The Dark Knight Rises and Mechanical Filmmaking

I am deeply ambivalent about The Dark Knight Rises, and that's more frustrating than it should be. This is from a guy who thought Batman Begins was refreshing, and The Dark Knight was the closest thing we've had to a masterpiece of comic book movies. Also, I like Nolan enough to have thought about which is his best film, and I've decided that it's Inception... a puzzle box wrapped around a vivid emotional core that debunks every talking point about how Nolan is a "mechanical filmmaker" who doesn't understand human feeling.

While I don't think Nolan is a mechanical filmmaker, I think that The Dark Knight Rises is an example of mechanical filmmaking. Or, to put it more precisely, it's film engineering, rather than organic filmmaking, and the result is a collection of calibrated gears and interlocking parts that add up to empty clockwork.

I think it worked out this way because Nolan was trying to recapture the power of The Dark Knight, but by identifying that film's many merits, which originally evolved organically, and trying to reproduce them intentionally, he lost sight of his third movie as a whole. It's an easy mistake to make, especially for a director who's controlled and calculated and cerebral. Unfortunately, in this case, he basically relied upon his targeting mechanism and it caused him to miss the target. That's a Luke Skywalker reference, in case you didn't catch it.

There were a lot of things that were great about The Dark Knight... like any serendipitous event, they sprung up spontaneously and he captured them all in the emulsion. The principal merits:

1 - An extreme, visceral, compelling villain with endless depths to plumb, and an actor at the top of his game, digging deep into the role.

2 - A compelling side-character who toed the line between hero and villain

3 - A broad, open-ended theme of human nature and the power of the symbolic hero as a way of purifying the corrupt human soul

4 - Political references that were somewhat timely, but not forced (cell phone surveillance, for instance)

5 - A couple major twists that radically altered the trajectory of the plot, involving betrayals and sudden shifts in loyalty

6 - The sense that Gotham City, as a macrocosm for its citizens, is sort of a character in itself, a populist gothic metropolis with a sinister underside

Those six things fell together so perfectly in The Dark Knight. It was a film that revolved around the slow rise and payoffs of two major action sequences, each with two or three parts: the lengthy introduction to the Joker and Gotham's underworld, proceeding through a series of plays and counter-plays that plateau with Gordon's "death"... the first major ascent and climax as the Joker chases Harvey Dent through Gotham, gets caught, and escapes while Rachel Dawes is killed... another tense, extended low-key sequence, as Harvey is corrupted and The Joker lays plans for a final showdown... and the climactic battle sequence, the fight for Gotham's soul in the rooftops, on the river, and at Gordon's home. Nolan orchestrated the whole thing like a grand symphony, tuning and conducting the rises and falls until every demand of the viewer was sated.

Those six things are all there in The Dark Knight Rises. The problem is, they're rushed together, glued into a kludge of ideas and sucker-punches that doesn't seem to have any rhythm at all. Tom Hardy almost makes Bane genuinely inspiring (I didn't really mind the voice much), but he's undercut by the need for a cheap twist at the end of the film. Anne Hathaway does justice to her role as Catwoman, but she is sabotaged by the populist theme and the conventional crisis-of-conscience device, which undermine her integrity. Nolan gets caught between the closely-linked wheels of the populist Gotham and the timely Occupy references, and he doesn't end up fleshing out either idea sufficiently. The Batman-as-symbol theme is draped over this whole structure, but it never reaches a moment of real clarity, as Nolan is caught up in the need to make Batman a traditional action hero and Bruce Wayne a winking playboy survivor.

This is the basic failure that motivates so many of the further complaints about TDKR. The plot is full of holes and the motivations are often indecipherable, because each character was trying to fit into a grand mosaic of elements that just weren't left any time to fall into place. Because Nolan was trying to get so much stuff in, the film felt rushed, even though it was a full one hundred sixty minutes. It could be reverse-engineered and put back together much more organically, and you could probably still keep most of the writing and plot developments... you would just have to extract a few threads to give the rest more space to breathe. You'd need to let go of some of the abstract ideas, some of the Occupy references and current-event set-pieces, and you'd need to give more love and attention to Bane, Selina Kyle, and Catwoman... those characters need space to stand on their own, to make decisions that seem meaningful within their particular moral arc.

