And you thought this would be a Dark Knight-free week on here

Surprise!

Actually, very little to say, really — most of the economic landmarks the film was expected to reach have now been. On the unadjusted chart, only Titanic tops it, and it’s steadily making its way towards $500 million, which on the adjusted chart will then soon take it past Shrek II as the number one domestic film of the decade. Worldwide, it’s the biggest film of the year. Even though it’s no longer number one it’ll chug along as it does, and a billion dollar haul, though hardly guaranteed, isn’t unlikely.

Shoehorning of The Dark Knight as a theme or reference into unrelated posts and topics continues as well, that’ll stay the case for some while to come. Etc. etc. etc.

As for myself, I’ve definitely decided against a fourth theater watch at this point — it’ll keep the memories a bit fresher for my now inevitable DVD purchase (and I should say that this is a very rare thing these days for me — not in a ‘well yeah everyone uses Netflix instead’ sense, since I don’t in fact use Netflix (too slow! the legal download technology/market is going to render it irrelevant shortly, much like the illegal one has nibbled away at it all this time), but in a ‘I want to keep the amount of extra stuff I own to a minimum’ sense). Other things have taken up my time and interest since then, including what’s been a good, wide-ranging discussion among a variety of friends over the Watchmen film, covering a lot more ground than I might have thought. It’s a private discussion, though, so I won’t say more here.

There is something else that references Watchmen briefly but in interesting fashion, though, and it’s the reason why this post — namely to call your attention to David Bordwell’s recent post ‘Superheroes for sale.’ Bordwell I know by name thanks to a film studies textbook of his regularly appearing on reserve here at UCI, but I hadn’t had a chance to read him yet at all. This proved to be a good starter point as well as a fine self-contained essay on the rise of the superhero film as established niche that covers everything from questions of film style to larger economic interests and back againt — an integrated study of ‘film’ in general rather than a separation of spheres, something which is fairly rare in my experience, at least.

Bordwell’s wide-ranging discussion uses The Dark Knight as its major example, and he’s not a fan of it, explaining so in quick but deft fashion near the start and then further references as the essay progresses. One of his best moments tackles the overarching tendency of reading a particular political point of view into the film, and it’s worth quoting here:

I remember walking out of Patton (1970) with a hippie friend who loved it. He claimed that it showed how vicious the military was, by portraying a hero as an egotistical nutcase. That wasn’t the reading offered by a veteran I once talked to, who considered the film a tribute to a great warrior.

It was then I began to suspect that Hollywood movies are usually strategically ambiguous about politics. You can read them in a lot of different ways, and that ambivalence is more or less deliberate.

A Hollywood film tends to pose sharp moral polarities and then fuzz or fudge or rush past settling them. For instance, take The Bourne Ultimatum: Yes, the espionage system is corrupt, but there is one honorable agent who will leak the information, and the press will expose it all, and the malefactors will be jailed. This tactic hasn’t had a great track record in real life.

More than most pieces Bordwell’s made me stop and think a bit before continuing reading, if only to puzzle over a point or reflect on my own contextual experiences that parallel his. (His third endnote in particular, while not detailing something I point-by-point resemble, matches my own generally distanced experience with the superhero comic in general.) Well worth a read, as this strange, knotted and still-unsettling film fades gently into the well-worn familiarity it will yet exhibit sooner than we all think, the blockbuster tentpole painted black, casting shadows.

Okay, so, two new ‘The Dark Knight’ things

Actually neither of them totally new, but I only found out about them today after yesterday’s post and I must share.

On the one hand, The Dark Knight Sucks, which is dedicated to its theme very well, and has caused a bunch of people who have no sense of perspective to write in with complaints. As the ‘about’ section says:

Part of the reason for putting this site together was to counter the seemingly unquestionable hype surrounding the movie. The viral marketing campaigns, the massive buildup, the fanboys… all leading so many movie-goers to pause critical reasoning and tout the movie as some kind of masterpiece. Further, whenever a dissenting voice is heard to even question such blind praise, it’s as if a blasphemy has been uttered.

And who can blame the site’s creator for being annoyed? I like the division of reviews between ‘Honest Reviews’ and ‘Deluded Masses.’

Meanwhile…okay, so I talked about in that last post about the weird-as-hell kiddie books ‘based’ on the movie, and how on ILE there was a joke about how the pencil scene would have been done with a crayon?

So today I find this — and to quote the description:

In case you missed it, check out this fan-made “Dark Knight” preview trailer, starring a cast of kindergartners as the Dark Knight, Commissioner Gordon, and of course, the Joker. Woulda been interesting to see these guys re-enact the infamous “pencil scene” with a Crayola…

It’s a strange, strange world.

[EDIT -- well, three new things -- this Human Events piece is a morally conservative take and attack on the film that explicitly calls out some of the politically conservative defenses of it. To quote the key part:

Others defend Dark Knight for its “conservative” values. It does acknowledge the difference between good and evil. The hero stands up to the villain, subdues him in the end, and takes the blame for the district attorney’s crimes to preserve hope in Gotham City. The movie also sends a constructive topical message about the need to defend ourselves against terrorists.

These points may be true, but the defense rings hollow. It smacks of making excuses for enjoying the movie. How can we justify Dark Knight’s indulgence in the pornography of violence? What if Hugh Hefner made a movie featuring two hours of skin and sex, but ending with the hero losing his marriage? Would Hefner deserve credit for warning us of the dangers of adultery?

The comments in response are...interesting.]

So guess what’s still the number one film in America…

…oh go on.

This *won’t* be yet another huge piece on The Dark Knight, though — I haven’t seen it again and am unsure if I will catch it in the theater once more, though it’s crossed my mind. But I will note two things in passing:

• If the truly massive success of a movie can be measured by how it percolates out into the culture, then more examples crop up all the time. This opinion piece from a Persian Gulf publication, itself noteworthy for being one of many pieces aiming to draw distinctions between a troubled American infrastructure and an allegedly much better setup elsewhere in the world, uses Hollywood and open-goal ‘dark night’ references as a hook. Entertainment Weekly got Diablo Cody to talk about her experience in seeing both The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!, and if that doesn’t sound enticing…well, I’m not entirely blaming you. An LA Times blog piece on the replacement of a Mexican general in that country’s drug war mentions ‘the Dark Knight’ as a comparison point, an eyebrow raiser no matter how you look at it. Then there’s Jake Tapper talking with the two guys who are running for a certain political office this year…well, anyway, read on.

  But perhaps the loopiest thing that’s cropped up was the discovery of a preschool book — one of several, it seems — that is listed as being ‘based on’ the movie. I can’t describe it, really — just read this post, and then follow the link back to this post. I openly wondered on ILE what the equivalent of the pencil trick was and someone responded, “A crayon trick.” Sounds about right.

• And while all this is going on, the film keeps making money — it’s not far from $450 million now in the US alone, and assuming that the predictions for crossing $500 million hold, as seems pretty much in the bag now, then it will be the US box office champ for the entire decade not only in the unadjusted ‘standard’ sense (which it already is — only Star Wars and Titanic are ahead of it now overall) but in the adjusted-for-inflation sense, having broken into the top fifty already, while passing Shrek 2 on that second chart for overall decade champ would place it in the top thirty. On that level alone, the film will now prove pretty damn well epochal, while at some point soon it will pass Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull as the biggest moneymaker in the entire world this year.

  But what’s really interesting is back on that second chart there — within the next couple of days, The Dark Knight will surpass the adjusted-for-inflation total of Batman, Tim Burton’s 1989 film, and will become the absolute biggest Batman film of them all on any scale. When friends of mine who like me went through that 1989 experience first started seeing The Dark Knight, their reactions were incredibly positive but there was often a caveat in comparison to Burton’s first bow — sometimes conditionally, saying the earlier film was more entertaining overall, but otherwise noting that the earlier film just felt like a bigger event. Memory is what it is and I’d tend to agree, but the evidence is clear enough now that The Dark Knight really is that huge in comparison, an absolute monster that’s still not fully slowed up.

  Again, this says nothing about it in terms of it as a work of art per se — as I said in my first post on the film, it was designed to be a massively successful tentpole film, and has it ever become one, hands down. But its contextual bleakness, its undercutting of audience expectations, its fraught if admittedly clumsy ending, makes it more and more remarkable the more successful it becomes, and my unease upon first viewing, while tempered by time and rewatchings, is no less absent for that reason. It has a near unique position now — and looking again at the adjusted-for-inflation list, once it gets to the top thirty there, what ahead of it even remotely approaches it on that level amid the other triumphalist entertainments in that top thirty? The Godfather? Doctor Zhivago? The Exorcist?

