When Christopher Nolan brought Batman back to the silver screen, he did so with his trademark layered approach to storytelling. That means that instead of the usual comic book drama of who The Riddler will capture or what kind of diamonds Catwoman would steal, Nolan discussed the socialist influences behind Bane’s criminal utopia and how Batman’s “Detective Vision” parallels the Patriot Act. It was a wild ride, for sure.
Among Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight stands as the crown jewel. Besides Heath Ledger’s killer performance as the Joker, The Dark Knight had the perfect blend of comic book action and political intrigue that perfectly captures how a superhero film directed by someone like Christopher Nolan should feel.
Hidden among the many small details and political allegories is a world of intricate backstories Nolan built for his take on Gotham City. Unlike most Batman flicks, The Dark Knight ties real-world political factions and conflicts into its narrative. We’re so used to “Sokovians” and “Wakandans” in our modern superhero films, that we mostly forget movies like The Dark Knight had an entire subplot about the Joker allying with a Chechen terrorist.
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As one user on Reddit noticed, the Joker’s relationship with the Chechen criminal might hold some hidden clues tying the movie to the state of Russian politics at the time of The Dark Knight’s release. What seems almost like an oversight might be the clue to understand the Chechen a bit better, and also why the Joker rose to power in Gotham as quickly as he did.
In the scene where the Joker gathers most of Gotham’s criminal bosses to offer his “services” and kill Batman, he proposes something absurd: he wants half of the earnings as tribute from the other bosses. That sounds crazy, even for the Joker. Naturally, all the other mobsters laugh in his face or react with anger and disgust – all of them except the Chechen. He just sits there, looking at the Joker without any clear emotion.
Sure, it might appear as if the Chechen is just a badass, but what if he’s simply accustomed to that way of doing business? Enter Vladimir Putin – a name you might have seen everywhere in the news for over two decades now. The Russian leader had an “interesting” route to power – one that included claiming tribute from some of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs.
Famously (or infamously) in 2003, Putin put Mikhail Khodorkovsky under arrest. Khodorkovsky was, at the time, the wealthiest man in Russia, but the state quickly seized most of his assets to turn him into an example for other Russian millionaires. From then on, the Russian State demanded “tribute” from all other powerful oligarchs and businessmen in the country – unless they wanted the same fate as Khodorkovsky, they had to give the Russian Federation half of what they owned.
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The Chechen we see in The Dark Knight still has a thick accent, which means he likely lived in Chechnya (a Russian republic) at some point. What this means is that he was more than likely familiar with Putin’s way of doing business, and when he found a man dressed as a clown demanding half of his earnings, it was just business as usual for him.
This mentality would explain why he was so prepared to work with the Joker, right until the clown decided to burn their earnings. Considering the Second Chechnyan war still raged on during the time of The Dark Knight’s filming, it’s no surprise that Nolan would want to include a nod to a real political issue in his film. After all, that’s what The Dark Knight really is at its core: a tense political thriller that just so happens to star a guy dressed as a bat fighting another guy who masquerades as a clown.
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