In this text the author suggest that Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film, The Dark Knight (2008),

bears traces, and more specifically might be an unacknowledged adaptation, of Conrad’s The Secret
Agent, a novel with which the film has several affinities.It is important to make one thing immediately
clear: even if it can be shown that a range of structural and thematic links exist between these
narratives, at no point, either interviews or elsewhere, has Nolan announced The Dark Knight as an
adaptation of

The Secret Agent. The similarities between The Dark Knight and

The Secret Agent, however, have not yet been pointed out, and it is intriguing to note that Furthermore,
both texts are influenced, both directly and indirectly, by terrorist events that occurred more than ten
years prior to their publication:

In The Secret Agent, the “anarchists,” if they can in fact be labelled as such, are hypo-

critical wretches who are reliant upon the very system they would overthrow. Even

their apparently most powerful iconoclast, the egoistic Professor, is all argument and

no deed, his absolute rejection of all things external to the self implicitly attenuated

by his powerlessness to find a disinterested foundation for his rebellious philosophising.

Significantly, The Dark Knight reduces the number of named anarchists to a single figure

(the Joker); however, despite some important variances between them, Nolan’s Joker is

not as far from Conrad’s Professor as he might initially appear. Like the Professor, with

his dingy looks and “greasy, unhealthy complexion” (Conrad 46), the Joker has a sickly

appearance indicative of an internal corruption. Neither character fears the authori-

ties, each one viewing himself as unthreatenable, and both look down upon their fellow

“revolutionaries” and “criminals.” Both declare themselves in different ways “ahead

46 NATHAN WADDELL

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of the curve”. The Professor walks around ready to detonate himself with explosives

at any time (though he never does), and the Joker attends a criminal get-together with
hand grenades strapped to his torso. Both resent and wish to annihilate the gamelike

qualities of Establishment power: “legality” in the Professor’s case, and “rules” in the

Joker’s. Both laugh at the ridiculousness of the apparent identity of law and chaos, and

both are associated with, although not personally responsible for, explosions that blow

an “innocent” to pieces. In this regard, compare Stevie’s violent death in The Secret

Agent (largely determined by Verloc, using explosives provided by the Professor) with the

explosive death of Rachel in The Dark Knight (set up by the Joker’s henchmen, following

his instructions). Both the Joker and the Professor are broadly identifiable as figures

influenced (or seemingly influenced) by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in

one of the more bizarre coincidences between these two characters, both travel about

unseen in buses. The Joker flees from robbing a Mafia bank by moving in a school bus

through oblivious rush-hour traffic in The Dark Knight, and the Professor creeps through

London’s cityscape “on the top of an omnibus” through an “unconscious stream of

people” (Conrad 47).

Jacques Berthoud has argued that the function of the Professor and the other anar-

chists in The Secret Agent is “to provoke questions not about themselves, but about what

they nominally oppose; to promote an inquiry not into the politics of revolutionary

anarchism, but into the prevailing climate of English public life” (133) in the late

Victorian and Edwardian time frames. Berthoud goes on to argue that in The Secret

Agent “[t]he British government’s toleration of revolutionary refugees from abroad

[especially the figures of Michaelis, Ossipon, and Yundt] smothers them in a demor-

alising embrace, reducing their principles to vacant clichés and their programmes to

private posturings” (133). The Dark Knight stages a confluence of similar tensions, first by

emphasising the blemishes of the Gotham City Establishment and its faulty responses

to the Joker’s anarchism, and second by showing Gotham’s Mafia as a tolerated, albeit
objectionable, presence within a city too financially stretched and ethically ambiguous

to eradicate it. A key difference between The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent, of course,

is that the Joker is very much not tolerated by Gotham’s officials, nor is he merely a

“vacant” or “cliché[d]” figure who provokes questions about Gotham’s legal and politi-

cal rhetorics. The Professor’s “meaning” likewise amounts to rather more than a series

of empty platitudes, although, as we will see, the fact that he is characterised in The

Secret Agent as a symbol of anarchistic resistance renders him somewhat less threatening,

ultimately, than the Joker. However, if the Joker stays in the memory as a foe willing to

problematise all standards to get what he wants, then the figure to whom he is opposed,

Batman, lingers in the mind as a hero who protects Gotham precisely inasmuch as he

allows himself to be positioned as one of its enemies.