  The only logical comparison in the end is really the least surprising, given that it’s already been made on the artistic front a number of times — The Empire Strikes Back. The chance of The Dark Knight besting it in the adjusted chart is nil, but it will be the closest runner up in terms of spirit, and even that said there’s no ‘true’ comparison if you stretch it out. Han Solo was briefly seen twitching and heard shouting, but he wasn’t pummelled and beaten for a long stretch on screen. Luke Skywalker was maimed but he didn’t spend the rest of the film showing seared flesh and bone, grotesquely corroded. And while Han Solo was frozen and spirited away, bait for a trap, he wasn’t kidnapped, left with a time bomb and slaughtered.

  And all this from ‘just’ a tentpole effort.

  Something remarkable has happened with the success of this film, as mentioned. What, though, is still unclear — but I’m still not fully at ease with the potential answers.

[EDIT -- and as a final bonus, I remembered an old interview done with Christopher Nolan for Box Office Mojo back in 2005 and scrounged for it. It's well worth a read, and while I don't think it necessarily explains or predicts where things would end up with The Dark Knight, I do think it's the best insight into Nolan as a filmmaker around yet.]

The Dark Knight continued: IMAX, family and horror

What, again? After not one but two other pieces?

Sure, why not. After all, I saw it again. And I might see it a fourth time. Might.

Sometime today or tomorrow The Dark Knight will crest the $400 million mark and become the seventh biggest moneymaker in American history. Uh, no, wait, the sixty-third. But it’s the thirty-ninth biggest film worldwide ever! Oh wait those dollars aren’t adjusted either…

None of my observations about the slippery nature of movie revenue are new and yet the fact remains that we’re still dealing with a conditional phenomenon rather than a true one. Conditionally it’s pretty stellar still; in American terms it’s the biggest money maker of the year and even with inflationary costs factored in it’s looking very likely to overtake the biggest money maker of the decade — Shrek 2, of all films (who knew? not me!). But the fact that it IS Shrek 2 helped underscore the curious sense of achievement at work — people aren’t talking about that film as some sort of mass era-defining cultural event still, and the fact remains that the same could easily be the case here.

An odd comparison leapt to mind today — Ministry’s Psalm 69. In a review of the album for my heavily quixotic 136 best-of-90s list (itself now a year away from being a decade old — good grief), I concluded said album, released in summer in a presidential election year, 1992, made sense for the rest of the time up through that campaign and then upon Clinton’s victory over Bush didn’t any more. Its glowering anger and sculpted rage, which I mainlined obsessively for five months, felt suddenly like hollow bombast.

Now, I’m not out to equate situations on an exact level here by any means. For one thing, The Dark Knight has hit on a cultural and subcultural level more universally than said album ever did and ever will. It makes me wonder how I’ll look at the film in the future, though, as well as how we’ll all look at it — as I’ve just said earlier today, I’m hardly out to assume what will be whatever actually happens in November, but regardless of what happens there how the film is digested and referred to further is also in the end impossible to predict.

One thing that is possible to predict, though, is that the chance to see the film in its ‘true’ format will be the most limited experience of all — via IMAX. One of the many technical points bantered around about the film is that Christopher Nolan actually shot a good amount of it using the IMAX camera and format, and since that has no real equivalent in terms of mass market consumption of movies otherwise, whether at theaters or with home setups, one has to actually see it in an IMAX theater to truly ‘see’ it. Or at least, so the filmmakers, Warner Bros and IMAX would love to have you believe (and IMAX ain’t complaining — as this news report notes, it’s received some major cash when only a short while ago things were not looking good for the company at all)

Nothing against the format itself, of course — IMAX is a gorgeous technical achievement and has been recognized as such for years — but until there’s a way to have one in every theater, ie the Twelfth of Never, going the big blockbuster route with it is going to have to be a self-consciously elite experience by default, determined by luck and how close one is to a theater that can show it that way. As it happens, I am lucky and I am close to one, so my friend Tom, who saw it with me on opening night at the Big Newport around here, went with me to see it again on the IMAX screen at the Irvine Spectrum last Wednesday.

We bought tickets in advance because we figured — rightly — that the massive attention and repeat buzz around The Dark Knight combined with the exclusivity of the format meant that this thing would sell out in advance. I’d be willing to bet this’ll stay the case for some while to come — even as the eventual attrition of screens takes its toll on the film in general, seeing it in IMAX will become all the more unique a prospect. It was also a way to pay gentle homage to how we both had seen Batman Begins there on its opening night in that same theater, though that of course was just done as a basic expanded projection of the letterbox format, striking but not a true IMAX cut.

So this third viewing was in many ways for me the calmest on the one hand — the contours of the story are now familiar and the beats starting to be remembered easily — and the most thrilling. Of all three showings this was the one geared in my mind towards appreciation of spectacle, and from the first shot after the murky smoke/Batman logo introduction — the stark, rushing closeup onto a skyscraper, only now expanded to actually FEEL like a skyscraper that we as an audience were charging relentlessly towards — I was lost in it.

Admittedly the back-and-forth nature of the camera frame was at points jarring, but not harmfully so, and in all the moments where I had figured from the first two viewings that the IMAX would be most effective — the huge swoops over and around buildings, down streets and over them — the sense of bottomless vertigo was readily achieved. I never felt sick or uncomfortable but I did feel a little disoriented, and I wondered how those who had not seen it before were taking it. I’m almost glad I didn’t see it this way opening night, as combined with the troubling feelings I was left with I might have done little but gibber.

Notably the final minutes of the film were shot in the format as well — nearly all of which are character close-ups, the final confrontation between Dent, Batman and the Gordons and the immediate aftermath. The effect was to render the conclusion operatic, something which I had always associated with some of the talk around Tim Burton’s first foray into Batman, referring to the confrontation at the top of the hyperGothic cathedral as the characters posed and fought over dizzying heights. Here instead the feeling was reversed — they posed and fought just as much, but in a generally understated fashion on a stable floor (albeit with a drop to the side), their forms and figures towering upon the screen. I say generally understated because the most nightmarish Dent moment in the film as Two-Face — his angry roar about what is ‘fair,’ shot to highlight his damaged left side — became even more so, his near-stripped-clean jaw almost seeming to dislocate from his skull.

That scene is foreshadowed, in one of the film’s slightly clunkier moments, when Dent taunts Gordon on the phone as the final showdown with the Joker approaches. If the line is forced, though, the impact has something to do with a point that I started to grasp after the second viewing and which the third helped to crystallize — when Gordon asks Dent where his family is, Dent responds “Where my family died.” Melodramatic, of course, but also suddenly illustrative of something as well.

As I’ve said before and will reemphasize, Gary Oldman’s Gordon is the calm, driven but not overdriven center of the films in many ways, the audience substitute but also, arguably, a societal one and — treading warily here, given the penchant for the autobiographical fallacy out there that I’m not immune to — one for Christopher Nolan as well. For this reason: Gordon is not merely a family man, he is, among all the major characters, *the* family man — and as a result the one with the greatest risk, the one who has the most to lose.

To explain a bit further — consider the major characters in the film and what is known of their families and relatives (strictly as it applies to this film and Batman Begins, I should note):

Bruce Wayne — quite obviously, orphaned
The Joker — utterly self-contained and origin-less, with multiple stories but no one ‘true’ one
Harvey Dent — unknown, apparently alone
Rachel Dawes — daughter of family friends of the Waynes but apparently alone now
Alfred — unknown, apparently alone
Lucius Fox — as with Alfred and Dent

…and then there’s Gordon — with a wife and kids.

Before going any further it goes without saying that there is convention at work here, namely most of the characters as they have been created and refined and developed over the decades before these films. Gordon’s family-man role is hardly new, neither is, say, Alfred’s seeming isolation. But Nolan and company, without expressly spelling out the differences between Gordon and the rest, nonetheless codify and present it that way for their films, and all the more strongly here — where in Batman Begins there was only a brief glimpse of Gordon’s family here there’s a series of scenes culminating in the final one.

