The Dark Knight: Some Scraps

[Published Tuesday, July 22, 2008, at doctorbippie.blogspot.com]


Sometimes in my rapture I write a tad more than I should. What follows are some bits and pieces I'm a little proud of that couldn't possibly fit into my little 600-word confection.

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The look of the movie adds much to its exploration of the blurry boundaries between light and dark. Batman prefers to work at night, of course, gliding through the negative spaces of Gotham's sprawl. But a fair part of the action takes place during business hours, in the spare, rectangular domains of financial and civic power. Nolan and his production team juxtapose night's hard shadows with a flat, gray light that seems to coat rather than illuminate. It hums from the drop ceilings of government offices or oozes in through the windows of ivory tower boardrooms. Not even the Batcave escapes the quotidian glare. With Wayne Manor under renovation, Batman is forced to hide his toys in a single football field-sized room buried somewhere in the inner city. Lined with fashionably polished concrete and lit with bands of fluorescent light, it resembles a huge empty desk drawer. But who has time to decorate?

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The Joker wants nothing except our fear. He has no beliefs, no allegiances and no agenda. And while he knows exactly what he’s doing, he scoffs at the notion that he has a plan. “Nobody panics when things go according to a plan,” he coos, adding, “even if the plan is horrifying.” It’s one of many instances where the ostensibly simple and silly comic-book world echoes the murky complexities on the other side of the theater walls. A look inside the mind of this fictional hyper-terrorist just might remind the audience of the thorny thicket of our own continuing response to terror, and of the hard lesson that crazy men who want to kill us may not be half as frightening as sane men who want to watch us lose our minds.

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At two and a half dark and stormy hours, the film might have benefitted from some trimming. Not fat, mind you; the movie is all muscle. But there are some pretty long stretches of dialogue, and much of what would otherwise have been subtext finds its way onto someone’s lips eventually.

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Oh, how I do love the sound of my own voice.


thanks for paying attention