There are, nevertheless, significant national differences at work here. It is an impor-

tant detail, for instance, that The Secret Agent seems to position the Professor as an

American.1

This gesture significantly expands the frame of reference provided by The

Secret Agent beyond the British, European, and Russian contexts it in all other respects

prioritises, but viewed in the context of The Dark Knight it also brings to mind that film’s

clearly American emphases, which in retrospect resonate with the Professor’s view that

the United States represents a “[f]ertile ground” which has “the root of the destructive

In addition, both texts are influenced, directly and indirectly, by terrorist events from more or less

ten years before they appeared: The Secret Agent, as noted earlier, by Bourdin’s attempted Greenwich
bomb-

ing of 1894, thirteen years previously; and The Dark Knight by the World Trade Center attacks of 11
September 2001, seven years previously.

There are, nevertheless, significant national differences at work here. It is an impor-

tant detail, for instance, that The Secret Agent seems to position the Professor as an

American.1

This gesture significantly expands the frame of reference provided by The

Secret Agent beyond the British, European, and Russian contexts it in all other respects

prioritises, but viewed in the context of The Dark Knight it also brings to mind that film’s

clearly American emphases, which in retrospect resonate with the Professor’s view that

the United States represents a “[f]ertile ground” which has “the root of the destructive

Consequently, The Dark Knight questions and rejects the Joker’s anarchistic ideals even as it insists on
the shortcomings of the Establishment’s responses to his chaotic endeavours. It is important to point
out that The Dark Knight’s representation of anarchism is reductive; nowhere present in the film are the
differing styles of anarchist thinking which so characteristically inform The Secret Agent’s view of
London’s dissident circles. That said, the film’s emphasis on the contingencies of ethics aligns it with
Conrad’s comparable interest in anarchism’s ability to question moral foundations, and in this regard it
is key that in The Dark Knight Two-Face is positioned as an anarchic figure who is committed to
abandoning his Establishment’s inadequate account of “the good.” The tragedy of Dent in large part
depends on his recognition that the idealised justice he champions before his transformation into Two-
Face is, in fact, fundamentally dependent on the subjectivism of those who agitate and legislate on its
behalf—hence his turn, 48 NATHAN WADDELL Downloaded from
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Information Technology user on 26 December 2019 once disfigured and broken, to the randomness of
chance. As he states to Gordon near the film’s end: “You thought we could be decent men in an
indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance.
Unbiased, unprejudiced, fair”. However, the fact that Dent is willing elsewhere in the film to use death
threats as an interrogation technique, that members of Gotham’s police force are paid by the mob, and
that Dent’s transformation into Two-Face is suppressed by Gotham’s authorities are all signs which point
to a corruptible Establishment situated cheek by jowl with the lawless figures it must openly denounce.
Moreover, the fact that Commissioner Gordon’s predecessor sees inebriation as the “appropriate
response” to a threat made against his life by the Joker aligns Gotham’s ruling classes with the same
aversion to reality evidenced by The Secret Agent’s negligent officials.2

My efforts to ascertain definitively whether Nolan has read The Secret Agent—if he read it when he
studied English Literature as an undergraduate at University College London in the 1990s; if he has read
the text at some point in the intervening period; or, indeed, if he has been influenced by The Secret
Agent (if he has read it with an eye to adapting it at all)—have either been blocked from the outset by
Data Protection issues, or have simply been met with silence. A letter I sent to Nolan by way of his
Hollywood agency was not answered (if, indeed, it actually reached him). Despite these uncertainties,
plausible connections between The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent come into view when they are
compared at the analytical levels of form and content. Like The Dark Knight, The Secret Agent explores
the relativity of ethics in an urban setting, depicts the bourgeois response to anarchism as at least as
problematic as the threat of anarchism itself, and contains at its heart a domestic tragedy. In The Secret
Agent the Assistant Commissioner’s view that from “a certain point of view we are here in the presence
of a domestic drama” (Conrad 163), the drama of Winnie Verloc and her immediate family, is mirrored
in The Dark Knight’s tragic domestic love triangle between Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne, and Rachel
Dawes. Note that, in conversation with Commissioner Gordon, Dent (now Two-Face) refers to Rachel as
his “family” after the Joker causes her to die.

