"The Dark Knight" And "The Black Cat" - The Reasons Of Immoral Actions
The act of evilness is not something we are usually born with. When a child is born he or she is usually innocent and doesn’t recognize what is right and wrong. Therefore, they learn the act of morality from their surrounding. In the movie The Dark Knight, and the short story The Black Cat both the protagonists are portrayed as heartless people. However, they are not inherently as evil as people make them out to be, something occurs in both of their lives that triggers their evil nature.
Firstly, in the dark knight the Joker is portrayed as the most evil and careless person in Gotham but we learn that he was not always like that as he is talking to Batman about his childhood. Secondly in the short story the Green Gulch the narrator of the story witnesses what evil is really like at a young age, demonstrating that many people don’t really know what evil is like until they see with their own eyes. Lastly if people were inherently evil, the world would be a much different place. that is proven by an experiment done by on babies In The Dark Knight, the joker tells two different stories of how he got his scar in two scenes of the of the movie.
In both of the scene he tells the story of how he was not loved and mistreated by the people he loved, ultimately changing him into the person he is. In the first scene he explains how he got his scar to Gamble by saying that his father who was abusive to his mother cuts both side of his mouth because he was “so serious. ” In the sconed scene he explains his story by stating that his wife got her face carved because of gambling and he tried to make her forget about her scars by putting a razor in his mouse to slit his mouse but she ends up leaving him instead. Although we don't actually know which story is true, we can come to the conclusion that Joker was hurt by his loved ones at some point in his life to become the evil person he is. In both stories he starts out as an innocent person and after the incidents that occur he changes his perspective of mankind and becomes a wicked person. Another way to look at is that the Joker is an outsider in Gotham he has no one he cares about and nobody cares about therefore, causing destruction doesn’t in affect him in any way shape or form. In addition this can also relate to how the narrator changes over the years in The Black Cat.
The black cat is a great example how people are inherently good but can still change because of an event in their life. The narrator in the story tells us that as a child he was a warm hearted person who cared about animals but later turned into a psychopath by killing his wife and cat in an inhuman way. He states that after getting pluto (the black cat) that he change into a violent person by saying, “Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character -- through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance – had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. ” By saying this the narrator tells his reader as to how the black which is usually associated with darkness and witches brought out the evil in him. As the author got closer to the black cat, he became extremely violent towards his wife and the other pets except the black cat. Him not abusing the cat until the very end shows that the cat took out the decency in him and brought out the villain in him. Before he had the cat, he was a loving and caring person however once the cat got into his life he changed for the worse. That is to say that he was born good but the cat had a negative impact on his morality. A study that actually proves the humans are inherently born good is an experiment done by the students of Yale University on babies to determine whether infants can tell the difference between right and wrong. The experiment is a puppet show that shows a good and bad behavior. In one of the scenarios one puppet tries to open a box and the other puppet helps him open it. In the next scene when the puppet attempts to open the box the other puppet slams it down.
At the the end of the show the infants are given the option to choose between the puppet that helped open it or the puppet that slammed it shut and “More than 80% of the times that experiment is conducted, babies will select the "good" puppet” . Even though all of the babies that did the experiment have not yet learned the difference between right and wrong, they still chose the puppet did an act of kindness. This is because the idea of doing what is right comes to us naturally, however we can choose not to abide by it and that why there is evil in the world.
In conclusion, the one thing that The Dark Night and The Black Cat have in common is that both people that are committing immoral action have a reason behind it and that they were once good. The research done on the infants also provides an evidence that humanity is born good. There is always a reason as to why one commits inhumane sin. Joker does it because he is not accepted by anyone and therefore he doesn't feel any remorse destroying peoples live in Gotham. The narrator in The Black Cat began to be violent towards his surrounding because of the cat and alcohol. In addition the infants in the experiment simply chose the puppet with the good behavior because they knew that he did the right thing even though they haven’t matured enough to know morality. For these reasons mankind is inherently good.