In that there’s surrogate families and close relationships at work involving these characters, of course, then there’s much to unearth — Alfred and Fox’s paternal air towards Bruce Wayne perhaps most obviously — but it’s interesting that Dent consciously or unconsciously pushes the sense of family the most in the film as it rushes to its end, asking after Eric Roberts’s Mafia character’s wife before seeing him off, confronting the traitorous cop Ramirez who weepingly begs forgiveness because of her mother’s hospital bills, then to the taunting phone call to Gordon and from there to the final conclusion, which puts the issue foursquare in the center. If the Joker is the agent of random destruction then when Dent heeds his call to ‘introduce a little anarchy,’ he does so for the most part by causing or aiming to cause death or injury that direct affects those near and dear to the victims.

Back in my first piece, I found and quoted a bit from Nolan that I’ll quote here again:

“It was about the threat of anarchy. It was about anarchy being the most frightening thing there is. Chaos and anarchy in this day and age, and I think it is. It’s certainly the thing I’m most afraid of.”

His use of the term ‘anarchy’ in the screenplay at that point is quite conscious, and to have it play out as a series of threats to family therefore equally so — to explain the potential biographical connection a bit more, Nolan himself is very much a family man, married to Emma Thomas, his producer, and together they are parents to several children. I don’t think Nolan specifically sees himself in Gordon’s shoes by any means, but if, as has so often been said, parenthood changes one and gives one new perspectives, then in combination with his expressed fear of anarchy (itself hardly surprising as a fear no matter what one’s circumstance or own familial situation, of course) the intense fear and loathing in the final scene — the sense that Gordon and his family could be on the verge of irreparable damage — is, if it succeeds for you as a watcher in its goal, drawn in part from the fears of its creator. Not a deep conclusion, but one more visceral, close to the edge, than some, and also why it works where the final speeches, attempting but failing to find a solid resolution, do not.

When it comes to things close to the edge in general, though, the continuing explosion of commentary about the film from any number of angles, political, religious, social and more, has brought with it even more seemingly untethered responses. Not all, of course, and there’s everything from a National Catholic Register piece on the film as a whole (a standard, thoughtful enough positive take) to, today and on the wryly lighter side, a brief but to the point take on the VOICE OF DOOM (“He’s Bruce Wayne and he’s famous! He’s a millionaire playboy, he’s a man about town, and probably quite a number of people are in a position to recognize him. He has to disguise his voice!”) to plow through.

Still, there are odder bits out there — Eric Lucas’s column on what he sees as an undue canonization of Heath Ledger for the role, specifically because of a ‘beautiful martyr’ complex, makes some good points about the whole live-fast/die-young myth but doesn’t succeed for me because I really don’t look at Ledger’s performance in that light — I acknowledge his fate, who wouldn’t, but to repeat earlier points elsewhere, I just don’t see him in there, I see the Joker as presented.

However, the most disturbing thing I read recently involves the blog comment responses to Alyssa Royse’s piece “Business Lessons From Batman and the Dark Knight” — having been published via her Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog, it got attention, and like the earlier swarmings on writers like David Edelstein, it was angry, negative attention, in that she didn’t like the film. Not surprisingly, though no less troubling for that, said attention took on a vile, gender-specific note — the comments are there for the reading — to the point where Royse rather understandably locked down comments after a certain point and posted a follow-up item, “My First Death Threats — And They Weren’t From Batman.” To quote her:

I went away for the day, away from my computer at all, and came back to find almost 200 comments on that blog post, some of which requested that I be shot and raped. The most mild of them suggest that I need to go back to the kitchen and make babies.

….

But I’m not taking them down. People often ask me whether I really believe that women are held to a different standard, face bias and anger from men, are threatened, belittled and demeaned in the world at large. Ironically, I’ve always wavered. I’ve never really felt it personally. I’ve never known what it was like to be threatened this way. So now I know. And now I can say, “yes” to all those questions.

Frankly, I find this really terrifying – and occasionally amusing. And it certainly brings up larger questions. In an email from Natalee Roan (a kick-butt woman entrepreneur who dares to speak her mind and flaunt her gorgeous femininity,) “Couldn’t believe the comments, wow. Personally, I just wanted to say GOOD JOB. The sexist nature of the comments, written anonymously, really gives insight into what we don’t see….any one of these guys could be working alongside a smart, talented woman.”

It’s an intense feeling. Yah, that scares me. Is this really amongst us, lurking until it can seep out in the incredible cowardice that is anonymous blog-harassment? (Hmmmm, not so different that the vile way in which this kind of weak-minded hatred against women has always played out. Behind closed doors!)

A strong, brave response, and it should be rightfully praised. However, there is an irony. I haven’t actually talked about the original piece she wrote yet. In her own words, it’s meant to be a ‘silly fluff piece’ following in a larger series of what she calls ‘Friday fluff’ pieces, something which I’m sure most of the commenters (and myself) know little about contextually. I’m gathering it’s meant to be a classic blow-off-steam-with-a-laugh move at the end of the work week, though, and as such what she does in the piece is make a somewhat strained comparison between The Dark Knight as a poor film and the mistake of many start-up companies in general (in line with her regular writing work on the business world).

The straining doesn’t deserve the response it got at all, of course — not in the slightest. But in constructing her comparison, while she at no point actually says that the film was a bad *business* decision — she never claims that the film has flopped financially or anything equally unsupportable by the facts on that front — there’s still an initial sense that she’s claiming just that, something which the title of the piece does nothing to clarify. Quite honestly it took me a closer reread to see the truth of it myself; initially I was wondering what strange fantasy world Royse lived in where the profit intakes of it and, say, The X-Files: I Want to Believe had been completely switched. A lot of other people jumped to a similar conclusion and reacted — and we see the results, and they’re not pretty — but while their posts are indefensible, their initial confusion I understand.

Bemusingly, while in her response piece Royse barely addresses this potential source of confusion — and honestly I wouldn’t blame her for ranking it low on the priority list — she does offhandedly claim at one point that “looking at this blog as a film review is stupid.” This is disengenuous at best and a complete evasion at worst — of COURSE the original piece was a film review. She might have been making a larger point about the mistakes of start-ups and the like but she starts the piece out by saying “You know I hate a movie when I spend the interminable duration of it figuring out ways to lampoon it…” and doesn’t let up. There’s no reason why she should, but you know, call it a review as well as the object lesson you were intending, and stand by it.

The point is not to rake Royse over the coals; she’s had enough of that already. If anything I recognize, in a small and nowhere near as upsetting way, what happens when you try and say one thing, end up accidentally implying another, and then in trying to fight back pass off what you were initially trying to say as something else entirely. That’s just being human, and being a writer as well. But I think her response would have been all the stronger had she been able to balance an icy sarcasm on how nearly all the commenters missed her larger point with her other observations, while ditching the offhand ‘a review? of course it wasn’t!’ comment as unnecessary.

But blogs are blogs and we write on them to get our thoughts out, and we’re not always our own best editors. What, in conclusion, does this have to do with The Dark Knight? Well, maybe nothing — but I’ll let Royse have some of the final words, tying back to the film in a way that helps remind us, again, that its place right now is conditional and not somehow set-in-stone, and that there is no requirement at all to love it or even slightly like it — which we all should remember:

I am not a conspiracy theorist at all. But I have to wonder, really, what I did to deserve this? Is it because I’m a woman? I’ve read far worse reviews of The Dark Knight (from the New Yorker and other sites) and they were not threatened with death and rape and told to change their “pads.” Is it because I dissed Batman? Is it because I threatened the status quo, the borg-like mentality?

The Dark Knight echoes outward

[EDIT: Folks, please take it as read that if I'm talking about a movie from here on in on my blog I'm almost certainly spoiling at least some of it. If not all of it.]

My earlier piece on the movie, if a bit lost in some of the personal stuff I’ve dealt with recently, has gained a fair amount of readers and bits of praise, such as Ian Mathers’ kind comment. But it’s only one of a new horde of pieces coming out due to things like this:

“The Dark Knight” sold an estimated $75.6 million in tickets at North American theaters from Friday to Sunday, according to Warner Brothers. Among other records it delivered the best second-weekend gross in recent Hollywood history.

“This picture has really taken on a life of its own,” said Dan Fellman, Warner’s president for domestic distribution.

…“The Dark Knight” has sold $314.2 million in tickets domestically in its first 10 days of release, a record. The film is still rolling out internationally.

