[COLUMN] Yesterday was Batman Day, So Let's Talk About Eric Roberts in The Dark Knight | by Darren Mooney

Since yesterday was “Batman Day”, it is a good opportunity to take a look back at Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It has been analyzed and discussed to death, taken apart and put back together. More than a decade-and-a-half removed from its original release, it’s hard to think of anything particularly novel to say about the era-defining blockbuster. Still, it’s worth acknowledging one under-appreciated aspect: Eric Roberts, who recently published a tell-all autobiography.

Christopher Nolan has a long-standing habit of working with older stars of the 1970s and 1980s who have cycled out of fashion. Tom Berenger has a small but appreciable role in Inception. Matthew Modine pops up in The Dark Knight Rises. William Devane played authority figures in both The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. Tom Conti featured in both The Dark Knight Rises and Oppenheimer. Roberts’ role in The Dark Knight is part of Nolan’s tradition of casting “that guy” actors.

Roberts is a notoriously fickle star. He has had a very troubled public life, including struggles with addiction and has been arrested. He is also entirely capable of phoning in a performance, filling his filmography with schlock like The Human Centipede 3, Sharktopus and Space Sharks. It would be difficult to argue that Roberts is one of the great talents of his generation. However, Roberts can also excel in the right context. He earned an Academy Award nomination for Runaway Train.

In The Dark Knight, Roberts is cast as Sal Maroni. Maroni is a comic book character who can trace his roots back to the early 1940s, the mobster who disfigures the supervillain who will become Two-Face. Maroni has become a recurring character in the Batman mythos, largely owing to his use by writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale in The Long Halloween. Most recently, Maroni was mentioned in The Batman and played by Clancy Brown in the spin-off The Penguin.

Maroni isn’t an especially significant figure in The Dark Knight. He is introduced as the new head of the Italian mob in Gotham, following the incarceration (and insanity) of Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) in Batman Begins. Most of Maroni’s appearances consist of the character smirking and watching the drama unfold around him, often with fellow gang bosses Gambol (Michael Jai White) and the Chechen (Ritchie Coster).

Maroni spends most of The Dark Knight as an observer. When the mob attempts to assassination Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the gunman (Michael Vieau) is on the stand while Falcone watches from the defense table. When the Joker (Heath Ledger) interrupts a meeting of the criminals of Gotham, Maroni mostly allows his fellow criminals to react to the supervillain. After the Joker kills Gambol, Maroni listens to the Chechen boast about hiring the Joker to kill Batman (Christian Bale).

This works reasonably well. Roberts is an actor with an interesting face, and so Nolan gets a lot of mileage out of cutting to reaction shots of Maroni as the action plays out around him. There is a sense of Maroni as a character with a certain amount of interiority. Roberts is about a decade older than White and Coster, and Maroni is framed as a very traditional gangster who presumably spent years in the shadow of Falcone before ascending to power. He is a patient man.

However, The Dark Knight is doing something else with the character of Maroni. Textually, The Dark Knight is about how Batman and the Joker are fundamentally changing Gotham, how these two comic book characters are dismantling the understanding of how law and order works in the city. Batman has spent a year attacking the mob, and has “hammered them to the point of desperation.” The Joker believes that Gotham “deserves a better class of criminal.”

The Dark Knight is often understood as a metaphor about the War on Terror, and the shifting understanding of legality and morality in 21st century America. As such, the mob represents a very old-fashioned and outdated sort of crime. After all, as Harvey Dent acknowledges, the Joker isn’t a traditional criminal. He is explicitly described as a “terrorist”, with Alfred (Michael Caine) even likening him to nationalist insurgents in Burma.

However, there is also a metatextual element at play. Nolan’s films are often described as “grounded” efforts in “cinematic realism”, but this often overlooks the extent to which they are stylized and framed in terms of genre. Dating back his short films like Larceny and his early features like Following, Memento and Insomnia, Nolan is a director steeped in the traditions of the classic film noir, which makes sense as a way to approach and understand Batman.

Nolan’s characters rarely speak in ways that could be considered naturalistic. Many of them feel like refugees from 1930s or 1940s gangster movies. This is perhaps most obvious with the “hothead” John Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt) in The Dark Knight Rises, who monologues about seeing Bruce Wayne arrive at his orphanage “one day in a cool car, pretty girl on [his] arm.” This is a function of genre, a heightening of mood and tone.

As such, Sal Maroni is not a realistic gangster. If anything, he feels like a character who wandered out of one of those 1930s gangster films, most likely produced by Warner Bros., the same company that made The Dark Knight. In this context, it is worth acknowledging that – like many of the actors who played those roles in those movies – Roberts is not Italian. The audience is not meant to see Sal Maroni as a real person, but instead as an archetype representing a larger concept.

