Every time I leave a movie about super powered, larger than life, mythic men careening around the world (smashing things humans cannot feasibly smash, picking up things we humans absolutely cannot), my muscles are tense, my back is straight, I feel filled with deep strength. Forget the movies. This storytelling – tales of gods and heroes – can move me in this way without a big budget and a thousand-strong special effects team. Each story has its own weight, smell, texture. I sharply remember leaving the first Spiderman movie knowing I could climb walls. I was as light, excitable, joyous and wild eyed as I’d been since careening around trees as a kid – and for a moment I could remember no good reason, beyond a regrettable failure of imagination, for the absence of playful, epic wall scaling from our lives. This summer I’ve had the pleasure of walking out of both The Incredible Hulk and Hellboy II with the knowledge that, were the power in my shoulders and chest set free, were I able to manifest that coiled energy I can picture inside of me, cars would be mere playthings, my city a playground, and I would dance with the world of heavy, serious objects like a wrestler, like a god.
I just walked out of The Dark Knight, and my chest is tight, and I feel the isolation that is the sensation of being super powered in a world of the normally powered, and I don’t walk to speak to anyone, and my face is set in determination. Tonight I am determined to make it across the parking lot. I have resolved to not hit anyone on the way home. I will bring my iron will to bear on figuring out what the fuck just happened to me.
I am, as are many of my fellow humans, effortlessly familiar with violence, destruction, and mayhem conjured up in vivid detail for my entertainment. I like to see the world of the dangerous and the scary captured by a screen, and I like paying money to see it, exercising control over it, consuming it. The great things of this world, be they cities, vehicles, buildings or people, make fantastically exciting toys in the world of make believe. I have never seen a car chase or fist fight or a depiction of a vast metropolis swallowed by tsunami that I didn’t enjoy; I have never seen an action set piece I found disturbing, or excessive, or distasteful. If a movie fails to hold my attention, I turn away. If it is shoddily made, I laugh at it. If it requests all sorts of suspensions of me – ethical, narrative, logical – I go along with it, because why not? What’s the harm in a movie? Why not flex our incredible ability to manifest our wild imaginings on a huge wall?
I am still astonished by this, and I’m not sure I trust or understand the feeling, but I may have just seen a movie that was too violent. I mean this like people mean it when they wander into a shoot-em-up after a life of crocheting, when they feel unexpectedly assaulted, shaken to the core. The Dark Knight felt like the weight of millions upon millions of dollars, and decades upon decades of mythology, and two and a half hours of rumbling bass speakers, being brought to bear like a sledgehammer on my chest. In a bad way. Specific choices that were made, especially in the screenplay and the location work, felt aggressively hostile towards me – me! the guy in the cushioned seat who pays for this sort of thing routinely! – and around the two hour mark, I began to seriously question the wisdom of releasing such oppressively bleak spectacle on the public.
First and foremost, the city The Joker assaults in this film is my city. This is not Gotham at all. This city is aggressively bright, violently realistic. Gone is the over the top, comic book grime and darkness we saw in Batman Begins (and every other Batman iteration). Gone is the clever and impossible monorail system, which definitively distinguished our fictionalized New York from the real one, gone is Wayne Tower and its embodiment of an alternative, abridged, and toothless version of city history, gone is “the narrows” with its endless and eternal yellow steam. The first shot of the movie shocked me: I could not believe I was looking at this bright business-like city in a Batman movie. Right away I was reeling, having lost all my comforting gothic footing. This is bright white stone and glass towers, not an ounce of exaggeration in sight. When our hope falters and our protagonists do such a poor job of setting things right, as police officers die in the line of duty, residents are tense, scared, and angry, and the city slips away from those who would order it, protect it – this feels like an assault. This is the most brilliantly plotted, meticulously planned, well financed assault on my emotional security I ever hope to endure. We are bereft, the poor audience, of Wayne Manor, and the Batcave, and any ounce of fun or irony or innocence, and instead we have lower Manhattan, or some city dolled up to look just like it, subjected to full on attack by the most evil, frightening, and powerful villain I have ever seen depicted on film.
Forget Max Shreck and Penguin, Cruella deVille, and the idiotic, self-parodying megalomania of Lex Luthor. All are laughable, amusing, and insignificant. Heath Ledger’s Joker wants your city torn to pieces. He wants to torture you and hear you beg for mercy. Most devilishly of all, he has no motivation for any of this except his own amusement and a desire to cut those of us who believe in symbols, structure, and goodness down to size. Why such a creature was projected on 3,000 screens for two and a half hours at the stroke of midnight tonight I may never understand. Our eventual victory is slight and gut wrenching in the face of such capable chaos. The movie lets us escape with our city intact and Batman alive, but just barely, and at the cost of all the grand feeling that comes with a protector, a superman, a hero. We are left spent and dirtied, relieved to crawl away with one or two decent men left breathing, while the monster has come within inches of tearing apart everything we love. If this hyperbolic, cartoonish language seems unlikely to be a sincere description of the events in a Batman movie, you haven’t seen how bright Gotham’s gotten since we last saw her. You aren’t aware of how well lit and familiar these places are this time around, and you may not have heard that full daylight is now fair game for supervillian activity, you may not have gotten the memo that real hospitals where our vulnerable loved ones are lying now threatened by escaped Arkham’s inmates, you may not realize that the nightmares we’ve been writing about tormenting fictionalized caricatures of ourselves for years, well, they’re knocking at the door, your actual front door, and they’re about to make you wish you never imagined them.
It almost makes you sorry to see those mid-nineties Batman films that were such a failure on every level recede into the past. What I wouldn’t give for a bright bauble of a failure, with happymeal-ready villains and sets that evoke Disneyland and Hell and every fantasy in between, anything but the real world, and anything but a real city where you might conceivably live. Instead, tonight I had to sit through a masterpiece, a brilliant and masterfully executed film depicting the death of heroism and myth and grandeur, telling of the triumph of an insane disregard for human life and the frightful power of violence and fear, all played out in front of my astonished eyes, eleven dollars, thank you very much, have a safe trip home, please come back at Thanksgiving for Bolt!
I will be waiting in line for the next one. I have respect and awe for the people who put this film together, every step, every nut and bolt, every second. I can’t help but second guess them, however, remembering that Alan Moore eventually disavowed his The Killing Joke as being too dark, and excessively so. That character – that Joker – may have no place in polite society, and make no mistake, comic books may have a self selected and savvy readership but this wide release blockbuster is going to make itself felt all over and through polite society. I can only hope that others let this wash over them and distance themselves, as I could not, from these city streets and these legends that maybe they don’t love so dearly or take so seriously. I hope it doesn’t get to them, this darkness masquerading as entertainment in their multiplexes.
This Joyful Noise 