Numbers are a mug’s game — everything from general inflation to rising ticket prices to much more conspires to make recent box office smashes look bigger than they are — but even the kind of self-congratulatory flackery which always comes into play like this can’t hide the fact that the movie has touched a nerve. I ended up seeing it again on impulse Saturday night — more about which in a bit — and my showing was almost totally sold out, while there was a lengthy line for the next available one when I left. Still early days yet for some of the more airy predictions (easily beating the Titanic record? c’mon, folks) but one thing’s clear — there’s huge repeat business already (I know several people who have caught it multiple times like myself and/or are planning on further) and it’s being more openly and immediately talked about in conversations I’m in or in casual ones I hear at work or elsewhere than any film like it in quite some time.

And this has played out onto the blogs and elsewhere, and to link everything would be superhuman. There’s just too much to note, but I’ve stumbled across a few worthy of attention. Among some recent takes worth your time — not because I agree with them all, I should note:

Alfred Soto’s ‘The Dark Nought,’ which articulates many of the specific concerns I felt upon initial impact and then extends this into a negative take rather than a positive, a fully understandable approach. The flamewar in the comments reflects, if at a distinct remove, the kind of pouncing going on vis-a-vis critics like David Edelstein and Joe Morgenstern. Edelstein’s understandably haughty response didn’t entirely do him much good, frankly (his brief footnote on Kit Kittredge actually reads much better as an implicit counterargument, even if it brands him as a spiritual heir to Sydney Pollack more than he might guess), but he, as does Alfred by default, at least realizes what century he’s living in and communication medium he’s being most read on, whereas Morgenstern and his friend Patrick Goldstein, whose story I’ve linked, confess to surprise and bafflement. A little late in the game there, guys.

Then again even I can be taken by surprise by the obvious too — namely, that despite the fact that the country is happily ready to see the back of him, the current president has not defenders but his own slavering fanboys who will not hear a word against him. Still, there’s something amusing about the rats still on that sinking ship, and to what lengths they’ll twist anything current in pop culture to help themselves out. As a prime example, consider Andrew Klavan’s ‘What Bush and Batman Have In Common,’ an already notorious and deeply hilarious Wall Street Journal piece that, in attempting to engage the movie’s broadest strokes as simultaneous text and subtext, becomes a paean to a vision of Bush that I honestly thought nobody was damn fool enough to believe in anymore. (Mind you, this hijacking of current memes of interest for larger points is hardly limited to the right, as Spencer Ackerman’s own treatment of the film makes fully clear. Commenters on Ackerman’s response to Klavan spell that out clearly enough, but Ackerman’s original jab to Klavan still works: “…try not to prove my points about the inability of conservatives to conceive of national security beyond the complexities of a cartoon.”)

In marked contrast, Thomas S. Hibbs’ ‘Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight’ is a far more readable conservative meditation on the film, which surprised me greatly appearing as it did in the often-bemusing First Things, one of those journals that professes irritation that philosophy and political and social developments can occur outside of a religious structure instead of everyone always paying attention to them. But Hibbs knows his film noir — and his Nolan in general, elegantly demonstrated in the first couple of paragraphs — as much as he does his moral and philosophical inheritance and addresses them all in a way that avoids the pitfalls of Klavan for the most part even though he skates towards the edge of it more than once. Instead, Hibbs does what few writers seem to have done so far, namely tease out the moral quandary of Bruce Wayne’s character as central as opposed to only focusing on the Joker as lord of hideous misrule, and does so in a way that while essentially paraphrasing and justifying Gordon’s concluding speech in the film instead of analyzing it allows for Wayne’s possible collapse in the future, that rightly appreciates that the film does not truly end a story but provides a pause because the form requires it.

Finally, Tom Ewing’s ‘Bruce Wayne, Auf Wiedersehn’, in his as-ever inspired fashion, looks both at the film a bit but also places it in two larger contexts well worth remembering. The first is one that is widespread if a bit buried in the commentariat mix online, so credit to Tom for digging it out: what he terms the ‘retconned disappointment’ in the pre-Nolan Batman films of the last two decades, reaching back not only to encompass Schumacher’s grotesqueries but Tim Burton’s first two smashes, despite the fact that both received much praise and love at the time. I addressed this (and admitted to it) briefly in my own piece (“…Burton and company had their own approach and if I can’t even bear to think about it now much, I enjoyed it a heck of a lot at the time…”) so it’s good to read a more comprehensive study that recaptures the anticipation, excitement and widespread satisfaction with the first Burton film in particular and how it differed from Frank Miller’s near contemporary redefinition of the character. This in turn allows him to address his second larger context, namely what’s happening right now in the comic version of the Batman story, with Grant Morrison’s “Batman RIP” arc playing out and what it means to the character and to the idea of the ‘Proper Batman.’ Put it all together and end on a great Superman riff and you have Tom at his very best, drawing together a slew of connections and swiftly analyzing something more thoroughly than most can manage, with deft wit at work from sentence to sentence.

As for myself, I was hanging around on Saturday with my friend Matt Maxwell — you owe it to yourself to check out his marvellous comic Strangeways — as we were both guests at the Saturday wedding, having known Chris for many a moon. Matt hadn’t seen it yet so one thing led to another and while we couldn’t catch an IMAX screening — sold out and then some — there was a regular screening we could catch that was about to start. Matt’s own reactions to the film, if he chooses to write about them, will be up via his blog link there and/or elsewhere so I won’t speak for him, but he seemed to be about in the place I was after I first saw it — massively entertained, aware of things that didn’t quite work, and a little shell-shocked. And Matt’s a wonderfully sharp and cynical guy so to see anything like that happen to him is an honest surprise.

As for me? The sheer unease with which the first showing left me had by default changed — since I knew the story now, there wasn’t anything for me to expect or not expect on that front. A different experience, as with any rewatching, and it allowed me to focus on more of the film’s details this time out.

What I think was the biggest change lay with the quieter performances now standing out all the more strongly. Arguably this was about everybody in comparison to Heath Ledger but some work was still just there, nothing more — most obviously Morgan Freeman and to a lesser extent Michael Caine. But Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart’s work, especially in their joint scenes but not limited to them, felt much stronger; if anything Oldman might yet prove pivotal for the entire arc of whatever kind of series of films this turns out to be in the end. Over on ILE, Roz made a cogent comment: “I love the subtle change in his character between the two movies – the weary idealist cop now newly-energized and given a purpose. The old Gordon could never have jumped to the Mayor’s defense the way he did, dude could barely operate a Batmobile.” It gives the final sequence with his family, Batman and Dent (if not the still awkwardly phrased final speech) much more heft than I first appreciated, and by keeping everything about the character toned down — strong but understated, as can be sensed in the sparring with Dent in the latter’s office near the film’s beginning — he glides through the movie with comfortable ease (while playing a clearly not entirely comfortable with himself character, even!) as well as necessary, logical intensity that matches the beats and points of the script.

Perhaps in keeping with this, Ledger’s best moments now clearly included the most dialogue-free parts — his drawled “…Hi” to the injured, bed-ridden Dent, his humming to himself during the chase sequence, as if following his own internal soundtrack, and as I’ve talked about before and elsewhere, the sublimely unsettling ‘puppy leaning out of a window’ moment. To repost the still I put up last night:

What I’d remembered from seeing it the first time was the serene sense of the Joker at his happiest and wordless — and this right after having killed a number of different people at the police station, not to mention Rachel Dawes’s death. ‘Disturbing but lyrical,’ to quote a friend again. This time around the sonics of the scene had a stronger impact — sound muffled and distanced, music (if there was even music?) at its most minimal, a couple of tones. In motion and in the film, it captures a sense of release and freedom that feels, more than anything else, perversely American — isolated, speeding, free. As Matt mentioned to me after the film, Ledger’s accent is one of a twisted Midwest, centered somewhere, out there, but with no vocal anchor here it’s fully decentered and let loose — the ‘dog chasing after cars’ that the character soon describes himself to Dent as being.

Yesterday in the LA Times this fairly ridiculous piece ran, which I recommend for entertainment value if nothing else. Its theme can be simply summed up as ‘gosh isn’t it interesting how there’s this highbrow and there’s this lowbrow and people enjoy both!,’ with a dollop of paranoia about standards and canons. Friend Anthony pulled out this part for scorn and I don’t blame him: “If the marketplace is left entirely unfettered, we’ll lose a lot of what we consider valuable — not just J.S. Bach and John Coltrane but shows such as “Deadwood” and nonchain bookstores.” The substitution of ‘we’ for ‘I’ or ‘some of us’ is the crux, and my own summation of where the article ended up was ‘yeah, let’s have an embracing-all culture and let’s codify a new canon that does it right with sophistication so we can feel good about ourselves.’

