dark night of the soul
So, dragged the Evil Landlord away from his cherry-wood piano-stool construction manoeuvres to see Dark Knight last night.
I tried very hard to avoid my usual bloody-minded backlash to all the hype about Dark Knight, and in fact it's a good film - gritty, layered, psychologically dense, intelligent in its explorations of evil. Unfortunately, while it's clearly a better film than Iron Man, it's also a hell of a lot less enjoyable to watch. When filling in its ticky boxes Dark Knight obviously picked "angst", "urban crime", "genuine psychopaths", "human condition" and "brood", leaving no space for "fun", "humour", "style" or "hope". As a drama it really works. As a superhero movie it's an epic fail.
See, I take my superheroes seriously, in the sense that I believe it's vital that they're inherently frivolous. IMHO they're one of the most important mythologies of the last century; the space they fill in our culture is, I think, almost identical to that filled by Lancelot or Hercules in their respective times. I've wittered on before, repeatedly, about the roles superheroes play, but Dark Knight demonstrates in starkly negative terms the central fact of superhero unreality. Masked, costumed vigilantes are not and never can be a realistic response to realistic crime other than on the micro level of rescuing little old ladies from muggings. They're about heroes, people whose abilities are beyond the human, kicking symbolic butt: they stand for the ability to make a difference in a vastly complicated world which denies most of us instrumentality in any real terms. It's one of the reasons why superheroes are most effective pitted against supervillains, who embody and externalise Evil in the same way that superheroes embody and externalise Good, Heroism and Hope. Superheroes are not people, they're emblems. Even when we get all postmodern on their butts and insist on exploring their psychologies and construction, that inner life must always be added to the power of the emblem to make a whole. Batman is neither playboy Bruce Wayne, nor angsty heir to his murdered father, nor even the Batsuit, but all three combined.
Dark Knight doesn't quite get this. In a lot of ways the film cuts the ground out from under its own feet by trying to be too realistic: it badly flaws Batman by insisting on the impossibility of his heroism. Batman himself is increasingly, sinisterly violent, his superheroic ability to sort out bad guys unleavened by the elisionary gloss that superhero narratives need to give, unavoidably, to the consequences and implications of violence. The villain and the hero are inarguably akin in their destructive power, but if you remind us of this too often, the hero is deconstructed beyond functionality into a sort of trapped, desperate futility. The film also horribly under-utilises Christian Bale, failing to balance the personality with the symbol to adequately represent the hero. His out-of-Batsuit screen time is mostly spent being a playboy billionaire with the Russian Ballet; there's not enough personality there to humanise the Batsuit, and he comes across as cardboard cut-out against the terrible realism of Ledger's Joker. (Part of this problem is actually the Two-Face subplot: Harvey Dent's struggle between heroism and violence belongs properly to Batman and merely reiterates the film's themes).
The film compounds this stacked deck by then putting Batman up against the criminal life of the city in a fight he cannot possibly win. The film actually has two villains, the Joker and Gotham itself; Batman can (eventually) neutralise the Joker, but the city will fight him forever, too big, corrupt and sordidly inevitable for a righteous left hook. There's no fun or satisfaction in watching the superhero kick villainous butt if he's just flailing at a pseudopod of the infinitely-regenerating monster. The Joker is likewise flawed in superhero terms. He's a marvellous creation, and mad props to the late, lamented Heath Ledger for imbuing him with such freaky, threatening life, but in a sense he embodies the problem with the film as a whole. He's horrifying because he's absolutely believable, a damaged creature characterised, like the film itself, by flamboyant, destructive despair. (The face-off between Batman and the Joker is particularly effective: the Joker is muttering "Go on, do it, I want you to do it" under his breath. He wants to break things, most of all himself.) But the Joker is, if anything, slightly too real, too anguished, too internal, and lacking the heartless, exuberant style of the true supervillain.
This is a relentlessly bleak film, one which insists on tracing the fallout around violence and the cost of standing against it, and like Harvey Dent's rigged coin it doesn't offer a flip side. In place of humour we have the decidedly unfunny psychosis of the Joker, and at no point does the film attempt to invert that into anything genuinely comic. Comedy is about warmth and hope, and the film denies them too stringently. Even the ferry-passenger Balloon Dilemma, while uplifting, seems a tacked-on commentary on the possibility of human morality, and the film's relentless grimmness outweighs it hopelessly.
I suppose the way to respond to this film is not as a superhero movie, but as a realistic drama, in which case it's pretty darned good, if somewhat too pointedly Oscar-baiting. (It's also hopelessly male-heavy - I like Maggie Gyllenhaal, but she's a sadly spurious presence, there mostly to be snarled over by the territorial males all engaged in Serious Urban Boy Business, and then sacrificed to make the no-hope point even more firmly). I actually can't fault the impulse to make a superhero film more gritty, and I know I tend towards the spandex-and-cape swashbuckle in my superheroes - I just wish the writers had been more sensitive to the superhero as emblem. The impulse is to get all territorial. Gritty cop dramas do everything this film does, male buddyism and all - leave our superheroes alone!