My efforts to ascertain definitively whether Nolan has read The Secret Agent—if he read it when he
studied English Literature as an undergraduate at University College London in the 1990s; if he has read
the text at some point in the intervening period; or, indeed, if he has been influenced by The Secret
Agent (if he has read it with an eye to adapting it at all)—have either been blocked from the outset by
Data Protection issues, or have simply been met with silence. A letter I sent to Nolan by way of his
Hollywood agency was not answered (if, indeed, it actually reached him). Despite these uncertainties,
plausible connections between The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent come into view when they are
compared at the analytical levels of form and content. Like The Dark Knight, The Secret Agent explores
the relativity of ethics in an urban setting, depicts the bourgeois response to anarchism as at least as
problematic as the threat of anarchism itself, and contains at its heart a domestic tragedy. In The Secret
Agent the Assistant Commissioner’s view that from “a certain point of view we are here in the presence
of a domestic drama” (Conrad 163), the drama of Winnie Verloc and her immediate family, is mirrored
in The Dark Knight’s tragic domestic love triangle between Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne, and Rachel
Dawes. Note that, in conversation with Commissioner Gordon, Dent (now Two-Face) refers to Rachel as
his “family” after the Joker causes her to die.3 How, then, to account for the link between these two
texts? A superficial way of doing so is to consider Nolan’s borrowings from film noir. Given that The Dark
Knight is a filmic narrative concerned with the nature of identity, fate and determinism, crime, money,
society, and existential crisis, it is easily recognisable as belonging to that long line of noir cinema going
back to the classical noir of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, which was continued by such neo-noir films as
The Parallax View (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Blade Runner (1982), Heat (1995), and L. A.
Confidential (1997), among others. The “hard-boiled” crime novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, and Mickey Spillane from which classical film noir emerged were all influenced by Conrad’s
writing (see Horsley), and those novels generically inform cinematic noir as well as the “retro-noir
fantasies” of the Batman graphic novels of the 1980s and 1990s (see Naremore 256). Nolan’s decision in
The Dark Knight to foreground the complicity between ethically opposed characters contributes to the
film’s “noirish” sensibility, as does the film’s camera work, with its accentuation of the oblique and
vertical lines of Gotham’s (really Chicago’s) cityscape. Indeed, The Dark Knight’s conspicuous “1970s”
The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent 49 Downloaded from
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Pfister has noted, was a conscious effort on the director’s part: “When I was a kid, that bank heist scene
in Dog Day Afternoon was real […]. It was that whole time around The French Connection and Bullitt and
The Seven-Ups. That’s what Chris was going for [in The Dark Knight]” (see Brown). Consequently, it is
possible to see behind The Dark Knight a complicated assemblage of overlapping generic and textual
negotiations, all of which disclose an inheritance from the literary modes that Conrad made his own.
More tangibly, though, we might also think about The Dark Knight in the context of what Gérard
Genette calls “hypertextuality.” As Genette articulates it, hypertextuality is a phenomenon that implies
the existence of “a text derived from another preexistent text […] which it consequently evokes more or
less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it” (5). What one means by “derived” is an
important consideration here. Such a link implies a kind of dominion over as well as “deference to the
original [text], a recognition of its primacy and generative power even in the act of consuming it” (Kerr
155). How The Dark Knight might be said to recognise the “primacy” of The Secret Agent is debatable,
but nonetheless this seems to be an appropriate way of approximating the relationship between these
materials, with The Dark Knight “adapting” the earlier work—The Secret Agent “hypotext,” as Genette
would call it—whose motifs it might be said to silently revisit. Furthermore, the connection I’m
proposing between The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent is bound up with the reason Will Brooker
finds the Batman mythos worthy of our attention in the first place. For Brooker, such figures as Batman,
“whose associations have changed over their histories—whether during the shifts from one medium to
another, as a result of a changing audience or in response to a new social context—offer more
interesting possibilities for study with every year of their development as they transform and resurface
in new guises, carrying meanings which increasingly toy with and sometimes overturn the conventions
of the ‘original’” (9). The Dark Knight indicates how a capacity for imagining conservative politics at a
time of terrorist activity and anarchist “threat” has changed in response to a series of developing social
contexts, and allows us to study how ideas similar to Conrad’s have taken shape in contemporary filmic
forms.