It shouldn’t've surprised me at all, then, that the new canon proposed towards the end would expand to include this:

What I’m talking about — what I hope the demise of rigid hierarchies is leading us to — is a flowering of work that draws on the whole range of culture but with a genius of structure and sophistication as well….It’s what I expect to find when I see ” The Dark Knight,” which, let’s not forget, was made by Christopher Nolan, an outsider (and literature student) whose first masterpiece, “Memento,” was a bizarre personal vision made with very limited connections to the Hollywood mainstream.

It’s the flowering of the ‘at last comics are MATURE’ point of view run cartoonishly rampant, something that mistakes the compendium of impulses and interests that are part of one’s life and thought with an approved set of keywords that legitimizes rather than describes — the ‘outsider,’ the ‘literature student,’ with ‘sophistication.’ It’s not out to describe Nolan or The Dark Knight, it’s out to make oneself feel okay for liking both in the first place. It’s as much an attempt to claim the film for something as Klavan and Ackerman’s pieces were, and succeeds just about as well, becoming a vehicle for axes to grind or hobby-horses to ride.

The Dark Knight doesn’t exist in a vacuum but it is potentially well on its way to becoming an isolated touchstone, a Silence of the Lambs to Batman Begins‘ Manhunter (an inexact parallel on many levels but nonetheless appropriate enough). Only time will tell.

The Dark Knight

No punning title or reference necessary, not this time out. There are spoilers as this story progresses; this is your one warning.

—

“I had fun.”

Read the link to the newspaper report from the East Coast to learn the context, no need for this blog entry to add to the google hit count on results for its speaker. No need at all. I could say more about why I feel this way right now but it is not the place. Another time, if at all, though regular blog readers will guess why I feel this way at present, and maybe for some while to come.

I am not, I should say by way of introduction, seeking to do anything more than analyze my reactions to a film and to consider its contexts and reception. That’s been the case with all my blog entries on films that I see and talk about — look back just this month at me talking about Wall-E, at me talking about Hellboy II. That will be the case here. But its contexts include the personal and specific and I have mine right now, and others have ones closer to the bone.

So that statement, when I stumbled across that story, leapt out at me. A story of crime, of tragedy, of murder.

Of insanity, of pleasure, of laughter.

—

“…Well, I don’t make comedies, per se, but” — he chuckles — “at least I think my films are funny. Nobody else seems to think so, though.” — Christopher Nolan

As posted the other day, I greatly enjoyed Batman Begins — for good reasons, which I outlined. Not a perfect film as I said but I felt an incredibly accomplished one, a reboot that worked, and that promised something which had not yet been delivered on film.

Some more context — Tim Burton’s Batman, almost nineteen years back, emerged when the comic world was in a fever over things like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. There was a will to believe that the film would be taking note of that four-issue vision of an aging Bruce Wayne in an eighties desolation — but it didn’t, really. At most superficially, but Burton and company had their own approach and if I can’t even bear to think about it now much, I enjoyed it a heck of a lot at the time. The path the films took after that point we all know, the impact of Batman Begins we also know.

Nolan of course was not interested in simply translating Miller to the screen either. He deftly borrowed hints from Batman: Year One and worked within a different context — to again borrow that quote from Roger Ebert I use in my Batman Begins thoughts, “The movie is not realistic, because how could it be, but it acts as if it is.” The language of cinema and the city was his to use, ranging from the visuals to the interactions of those in the public and private space, conventions and approaches to be employed as desired in service of the larger goals.

The Dark Knight continues this — in the first section of that story I linked you read this sequence:

How “real” are we talking here? When Nolan unveiled a six-minute Knight prologue on Imax screens last December (a twisty bank heist with a jarring Joker reveal), it was clear that his cinematic vision owes more to director Sidney Lumet than golden-age DC comics. You can feel the tension of Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon and Michael Mann’s 1995 drama, Heat. [NOTE -- as has been noted for some time, the presence of William Fichtner from that latter film in the opening sequence is an intentional nod in Mann's direction]

Nolan had an ally in [cinematographer Wally] Pfister, his collaborator on every film since the 2000 sleeper hit Memento. “When I was a kid, that bank heist scene in Dog Day Afternoon was real,” Pfister recalls. “It was that whole time around The French Connection and Bullitt and The Seven-Ups. That’s what Chris was going for.

Of course, as Nolan and Pfister would be the first to reiterate, said realism didn’t just happen in those films and neither in theirs. Planning, coordination, judging of what works and what doesn’t — to be ‘real’ required, requires, a lot of thought. But this is axiomatic and there’s no need to dwell on it on the technical front.

To be real on other fronts requires other plans and goals. It’s a story being told, of course — it’s not real at all. It’s being made up. One can make the choices one wants, and with the help of his brother Jonathan and with David Goyer, both collaborators of his and the latter a veteran of Batman Begins as well, Nolan settled in and created his story and his screenplay and did so with the obvious goals in mind:

* Make Warner Bros. a happy studio by making a lot of money — relative quality of the film being irrelevant, as ever.

* Quality however mattering in terms of things like word-of-mouth and repeat business and trying to attract as many people as possible in the first place. Bring out the tentpoles, once more.

Both of which are also truisms. They say nothing about artistic satisfaction or the sense of personal accomplishment. They shouldn’t. This is the sixth film in twenty years by a studio with a sense of a hot franchise property that in a time of continuing unsureness of what and how best to continue to make money to keep the machine going and the parties happening is not one to have the goose laying the golden egg be killed off. Nolan knew that and knows that, he’s no fool.

But Warner Bros. knew that Nolan had pulled something off pretty solidly with Batman Begins and therefore the money being put up for The Dark Knight was a likely investment. They had the core returning cast and crew. They had iconic villains making their first appearances. They had a replacement for the weakest acting link in the first film, hands down. They even had the inadvertant publicity from hell when one of the key actors died after completing his work.

And they had to have seen the final cuts a few times before releasing it. Nolan very well knew what he was making. So Warner Bros. knew what they were releasing.

Didn’t they?

—

“Why does blood and torture and anguish still excite us? We thought that by making [the superhero] world more violent, we would make it more “realistic,” more “adult.” God help us if that’s what it means.” — Grant Morrison

Read that link to get one writer’s brief take on the original comic book sin of the eighties, Anglophone version, if you like, but the quote almost says it all in terms of the disenchantment that set in after a certain point. Alan Moore’s feelings are discussed via paraphrase as well — and the fact that he wrote the introduction to the original trade paperback of The Dark Knight Returns is worth noting.

It is a common story, of hindsight and of insisting that others missed the point, and the skating around the question of hypocrisy, unintentional or otherwise (elsewhere on ILE a thread regarding the forthcoming Watchmen movie includes this brief comment from elsewhere: “i like alan moore gettin worked up about racism and homophobia when most of his funnybooks are filled with well-meaning misogyny” — though it’s also interesting how something further in that very comment adds a further layer of irony). To say that this has affected film as well as comics is an understatement and requires far more space and time than I can devote to it here.

But of course it’s such a potent issue because the stakes are so high — about life and death, about violence and pain, ‘blood and torture and anguish.’ This decade has hardly lacked for it, no decade has, no decade will. How those stakes are addressed, how certain interpretations of that kind of address in artistic form take on roles of their own, new statures, becoming part of the canon — it’s no less powerful for being familiar in subject and in the shape of the debate. What is appropriate and when (‘adult’ versus non-adult, say).

It bubbles below surfaces, collects, spreads. It’s one of those issues that is omnipresent, eternal, at once always in focus and not always on our minds. It is contextual itself, by country, nation, state, community, ‘society.’ It takes on no one form. And this again is a truism.

And so in the context of July 2008 (a contextual date, given shape by a Mediterrenean society and a Middle Eastern religion) there appears for general public consumption The Dark Knight.

—

“That is precisely why I made the film….the viewer pays for it, as you say, with having to think about it, his role as a viewer and as an accomplice in the action. I often say those who watch the film to the end, they obviously needed it, and those who leave early did not need it….This is the method of the film, to show the viewer how manipulatable he or she is.” — Michael Haneke on Funny Games

I have not seen Funny Games, either the original German-language version or the English language remake. I have no interest in doing so. I do not imagine I will do so. What I have learned of it through discussion with others and in reading pieces about it, such as the interview linked above, is of interest insofar as I have a general if not constant interest in the idea of what one creates, how one creates it, how one engages with a potential audience and how one feels about that audience.