Even without the substance, you can see the plot engineering going on. The fights between Batman and Bane occur at the correct times... right in the middle, and at the moment of maximum crisis... but they have no soul, looking less like tactical encounters and more like games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. Bane's build-up is hasty and obscure, but we're good at responding to Nolan's rudimentary cues, so we know he's supposed to be terrifying and malevolent... but even as we buy into his evilness, we're cheated out of a gratifying defeat, because the guy is just blasted off-screen by a battery of guns. And it's a lovely setup that Bane treats Gotham as a doomed revolution, so yes, we want to experience Gotham as a chaotic locus of resistance poisoned by a petty tyrant. But that experience never gets fleshed out, because we don't spend any time among the citizens of Gotham. It doesn't look like a police state, nor like London during the 2011 riots. It just looks like a bunch of cleared streets, a big controlled set for furtive encounters between our protagonists.

The moments with Bane, Selina Kyle, and Scarecrow make it worth another viewing some day, and I want to congratulate all the actors for bringing these clumsily-scripted characters to life. But I'm eager for Nolan to make another film for his own edification, because this one is his biggest stumble, in my opinion. Nolan knows the art of cinema, but I think, by acting as an engineer in this last entry, Nolan neglected his role as an artist.

2010: The year of the signature movie?

Has anyone gotten the sense, this year, that the "directors of the hour" have all suddenly made their signature movie? By "directors of the hour," I'm not talking about the Hollywood staples (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, etc), but rather of those provocateurs who are emerging into the mainstream. In particular, I've noticed this phenomenon with Christopher Nolan (who's just become the trump card of studios trying to ride the nerd zeitgeist)... Darren Aaronofsky (who's recently graduated from cinema cult-leader to critical boy wonder)... and Gasper Noe (who seems to be following Aaronofsky into the role of "that guy that directs those batshit crazy movies").

For Christopher Nolan, it was Inception. This was obviously the movie the guy's been fantasizing about since he was a teenager, back when he started writing the script. It marries the techno-futurist with the retro-stylist, bring noir into the realm of the virtual and the psychological, and it provides a great forum for structural experimentation and visual flair. As a bonus, Nolan got the creme de la creme of swaggering neo-noir actors, including Leo, JGL, and Michael Caine.

Memento will generally be seen as Nolan's Reservoir Dogs, I think. He came out of nowhere with that little shocker, riding the formal gimmick and stylish presentation out of the obscurity of film school... and The Dark Knight may always be seen as his Pulp Fiction, cementing his fame and proving his genius. But as much as it was a great piece of cinema, Dark Knight was tied down by its reliance on the Batman franchise, and by the legions of comic book fans who don't actually particularly care about cinema per se. Inception is the piece that Nolan will be able to claim as his own, stylistically, conceptually, and in every way necessary for it to become his signature piece.

As I mentioned above, Aaronofsky has gone through a transition recently. He was born as one of those bad-boy director provocateurs, giving us the hyper-intense and disturbed Pi, and then the devastating American neo-realist tragedy Requiem for a Dream. I think that phase of his life ended with The Fountain, which was his little vanity project, offensive to public sensibilities not because it was ugly, but because it was so soaring and uninhibited. But recently, with The Wrestler, he's made a decisive move into character-study territory, and he's become a guy for the middlebrow critics to watch.

Enter Black Swan. Could the man have a more perfect film to give to the world, at this moment of transformation? Black Swan retrieves Aaronofsky the stylist, the impressionist, the conductor of madness and dissociation, which are the themes that characterized his earlier work. It also marries the stylistic precision of The Fountain (the gothic, the erotic, the intimate) with the real-world anxieties and uncertainties that made The Wrestler work so well. And it's admirably reserved, refusing to resort to cheap shocks for his visual and emotional climaxes.

