Miller's Perspectives on The Dark Knight - Essay Example

Miller's Perspectives on The Dark Knight According to Miller, communication occurs when a source/individual shares a message with one or more receivers with intent of impacting the receivers behavior, both physical and mental. Using critical components such as process, message exchange, and shared meaning, the communicators engage in a form of ongoing activity called interpersonal communication. Under this broad topic, Miller presents two contrary perspectives that define and identify his view on interpersonal communication: situational perspective and developmental perspective. These two broad subjects distinguish themselves in several distinct ways so that when you consider using interpersonal communication, both the context and the content of the situation can only belong to one category but not the other. Analyzing the movie “The Dark Knight”, I conceived that a clear example of this concept is portrayed in the scene where the Joker encountered Batman in jail. In this scene, Bruce Wayne (Batman), the main character of this movie who is trying to protect Gotham City, confronted the Joker, the antagonist of the movie who believes that chaos and lawlessness is the only “sensible” way to live in this world, to figure out where to find Rachael and Harvey Dent “where are they? Tell me or I will kill you”. Throughout the scene the Joker plays around with Batman's mind, warning him that the city will cast him out in the near future, implicitly calling him a failure if he kills him (only rule Batman follows is no killing) “thats the rule you would have to break to know the truth”, and calling him out for having an affair with Rachael when she is in a relationship with Harvey Dent. However, in the end of the scene, the Joker tells Batman where Rachael and Harvey are held, forcing Bruce to make a choice between the two “lets play a little game to save on of them...you have to choose”. Under pressure, Bruce chooses to save Rachael without realizing that the Joker tricked him by mixing the locations, thus achieving his plan. All this said, it is important to acknowledge that the Joker did not need Batman in the interrogation room to execute his plan, considering that fact that he would have won “power” – the main reason for his unruly activities – without Batman in the scene. When we examine the situational perspective, the communicative context of this scene suggest interpersonal communication between the characters introduced. West and Turner define situational perspective as including specific characteristics of interpersonal communication such as the number of communicators, physical proximity, immediacy of feedback, and use of maximum sensory inputs. These situational perspective traits can be described distinguishably. The number of communicators in the room can convey the amount of communication between subjects such that less communication hinders their interpersonal communication. This is mainly apparent because only two individuals engage in a face-to-face interaction (so no intermediaries) with both verbal and nonverbal channels and with access to a dragged, yet immediate feedback from the receiver. The minimal number of communicators in this scene increased the level of proximity, channel availability, and feedback immediacy. The level of physical proximity signifies the balance of interpersonal communication meaning that the closer the sender is to the receiver the better the interpersonal communication between them. Likewise, since the setting was in a closed jail cell, the communicators were in close distance from each other. Along with the proximity and closeness of the characters in the scene, the act also had the critical sensory inputs of hearing, seeing, and feeling to further bolster the interpersonal communication between the main roles; using more sensory units in an face-to-face interaction can mean that their interpersonal communication is prominent. After incorporating all these characteristics of situational perspective, immediacy of feedback can symbolize the reaction-time of a response to the message from a sender; the faster the response to a the message the better for their relationship. Evidently, the immediacy of the feedback – response from the Joker to Batman about where he held his victims – played a major role in the indication of the situational perspective for this scene. Ultimately, the long, close, personal, and physical interaction between the Joker and Batman denotes that this communication episode can be categorized as the situational perspective of interpersonal communication. On the contrary, Miller's developmental perspective, where interpersonal communication develops overtime, cannot be accounted for this particular scene. The book alluded to how the humans predict the actions of individuals and society: prediction-making. Under this category, West and Turner classify psychological norm as everything a person's brain understand to be standard, sociological norm implying all the different and unique stereotypes we perceive, and cultural norm indicating to thing our culture has taught us to be normal. The direct interplay between the main characters can only be used to make prediction with psychological norm, since cultural and sociological norms have no role considering the minimal number of communicators in close proximity. For instance, when the Joker tries to clutter his mind full of frustrating thoughts, it shows how he crosses psychological norms to reach into the angry side of Bruce. On the other hand, since there was a group of detectives watching this scene from the other side of the tinted glass, we can conceive or consider how they might have made prediction based on cultural and sociological norms. The strange activities and conversations inside the cell can lead these isolated detectives to judge the unusual personals against cultural norms they were taught by culture and sociological stereotypes they have seen along their lives. Even though Batman and the Joker are the two main prevailing figures of Gotham City, their interaction can only cover the outlook of their personal relationship; therefore, showing that the act only uses intrinsic rules (rules negotiated within the members of the relationship to be normal) but not extrinsic rules (rules based on the social-cultural standards living outside with the society). However, extrinsic rules we operate based on social and cultural standards can be acknowledged if the views of the police officer, who were disconnected from action, are examined. Apart from these developmental perspective characteristics, The Levels of Knowing criterion was well exemplified throughout the scene. This criterion measures how well someone know the person they are interacting with using three different levels of knowing: descriptive, predictive, explanatory. For the descriptive level of knowing, the person can describe the one's behavior, whereas the person with predictive level of knowing can foresee one's behavior. Lastly, the person with the explanatory level of knowing can analyze and throughly explain one's behavior. These references for the developmental view explain why Joker planed his arrangement the way he did, because he exactly knew what was coming and planned accordingly. When Joker was mocking Batman to kill him for the truth, he knew that Batman will not go over his rules and kill him; this show the descriptive and explanatory levels of knowing from noticing how well Joker knew Batman, and how Joker pointed out that fact that Batman won't kill him. Then, when the Joker revels where he held both Rachael and Harvey to Batman, he predicted his behavior and fooled him with the wrong information; this exemplifies the predictive level of knowing. Also, in class Ms. Cunill said “the level of knowing develops trust”, however, in this case, Batman was tricked into killing his love Rachael, which adds anger and disbelief for Batman against the Joker. Ultimately, this episode can be regarded as interpersonal communication according to the developmental perspective only with psychological norms, intrinsic rules and all the levels of knowing; on the contrary, if we want to acknowledge the crowd of cops outside the jail cell watching the scene, we can also connect the cultural norms, sociological norms, and extrinsic rules of the developmental view with the episode. References Richard, West, Lynn H. Turner. (2012). IPC What's Inside: A Student-Tested, Faculty-Approved Approach to Learning Interpersonal Communication. Boston, MA: Wadsworth. Read More