The particular terms of that contract in Haneke’s case do not interest me, however much it might be interesting in general to view things like the ‘rewind’ scene (for some, I understand, his most facile and obnoxious move; for others, his boldest). In part — not entirely, I must emphasize, but in part — I would say it is because it was oversold to me beforehand — having not seen the original or heard of Haneke by name before word of the remake of Funny Games came out, the fact that I was being told that it was a movie about audience manipulation in the context of what an audience wants in terms of violence, among whatever else was being discussed, meant that it was essentially spoiled for me but also that what was spoiled sounded singularly uninvolving. This is the message? Then why should I care? And a smug pat on the back for my dismissal of it.

I don’t go out of my way to view movies that portray violence. I often enjoy the ones I do see. I don’t need Haneke to tell me that this could be problematic. And a further smug pat. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And on this past Friday night I go see The Dark Knight.

—

“It was about the threat of anarchy. It was about anarchy being the most frightening thing there is. Chaos and anarchy in this day and age, and I think it is. It’s certainly the thing I’m most afraid of.” — Christopher Nolan

It’s the Internet, therefore there is anarchy out there. I’m not afraid of it, but I am observing it right now, and have for a couple of days.

The rage is palpable in some cases. The hate, the loathing. It’s directed against critics who didn’t like it. It’s directed against Nolan and company for making it. It’s directed against each other, it might even be directed against the self more than once.

So what, one should understandably say. What else does one expect — it’s a film, it’s high-profile, and people will be divided. We’ve all seen it before and we will all see it again. Another contextual constant.

There’s been a little something more, though. Just. Not enough to suddenly say that some sort of major step has been made. Very easy for me to oversell, I need to resist the temptation to do so but it’s pretty hard.

Amid the complaints and praise for the acting, the editing, the music, the pace, amid all the discussions of minutiae and the trash-talking between franchise fans, a dark thread, sensed in the questions about what children might think, about how people reacted to certain scenes, about what stuck with them in the memory the most. Unease.

There is context here too — the most important. If this had ‘just’ been a crime procedural film of the kind Nolan and collaborators often refer to, this context would not exist. But it’s the Batman, the Joker, Two-Face. Gordon, Alfred, Fox. Gotham.

There’s a million reviewers out there all saying similar things — how it’s the film that shows comics have come of age, how it’s more mature. Cast your mind back to that Grant Morrison quote above, though. Then ignore that angle and debate and terminology entirely.

Instead — if you have seen the film — ask yourself this — did Christopher Nolan, perhaps unconsciously, succeed where Michael Haneke failed?

—

“I think that this second movie has surpassed the first and it stands as a great movie regardless of genre.” — Christian Bale

So, The Dark Knight.

I’m already planning on seeing it again in the theater. Maybe even a third time, depending.

No, it’s not perfect. I don’t think I really have perfect films, I’m sure I did at one point, but that’s understandable enough. Some criticisms I’ve read just made me more excited to see the film.

Others I agree with. The pacing does seem too strangely drawn out towards the end at points. The very final speeches appear to strain to provide a point of closure (more on that later as well).

Others I understand but don’t agree with — Christian Bale gets a lot of those, and a lot of it has to do with the VOICE OF DOOM. But I was fine enough with that in Batman Begins and I really have no problem with it here. If anything, its intentional artificiality is necessary in the world Nolan has created — if the effect is to be ‘real’ then Batman communicating with any number of people in the voice of Bruce Wayne is a problem. Bale also gets complaints that he is a blank, both as Bruce Wayne and as Batman, and as Wayne both ‘in character’ in public and in the private moments. But this bothers me even less — the first film did all the setting up, and what others see as flatness I see as cool control and internal despair hinted at rather than splayed out. He is a decentered titular character, though, certainly — and this isn’t new even in Batman films (never forget that Jack Nicholson got the lead credit in the 1989 film — rewatch the opening minute if you don’t believe me) — but I think it is effectively done here.

So there are the criticisms to note, yes.

And what a film, what a film. WHAT a film.

I’m trying, for once, to avoiding dragging out all the adjectives. They all seem insufficient, down the line. The film is just that good. My faith was rewarded, and it was faith — I had a trust in Nolan and crew and I was not only not let down but had my expectations smashed.

The comments and thoughts I’ve left on ILE and elsewhere, upon reviewing, barely say anything, so in some respects I find myself wondering how best to approach this. A checklist? A scattered list of observations? A general ‘look, really, GO SEE THIS’ post, even despite the fact that as noticed I don’t think this film ‘perfect’?

There is continuity, certainly. If Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine don’t have much to do then they do it very well in roles that are necessary if thankless, though not without quiet reward — Freeman’s moral dilemma towards the end is the weakest one of the film (strange considering that in ways it most clearly addresses a larger dilemma in current America than anything else in the film) but he makes up for it with a great line delivered to a scheming accountant. Caine, meanwhile, for all his Michael Caineness verbally, has his best moment in a visual shot towards the end, a deft script suggestion that is gently played out. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, nails Gordon so well that my belief circa Batman Begins that he could anchor a film on his own as the character isn’t changed much at all — and if he’s saddled with the forced concluding speech, one flash-forward moment accompanying it makes up for it all, an iconic part of the Batman mythos destroyed at his hands. And there’s a great one-scene cameo by Cilian Murphy as the Scarecrow, because why not?

Of the newer actors, besides a perfectly serviceable pool of names such as Nestor Carbonell, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall and more besides, all of whom deal with the movie and setting as if it was ‘just’ a crime drama and therefore help sell it all the more, there’s the bigger name of Maggie Gyllenhall (a fine job, I like her as an actress well enough, but it’s less about her character than what happens to her character) and Aaron Eckhart, who can only seem to play WASPy professional types — no complaints there, he’s the William Hurt of his time on that front and as such while it’s impossible to look at him without thinking, “Hey, it’s Aaron Eckhart,” that makes him perfect for Harvey Dent both before and after his transformation into Two-Face. More on his character in a bit.

Technically there’s little to add that hasn’t been explored in much more detail — still haven’t seen this in IMAX but I’ve little doubt it’s just that spectacular in it, there was enough of a rich feeling visually to start with, hyperclean surfaces and deep black shadows and more. Serviceable enough visual effects when needed but mostly done in camera when possible (check the first Nolan link above for more). Hans Zimmer and James Michael Howard are two studio pros who know exactly what they are doing when it comes to the music and if their best trick is obvious it is still a killer trick, a one-note motif that clearly signals imminent threat — a cliche by now in many other hands but deployed here with can-do effectiveness.

Special notice for the editing in particular — in combination with the camera work, easily the two most crucial things about the film, and if not perfect (as noted above, the structure and pace starts to give towards the end — nowhere near as badly as the Indiana Jones movie did, though), the amount of times that scenes relied on the quickest of cuts to end on moments of sudden tension, unease, panic or something equally unsettling only ratcheted up a tense movie’s impact all the more. Again, as with the music, the wheel not reinvented, but used to the best of its considerable ability.

And more can and should be said. But two things left to talk about in detail for now.

—

“I personally had strongly mixed emotions about this film. While it was a little bit too violent for my tastes, it wasnt until a certain scene that made me literally burst into tears. But there is a backstory.” — a poster on the LA Times Hero Complex blog

What do people want out of a movie? What do people want out of a script? A story?

As Nolan says, he makes movies that are funny to himself at least, and unintentional humor (or not) of the Batvoice aside, plenty of funny moments in this one. The source of many of them can be guessed but that’s for the final section. But there’s a variety of humor styles deployed, from the visual gag to the wry understatement to even the kind of joke that would have worked in the Schumacher Batmans but still works in this one too — think of the scene where the judge counts off the absurdly high amount of collective charges and the camera cuts to a courtroom packed with seemingly nobody but defendants and lawyers all protesting at the top of their lungs. It’s not a laugh a minute movie but it has its ways of relieving things around the corners, even if it’s Gordon and Wayne exchanging a bit of ‘hey how ya doin’ talk following an intentional smash-up towards the end of the film.

It’s all needed because as time goes on — and as the character that laughs the most starts to laugh louder and louder — the grimness builds. And we come back to Nolan-as-Haneke-analog…maybe.

It doesn’t hit you over the head at first, or so I think. In retrospect it does a bit. You realize that the opening scene worked, if it did for you, for the sheer glee of realizing how the Joker set up each of his accomplices and then got away with it all scot-free. You wanted him to succeed, a crime that after all was against what was clearly described as a front for the Mafia, and where only small time criminals were killed otherwise. The deaths were all meant to entertain.