I tried very hard to avoid my usual bloody-minded backlash to all the hype about Dark Knight, and in fact it's a good film - gritty, layered, psychologically dense, intelligent in its explorations of evil. Unfortunately, while it's clearly a better film than Iron Man, it's also a hell of a lot less enjoyable to watch. When filling in its ticky boxes Dark Knight obviously picked "angst", "urban crime", "genuine psychopaths", "human condition" and "brood", leaving no space for "fun", "humour", "style" or "hope". As a drama it really works. As a superhero movie it's an epic fail.
See, I take my superheroes seriously, in the sense that I believe it's vital that they're inherently frivolous. IMHO they're one of the most important mythologies of the last century; the space they fill in our culture is, I think, almost identical to that filled by Lancelot or Hercules in their respective times. I've wittered on before, repeatedly, about the roles superheroes play, but Dark Knight demonstrates in starkly negative terms the central fact of superhero unreality. Masked, costumed vigilantes are not and never can be a realistic response to realistic crime other than on the micro level of rescuing little old ladies from muggings. They're about heroes, people whose abilities are beyond the human, kicking symbolic butt: they stand for the ability to make a difference in a vastly complicated world which denies most of us instrumentality in any real terms. It's one of the reasons why superheroes are most effective pitted against supervillains, who embody and externalise Evil in the same way that superheroes embody and externalise Good, Heroism and Hope. Superheroes are not people, they're emblems. Even when we get all postmodern on their butts and insist on exploring their psychologies and construction, that inner life must always be added to the power of the emblem to make a whole. Batman is neither playboy Bruce Wayne, nor angsty heir to his murdered father, nor even the Batsuit, but all three combined.
Dark Knight doesn't quite get this. In a lot of ways the film cuts the ground out from under its own feet by trying to be too realistic: it badly flaws Batman by insisting on the impossibility of his heroism. Batman himself is increasingly, sinisterly violent, his superheroic ability to sort out bad guys unleavened by the elisionary gloss that superhero narratives need to give, unavoidably, to the consequences and implications of violence. The villain and the hero are inarguably akin in their destructive power, but if you remind us of this too often, the hero is deconstructed beyond functionality into a sort of trapped, desperate futility. The film also horribly under-utilises Christian Bale, failing to balance the personality with the symbol to adequately represent the hero. His out-of-Batsuit screen time is mostly spent being a playboy billionaire with the Russian Ballet; there's not enough personality there to humanise the Batsuit, and he comes across as cardboard cut-out against the terrible realism of Ledger's Joker. (Part of this problem is actually the Two-Face subplot: Harvey Dent's struggle between heroism and violence belongs properly to Batman and merely reiterates the film's themes).
The film compounds this stacked deck by then putting Batman up against the criminal life of the city in a fight he cannot possibly win. The film actually has two villains, the Joker and Gotham itself; Batman can (eventually) neutralise the Joker, but the city will fight him forever, too big, corrupt and sordidly inevitable for a righteous left hook. There's no fun or satisfaction in watching the superhero kick villainous butt if he's just flailing at a pseudopod of the infinitely-regenerating monster. The Joker is likewise flawed in superhero terms. He's a marvellous creation, and mad props to the late, lamented Heath Ledger for imbuing him with such freaky, threatening life, but in a sense he embodies the problem with the film as a whole. He's horrifying because he's absolutely believable, a damaged creature characterised, like the film itself, by flamboyant, destructive despair. (The face-off between Batman and the Joker is particularly effective: the Joker is muttering "Go on, do it, I want you to do it" under his breath. He wants to break things, most of all himself.) But the Joker is, if anything, slightly too real, too anguished, too internal, and lacking the heartless, exuberant style of the true supervillain.
This is a relentlessly bleak film, one which insists on tracing the fallout around violence and the cost of standing against it, and like Harvey Dent's rigged coin it doesn't offer a flip side. In place of humour we have the decidedly unfunny psychosis of the Joker, and at no point does the film attempt to invert that into anything genuinely comic. Comedy is about warmth and hope, and the film denies them too stringently. Even the ferry-passenger Balloon Dilemma, while uplifting, seems a tacked-on commentary on the possibility of human morality, and the film's relentless grimmness outweighs it hopelessly.
I suppose the way to respond to this film is not as a superhero movie, but as a realistic drama, in which case it's pretty darned good, if somewhat too pointedly Oscar-baiting. (It's also hopelessly male-heavy - I like Maggie Gyllenhaal, but she's a sadly spurious presence, there mostly to be snarled over by the territorial males all engaged in Serious Urban Boy Business, and then sacrificed to make the no-hope point even more firmly). I actually can't fault the impulse to make a superhero film more gritty, and I know I tend towards the spandex-and-cape swashbuckle in my superheroes - I just wish the writers had been more sensitive to the superhero as emblem. The impulse is to get all territorial. Gritty cop dramas do everything this film does, male buddyism and all - leave our superheroes alone!