The Dark Knight: where I stand

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I've been reading over the comments from my last post.

My fascination with The Dark Knight is, primarily, structural. I have not encountered an American movie -- much less an American movie designed to be a gigantic blockbuster -- that is structured as ingeniously and compellingly as this one. I've simply never seen anything like it, and after several viewings it still continues to flabbergast.

I've worked on a handful of these types of movies, and let me tell you: they're hard -- they're really hard. There are so many issues for the writer to address: the protagonist must be active, the villain's plot must make sense, there must be a romantic interest, there must be due attention paid to the history of the character and the rules of the genre, they must be both fantastic and grounded at the same time, all these balls must be kept in the air and these concerns must mesh in a straightforward, compelling, swift, action-packed cinematic narrative, consistent in tone and true to its source material. I haven't seen one -- not one -- that has managed to get everything in and do everything right. None of the Superman movies do it, none of the previous WB Batman movies do it, none of the Spider-Man movies do it, neither of the Fantastic Four movies do it, and, as [info]jacksonpublick has noted, none of the Bond movies -- after more than 20 tries -- do it either. (Iron Man comes close -- really close.) But The Dark Knight not only does a better job than any other movie based on its source material -- and by that I mean "superhero comics" -- it does it with a radically ambitious screenplay that challenges any number of conventions and brings a new, added weight to its subject.

As such, I tend to let issues such as "Batman's growly voice" fall to the wayside as I try to figure out just how the hell the Nolans built this hugely compelling cinematic narrative.

Since I'm going to mostly refrain from nit-picking in my analysis, here's where I stand on most of the issues brought up by the Dark Knight discontents:

1. Batman's "growly voice" does sound a little silly.

2. I do not think Batman is a passive character. In fact, I don't consider Batman to be much of a character at all. Bruce Wayne is the protagonist of The Dark Knight, he is an active protagonist in every sense of the word I can think of, and "the Batman" is a costume he puts on when he goes out to fight crime. This sounds like hair-splitting but I think is a key to understanding the success of the narrative and the world Nolan is building.

3. I did want to see more of Two-Face, because I like Two-Face, but I don't feel like his story is rushed or tacked-on. Visually, it feels like a pretty big gimme to ask the audience to behold the unspeakable horror of a guy with half a face, only to then kill him off forty-five minutes later, but dramatically I have no complaints, and as we move forward I'll make my case for that.

4. The Joker's plans are complicated and slightly fanciful, but gee whiz, compared to what? Compared to the Penguin's army of rocket-laden penguins in Batman Returns? Compared to Poison Ivy's plot to team up with Mr. Freeze to freeze Gotham City (using a giant telescope) in order for plants to take over in Batman and Robin? Compared to Ras Al Ghul's plot to microwave Gotham's water supply with his magic microwave-gun in Batman Begins? If you ask me, the Joker's ability to wire a hospital with explosives in The Dark Knight on short notice is a model of logic and circumspection compared to, say, Lex Luthor's plot to build a new continent in Superman Returns.

5. Ditto Bruce Wayne's sonar-cell-phone device. As a fantastic gadget, it has the icy breath of the plausible compared to some of the things Batman's lugged around over his decades of public service. The fantastic elements of The Dark Knight, I feel, are the screenplay's nods to convention and the source material -- Batman without at least one moment of "now, wait a minute" would hardly feel like Batman.

6. The action scenes: I see that some people find them incoherent. Sorry, I don't agree. I don't know what else to say about it -- I have not had trouble following the action in The Dark Knight, not the first time and not when I've watched it since.

7. To some people, The Dark Knight contains some sort of a political message. If one is intended, I can't make head or tail of it. The Dark Knight deals with a lot of real-life civic issues, but it remains a drama, not a treatise. If I was supposed to vote for John McCain or something because of watching this movie, well, then I guess it's a failure.