And they did, I was entertained. I’d guess we all were.

And slowly but surely the bodies piled up.

On ILE, moonship made this comment:

here’s another thing we’re suffering through: movies where people casually shoot each other without warning….a lot of times during the dark knight i was like “oh for god’s sake, will the director please stop having hapless beat cops get shot for no reason”.

Hapless beat cops indeed. And small-time criminals. And vigilantes. And bystanders. And high civic officials. And not all for no reason…perhaps?

When Gordon’s character ‘dies,’ his is the one that is most milked for dramatic impact, pushed to the limit. Its audaciousness is another thing you realize in retrospect — he’s not even Commissioner Gordon yet, how could he have been killed? But then, why not? And that’s what I was thinking of the whole time until his return, that he was really out — why not raise the stakes some? I didn’t question it at all — that death made a certain sense. And then he came back and all was right with the world…for the moment.

But before that time is when things first began to clearly take shape in my head as to what was going on, when Harvey Dent individually confronts and is on the verge of taking the life of a suspect in the Gordon slaying. On the surface level, this is exactly the kind of thing being talked about for the most part — the articulation of what is justice, of what kind, how is it done? The discussion between Batman and Dent at that point is, essentially, necessary formula to drive the plot further. It’s not about a Macguffin — the plot IS the Macguffin.

This can overstate, to put it mildly. My lens is my own, after all. Yet consider — from that point forward I felt strongly that the movie even more clearly aiming to have its cake and eat it too, the blackest of black jokes when it came to death and loss. The ways it did so were manifold — the major ‘real’ death in the movie, Rachel’s, is blunt, a raising of emotional stakes that again drives the plot forward, meant to be accepted. But while that happens, the Joker breaks out and bodies are everywhere. The mayhem builds up further, the threats get more convoluted. The Joker threatens to destroy a hospital unless a man is killed by a random citizen in sixty minutes. Attempted killings, kidnappings, bombings, fear. Victims caught on video. Macguffin…again?

Then we hit the boats. As my friend Tom said to me, “The buttons have to be wired up to their own boats.” But we didn’t get that, no explosions at all. The Joker is rather disappointed.

I was disappointed.

One reason could be, to quote an ILE post, “the Joker’s “social experiment” towards the end and the decision the people come to (and the way they come about it) is oddly reminiscent of the type of upbeat, populist messages you might expect from the Spider-Man movies during scenes where the masses get involved in the film…why’s [Gotham] such a sewer if everyone (including convicted murderers) are really saints?”

And I wasn’t feeling particularly saintlike right then. I wanted a ship to go down. Maybe both.

Everything felt a little more nightmarish from that point on in what remained, to the point where I was fully expecting…wanting…Dent as Two-Face to murder Gordon or a family member in cold blood in the final sequence.

That was not a pleasant feeling. And I’d be willing to guess I was far from alone in expecting that, even wanting it.

So what, it’s only a film, a fictional story about a melodramatic situation that looks realistic but is not real — not everyone reacts this way that I did nor is there any reason why they should. My supposition about what is going on might only be that in the end, at most unconsciously intended, maybe. Yet the slow grind of the story towards the conclusion, towards the overt statements between Gordon and Batman at the end — did the Joker win or did what Dent stood for before his fall maintain its resonance, can a violent impulse be tempered? — seems only to drive towards a parallel and overarching conclusion — is this what the audience wants? what I want? what you want?

Because after all, if Dent had lived in this version of the Batman story, he would go on to cause more death and slaughter in the next movie, presumably, and didn’t the audience want that story to continue? With a kind of suddenly self-conscious horror, I realized I expected that continuity, I wanted that — and I didn’t get it. Nolan knew that going in and saw it through, and he would well be aware of what kind of reaction that would generate, understatedly if not overtly — that fanservice wasn’t on the agenda. There was a larger agenda at work.

So why so serious indeed. But consider the quote that started this section, consider the opening quote I listed and linked up top, consider that which I alluded to at the start which regular blog readers over the past week would know about.

Haneke couldn’t get me interested in his games. Nolan, on the other hand, had me played from the start, and I won’t be the only one.

And that leaves one last thing to talk about.

—

“He’s going to be really sinister and it’s going to be less about his laugh and his pranks and more about just him being a just a fucking sinister guy.” — Heath Ledger

The elephant in the room. The Oscar talk, the real death. The posthumous worship, the exploiting without being seen to.

I had no real opinion on Heath Ledger at all. I hadn’t really seen him in anything. Bits, pieces…he’d yet to do a movie that made me go “Man, I really need to see that sooner rather than later,” and yes that includes Brokeback Mountain. Some part of me still remembered about ten years back, going “Roar? What kind of a stupid name for a series is that?”

When it was announced he was going to be the Joker — hey, I was fine with it. No preconceptions, let him be the Joker. And so it went from there, and things trickled out as they would — spy photographs of the makeup, formal promo shots, audio snippets, initial trailers…worked for me, caught ‘em as I did.

And we all know what happened next.

You can talk about people disappearing into roles, but for me, the Joker WAS Heath Ledger’s role just because I had nothing else to compare it to — other Jokers, surely, but not other Heath Ledger parts. And unlike Aaron Eckhart, I didn’t look at the Joker and think “Oh right, Heath Ledger,” which was of course the whole point, the makeup, the scars, everything else.

There’s already a backlash to the Oscar talk and there’s going to be a backlash to the backlash. The only thing to do was to come in and see if he pulled it off.

And now I think of moments, on top of moments, on top of moments.

The pencil trick, of course. Knocked everyone flat. (Horrified laughter — entertainment and death.) The first speech about the scars, the broken pool cue. (Again, horrified, etc.) The videos. The disfigured bodies. The literal lip-licking enjoyment of it all. The masochism, the taunts, the pauses and the uncaring about all that which one might normally care about, in the world of Gotham at least if not the real one. The phone call.

The nurses’ outfit. That WHOLE scene, down to him toddling out into the street just…walking that way in that dress. And then when you expect him to do the ‘every film’s done it’ bit of him just moving away from all the mayhem, it misfires, he turns around and gets frustrated and pissy. Nolan and company’s conception but that was Ledger on screen.

And then something which I remembered vividly and which others did as well — to quote a public take on it from ILE:

Best scene (shot, I guess) in the movie: without a doubt the Joker riding in the police car, hanging out the window, mugging for nobody, then silently closing his eyes and taking in the air. Fabulous.

Another friend called it ‘disturbing…and lyrical.’ Rightly so. Free of dialogue, free of nothing but the kind of impulses that tie together things on so many levels — the power of speed, the snubbing of authority, the sheer solipsistic glee in wanting it all to come down and fail in a sprawling mess — something about it is lyrical, recognizable. When Nolan said he feared anarchy up above, he also knew that he wanted to make it look great.

The Dark Knight is arguably all about beginnings and endings both. Some characters begin and end in it, Harvey Dent most obviously. Some just end — Rachel Dawes on a rooftop, speaking with all the time she has left, cut off in mid-syllable. Origin stories are told and/or final moments are overseen. And the Batman’s origin story was already told, and Gordon’s, and Alfred’s, and more.

The great exception: appearing in medias res, no beginning, no fixed point of entry or reason or rationale, changing his story as he pleases, offering little explanation beyond words that the character seems to say only for his amusement, laughing with delight at each pounding fist Batman gives him, ending his story literally hanging in the air, neither here nor there.

One reason why the very ending doesn’t quite work for me is that it is that it felt like there had to be an ending, a punctuation, some kind of flat reassurance and summation. Perhaps unavoidable. Heath Ledger didn’t have to worry about that with this character, and the last image nearly everyone will ever have of him now, cackling and held at bay by gunpoint, swinging back and forth above an abyss, seems like a permanent stasis worth staying in.

—

“…it feels evil when it’s not necessarily an evil thought, but it may look and come across as evil.” — Heath Ledger

It was only a movie, after all. And yet, again, context.

I had fun.

A quick look back at “Batman Begins”

Because why not. Have I mentioned I can’t wait for The Dark Knight?

These two pieces were written and posted a day after seeing Batman Begins. The first, a shorter one, appeared on Freaky Trigger:

The advantage of knowing the general story of Batman without knowing the details is handily refreshing. It meant that I could and did enjoy everything from That TV Series to the weird white-eyed version in the 70s Superfriends cartoons to the Miller interpretations to the Burton films as they came, all spinning in their own universes. (The Schumacher films I did not enjoy. But that would take too long to talk about.)

