Sucker Punch: The Hidden Hero of The Dark Knight Part I, Section I
Sucker Punch: The Hidden Hero of The Dark Knight. Part I, Section I: All Finale
by Simon Augustine, Fister McGee and help from The Lights! Editorial Staff
Sucker The Dark Knight is like a sucker punch stretched over two and a half hours: you don’t see it coming, and when you walk out of the theatre, you come to in a daze, painfully and giddily light-headed, with the faint, and faintly pleasing, taste of blood in your mouth. Given the hype, you expect it will have some popcorn power; but the kind of impact it wields – adult, pessimistic, and intellectually challenging – is completely unexpected, and leaves you shaking your head a bit with wonder and confusion. The narrative structure is the first surprise in store: often, an action movie culminates in a propulsive last twenty minutes – that is, the climactic, headlong stuff, when a slow, palpitating music insistently revs up, and the audience is signaled to brace themselves. Soon after that cue, the disparate pieces of a narrative begin to rush together, as heroes and villains move inevitably towards each other for a final clash. The Dark Knight moves at this breakneck pace and persistent kineticism right off the bat, and from slam-bang beginning to crashing…
ambivalent end, it never lets up. From the opening bank job by the Joker’s minions, with a visceral you-are-there electric techno-thump worthy of Michael Mann, to the last scenes of a hunted Batman on the run, the entire film sustains the velocity usually reserved for Last Twenty Minute Land. Amazingly, it never goes slack enough to break the spell and lose your attention, nor does it become overwrought enough to feel smothering. If a movie is fireworks, then Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film is all finale.
The next unexpected thing is the narrative’s willful inaccessibility. Critics, such as Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, have complained about The Dark Knight’s quick, erratic jumps from scene to scene; its confusing, fragmented plotting that threatens to spin out of audience’s reach; and the obtuse framing of the action. And it is true; not even the most ardent analyst could keep up with the on-the-fly symbolism and shifting plot lines thrown at them (just think of Harvey Dent’s two-headed coin; Nolan puts it through so many machinations of representation – fate, chance, good and evil, human will, destiny – that eventually I just gave up trying to follow them all.) However, if you make the leap to consider The Dark Knight on its own terms – that is, as essentially an innovation, an unprecedented, aesthetically bizarre and revolutionary interpretation of the superhero tale – then these elements are not so much flaws as factors contributing to a fresh re-telling of the story of Batman and Gotham City. That is, the film is a purposely impressionistic telling of a classic pop-culture myth. It takes big risks, but they are calculated, and not at all arbitrary. The jumbled, catch-as-can form of The Dark Knight’s narrative, in which fights, characters, and themes pass by too quickly to grasp completely – serves a crucial thematic purpose: it is meant to lend itself to the moral turpitude at the story’s philosophic heart.
With its aesthetic of quick brushstrokes, and favoring of sensibility over sense, The Dark Knight almost has the experimental whiff of an art film. It refuses to hit all the marks and do all the dances audiences expect; rather, it smacks them with a strange, troubled, and messy vision. Nolan (whose meta-tricks in The Prestige most of us are still trying to figure out) is too precise and meticulous a filmmaker to be accused of mere technical sloppiness; what we have here is technique in service of eliciting disorientation, a hammer to the brain skillfully aimed. Why disorientation? Because in this case it is required to touch on the particular zeitgeist that drives The Dark Knight: an American society pray to a diffuse anxiety, a generalized feeling of impending catastrophe, and all of it magnified by a technology that seems to be outpacing our understanding, human command, or moral systems. It touches on our current era’s version of “future-shock.” If the viewer takes the delivered blow in the right spirit, the off-kilter and panicky style illuminates the phenomenon with which The Dark Knight is most concerned: namely, the experience of being the member of a society that lately seems able to respond to madness only by summoning more madness (at this point it almost seems redundant to do the roll call of American myopia: Iraq, torture, wiretapping, rendition, etc.) Even more troubling, in a mythic sense, is that this Batman becomes more a product of the zeitgeist than a savior able to rescue the rest of us from its clutches. These days even the best of heroes is sucked into the maelstrom.
Short URL: http://www.somebodyhitthelights.com/?p=139
Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff
on Feb 24 2010 Filed under The Adventurous Spirit.
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