No matter how rancorous our politics grows, we can at least be confident that ordinary Americans would not commit mass murder. Or would they? Maybe the Joker was right after all. Maybe the climax of The Dark Knight, from ten years ago, looks hopelessly naïve today. “What were you hoping to prove? That deep down, we’re all as ugly as you?” Batman asks the Joker in the final moments. “You’re alone.” I wonder if the Joker would feel so isolated today.
The Joker’s plot struck him as infallible: He’d rigged two fully loaded ferries with explosives and put onboard each boat a remote detonator with which to blow up the other boat. If neither boat blew up its neighbor, the Joker promised to destroy both at midnight. To make the temptation to mass murder irresistible, he arranged that there would be a social chasm between the populations of the two boats: One contained ordinary commuters, the other convicts. The convicts, the Joker figured, hated the ordinary citizens. And the ordinary citizens likely hated the convicts even more, maybe even considered them subhuman. In an offhandedly chilling moment, a businessman on the commuter ferry argues, “Those men on that boat made their choices. They chose to murder and steal.” Wait a minute — “to steal”? You not only deserve to be locked up but to forfeit your life if you steal?
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