Villainy in The Dark Knight Trilogy Superhero movies comprise one of the largest, and most profitable, genres

of movies. From classic 1989 Batman by Tim Burton to 2012s superhero extravaganza The Avengers, movie makers have long taken from the pages of comic books to tell their stories. Often these movies, and the series of movies which often result from their success, have many similarities about them. An initially cocky hero is bogged down by the trials of heroism, but finally overcomes his doubt to defeat the villain in an epic final battle. Often, the heroes in various superhero movies are similar; comparing heroes from different movie franchises yields little insight. Where superhero movies most often diverge from one another is in their portrayal of villains. Villainy is an expansive and controversial subject matter. Villains in superhero franchises are unique, because due to the nature of the stories, villains must change from movie to movie. To maintain a consistent message about villainy while keeping each new villain fresh and different is an immensely difficult task, and it is often this very task which causes movie franchises to weaken as they add more and more sequels to the story. One franchise which both gave a clear message about villainy (and as a result, heroism) is director Christopher Nolans Batman series, The Dark Knight trilogy. Although the villains in these movies are different and often unrelated to one another, each in his or her own way carries the movie hes featured in and makes the franchises theme easily apparent. A thorough study of these villains and themes renders a much greater understanding of the message and meaning of the franchise as a whole.

The first movie in the series, Batman Begins, has two main villains: Bruce Waynes mentor Ras Al Ghul, whos villainy is a twist shown at the end of the movie, and the psychological terrorist Scarecrow, who uses a gas-form medicine to torture his victims into powerful and terrifying hallucinations. The villains in this movie have one goal: the destruction of Gotham. As the leader of an ancient society called the League of Shadows, Ras Al Ghul is dedicated to the destruction of societies he judges have become too decadent: in other words, he is a high-minded terrorist. Batman Begins does not enter deeply into a discussion of the ethics behind what Ras Al Ghul does. Much of the movie goes on without him in it. But having a villain bent solely on the destruction of a city was an interesting twist. While this plan certainly seems to be typical villainy, it is important to note that Ras Al Ghul does not try to gain anything in particular through his destructive plan. He is not destroying Gotham for money or power, or even for revenge. He tries to destroy Gotham because he actually believes it is the right thing to do. This ideology mirrors the ideology of the jihadists who have preformed acts of terrorism around the world. Jihadists do not terrorize for personal gain. Often, their acts of terrorism involve their own death, such as a suicide bombing. They terrorize people because they actually believe it is the right thing to do. The goals and philosophy of Ras Al Ghul mirror this attitude. He is an allegory for the terrorism which afflicts the modern world. The best movie in the series, one of the best movies of all time, featured one of the most iconic villains of all time. Just months before The Dark Knight hit theatres, lead actor Heath Ledger tragically died of a prescription drug overdose.

The attention surrounding his death led to intense anticipation for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Despite the anticipation, Ledgers performance blew audiences away and he won a posthumous academy award for his performance. The Joker took the terroristic tendencies of Batman Begins Ras Al Ghul and intensified them to ridiculous new levels. The Joker explains his philosophy in one stirring scene with Gotham hero district attorney Harvey Dent (insert link to scene here). All I do is show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. The joker is an anarchist, someone who wants nothing out of life except to see the order around him break down. As Bruce Waynes butler says, he is a man who just wants to watch the world burn. The point of his villainy is not to destroy a society he sees as too elegant, it is not to make people suffer and it is not to find revenge. His point is to destroy everything, to turn the world in on itself and watch it display the madness which he holds inside himself. A poignant final scene involves the joker attempting to convince yachts full of people to blow each other up. As Batman says, he was trying to show that deep down, everyone is like him. This appears to be the Jokers motivation: to remove the strictures and comforts of society from the worldly sphere so that he can prove that everyone is as depraved as him. The message the movie sends is a much darker one than the message Ras Al Ghul sent in Batman Begins. The movie posits that terrorists operate not out of a misplaced sense of morality but out of a complete lack of any morality. Some terrorists do not proscribe to any code, but only want to witness the destruction of the world. These types of people require a certain form of heroism to be combated, a heroism which requires courage and moral conviction.

The final movie in the trilogy features its most intimidating villain. Straying from the franchises previous strategy of utilizing well-known classic Batman villains, The Dark Knight Rises decided to make its own icon in the form of Bane, a lesser known villain whos monstrous physical size and background in the League of Shadows makes him the rare physical and mental match to Batman. Bane is, like the other villains, a terrorist seeking to destroy Gotham. Unlike the other villains in the series, Bane has a more human motivation for his actions: revenge for the death of his former mentor Ras Al Ghul and his love for Bruce Waynes business partner Talia, the daughter of Ras Al Ghul. Despite the apparent humanity of Banes motivations, his plot for destruction is the incredibly vicious and destructive. Using a technology developed by a nuclear physicist, Bane creates an atomic bomb strong enough to destroy the entire city of Gotham. Instead of setting the bomb off immediately, though, Bane decides to wait and let Gotham destroy itself from the inside. Playing on the rising tensions inside the city, Bane incites a FrenchRevolution type riot, sending the city into a perpetual state of chaos. Hanging over this chaos is the nuclear bomb, which Bane turns into a ticking time bomb. The point of Banes plan is not just to destroy Gotham, but to show the world that its greatest city was actually a den of vice and destruction. Bane wanted to destroy not only Gotham, but everything Gotham stood for. These three villains cover all ends of the spectrum: from the pure insanity of the Joker, to the cold calculating plots of Bane, they represent a diverse group, but still provide a unified message about the nature of evil. The evil which our world faces today is of one main form: terrorism. From the middle east to inside our very

