What Does The Dark Knight have to Teach Us about the Nature of Organisation - Movie Review Example

What does The Dark Knight (2008) have to teach us about the nature of ‘organisation’ and the challenges of living and working in an organizational world? In the framework of organisational analysis, most widely popular movies have a chance to appear in a radically different light. In this context, The Dark Knight (2008) is an illustrative example. In fact, the movie is the second one in a trilogy about Batman created by Christopher Nolan. At the beginning, the dangerous and tricky villain Joker emerges, commits various offences throughout the plot together with local mobs, and surprises everyone in the city of Gotham by the extent of his cruelty and inventiveness. In response, respectable and humble district attorney Harvey Dent appears in a local police; in addition, Gordon’s promotion to the lieutenant position occurs. As for Gordon, he cooperates with an outsider hero called Batman on a regular basis. In the given circumstances, the game-like competition between these personalities develop. In this context, the most fascinating struggle is between Joker and Batman, since they both are deviants and have an access to technological innovations others do not have. As for the other forces, they are absolutely non-decisive and corrupt. At the end, both of camps lost. On the one hand, Harvey Dent turned into the villain after the death of his girlfriend Rachel. On another hand, Joker’s plan to destroy population of Gotham also did not work; thus, he had to leave it. The final scene shows that Batman turns into villain for Gotham society, even though he always helped people to combat criminality. Consequently, the movie ends in an open-final manner. In general, audience values The Dark Knight (2008) as an example of impressive masterpiece in terms of its visual effects and rapid plot twists. Notwithstanding these merits, the type of social order represented in the movie is also highly interesting. Hence, the given essay provides an analysis of Gotham’s organisational structure demonstrated in The Dark Knight (2008) movie in terms of Power, Technology and Identity. In contrast to the social environment of Gotham, it is evident that each society tends to build a sustainable organisation within its structure in order to guarantee security and tolerance in political means, comprehensive and safe technological development, and predictability in the interactions with the others, based on common values. To start with, the power relations in the movie show that any force does not have the whole control over the internal city situation; as a result, the plot twists appear often and show the impossibility to feel safe even in the nearest environment in the conditions of unstructured society. For instance, the family of police lieutenant almost died in the movie. In this context, the two camps try to exercise different types of power over Gotham society. On the one hand, the type of power Joker in cooperation with local mobs possesses on Gotham is coercive and charismatic in the Max Weber’s terms (Grey, 2012, p. 19-20). Even the spectators felt this, since the attitude towards Joker is generally admirable, even though his cruelty is also obvious. Notwithstanding Joker’s charisma, his tactics of provoking the constant conflicts leads to the low effectiveness of his policy in a long-term perspective (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 260). In fact, the movie represents this situation clearly. During the plot climax, Joker told that his actions on getting power over Gotham did not work appropriately only once. And so, he did not comprehend that the nature of power he tried to impose over Gotham was the core reason of his failure. On another hand, the forces of resistance systematically articulated different type of power. In Grey’s (2012) opinion, “that brute force – call it coercion, call it power – isn’t quite the same as authority, though, which connotes people going along with the will of others through consent given on some basis other than just fear” (p. 20). In the given circumstances, police and Batman always tried to build the new society based on hope. In other words, constant emphasis on justice, security, and kindness allowed them to take strategically favourable position in a given conflict. Consequently, their starting position enabled public final preference, since the conflict appeared in the situation of uncontrollable environment. In the opinion of Hatch and Cunliffe (2012), they won since they were able to give people something more than just control over them, mentioning informal rules, cultural values and normative sanctions in this context (p. 231). Nevertheless, the internal diversity of coalition revealed right after their victory. Hence, the given battle for power also meant the struggle for owning the technology, which corresponds with Heidegger’s postmodernist view on technology (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 140). In the movie, people often faced the choice whether or not rely on technology in order to get power. For instance, the right to push the detonator on the ferries meant getting rid of the criminal social cluster. In this context, lack of common culture appeared in their coalition with Batman, since the decision-making process operated in the conditions of ‘bounded rationality’. In the given circumstances, “decision makers are aware of politics, [and] they can manage or manipulate the decision-making process” (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 230). In the movie, people after Joker’s exile in the above-mentioned alliance immediately started hunting Batman, as their social environment had changed in the same moment. Thus, events in Gotham, which is a hyperbola of the existing corrupted systems in the world, represent the idea that long-term and cruel conflict is harmful for the living. Namely, power vacuum within the society means among all the absence of organisational rules and safety. Furthermore, the closer analysis of Gotham’s social order in technological terms demonstrates that appearance of highly developed personalities in the city rather challenges than facilitates the ordinary existence. In general, the social structure of Gotham represents that each actor in its behaviour took different roles according to the type of technology he was preoccupied with. In the Perrow’s typology, according to the level of variability (exceptions to standard procedures) and analyzability (dealing with innovations) there exist four types of technology: routine, craft, engineering and non-routine (Hatch and Conliffe, 2012, p. 134-135). In fact, all these types appeared in the movie to a greater or lesser degree. For instance, Bruce Wayne’s (human name of Batman) assistant Lucius Fox is a representative of engineering technologies, as he had not only invented Batman’s high-tech image but also dealt with non-stop challenges of its effectiveness. On the contrary, local mobs used non-routine technologies by inventing numerous types of crimes with constant failures, because they lacked understanding of all the appearing