The Dark Knight’s implicit answer to this is: break with your principles. More precisely, let Batman—the
only figure really capable of tackling the Joker head-on—break with his principles, a set of values
Batman adheres to as he serves Gotham City and its inhabitants, but which is shared neither by
Gotham’s ruling classes nor by its citizens. This point is driven home by Batman’s status as a vigilante, a
useful and yet officially The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent 51 Downloaded from
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suggested, eventually be brought to justice. Batman’s “code” enables him violently to fight criminality
and yet not murder criminals (as in the case of Salvatore Maroni—played by Eric Roberts—whom
Batman throws off a balcony to extract information from him, leaving him alive but crippled). The key
point here is that Batman does not break with his principles; by the film’s end, he has not killed anyone.
Unlike Tim Burton’s Batman, in which Batman kills the Joker by making him fall from a helicopter, The
Dark Knight takes a more stringent view of its protagonist’s ethical responsibilities that is in keeping with
Nolan’s more realistic directorial style. In Nolan’s film, the only deaths are those caused by the villains:
the Joker, the Joker’s henchmen, the Mafia, and the fallen angel Two-Face. However, to put it like this is
to ignore the essential death that provides the film with its key emotional centre-point: the demise of
Rachel Dawes—Bruce Wayne’s love and Harvey Dent’s girlfriend—in a large explosion rigged by the
Joker. This death is, in a way, Batman’s fault. If he had killed the Joker earlier in the film—if he had
broken with his principles—Rachel Dawes would not have been taken hostage and thus would never
have been put in a situation in which she could die in this way. The Dark Knight consequently offers
viewers an ethical impasse. Should Batman have broken with his principles to prevent a personally
significant death? Or, ought Batman to have done what he finally did: let the Joker live and suffer the
consequences? Neither alternative seems to be the right course to take because the film does not
explore the first option and reveals the second to be deeply problematic. That is, The Dark Knight does
not investigate what might have happened if Batman had broken with his tenets, and the fate for him in
the aftermath of not breaking with them is misery followed by public scapegoating for Two-Face’s
apparent murder (which is in fact caused by self-defence on Batman’s part). Indeed, The Dark Knight is
careful to show that its ethical parameters cannot fully be explained by a binary framework. The figures
on the side of good in this film—Batman and Dent in particular—are themselves revealed to be caught
up in the iniquities against which their goodness is rhetorically positioned. Hence, Batman is a
lawbreaker whose motivations originate in psychopathology (his need to avenge the death of his
parents). As the Joker insightfully recognises, Batman is the necessary other half to his own existence; in
a Jungian twist, the Joker sees himself as the criminal yin to Batman’s protectionist yang (see Nash),
both characters being opposite sides of Two-Face’s arbitrative coin. “You—complete—me”, the Joker
only half-mockingly declares, in a cute reference to the titular character in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry
McGuire (1996). This line also evokes the Batman-Joker “romance” in The Dark Knight Returns and The
Killing Joke graphic novels. Dent’s change into Two-Face reveals the latent anger and violence already
present within him, and which we see, during his interrogation of one of the Joker’s goons, before his
metamorphosis. His scarred, divided visage bears out how far his identity is not unitary but splintered,
how it functions as the reminder of a justice delivered without the moral props of the community it was
originally meant to protect.4 To say all this about The Dark Knight is, in one sense, to provide fairly trivial
descriptions of a text superficially indebted to Conrad’s work by virtue of its generic inheritances. At the
same time, though, the link back to Conrad is key, first because of the Joker’s similarity to the Professor,
and second because The Dark Knight’s interest in 52 NATHAN WADDELL Downloaded from
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its absence, the choice that the film does not show but with which it is concerned throughout: the
moment that the Joker’s persona is born, the decisive point at which he decides to abandon the ethical
systems by which he is surrounded in favour of a life lived through anarchic resistance. In assuming this
perspective, he becomes, like the Professor, a kind of meta-moralist, a figure who reveals to others the
contingencies through which ethics are defined and maintained, even as he attempts to cast off morality
from his own sense of self. When the Professor asks “What is crime? What can be the meaning of such
an assertion?” (Conrad 53, emphasis original), it might as well be the Joker talking. This outside view lets
the Joker perceive the overlapping nature of goodness and badness, the contiguousness and coexistence
of criminality and lawfulness; in essence, this view lets him perceive the emphases of noir. However, it
also bears out the extent to which the Joker’s “defeats” merely serve as preludes to ever-more-powerful
reiterations of his indifference to the ethical structures from which his enemies take their bearings

