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Bradley J. Kelley
Ms. Jennifer Enoch
ENC1145
27 January 2015
The Worlds Greatest Detective: The Dark Knight as Detective Fiction
In the realm of comic books, particularly those pertaining to
super heroes, Batman is considered to be the greatest detective in the
world. Although he lacks super powers, he protects his city, and often
times the world, by solving crimes with his immeasurable arsenal of
tools, perfected physical state, and genius level intellect. Batmans
seemingly unmatchable detective skills have been present since the
characters inception, but never has it been so masterfully depicted
onscreen as it was in the film, The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008). The Dark
Knight is one of the best representations of Batman as detective fiction
in the way that the genre is defined in the book, The Figure of the
Detective: A Literary History and Analysis (Brownson). This is greatly
due to the way in which the film uses three of the major modes of
communication to convey to the viewers that Batman is an indomitable
figure of the detective who will stop at nothing to find justice (Arola,
Sheppard, and Ball). While the entirety of the film is an example of
detective fiction, one scene in particular displays Batman indisputably
as the storys detective. In this scene, Batman is standing atop a
skyscraper as he intercepts a radio transmission made by the film's

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criminal, the Joker, about a nearby crime. Batman immediately heads
to the crime scene and is met there by the city's police commissioner,
James Gordon. At the crime scene, Batman and commissioner Gordon
find two murdered men that had been fatally shot and a newspaper
clipping about the city's mayor. They both quickly deduce that this was
an act of the Joker and that he was trying to send a message about the
important city figures that he planned to kill next. Batman and
commissioner Gordon go over the clues they found and came to the
conclusion that the Joker is planning on killing the city's mayor and the
city's district attorney, Harvey Dent. These deductions were made due
to the fact that the two murder victims and the newspaper clipping
about the mayor, all had the Joker's signature face paint emblazoned
over them. Even further, the last names found on the two corpses were
Harvey and Dent respectively. After piecing together the clues, Batman
and the commissioner realize that they must find and stop the Joker
before he can kill anyone else. Batman then proceeds to inspect the
scene for any place where the bullets that killed the two men might
have ended up. He finds a bullet hole in the wall behind the bodies and
then uses a drill tool from his utility belt so that he could remove that
segment of the wall and use it for further inspection.
One of the most prolific modes of communication used in this
scene that epically captures Batmans grandeur as a figure of the
detective is the visual mode. According to the authors of

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Writer/Designer, the visual mode refers to the use of images and
other characteristics that readers see and includes color, layout,
style, size, and perspective in order to communicate an idea or
message (Arola, Sheppard, and Ball). Director Christopher Nolan
effectively does exactly this in the scene as he displays Batman
standing on top of a towering skyscraper at night while listening to
radio frequencies. This part of the scene is shrouded in the cover of
night and the camera perspective slowly encroaches upon Batman and
this is done to communicate the dark overtones of the film itself, but
more importantly to communicate the heros shadowy and methodical
ways as a detective. To further this notion, Christopher Nolan even shot
this part of the film with an IMAX camera, which adds an enormous
depth to the scene and captures a large part of the city in the
backdrop. This not only gives depth to the perception of Batmans
methods as a detective but in a way communicates that he is
protecting and watching over the entire city, which is this films
embodiment of threatened innocent bystanders (Brownson). The
visual mode is strongly used again as the perspective shifts to when
Batman meets the police commissioner at the recently discovered
crime scene. The location is a dimly lit apartment room that was
ransacked and dismantled with two dead bodies leaned over across the
top of a table. The camera swiftly glances over the length of the room
showing that every facet of the apartment is wrecked and the two

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corpses are haphazardly sprawled on the table, completely lifeless.
This eerie visual was meant to unsettlingly convey to the viewers the
mysterious and murderous nature of the person responsible for this
vicious act and moreover, the films criminal, the Joker (Brownson).
Another mode that was used to profoundly communicate Batman
as a true figure of the detective in the scene from The Dark Knight is
the linguistic mode. The authors of Writer/Designer describe the
linguistic mode as the use of language, which usually means written
or spoken words in order to relay ideas or meanings (Arola, Sheppard,
and Ball). The linguistic mode was tactfully used in the form of two
nametags, with one being on each of the two dead bodies left at the
crime scene. One nametag read Richard Dent while the other
nametag read Patrick Harvey. This play-on-words revealed that the
Joker planned on killing district attorney Harvey Dent but more
importantly it displayed that the Joker sadistically intended for Batman
to use his detective skills to find out his who his next targets were.