So Batman Begins is something that I approached not cold but not well steeped either, a good balance for something that is meant to be an adaptation but not definitive, not the ‘true’ source. Some random flack article the other day reminded me that Batman screen versions have been attempted in various forms since the forties, so there’s an advantage in seeing this as a new, wholly separate attempt to deal with what’s still a handy story, in fact a striking one. If Superman was the messiah from the sky who had to learn how to deal with ‘being human,’ the all-too-human Batman was, as this great evisceration of Batman and Robin put it, “one of the few costumed crimefighters who chooses to be a superhero.” However this particular film was cooked up, that turned out to be the goal of this film, to outline one potential route and to make, hopefully, something entertaining and moneymaking out of it.

No worries there for Warner Bros., as this turned out to be something close to a slam-dunk, not perfect but really, really good. My feeling when I saw a trailer for the first time was that this could be a good film, not just a good comic book adaptation. It doesn’t quite get there but it gets very close, and in fact improves in the mind upon reflection, though probably that’s due to its strengths coming more to the fore as it’s thought about. Others observed earlier it was less an action movie than a suspense one and I think that’s spot on — the action scenes are directed/edited with more intent to actually *be* action scenes than Burton’s equivalents, say, but when Christopher Nolan and crew call up the idea of Batman as terrifying alien avenger and put that to play, the film is expressly on, full stop.

Well worth it and if you see it like I did on an IMAX screen, really well worth it. Just avoid having to crick your neck, though.

I had a longer ramble over on ILE, which I’ll repost here with some slight edits taking out a couple of contextual references to the thread:

* It’s a film with too many ideas/approaches rather than too little, and better the former option than the latter. It has to maintain a careful balancing act which it doesn’t quite succeed it but comes very very close to with. Packing in everything from classic urban/conspiracy theory paranoia (modern variants beginning with the ‘mysteries’ genre in popular fiction in the nineteenth century in Europe) to working schlub woes is a noble attempt, actually, the more so because it demands shifts in tone that flow well in order to work. As such the film occasionally falls down, feels clunky, steps out of its flow, though not so much as to damage. It did stop me up a few times as it goes, though, partially because there *were* scenes when such transitions were handled with aplomb (think Wayne having to dismiss the party guests when he has just found out the true (?) identity of Ducard) if not perfect grace. But I never felt completely taken out of the film even when I could sense some parts and exchanges I could almost literally look past or slightly ignore. Importantly, whether in terms of language or motivation or even just general depiction, [Roger] Ebert’s call on the film — “The movie is not realistic, because how could it be, but it acts as if it is” — nails it. Much like, say, Peter Jackson’s interpretation of Lord of the Rings where a guiding principle was to avoid irony completely, here the same principle clearly works. Much of what is in the plot, and even the specifics of the script, could have been purest camp if played/directed differently. Here Nolan and crew took the chance like Jackson et al that if they filmed it and played it straight it would work more often than not. So Christian Bale’s “I AM DOOM” Batman voice *almost* could fail but holds through well and in fact arguably works even more effectively as the film goes, as we get used to it more. With that as an effective anchor, the rest follows.

* Hands down best overall performance — Oldman. Nothing against Bale at all, in fact, because I think he did a fine, fine job, but Oldman was, just, the best balance between the hyperreality of the setting and story and a regular Joe, and played it as such, and never stepped out of it. That Oldman knows how to nail an American accent was clear years ago, he’s done many inspired performances since with many different varieties of same. That he could *perfectly* disappear into the role — reminiscent of Miller’s Gordon in his Batman: Year One without being an exact equivalent — was inspiring, in a way. He was easily the best character I could enjoy seeing a separate movie about, an alternate approach where it’s Gordon’s story with Batman to the side. Part of it was the deft hints at there being more to say — the brief observation of his family at home, the sense of his frustrations and disappointments over the years — but part of it was him feeling very lived in, very there. It was almost too good at parts, if that makes sense — where Katie Holmes was just bluntly functional at best (I honestly think the tone of her voice was the worst part, something too…I dunno, light, breezy even?), Oldman’s Gordon could have been something near to a documentary performance. And as noticed [elsewhere], that brief ‘Sorry!’ almost says it all.

* As for the rest, good ensemble cast with some standouts and some thankless parts. Caine basically played Alfred-as-Caine but the humour was definitely a good outlet without making his role comic — his combination of frustration/anger/sarcasm/being ‘proper’ when delivering the push-up line as the Wayne manor burns was emblematic, as was the one time when his sudden burst of anger towards Wayne gave just enough hinting of depth without being a forced “Look! See! Depth!” moment. I liked Freeman’s easygoing nature but the role was plug and play, more’s the pity. Hauer having gone from being Roy Batty twenty five years ago to being a proto Dr. Tyrell now was kinda funny if you look at it that way (and I do). Holmes, as mentioned…well, anyway. Did a poor job handling The Big Issue Speeches, but then again she was stuck with them — as was…

* Neeson, who essentially played a Dark Side of the Force Quigon Jinn. Now don’t get me wrong, he did a fine job of it, though as friend Tom told me afterwards, “He has to watch out or he’ll be typecast as Mr. Miyagi from here on in” (and for all I know he was that in Kingdom of Heaven). And as I mentioned, the whole trick lies in playing it straight, which he did — I could be wrong, I don’t think he smiled once in the film, which was true to the character as set up in this interpretation, a pitiless man with an overarching mission. But as an opponent for Bale things fell apart a touch when the two of them were facing off verbally towards the end — given that the actual knock-down drag-out final fight was a mash and mush of quick edits that frankly I found hard to follow, the confrontation in Wayne Manor needed to work more than it did, especially since the twinges of ambiguity worked much more effectively at the start of the film during the training than at the end. That the film allowed Bale space to explore the ambiguity more during its length is to its credit, that it fell off too swiftly towards the end isn’t. In the end, the last two-line exchange between the two on the train before Batman escapes works better and says more about the two characters than the Manor sequence as a whole.

* Meanwhile, Murphy was *very* nice as Scarecrow, the more so because he played him as a character who wasn’t necessarily invested in being Scarecrow all the time, or rather that he didn’t need to become Scarecrow to be unsettling, evil-doing, etc. The spookout sequences with Batman and Falcone were brutally effective (though the bad ‘lighten up’ joke with Batman shouldn’t have been there) but the absolute most scary part was Crane introducing Holmes’s character to the poison prep room and calmly, casually talking about what happens next. Followed as it was by her panicked bolt away (and how that was edited), the scenes worked *very* well. I would like to see him come back if they can make the character all the more damaged from the results of this film, building on it rather than just simply more of the same.

* And speaking of scary….while I don’t think it was truly *always* creepout central it got closer than not. Where I think the action scenes could be flawed they were at their best when suggesting uncontrollable chaos and fear, thus the panicked men at the drug dropoff being taken out in a group. But it was the building up to that point which made it work, the sense that something was picking them off one by one. It immediately reminded me of Alien, an impression further heightened by the way Batman would grab victims at points to suddenly haul them up in the sky, unexpected, terrifying — think of Harry Dean Stanton suddenly hauled up into the shuttle bay by the still not full seen/apprenhended alien itself. Another film referenced, at least semi-consciously, was probably The Silence of the Lambs — anything at least partially set in an asylum might well have to deal with that nowadays, but the sense of different layers and atmospheres in the asylum, as well as the spreadeagled (but not eviscerated) Falcone on the searchlight, called the comparison to mind. There were other steals and references but always fairly deftly done, no complaints there at all — when it works, it works well.

* Random thoughts since I actually do have to work a bit here — the music wasn’t that bad, but didn’t stand out, it was appropriate, for better or for worse; the Iceland-based shots for the training at the beginning were indeed really something, very good atmosphere, as well as excellent set design for the monastery itself; similarly using Chicago as the base for the city itself was a nice variant on using NYC, say — favorite shot might actually be the early morning one where Batman stands calmly on an outcrop of building while the camera swoops around to silhouette him against the rising sun; the Batmobile made me think of the Dark Knight Returns tank in miniature — and why not?; a couple of instances aside, the humor throughout seemed to be handled just fine so I’m not too sure about the complaints there; the actual death of Wayne’s parents was I thought kinda weak (and the whole stethoscope thing and all that…eh, whatever); absolutely LOVED how there were no credits at all until the very end, not even the film title; sound and visual design top notch.

So. Roll on tomorrow. (No midnight showing for me — tickets LONG gone.)