So I think Black Swan will be a signature film, as well: Aaronofsky's first award-winning, show-stopping feature, and also an index of his established themes: trauma, madness, and the tortured mind of the alienated genius.

And finally, we have Gasper Noe, who still sort of fulfills the role that Aaronofsky recently left behind: provocateur, offender of sensibilities, whose challenging and aversive style reads as "courage" to the independent circuit. Irreversible is commonly hailed among cinephiles (horror and extreme cinema enthusiasts, especially) as a breakthrough for extreme cinema. I think it really got noticed because the 9-minute rape scene got so much attention -- but, you know, once he was visible, Noe managed to convince people that he's a proficient auteur, and that's no small task in our skeptical community.

I think it was clear that after Irreversible, Noe had to push his sensationalism to the max before he could break in a different direction. I think, with Enter the Void, he did that. It's not only difficult and arresting in its visual innovations (the strict first-person camera, the hallucinated cityscapes), but it's also provocative in its specific images. If you want to read about them, it's all over the Internet. From what I understand, it's pretty intense.

Sibling loyalty, incest, death, and the cycle of destruction and rebirth are pretty ideal themes for an elusive assault on the viewers' senses. This is the piece that Noe's previous work was leading up to: something that people just had to see, something to polarize the community, something to provide the basis for grand controversy and extravagant claims. Again, it's the signature piece. This is the final draft of Noe's stamp as an auteur, and everything he does from here on out will be a reference to Enter the Void, or a notable departure from it. Or both.

Am I sure? No. It's possible that Aaronofsky will be remembered by his urban grime and realism, rather than his epic stylization. It's possible that Nolan will make an even more Nolan-esque movie in a couple years, or that Gasper Noe will manage to totally leave behind this shock-and-awe period in his cinematic oeuvre. But I'm guessing that one or two of these three films will end up being the signature film of its particular director, even though these directors have a lot of growth and accomplishment ahead of them.

Dreamlike Films: Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), with additional notes on Inception

Yesterday was Stanley Kubrick's birthday. In his honor, I'm gonna take a moment away from Inception and talk about his own dream odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut, although there will be a touch of convergence between the two discussions.

What an interesting film, right? So many of Kubrick’s great films (The Shining, 2001, Full Metal Jacket) take place in universes that are wholly divorced from our own – hermetically sealed mansions and space craft, barracks and war zones – even Clockwork Orange’s future-verse seemed to have its own alien logic – that it’s striking to see a film that takes place right here on Earth, in the bowels of New York City. But STILL, it doesn’t feel like our New York City, our Present Day, our Planet Earth, because it’s not a realist film. It’s still a hermetically-sealed universe, but in a deft deconstruction of his own style, Kubrick gives us a real-world that’s sealed up inside a character’s head, shaped and influenced by that character’s jealousies and obsessions.

In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill escapes into a hypnotic New York City that’s hyper-sexualized, with every remark and casual encounter having an erotic component (except, arguably, passing the frat boys, whose comment is less erotic than emasculating). Read this however you want, but I have no doubt that Bill is experiencing his world this way because of his recent conversation with Alice, which has forced him to confront their respective romantic and sexual roles in their relationship. In the course of the film’s central narrative – which I would suggest is brought on by marijuana and the experience in the presence of death, signaling implosion and descent – there’s something simply off-kilter about the way things happen. This is an alternate-universe New York City, and I believe that it’s Bill’s dream-city.

Some of the best commentary on the film -- like this Film Quarterly article by Tim Kreider -- argue that the psychoanalytical reading of Eyes Wide Shut is a red herring, and that it should really be looked at sociologically, in terms of class, wealth, and human commodification. I'd agree that this is an important pillar of the film's framework, but I don't think it's a dead-end to consider the film on an atmospheric and aesthetic level. The film may include real-world subtexts, but they're all placed within a very cerebral world. I can't read Eyes Wide Shut in a purely realist-symbolic-allegorical way, because there's so much stylization, and because the experience is so distinctly disconnected and hypnotic. So even if I don't go for a strict ego-superego-id reading of the film, I do believe it speaks with an oneiric voice, and that the dynamic of sex and desire is one of its definitive registers.

