Even those reviewers who remain luke warm
about Christopher Nolan’s latest installment in the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, find enough to
like about it that will make their readers want to see this summer’s
blockbuster. This enthusiasm for the film, however muted, worries me. While the
literate public are all too accustomed to believing press reviews in the daily
papers, even though we know them to be directed towards the commodification of
our desires and dreams, for some reason, the apparent mis-perception of The Dark Knight Rises worries me more than usual.
Manohla Dargis for the New York Times is not alone in his consideration of the film as
“intelligent” as well as “pleasurable, [on a] purely cinematic level.” Dargis
and others praise The Dark Knight Rises
for its references to the French Revolution, claiming that the evil Bane’s speeches
are worthy of Robespierre. However, in my understanding, just because a film
makes reference to the French Revolution, and the villain makes speeches that
match the verve of the revolutionary lawyers, doesn’t make it “intelligent” and
neither is Bane given any substance whatsoever through a parallel to
Robespierre. Similarly, the rise of the mob seeking justice, the construction
of a kangaroo court, the soaring skyscrapers and bottomless misery deep
underground might resonate alternately with Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Metropolis (1927), but it doesn’t mean that the film has
any coherent vision of the political ramifications of a social uprising. Nor
does it even take a position on the disenfranchised workers in their struggle
against evil. And neither do the utterances about justice for all by the right
wing mob in The Dark Knight Rises make
any political or social sense. Afterall, this mob has only one goal: they just want to destroy
everyone, including themselves. Critics all complain about the difficulty of
understanding Bane’s dialogue because of the mask he wears, but they can rest
assured, they didn’t miss anything. I read the French subtitles when Bane
talked, and really, he didn’t say anything worth noting. He may have begun his
rampage through Gotham City by wreaking havoc on the stock market, but even
Lang’s chameleonic Dr Mabuse (to
which Bane is surely a reference) seemed more articulate – and Mabuse was in a
silent movie.
I could go on with other examples, but I will only indulge in one more. Philip French of The Observer thinks that
the ending is given complexity because it is “ambiguous”. However, I wondered if we had watched the same film. After Batman has saved Gotham City from complete obliteration, Bruce Wayne is spotted with Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) by Alfred (Michael Cain) in a café in Florence, incognito, in broad daylight. To my mind, there's no ambiguity at all, as Nolan sets the path for the next installment. Oh look, they survived afterall, what a surprise!
I have students – many of them – who think
that Christopher Nolan is the best director since Alfred Hitchcock. Correction,
they believe that Nolan is actually a better filmmaker than Hitchcock. There’s
something about the mental gymnastics, the confusing narratives, the fragmented
stories, the layer upon layer of impossible visual worlds, all of which they
believe gives his films an intellectual command. In my mind, these “qualities” communicate
a self-indulgence in special effects and an inability to put a narrative
together. And The Dark Knight Rises was no different. At the end of the film,
I didn’t really know what it was saying. The
Dark Knight Rises is a long way from the DC Comics' character of Batman who
fights crime to keep people safe. When Batman gets the better of terrorists,
the Atomic Bomb, Armageddon, the financial crisis, and intergalactic warriors,
all through brute force, a housekeeper and a “financial” advisor, Nolan moves
so deep into the realm of the ridiculous that it’s hard to take the film
seriously. Let alone compare it to The Birds for example.
In a film that makes no argument, a film
that is apparently little more than a way to make money at the box office, what
worries me is that the world gets caught up in the spell of a pretension
that is all but a thin mask for vacuity. Yes, the deaths in Colarado are tragic and
that event was terrifying, but the power of The
Dark Knight Rises lies not in its ability to incite a lone gunman seeking
vengeance for his troubled mind. The very real destruction of a film such as The Dark Knight Rises is that of the minds of
all those who actually believe the film has anything to say.
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