However, Conrad also noted that the Professor was the exception here. “I did not intend to make [the
Professor] despicable”, Conrad wrote. “He is incorruptible at any rate. […] I wanted to give him a note of
perfect sincerity. At the worst he is a megalomaniac of an extreme type. And every extremist is
respectable” (ibid.). As a “sincere” creation, then, a serious portrayal of a stereotypical malcontent, the
Professor shows that in The Secret Agent Conrad took seriously the threat implied by the Professor’s
“transcendental” (51) ideology not as a goal in itself (because it is undermined throughout) but rather as
a viewpoint to which people might be attracted when swayed by rebellious feelings. The ironic
structures of The Secret Agent mean that this ideology is rendered nugatory by the text’s end, whereas
the simpler narrative principles of The Dark Knight leave the Joker’s menace in a far more substantial
position. But thinking about these texts in terms of which has the more complex form only gets us so far
here because both texts are powerfully symptomatic of a capacity to imagine the anarchist-terrorist as a
“purely destructive” figure. Considering how such a figure is depicted in each case allows us to chart
how textual responses to this anxiety have changed between the Edwardian and postmodern periods.

Although on a casual glance the Joker can appear very similar to the Professor, he is quite different.
Neither the Joker nor the Professor regard themselves as “progressive” political figures. On the contrary,
their negative programmes are claimed as purely destructive insofar as both view the terroristic event
itself, the instant of the deed, as the horizon of their revolt. There is nothing beyond this. Both deploy
violence qua violence, not to smash apart society so as to remanufacture it on different lines but simply
to annihilate. What is at stake for the Joker and the Professor is not a reformed social landscape as such
but rather the idea of “reform” itself. Each figure desires the The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent 53
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formed in such a way that anything beyond that end is left unimagined. Hence, the Professor’s toasting
of the destruction of “what is” and the Joker’s fixation on the purity of events, a psychology captured by
his view of himself as a dog chasing cars who “wouldn’t know what to do” if he caught up with them. To
embrace anarchy, the Joker believes, is to embrace not what humanity would have the world be but
what he thinks reality actually consists of: a state of chaotic “fairness” in which existence is dictated by
the impartiality of randomness in contrast to contingent ethical impulses. Thus, stated, Alfred
Pennyworth’s reading of the Joker as a man who “just want[s] to watch the world burn” is, strictly
speaking, a misreading of his true intentions. For the Joker’s efforts are directed toward revaluing
reality, not merely destroying it. In a sense, he perversely literalises Stevie’s doodles in The Secret Agent
—that “symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable” (Conrad 34)—by embracing chaos in an
attempt to realise a wholly alternative state of affairs. Neither The Secret Agent nor The Dark Knight
endorses these positions. Both texts, respectively, reveal the projects of the Professor and the Joker as
physically and psychologically injurious to others, as endlessly deferred by their own theorists, and as
inconsequential in the grand schemes of the social contexts in which they are enacted. For example, the
Joker’s account of himself as a dog chasing cars hints at the incessant nature of what the film shows as
an unfinishable set of rebellious moves. Within the trajectory of the atrocities he commits, a trajectory
culminating in the nonevent of his “social experiment” (in which he attempts to force two sets of ferry
passengers to blow up their counterparts) is a rejection of his fierceness as an unsatisfiable obsession
that has no apparent lasting effects on the population it is meant to terrorise. More precisely, Gotham’s
population appears unaffected because the truth of Dent’s change into Two-Face, the Joker’s “ace in the
hole”, is suppressed by the city’s power-keepers. Gotham’s future, in other words, depends on a lie. A
comparable predicament occurs in The Secret Agent, in which Conrad shows London’s responses to the
