In which I pay my dues to the zeitgeist…
At a key point in The Dark Knight Rises the villains take
the Gotham City stock exchange hostage, in order to upload some kind of program
that will make some kind of sale that will fuck up Bruce Wayne/Wayne Enterprises.
The details of which escape me--and I saw this picture like two hours ago.
Anywhoo, these shenanigans leave Bruce Wayne without a penny to his name,
except for maybe tangible assets to the tune of…let’s say…eight figures.[i]
This all leads to a pretty sweet chase scene where Batman reemerges like Kaneda
in Akira on that bike with the wheel
that spins sideways when it needs to make a fast turn, and makes me happy
whenever it does that. The point is though this is a stupid way to ruin
someone. If the entire stock exchange was raided by a super terrorist I’m
pretty sure that would invalidate any trade made that day. Also, unless it’s
the middle of winter it seems like by the time the program finishes loading the
trading would have closed. This bothered me until I forgot about it because of
the cool motorcycle doing that thing I just mentioned, but then bothered me again
whenever it was mentioned. Usually this kind of thing doesn’t bother me. For
example, I wasn’t bothered by the fact that Prometheus
didn’t make a lick of sense and just enjoyed as it snowballed into a giant
avalanche of crazy awesome. I bring this up though because Christopher Nolan’s pictures
demand that you analyze them narratively and marvel at how clever he is.
Basically, Nolan is a director who dumb people think is sophisticated. His
films play with extended narrative gamesmanship. But his method never surpasses
the merely clever. I’m inclined to say that his is the cleverness is of a
crossword puzzle maker, but the fact is that his is closer the cleverness of a
sudoku creator. It’s all in the larger story-arc. So while he has an interest
in a syuzhet[ii]
he has no interest in the mechanics of the fabula. So the example above
demonstrates how at a scene-by-scene level his films don’t stand up to
scrutiny. Aesthetically and narratively, there’s simply no there there.
The thing is though I actually liked this movie while I was watching it.3 Then again. Batman
is basically Jesus, James Bond, and Phillip Marlowe all rolled into one.
Nolan’s big innovation is basically to take Batman seriously. Which is not to
say as some critics do that his interpretation of Batman is realistic or
gritty—does gritty even mean anything at this point? Rather, that as a mythical
figure he represents…err…something. But
there’s a lot to enjoy; Imax, Batman punching people and taking out criminals,
the motorcycle, that opening kidnapping (which again, makes no sense)
especially that one part where the plane falls away and Bane and the scientist
dude are just hanging over the landscape, etc. The thing is though that the
film leaves a bad aftertaste. It just thuds along in the thrall of its own
lugubrious crypto-fascism. Not just in content but in form. The fast-cutting,
giant Imax imagery, and marshaling score crush the viewer’s critical faculties
into a not entirely unpleasant but still pernicious puree. Its moments of
pleasure come, not from human moments, but the work of technicians. Its appeal
is pornographic. There’s no room in these films for sensuousness or pleasure that
comes from the mechanics of a heist, fight, or a conversation. But then again
what should I expect from a tent-pole superhero movie? Well, how about Batman
doing some goddamn detecting? He is after all, along with being the Dark
Knight, the World’s Greatest Detective. How about a villain with a coherent
(not necessarily logical or realistic) scheme to bring Gotham to its knees? How
about a Batman movie where every dialogue exchange didn’t involve some
character expositing the films empty themes? Nolan gets away with it though because
American cinema is so enraptured with perpetual adolescence that his own
adolescent[iii]
signifying is taken seriously. Christopher Nolan isn’t the auteur we need. He’s
the auteur we deserve.
Come at me nerds!
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ReplyDeleteThese last three posts have been especially killer! I finally saw this yesterday, and I'm with you for a lot of what you say. Also the middle of the movie lost me for a while because there weren't enough relatable ladies.
ReplyDelete*SPOILER ALERT*
And speaking of the whole problematic girl thing, he revealed that the sixteen-year-old who escaped was a girl instead of a boy like it was some huge shocking thing, which it wasn't. That's actually the demographic that would be most likely to complete a leap like that. http://gabrielledouglas.com/