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Saturday, July 4, 2009. New Comics were 3 days ago

 

Windows on the World

By Kent M. Beeson

Saturday July 26, 2008 11:00:00 am

Back in 2005, when I walked into Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, all I wanted was a good scare and for Zombie to make good on the first five minutes of the otherwise-terrible House of 1000 Corpses. The last thing I expected from this low-down, crude and bloody Manson-esque road movie was an articulation of my post-9/11 malaise. But there it was in front of me -- a war between a group of ruthless killers and the lawman who "crosses the line", legally and morally, to bring them to justice. There are no winners in this battle, just bodies and roadkill. That would've been enough, but Zombie takes it even further. He gives us the torture the Rejects "deserve" for their crimes, even has the pictures of their victims stapled to their bodies, and then asks us to ponder how we respond to senseless evil -- if taking an eye for an eye is any kind of solution, or if it even makes us feel better.

Now, I shouldn't have been too surprised to find something of depth in a disreputable genre piece like Rejects -- for years, horror, science fiction, crime and other genre films have been giving us windows to see the world, if we only take the time to look through them. Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, released that same year, was another genre film that sidled up to certain post-9/11 contexts -- a dangerous group of fanatics, led by one Ra's al Ghul (dig that Arabic name!) attempts to destroy a city for its perceived sins. But while Batman Begins was far from an artistic failure -- for one thing, it presented the revolutionary idea of Batman/Bruce Wayne as the protagonist of his own story -- there was something lacking about it, especially compared to Nolan's previous work. The allusions to Al-Qaeda were interesting but a bit shallow, and for a director whose films live and die by their ideas, there's no real frisson between Batman and Ra's conflicting credos -- not when they want the same thing, really, just in different ways. This lack of spark turned Ra's into just another villain, Batman just another hero, and the film into just another superhero story.

So I hope I'm forgiven for walking into Nolan's followup The Dark Knight expecting of more of the same. Of course, some things are the same: Returning for another go are not only Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman, but also Nolan's micro-managed editing style and pigheaded indifference to action movie aesthetics. (No one's ever going to confuse Nolan with James Cameron, that's for sure.) That indifference is still on display, but I finally get what he's doing with the editing. Pretty simple, really: If a movie is a story told in pictures, Nolan wants to cram as many clear images as he can in the time allotted. (I say "clear" to differentiate him from the likes of Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass, who put up shakily-filmed blotches on the screen and call it a day.) He rarely lingers on any one moment; once he feels the image has registered on your eyeball, it's on to the next one. It's a ballsy choice, because it puts a great deal of trust in the audience to be able to process the visuals and not get lost. But when it works -- and it does here -- it gives the film, much like his previous one, The Prestige, a density that goes beyond the plot-heavy story, a sensation not unlike finishing an absorbing book.

But really, nothing is the same -- this isn't just another superhero story. The Dark Knight shares more with The Devil's Rejects than just a terrifying killer in clown makeup. It's also about how we respond to evil, and Nolan makes the bold choice to really mean the "we". It's not about how Batman or Harvey Dent or Jim Gordon respond (yet it's that too) -- it's how Gotham as a whole responds. Using real Chicago locations instead of sets, Gotham looks more like the New York of The French Connection than Tim Burton's Gothic Disneyland. Rarely does a shot go by that doesn't attempt to establish Gotham's concrete reality and the characters in relation to it, whether it's two criminals swinging along a zip line hundreds of feet over the city, a funeral procession between the sidewalks, or Batman perched on a rooftop overlooking the skyscrapers of Gotham. Windows are a big motif; offices and penthouse suites are always just a pane of glass away from the real city outside, while other windows are blown apart (sometimes by criminals, sometimes by Batman) or used as deadly distractions. I can't think of another superhero movie, save perhaps the recent Hancock, that situates its hero in something that so strongly resembles the real world, and the possibility of failure looms every time Bale shows up in his Batsuit with his darkened lips and gruff Eastwood voice. But the choice is too entwined with Nolan's true subject. The city is more than just a backdrop for the characters -- for some, it's a home; for others, it's money to be made or lost; for another, it's a symbol for the possibility of change. But regardless, a city only works when there's trust ("Can I trust you?" is a phrase heard more than once) and trust can be incredibly fragile -- and especially vulnerable to sociopaths.

