<다크 나이트>에 나타난 수퍼 히어로 서사의 양면적 가치와 정의의 문제

Ambivalence of Superhero Narrative and the Question of Justice in The Dark Knight

This essay primarily aims to discuss the ambivalence of superhero narrative in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) by analyzing how the traditional hero characters of the Western are deconstructed in this film. It also accompanies the discussion of the ambivalent role of a superhero by questioning the way he carries out his extra-legal justice. First of all, The Dark Knight is a twist of the Western in the sense that it starts with a triangular relationship of outlaw hero, official hero and a woman, and ends up with their individual tragedy. By this twist, the film shows a tendency to define good and evil in terms of their relative values rather than absolute justice. Batman, a masked hero to fight against evil, is confronted with an anxiety that his own exceptionality as a figure outside the law might lead to the destruction of the very society that he wants to save. Harvey Dent, an unmasked official hero to righteously defend social justice, transforms himself into a psychopathic killer after he gets disfigured by the Joker’s plotting. The Joker is also a problematic character. He does not represent a traditional villain. Instead, he functions as an on-going force of chaos which subversively puts the symbolic into question. The question of justice in this film also promulgates the idea that the heroism for Batman and Harvey is undermined by the Joker’s deconstruction of law and justice. In this sense, the Joker can be seen as a character to represent the symptoms of the collective paranoia of American society against the war on terror after the terrorist attack in 2001.