Professor as an indifference bordering on an “impervious[ness] to sentiment, to logic, [and] to terror too
perhaps” (Conrad 61). The only act of terrorism in the book, which the Professor does not directly
perform, has no symbolic effect on either the scientific discourse it is supposed to undermine nor any
consequences for the society it is meant to shock. London life, meagre and suffocating, goes on, as
shown by the Professor’s view that most individuals are “[i]mpervious to fear” (61) and his “unsuspected
and deadly passing” through “the street[s] full of men” (227) at the novel’s end. In The Secret Agent, the
Professor insists that with “madness and despair” as a “lever” he might “move the world” (226).
Likewise, in The Dark Knight the Joker insists that with just “a little anarchy” he is able to “upset the
established order”, turning all into “chaos.” However, although the Joker seems aware of his limitations
—the “dog chasing cars” line being evidence for this—the Professor seems unaware that he, like “the
most ardent of revolutionaries”, is “perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the
rest of mankind—the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased
conscience” (Conrad 61). Moreover, the irony of the Professor’s partial involvement in, rather than
direct culpability for, The Secret Agent’s single act of (ineffectual) terrorism finds another outlet as his
energies are displaced onto the “perfection of a really dependable detonator”, a project that will go
unfulfilled because he 54 NATHAN WADDELL Downloaded from
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various kinds” (55) of detonator that he might conceivably use in a never-ending series of investigations.
(It is also worth noting that the Joker might profitably have improved his detonators, as the scene in The
Dark Knight set outside Gotham City General Hospital, when the Joker’s explosives nearly fail to
detonate because his handset malfunctions, attests.) These ironies, in turn, culminate in the Professor’s
view of the Greenwich Bombing as a trial run for a great “bombing” that in all likelihood will never occur
(Conrad 60). It is through such textual elements that the Joker and the Professor are revealed as
tragicomic figures apparently unaware of the bleakness of their own desires, cut off not only from
humanity at large but also from the shortcomings of their own efforts to exceed ethical forms of
judgment. However, there is an important difference between the Joker’s appreciation of his
intersubjective involvement in Batman’s identity and the Professor’s utter antagonism to, but final
complicity with, relational experience. Put another way, the Professor’s egoistic insistence on an
inimitability and confidence that justifies his terroristic philosophy cannot be squared with the Joker’s
view of his need for Batman as a vital part of his own sense of self. The Professor knows that London’s
legal and criminal systems—“counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical”
(Conrad 52), as he calls them—are similarly interleaved, but the Professor still disdains relationality even
as he unknowingly finds himself caught up in relational forms. On this point, his view that in the wake of
his terrorism all that will remain will be him and him alone—“I remain—if I am strong enough” (222)—
depends on the strength of that conjunctive “if ”, a conditional clause in which Conrad shows the
Professor’s viewpoint as lacking. For, notwithstanding his self-professed separation from “life, which […]
is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organised fact
open to attack at every point” (51), The Secret Agent shows the Professor as linked to the exteriority he
everywhere denies. It is suggested that his views derive from a form of ressentiment caused by a quarrel
“at some technical institute […] with the authorities upon a question of unfair treatment”, and,
thereafter, by discriminatory handling “in the laboratory of a manufactory of dyes” (56). Like the
reliance upon well-to-do women shown by the text’s other anarchistic insurgents, the Professor lives in
a room “rented furnished from two elderly spinsters” (47). Furthermore, it is hinted that his opposition
to the “artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous” morality he sees everywhere about him has its roots in an
Oedipal conflict with his father, whose beliefs the Professor displaces with a “frenzied Puritanism of
