Now that The Dark Knight‘s been out for a bit over a week, reviews and commentary are appearing all over the place. One particular topic of note among feminist fans is the movie’s treatment of the Rachel Dawes character.
I don’t think I have to warn you that these links and quotes contain massive spoilers.
Dotfic had a favorable reaction to the character:
*Rachel, with Maggie Gyllenhaal portraying her, a great improvement over the first movie. Rachel is motivated, good at her job, and she stands up to the Joker, so I have to give the movie points for giving her guts. But in the end she’s a plot device and she gets killed. However, because she’s a likeable plot device where there was effort to make her a real person, her death hurt and it made Bruce and Harvey’s story work even better, because I liked her and was sad at her death.
Digital-Eraser was less than pleased with the movie’s treatment of the character:
Sure, Rachel Dawes got to do things in a limited capability in Batman Begins. But in The Dark Knight she takes a back seat out of plot necessity, since Harvey Dent needed to be established as the big star attorney. So Rachel ends up becoming the audience-perspective person, asking Harvey things her character should already know, so that Harvey can explain it to us. With her finishing his sentences for him when she suddenly “gets it,” I guess trying to make her appear to us as though she’s not completely dumb. (Why they didn’t just set up Harvey Dent as the best friend in the first movie, I don’t know…did the story really benefit that much from having a love interest, something the Batman comics are able to manage without?)
But Rachel Dawes isn’t even what bugged me about the movie. Sure, I rolled my eyes at Rachel becoming yet another cliche Woman In Refrigerator, allowing Harvey Dent to go off on a “you touched my stuff” rampage. But I was almost glad just to have her off the screen, because her character being so completely useless as anything but Love Triangle Girl was starting to get on my nerves. Yeah, she gets to deliver a hit to the Joker, but only light enough so that he can make a comment about her having “spunk” and then dismiss her as being any threat whatsoever
While the blogger at Forgotten Panopticon finds Rachel’s role in the film interesting:
Throughout the film, all the major characters save one choose to break into a new identity, sometimes foolishly, and all are forced by chaos and destruction back into their old molds, sometimes tragically. Rachel Dawes suffers in this the most. She has moved on from her childhood friend Bruce, while keeping his dangerous secret, and established a relationship that is nurtured by her career and ideals, not in conflict. Bruce, meanwhile, has come to see her more as a symbol than his friend, as his “last hope for a normal life.” He asks her to wait for him, and she wavers, but chooses instead to marry the man who is more her partner, and is targeted for assassination because of her work and position—not solely for her connection to a male protagonist.
Rachel becomes a Woman in a Refrigerator, but in an interesting way: textually, she refuses to be defined as part of either man’s self-image and chooses her own future, one that abets her own crusade. After all, it certainly would have been easier to live as the wife of a billionaire, protected and wanting for nothing, than to actively face intimidation and assassination (and more immediately, the hours and numbing drudgery) as a prominent civil servant. Her death is her own martyrdom—she is chosen as a victim not because she is Batman’s girlfriend but because she is an effective, and legitimate, prosecutor. She is part of the Joker’s criminals-and-crimefighters paradigm, not a bystander.
So what did you think?
July 27th, 2008 at 5:30 am
Batman Begins needed the love interest and Rachel Dawes. You could say that Harvey could have been the friend in Batman Begins, but Rachel just shows how dead Bruce Wayne is inside. The end of Batman Begins is very sad and tragic because unlike other superheroes who can’t be with the girl to protect them, she can’t be with him because he’s not even human anymore. The line about them being together again when Batman isn’t needed is false hope since we know he will be Batman till he dies.
July 27th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Maybe it’s the fanboy in me, but all I saw when Rachel (as a character) would hit the screen in both movies was “plot device”. One, in my opinion, wasn’t needed, given the amount of women who have affected Bruce in the Batman history. The obvious choice to use, of course, was Vicki Vale. But there are many others. For the comic fan, there was no real connection.
July 27th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Most characters in movies are plot devices.
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A female character gets killed, so it’s automatically called a ‘woman-in-refrigerator’ moment. Sigh. Another cliche to remember to try to find in every story.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I agree with messi that Rachel was needed in BB. There’s the simple matter of BB being something of a “sausage party” and not having any other significant female characters, but she definitely served a purpose. She existed to point out just how dead inside Bruce Wayne is. She provided a brief glimmer of hope at the end of the movie, in that Bruce might’ve had a shot a normal life if Batman’s successful at riddding Gotham of corruption and crime. Obviously, the events TDK show that isn’t going to happen.
Rachel’s death was tragic enough, but it also stood for something much larger. Joker raised the stakes in Gotham. As Alfred said, the criminals got desperate and turned to someone even they didn’t fully understand. Things were going to get worse before getting better. It’s an intriguing end to an excellent movie, though it’s too bad Rachel had to be a casualty. I understand how killing her off drives Batman to the edge, not to mention showing just bleak things have gotten in Gotham, but part of me was hoping she might survive.
Since The Killing Joke was said to have been an influence on TDK, I thought one possible avenue was to have Rachel suffer the same fate as Barbara Gordon did in the comics. Not dead, but permanently disabled. Batman can certainly use some help from an “Oracle” type of character (both Alfred and Lucius had “Oracle” moments in the movie), and I thought it might’ve been a perfect role for Rachel to take. Clearly, Chris Nolan has other ideas.
I would guess that Batman 3 will have a woman (or women) in it, but at this point it’s hard to tell who or what it’ll be (I’m not a fan of Vicki Vale). Hell, I’m not even sure what they’ll do for a villain, based on how TDK ended (not to mention Heath Ledger’s passing)! Catwoman perhaps, but I like her as something of a renegade who’s also an ally of sorts to Batman. She shouldn’t be the lead villain. I would definitely like to see Talia Al-Ghul in the movies, but she probably wouldn’t be the lead villain either.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:24 am
I’m wondering if the person who said “her death is her own martyrdom—she is chosen as a victim not because she is Batman’s girlfriend but because she is an effective, and legitimate, prosecutor” was watching the same movie I was. Someone who had not seen the first movie wouldn’t have known if she was good at her job, because there’s no evidence in the movie indicating so…she’s been “depowered” from a star attorney to a girlfriend attorney, so that Harvey Dent can shine. I think most people overlooked this because they were just so happy that “yay, that cultist actress is gone!”
And you mean to tell me the Joker didn’t set up that choice for Batman because of the scene where he noticed Batman seemed to care for her almost as much as Dent does? She absolutely was put in that position to make Batman choose between Dent and Love Triangle Girl, not because she was (supposedly) an effective prosecutor.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
I think Rachel’s letter to Bruce raised her above a plot device. She made a choice as a character which marked her out as having moved on from the first film and Bruce’s decision to assume responsibility for Dent’s actions and death arguably gives her a legacy within the “Nolanverse” that we haven’t even seen in the comics (to my knowledge). In a certain sense, she stood as a symbol for the hopes of the citizens of Gotham that was underlined by the later scenes on the ferry.
Her death was intended to be tragic and had more to do with the filmaker’s views of the Joker than toward women characters in general. She was used as a weapon. It was the Joker who degraded her, not the perceived chauvinism of the writers.
Nobody described it as tokenistic pandering or condescension when she electrocuted the Scarecrow in BATMAN BEGINS.
July 29th, 2008 at 6:16 am
“There’s the simple matter of BB being something of a “sausage party”…”
Would you call a film with an all-female cast a “bacon sandwich party”?
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