To illustrate this point, Roberts was not the only choice for the role. Nolan reportedly considered James Gandolfini, coming fresh off his era-defining work on The Sopranos. In fact, it’s possible to imagine Gandolfini making a meal of lines like “he made you… like this” or “I thought the DA just played golf with the mayor or things like that”, probably while smoking a comically large cigar. This version of Maroni would have been just as much an abstraction as the one played by Roberts.

Casting Gandolfini as Maroni would have effectively turned The Dark Knight into a story about a television mobster being severely outclassed by the manipulations of a pair of cinematic superheroes. Gandolfini was one of the biggest stars on television at the time – having won three Emmys for his work on The Sopranos. However, despite the understanding that Gandolfini was king of television, Batman and the Joker would have torn him to pieces.

Indeed, Gandolfini’s casting would have added an additional layer of self-awareness to the character. On The Sopranos, the mobsters confronted their own obsolescence in the context of the War on Terror as the FBI diverted resources away from organized crime towards terrorism. Casting Gandolfini in The Dark Knight would make that arc even more explicit. It’s almost as sly and knowing as having Michael Jai White, star of Spawn, protest the Joker by yelling, “Enough from the clown!”

Roberts explores this idea in another way. Roberts is an old-fashioned movie star. He began his career as a genuinely respected actor, even headlining Bob Fosse’s final film, Star ’80. Much like Bob Hoskins, reportedly the other major contender for the role of Maroni, Roberts is an embodiment of an older style of filmmaking. In fact, casting Hoskins would evoke memories of The Long Good Friday, in which he played another gangster who finds his best-laid plans unraveled by terrorists.

This gets at the larger metatext of The Dark Knight. The film is often compared to Heat, with Nolan even casting actor William Fichtner in a similar role. Nolan has been candid about the influence of Heat on the structure of The Dark Knight. It is possible to imagine Eric Roberts starring opposite Gary Oldman in a three-star knock-off of Heat that would quietly become a video store or cable classic. However, the central point of The Dark Knight is that Batman and the Joker tear through that movie.

The Dark Knight arrived at a pivotal moment for the superhero genre. The superhero was already gaining traction in Hollywood, owing to the success of films like Blade, Spider-Man and X-Men. However, 2008 would prove to be an important year, with Iron Man serving as the launching pad for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As the Joker tells Batman in the interrogation room, “There’s no going back.” In The Dark Knight, Maroni faces his obsolesce – not as a character, but an archetype.

In terms of genre, like Heat before it, The Dark Knight could be understood as a western. It is about attempts to impose law and order in a time of chaos and savagery. Dent argues that it is a story about being “decent men in an indecent time.” Bruce imagines Batman as something close to the classic cowboy, a stranger who rides into town, dispenses justice and then rides off into the sunset. The closing scene evokes the “print the legend” aspect of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the “no more guns in the valley” logic of Shane and even the beloved closing shot of The Searchers.

If The Dark Knight is a western, it is a postmodern example of genre. The western is often a story of displaced groups. In the early films, the indigenous population was displaced by the settlers. In revisionist takes, those settlers were often themselves displaced by the advance of capitalism or modernity. In American popular consciousness, the outlaw archetype underwent a similar displacement, as cowboys gave way to gangsters within the space of pulp fiction.

The Dark Knight then becomes a story about the displacement of the gangster or organized criminal in American pop culture, their place usurped by the superhero. After all, the superhero is ultimately an expression of the same vigilante libertarianism as the cowboy and it’s not uncommon to compare the modern superhero genre to the classic western. As played by Eric Roberts, Sal Maroni feels like the sort of villain who might appear in the kind of mid-level studio programmer that no longer exists.

Rewatching The Dark Knight, there is a sense of tragedy to Maroni. As played by Roberts, there is a feeling that Maroni believes he is above it all. Even as the Joker murders Gambol and the Chechen, there’s a sense that Maroni assumes that he will outlast these costumed freaks – that they are just a fad. When the Joker has served his purpose, Maroni gives his location to the cops. Later, when the Joker threatens Gotham, Maroni assumes that he can just drive out of the city untouched.

In some ways, this is the beauty of Roberts’ performance of Maroni and how Nolan approaches the character. Watching Roberts, even two decades removed from the peak of his career and in a minor role, it’s possible to believe that Maroni sees himself as the star of the film around him. One of the tragedies of The Dark Knight is the collision of that very old-fashioned idea with a new reality.