ambition” (60). All this can be contrasted with the Joker’s lack of origin in The Dark Knight, a baseless
identity that he intentionally obscures with alternative and increasingly macabre back stories.5 This lack
is not absolute—that is, it emerges from the Joker himself; it is revealed “in the telling”—and as such it
ambivalently bears out the point that the Joker is in different ways aware of his implication in the
system that cannot let him walk freely on Gotham’s sidewalks nor keep him imprisoned within its jail
cells. In denying a stable point of origin for himself, he signals his wish to escape from a conception of
identity that insists on “roots”. And yet, that he creates any such point at all—stable or otherwise—
shows that he recognises that some kind of starting point is required for his terrorism to have a grasp
upon the material world. In a sense, the threat posed by Nolan’s Joker is that he has self-reflexively
rearticulated the Professor’s ambitions. The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent 55 Downloaded from
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Information Technology user on 26 December 2019 When The Dark Knight concludes on a note
suggesting that the Joker will one day return to face Batman, the film gives away how seriously it takes
this threat as an ineradicable condition of the post-9/11 imaginary, within which it situates itself from its
very first frame. Note that the opening shot of the film starts with a pair of bangs: the blast of a criminal
shooting out an office block window and the pre-heist sequence image of a Bat signal emerging from
explosive blue flame. Thus, The Dark Knight suggests that Batman’s “misplaced sense of righteousness”,
as the Joker calls it, is inseparable from the collateral damages Batman hopes to avoid. At a crucial point
in The Secret Agent, we learn that the Professor, by “exercising his agency with ruthless defiance”,
procures for himself “the appearances of power and personal prestige”, a result which “pacifie[s]” the
“unrest” of his “vengeful bitterness” (Conrad 60–1). By this strategy, the novel explains the Professor’s
ambitions as a psychopathology; his goal of destroying “the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the
faint of heart, and the slavish of mind” (222) is revealed as little more than an attempt to satisfy a
private yearning for sovereignty (“power”) and esteem (“prestige”) amid the “weak-minded creature[s]”
(160) of society, an aim which can only take the form of pretence in a “world of vain effort and illusory
appearances” (114). The Joker of The Dark Knight, by contrast, exercises his agency with ruthless
defiance all too well, for by the film’s end he has not only committed acts of terrorism (in contrast to the
Professor’s “all talk and no play” attitude) but, more disturbingly, has revealed himself as an essential
part of the inglorious heroism (Batman) drawn out to combat him. In this respect, the Joker represents a
culmination of the Professor’s sense that whereas he can be killed (or “eliminated”), he cannot be
arrested due to the explosives he carries on his person at all times (Conrad 49). In other words, when
Batman captures the Joker at the end of The Dark Knight, he ensures the paradoxical reproducibility of
the plot which has thereby been concluded, the inevitability in the story world of the Joker’s eventual
reappearance as a terrorist threat in contrast to the Professor’s “frail, insignificant, shabby, [and]
miserable” form (Conrad 227), which exits The Secret Agent as understatedly as it enters it.6 Although
the last we read of the Professor is of him walking “unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full
of men” (227), the preceding narrative has so fully discredited his philosophy, and his ability to
implement it through violence, that his “threat” is contained. In contrast, the Joker leaves The Dark
Knight laughing at both Batman and the viewer, thereby disclosing his knowledge of two fundamental
quandaries: if Batman had killed him, Batman’s ethical code would have been abandoned (thereby
destroying the Dark Knight’s attempts to be virtuous); if Batman does not kill him, as he does not in the
film, then the Joker will simply reappear to commit yet more misdeeds. This stalemate challenges the
viewers of The Dark Knight in a way that The Secret Agent does not challenge its readers: the Joker’s