borders, terrorists are constantly plotting attacks on our peace and security. Khandelwal discusses the nature of terrorism in his article Debunking Myths About Terrorism. The power of terrorism, Khandelwal argues, is not that terrorists can inflict extraordinary violence, which they clearly can, but that terrorists can instill in a large and diverse group of people fear of the same thing. This reality about terrorism is evident in all three Dark Knight movies. In Batman Begins, Ras Al Ghul uses a chemical hallucinogen to send the entire city of Gotham into a panic. In The Dark Knight, the Joker uses highly public assassinations and high profile terrorist attacks to scare the do-gooders in Gotham off the mobs tail. In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane the fear of being cut off from the outside world to encourage Gothamites to attack each other to fend for themselves. In each of these cases, the villain is not attempting to destroy the city of Gotham through the use of sheer force; the closest we come to that is Banes ticking nuclear bomb. Rather, each villain is using terror as a weapon to encourage Gotham to destroy itself. This mirrors the intentions of terrorists today: although immensely powerful, they will never be able to destroy entire countries through the use of sheer force. Rather, they use attacks such as 9/11 or the subway bombing in London to encourage Western countries to destroy themselves. The negative effects of terrorism on the countries which fall victim to it are explored in Alex Bellamys article "Torture, Terrorism, and the Moral Prohibition on Killing Non-combatants." Bellamy argues that terrorism often leads victim countries to torturing enemies to combat it, which in turn leads their enemies to more terrorism. The moral degradation of a country is just as serious as the physical or economic degradation. If a country no longer acts on what it stands for, it

will crumble from the inside. This truth is demonstrated in The Dark Knight Rises, where Gotham, driven by the actions of the Joker to canonize Harvey Dent, who became a homicidal maniac. Although at the end of The Dark Knight the decision is made to pin the crimes of Harvey Dent on the Batman and is praised as a heroic choice, in The Dark Knight Rises the consequences of such deception come to life. Bane finds a speech written by Jim Gordon explaining the entire deception and revealing the truth about Harvey Dent. Bane uses this speech to incite the masses of Gotham to riot against the upper class and at the same time release the prisoners of Blackgate prison, all of whom are there almost exclusively because of the Dent act, a piece of legislation which made pleading insanity a near impossibility for members of the mob. The message Nolan is sending here is that the moral effects of terrorism on a victim nation can be as serious as the physical effects of the violence and the psychological effects of the fear it inspires. When nations or cities use terrorist attacks as reason to lie to their citizens or to violate their own laws they damage themselves more than the terrorists ever could. Terrorism is the organized use of violence to attack innocent people or their property for political purposes (Coady, 39). The motivations of the various villains in the trilogy often differ, but they each fit this definition of terrorism. Ras Al Ghul is looking to start a brave new world from the ashes of the worlds former greatest city. The Joker is looking to project onto everyone else the madness and pain he feels inside himself. Bane is looking to avenge his mentors death and teach Batman the error of his ways. To accomplish these goals, each villain uses acts of mass violence, or the threat of such acts, to coerce the city of Gotham into yielding to their

demands or to destroying itself. It is interesting that the threat of violence can be just as effective as violence itself. Bane never sets off a nuclear bomb, but the everpresent threat of such a catastrophe drives people to places they never before encountered. The victims of Ras Al Ghuls chemical attack have nothing real to fear, but the perception of frightening things or situations leads them to tear apart their portion of Gotham. Coadys definition therefore misses a key point about terrorism: it is the perception of the threat of violence which instills fear and thus changes attitudes, not the perpetration of such violence. A better definition might have been given earlier in the same article: Terrorism is the premeditated, deliberate, systematic murder, mayhem, and threatening of the innocent to create fear and intimidation in order to gain a political or tactical advantage, usually to influence an audience. This definition has important consequences for the way countries deal with terrorism. If innocent countries realize that terrorism is powerless to change us unless we let it, we will not have to stoop to lows such as torture and lies to successfully combat those who perpetrate it. This sort of self empowerment is a major theme of The Dark Knight. The climactic scene in which the Joker rigs the ferries to explode demonstrates the power of this premise. Despite an extremely stressful and terrifying situation, two groups of people, one ferry full of people who have led extremely hard lives, and one ferry full of people who are trying to protect their innocent families, kept their heads and did not give in to the obvious yet terrible solution the situation presented: neither ferry pulled the trigger for the other boat. The people on the ferries would rather accept death at the hands of a madman than give in to becoming murderers themselves.