of a government bailout of banks, an enterprising satirist at Overthinkingit.com created a mash up video of the Joker and Gotham City’s criminals watching President George W. Bush’s speech.276
The image of Heath Ledger’s Joker was so indelible that it was used for political commentary after Barack Obama’s election as president of the United States. In early 2009, posters began appearing in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities that showed Obama with white face, black eye sockets and red joker smile and the word “socialism.” Some viewed it as a right-wing critique of Obama’s efforts to reform health care, others thought it racist. The Los Angeles Times tracked down the poster’s creator: Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old senior history major at the University of Illinois. Alkhateeb told The Timeshe didn’t create the Obama/Joker portrait to express a burning political ideology, but that he had just been tinkering around during the holidays with Photoshop digital imaging software and was following an online tutorial about how to “Jokerize” portraits. The word “socialism,” he claimed, had been added by an unknown person who downloaded the Obama/Joker image from the photo-sharing website Flickr and circulated copies of the image. He knew when the theft occurred. In the first two months the image was on Flickr, it logged around 2000 hits. After it was stolen, the hit counter suddenly ticked into the tens of thousands. Alkhateeb said he was alarmed and slightly ashamed of what happened, but remained silent because of Obama’s popularity in Chicago and because he was afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. The person who added the word “socialism” and distributed the posters was never tracked down.277
A potential international political incident arose in early November 2008, when Batman was sued by Batman. Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, an oil producing city in southeastern Turkey, sued Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from The Dark Knight for using the city’s name without permission. Kalkan said, “There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us.” Mayor Kalkan said the psychological impact that the film’s success had on the city’s populace was responsible for a number of unsolved murders and a high rate of female suicide. Warner Bros. shrugged off the suit, saying in a statement, “We are only aware of this claim via press reports and have not seen any actual legal action.”278
The release of The Dark Knight on DVD and Blu-ray in mid-December 2008 highlighted the decline in DVD sales, and the rising popularity of Blu-ray. On the day it was released on Blu-ray, The Dark Knight set a new record, selling 600,000 copies in one day. The combined sales for DVD and Blu-ray were 3 million copies; the second day, the total number had risen to 4.4. million sales. However, just two years earlier, Warner Bros. sold 5 million copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on its first day in DVD and Blu-ray release; the all-time best sales record was set in 2003, when Finding Nemo sold 8 million DVDs its first day out.279
As sales of DVDs declined, industry watchers looked at The Dark Knight sales as a test of the new Blu-ray format in a depressed economy.280 Previously, Iron Man had sold 260,000 Blu-ray discs in its first day, with sales topping 500,000 before the end of the first week. In its first week on the shelves, Iron Man’s combined Blu-ray and DVD sales hit 7.2 million units. The Dark Knight outsold Iron Man on the first day, and its sales were expected to climb through the Christmas holiday.281
On February 15, 2011, Warner Bros. found a unique way to offer The Dark Knight along with Christopher Nolan’s follow-up film, Inception, to consumers in 23 countries where it wasn’t offered through iTunes. The solution: make the films into iPhone apps. When the free apps were downloaded to an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, users were able to see the first five minutes of the movie along with tie-in games, trivia, and other material. They could then access the full movie within the app for the standard iTunes price of around $10. The idea allowed Warner Bros. to offer the movies in markets where Apple had yet to launch a full digital movie store, such as China, Russia, Greece, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic.282
A month later, Warner Bros. became the first Hollywood studio to make films available for rent or purchase on Facebook. The first film they made available to the website was The Dark Knight, which could be rented for $3.283 Making the film more available online was Warner Bros.’ way of boosting the digital distribution business, which the studio hoped to grow to offset losses from the diminishing DVD market.284
As the American economy began to crumble in 2009, collectibles suddenly seemed to be better investments than stocks. In the auction market, rare issues of Superman and Batman comics battled for the record of most money paid for a comic book. On Monday, February 23, 2009, a rare 1938 copy of Action Comics No. 1, featuring the first appearance of Superman, sold for $1 million in a private sale arranged by the New York auction site ComicConnect.com.285 But Superman’s supremacy didn’t last long; by Thursday, a 1939 copy of Detective Comics No. 27, with the first appearance of Batman, was sold in Dallas by Heritage Auctions for $1,075,500.286 Malcolm Phillips, of the leading British seller Comic Book Auctions Ltd, said, “What it tells you is that high-end comics are going into collections which have become like an extension of the equities market. They are going into a very wealthy person’s investment portfolio.”287 Fewer than 100 copies of each comic were believed to still exist.288 But Superman bounced back. On March 29, a 1938 Action Comics No. 1 sold for $1.5 million on the auction web site ComicConnect.com.289
Christopher Nolan was contracted for a third Batman film, but after the success of The Dark Knight, he wanted to take some time away from the character and pursue other projects.290 In October 2008, when asked about the inevitable third film in his Batman trilogy, and whether or not he would be involved in making it, Christopher Nolan told The Los Angeles Times, “There are two things to be said. One is the emphasis on story. What’s the story? Is there a story that’s going to keep me emotionally invested for the couple of years that it will take to make another one? That’s the overriding question. On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name?”291
The Times of London speculated that if Christopher Nolan were unwilling to return to the series, Warner Bros. might find another director for the next Batman film. The paper asked Christian Bale if he would appear in a third Batman movie if someone other than Nolan were to direct it. Bale said, “I don’t even want to think about that, I don’t know if there will be a third.”292 Speaking to Daily Variety’s Michael Fleming, Christopher Nolan looked back on The Dark Knight and summed it up by saying, “We weren’t trying to make people think as much as feel, using the operatic quality of these iconic characters. Batman is appealing because of his human nature. He’s not a guy with super powers, he’s relatable because he has suffered greatly and tried to channel that into something positive. He is a perfect blend of the elemental qualities and romanticism found in such stories as The Count of Monte Cristo, The Prisoner of Zenda and Zorro.”293
Zorro. It all began with Zorro....
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1 Moran, Michael, “Dark Knight, ‘I Believe Whatever Doesn’t Kill Y
ou Simply Makes You Stranger,’” The London Times, March 14, 2008
2 Barnes, Brooks, “A Studio Head Slowly Alters the ‘Warner Way,’” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/business/media/10warner. html?scp=405&sq=batman&st=nyt, accessed Aug. 16, 2011
3 Ibid.
4 McClintock, Pamela, “Warner’s Men in Tights: ‘Batman,’ ‘Superman’ to See Sequel Action,” Daily Variety, Feb. 23, 2006, p. 17
5 Miller, Neil, “Interview: The Dark Knight Scribes David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan,” FilmSchoolRejects.com, July 17, 2008, http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/ interview-the-dark-knight-scribes-david-s-goyer-and-jonathan-nolan.php, accessed Aug. 27, 2011
6 Brevet, Brad, “’The Dark Knight’ Writers’ Desk With David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan,” RopeOfSilicon.com, July 16, 2008, http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/the_dark_ knight_writers_desk_with_david_goyer_and_jonathan_nolan, accessed Aug. 27, 2011
7 Miller, Neil, “Interview: The Dark Knight Scribes David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan,” FilmSchoolRejects.com, July 17, 2008, http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/news/ interview-the-dark-knight-scribes-david-s-goyer-and-jonathan-nolan.php, accessed Aug. 27, 2011
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