difficulties in Gotham internal structure. Moreover, Perrow has supplemented above-mentioned theoretical system by terms ‘complexity’ and ‘tight coupling’; in fact, they demonstrate the importance of settled interactions within different technological components (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 138). In contrast, Gotham showed the hyperbolized circumstances of tight coupling where “the conditions ripe for failure escalate rapidly” (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 138). For instance, popular attitude towards such social outsiders as Joker and Batman proves the necessity of stable environment. In the situation of coalition between Batman and the police, only certain circumstances could guarantee the trust and mutual development of society and technologies. Hence, the whole story of unrecognized hero Batman who demonstrated his conduct to ordinary people so many times is illustrative. In the dialogue with Joker, spectators can hardly disagree with the statement, “to them, youre just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they dont, theyll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, its a bad joke” (The Dark Knight, 2008). In the same manner, the personality of Harvey Dent as a ‘Two-Face’ man literally reflect the postmodernist Janus metaphor of an ambiguous role of innovations within the society. In this context, the radical change of Harvey’s behaviour proves that any new thing including a technological progress does not have a straightforward meaning. Thus, it is reasonable to state that technological impressiveness in Nolan’s film is not only about visual effects but also concerning the internal social technological fabric. As it is evident in The Dark Knight (2008), only existence of stable organisational structure creates an environment where it is possible to trust technology and use it for human development.   Finally, rapid changes within the balance of power in Gotham demonstrate that stable cultural identities are crucial to guarantee predictable social relations. In Foucault’s opinion, the lack of routine as the manifestation of power vacuum prevented such social structure to form any kind of stable identity (Grey, 2012, p. 73). In this context, the absence of common culture in the case of Gotham prevents the creation of the “sense of identity and belonging, demanding considerable loyalty in return” (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 167). In the given circumstances, legend around Harvey Dent reflects the importance of building a stable basis for the new Gotham society, as it had always lacked common cultural narrative. In addition, the episode with narrative creation around the personality of Harvey Dent in the final part of the movie (when he actually turned into the Dark Knight) reflects the role of media and its technological power in social organisation. In the given film, the battle for being a social symbol between Batman and Harvey Dent did not actually develop. In fact, this plot line reflects postmodernist warning about the power of technology to imprison contemporary people by the needs of innovative progress (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 140). In the theoretical framework of actor network theory (ANT), the necessity of Batman is seen as of a kind of enhanced technology, as people’s rational willingness to survive encouraged its existence (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 145). In this context, choosing Batman to help Gotham in the struggle with Joker fits Woodward’s idea of ‘technological imperative’ as “choosing a technology determines the preferred organizational structure” (Hatch and Cunliffe, 2012, p. 145). Although society recognized the necessity to have Batman as its guard, people stopped to identify him with their social organisation once he took the blame for Dent’s crime on himself. Thus, Batman can never turn into Gotham’s cultural hero, since people cannot treat his nature as normal (Grey, 2012, p. 71). In other words, Gotham is a typical society because it cannot associate its own cultural hero with the crime by keeping it on deviant position. In this context, each society while constructing its organisational structure vitally needs common culture and symbols in order to maintain its shared identification. In the case of the analysed movie, it is evident that technology cannot play this role and remains deviant due to its unpredictability in the constantly changing social conditions. In order to sum up, it is evident that the processes within the organisational structure of Gotham society in The Dark Knight (2008) movie are representative in terms of power, technology, and identity. In particular, this type of organisation is chaotic and hyperbolizes all the negative processes of unstructured social world. In the dimension of power relations, the conflict between personalities possessing either coercive or authority powers emerges. As for the villain camp, the charismatic and brutal type of control fails due to its inability to create predictable non-conflict social system. On the contrary, the resistance forces had built cooperation in the given struggle due to the conditions of bound rationality. With the end of conflict with Joker and absence of institutional rules, the former partners started a conflict with each other, which proves the lack of predictability in the situation of power vacuum. As for technology, the outsider positions of Batman and Joker revealed absence of defined circumstances for the social development in partnership with technology. In other words, Gotham society demonstrated lack of trust in the conditions of tight coupling. In addition, the personality of Harvey Dent as a ‘Two-Face’ man underlines the ambiguous position of everyone in this social system with the chaotic organization. Finally, the legend of Harvey Dent means the necessity of cultural policy for social organization. In this context, the absence of stable identities in Gotham society enabled numerous twists in plot and in the behaviors of actors. In addition, decision made by Batman on blaming himself reveals his understanding of inability to build stable society based on technology. In contrast, media image of Harvey Dent as a ‘White Knight’ serves as an appropriate basis of Gotham’s identity in terms of justice, tolerance, and kindness. Thus, The Dark Knight (2008) goes beyond the limits of the high-tech blockbuster, as it revealed itself as a comprehensive investigation of the nature of social relations and the necessity of organizational rules. In this context, it turns evident that social organisation has to guarantee its internal safety, provide fixed rules for technological development, and maintain predictable social interactions to make living comfortable in it for everyone. References: Grey, C., 2012. A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations. 3rd ed. London: Sage. Hatch, J. M. and Conliffe, A.L., 2012. Organization Theory: Modern, Symbolic, and Postmodern Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Dark Knight, 2008. [Film] Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Warner Brothers. Read More