Previous Jokers, in the comics and the movies, have been portrayed as insane men who commit crimes because of their insanity, and do so with a glint in their eye. The scary truth is that this Joker is not insane -- one of the best moments is his quiet and firm insistence to Gotham's mobsters that he isn't crazy -- and there's nothing seductive about his evil. He's a moral disease, intent on infecting everyone in the city. It's no coincidence that he tends to mark his victims with the same whiteface and red smile. Nor that, at the height of his power, he looks out on Gotham from a windowless construction site -- there is nothing to separate the internal decay from the external.

I know that calling this Joker sane -- the one that blows up hospitals and makes pencils disappear in the worst way possible -- may seem weird. But it's true, if only technically: this Joker isn't actually human, so the word "insane" doesn't really apply. He's a concept, a symbol -- the perfect embodiment of chaos, who only wants to eat away at the physical and social structures of the city like a termite at a tree buffet. He can't be traced by fingerprints or DNA. There's no narrative to his humanity -- he treats his own backstory like, well, a joke. He walks like a marionette made of flesh, something hollow and malevolent. He has an almost supernatural ability to plant bombs anywhere, even inside a human being. As real as the city is, the Joker is the complete antithesis -- he may as well be a spirit or a ghost.

Yet, that's exactly what makes Heath Ledger's performance so bracing -- he takes this anti-character and makes him recognizably human. It would've been easy to go for a big, scenery-eating performance -- a Jack Nicholson, if you will -- but Ledger goes the opposite route, underplaying him, looking for small character details. (You know this isn't your father's Joker when he enters a roomful of mobsters with a malignant chuckle, then with only a slight change of tone, mocks his own malignant chuckle.) It helps that Ledger and the script (by Nolan and his brother, Jonathan) emphasizes the physical. No longer is his bone-white skin and blood-curdling smile the result of some bizarre chemical accident -- the smile is a scar, the skin is makeup, and it smears. He gets in people's faces. He gets into the thick of things -- a bank robbery, a freeway attack on the police. He gets manhandled, whether by Batman or the sudden recoil of a rocket launcher. The interrogation between Batman and the Joker is as intense as anything I've seen in the comics -- the perfect combination of physical force, philosophy and mind games. He's dangerous just sitting there, doing nothing. His very presence is cause for alarm, like the Ebola virus.






But here's the thing, though: As dangerous as he is, the Joker can't do anything without the willing participation of others. Everything he does, every horrible thing, is built upon the acquiescence of corrupt cops and cowardly criminals -- men and women who place money, survival, safety, anything, above the courage to simply say no to evil. This isn't to denigrate these characters -- the Joker puts them in impossible situations -- but it does make them complicit. The Joker is no Republic serial villain, ready to blow up the world with missiles launched from the safety of an island hideout. He is a terrorist in the very primal sense of the word -- he doesn't act from any political or ideological position, he just wants to spread fear, mistrust, anarchy. But he can only do as much as you let him.

At the end of the movie, the Joker has rigged two ferries with explosives -- one ferry is filled with regular Gothamites, the other with prisoners, the hardened criminals of Gotham. Each ferry comes with a detonator -- if the passengers on one ferry press their detonator, they will live, but they'll destroy the other ferry. If neither of them use their detonators, the Joker will blow them both up. Batman can stop the Joker from killing everybody, but he's absolutely helpless when it comes to the passengers' dilemma. It's the most critical moment in the film -- if the usual superhero story is "only one man can save us", The Dark Knight's story is "there's only so much one man can do." Batman is heroic throughout the movie, but the film underlines the many times he can't be -- he can't save the passengers from themselves, he can't eliminate the corruption in Jim Gordon's department, and most tragically, he can't be in two places at once. Perversely, these failures make his successes feel all the more important, but nonetheless, Gotham's salvation isn't in his hands.

Seven years ago, when the planes hit and the towers fell, America was confronted with evil, the likes of which few of us had ever witnessed before. But instead of simply enduring, we chose to inflict even more evil back onto the world. The people on the ferry are given the same choice. It's up to each of them -- the businessman, the mom, the tattooed convict, the warden, the ferry captain -- to take responsibility for facing the evil that confronts them, and whether or not they'll be complicit. No one's going to swoop in and make the choice go away. The message is clear: You have to believe in more than the Harvey Dents of the world. You have to believe in yourself.

Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.

The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008

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