knowledge of his threat, and his ability to realise his philosophy, makes him significantly more
challenging than the Professor, who professes a creed of total destruction doomed from its outset
because he is himself unable to implement it. One possible objection here is that the Joker of The Dark
Knight does seem to be positioned as similarly inadequate at the film’s end, when he tries, but fails, to
detonate the ferries carrying the passengers who have immediately beforehand shown themselves
“ready to believe in good”. As the Joker goes to trigger his emergency 56 NATHAN WADDELL
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who fires defensive shards into the Joker’s chest before hurling him from a rooftop. However, the fact
that the Joker attempts to detonate the ferries is an important detail here, for it indicates that he is,
when the time comes, ready to terrorise Gotham in a way in which the Professor evidently is unable to
terrorise the late Victorian world.7 Such a gesture, then, indicates the extent to which The Dark Knight
constructs the threat of the anarchist-terrorist who is ready to “go beyond the intention of vengeance or
terrorism” and kill to be “purely destructive” as a disturbingly capable individual, as an antagonist aware
of his enemy’s limitations, of society’s enfeeblements, and of his own menace as a disruptive force
within legal, ethical, and, indeed, criminal systems all too quick to dismiss him as a “joke” or madman.
Thus, when the Joker informs the bank manager in the film’s opening scene that he believes “whatever
doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger” he does still more than adapt the Nietzschean overtones of
his ideas—he proves himself able to respond articulately to a culture unable to see his true menace
exactly insofar as it takes him to be the “same” (to use the bank manager’s word) as the felons he
transcends. These moves indicate where The Dark Knight’s post-9/11 credentials most evidently reside.
In constructing the Joker in this way, the film discloses how sensitive it is to the postmodern quandary of
a world beset by forms of terrorism sponsored by individuals viewed, and thus “othered”, by the
Western world’s media and politicians as “unfathomable” or “illogical”. Yet it is precisely this kind of
discourse that prevents such individuals from being seen for what they are (in many cases articulate,
Western-educated malcontents) and thus from being tackled effectively. A large part of the problem, in
other words, lies with those constructing such individuals as terrorists in the first place. Both The Secret
Agent and The Dark Knight are attuned to this irony, and studying these texts in tandem allows us to
trace many continuities between the ways in which they represent compromised societies plagued by
intelligent, transgressive adversaries, and thus to reflect on the persistence of certain kinds of
imaginative projections over time. Studying the differences between the two narratives, though, allows
us to see even more clearly how such projections have bent and buckled in response to radically
changed historical circumstances. From this point of view, it is easy to recommend The Dark Knight as a
more thought-provoking film than it might otherwise be termed, for in watching it we experience what
The Secret Agent does not (or cannot) offer: a terrorist (the Joker) who might be captured by a power
(Batman) willing to compromise itself to secure his entrapment, but who will always exist so long as
such power is deemed necessary

Alongside this plot, Conrad’s novel charts the Professor’s desire for a world in which “[e]very taint, every
vice, every prejudice, [and] every convention must meet its doom” (222), while mapping the differences
between him and various false revolutionaries, in particular Michaelis, Ossipon, and Yundt, who are all
reflections The Dark Knight and The Secret Agent 45 Downloaded from
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Information Technology user on 26 December 2019 of late Victorian and Edwardian anxieties about the
threats of distinct kinds of counter-Establishment insurgency. At the same time, the novel links
constabulary and criminality, both of which are troped as “[p]roducts of the same machine, one classed
as useful and the other as noxious, [taking] the machine for granted in different ways, but with a
seriousness essentially the same”