[EDIT -- on re-reading, I realized I had pretty seriously misrepresented the FIlm Quarterly article. I insinuated that Tim had rejected all psychological and subjective readings entirely, which he absolutely did not do... if anything, he did the opposite. So I edited that part. Sorry about the original misrepresentation.]

There are a couple things that lead me to believe that even if Bill isn’t literally dreaming, he’s at least entered a sort of fugue. It fits with a couple of my first-post principles: the film certainly makes use of an intensely heightened reality, a veritable painting of crimsons and golds, reds and blues injected at key moments, and expressive spaces that sharply influence the mood of the moment. There is also a dramatic emotional disconnect between Bill, the audience's avatar, and the events that he's falling into. At his wife's dramatic confession, he seems to go numb, and at each key emotional moment -- his departure from the prostitute's apartment, his revelatory conversation with Nick Nightingale, his jarring tour through the orgiastic celebration -- his reaction seems blunt and detached, like a man watching the world through a pane of glass. This is because the film is less about Bill himself, and more about the alternate reality he's entered, which now bears his imprint.

Bill’s downtown NYC seems alien, but navigable. At the very least, he manages to find Nick Nightingale, and to acquire a mask and a robe. However, after passing a series of gateways (most notably giving the password to the doorman), he finds himself in a deeper level of his subconscious: a clandestine party where primal urges are given free reign. Here the bystanders are truly faceless, and they’re openly hostile to outsiders. It turns out that Bill’s biggest problem is that he stands out, and almost as soon as he enters the revelers’ sanctum, he starts feeling like he’s being monitored, and forces are rallying against him. Unfortunately, no amount of warning from a sympathetic spirit can dissuade him from exploring this new space that’s opened up.

The revelers in Eyes Wide Shut treat Bill as a pathogen, an outside agent that has to be destroyed, or at least rejected. This is closely paralleled by the behavior of the projections in Inception, and if you read the structure of the latter film retroactively onto the former, you can easily interpret the party as a stage for Bill’s subconscious, an inner layer where his conscious mind isn’t welcome. The Inception protagonists infiltrate this part of the mind in order to achieve a mercenary objective; Bill gets down inside there not knowing what he’ll find, and unprepared for the consequences of digging too deep (eek! Was that a Lord of the Rings reference?).

And so Kubrick’s story shifts fluidly from a fable of descent to a chronicle of unforeseen reversals, apparently the ramifications of his dangerous curiosity. When he emerges from the Dionysian underworld, Bill discovers that everything in his sexually-charged universe is broken, spent, disturbed, and overturned: his friends and admirers have moved away, or they’ve been “disappeared,” or (in the most unsettling developments) they’ve submitted to macabre breakdowns and perversions (I’m referring specifically to the shop owner who’s suddenly become his daughter’s pimp, and to the prostitute who’s been diagnosed with HIV). Bill’s friend Victor is finally there to wrap up Bill’s loose ends – he provides the necessary guilt (“What were you thinking?”) and the rationalization required to move on, and though he doesn’t actually answer our questions, he at least paves the way for Bill to return to the appropriate private spaces of his own life. There, he can go through a cathartic release, and complete the movement of “waking up” in his own bedroom, with his own wife.

My Inception parallels are still thin, but there are probably a lot more to work through. After all, both films rely on opulence and commodification as a subtext, whether it's prostitution and objectification of the body in Eyes Wide Shut, or mercenary ethics and territorialization of the mind in Inception. Both create multi-tiered spaces that provide an allegory for different cognitive functions, with an "inner sanctum" as the final, dangerous, and unstable destination for the unscrupulous explorations of the main character(s). And both of these main characters embark on these explorations in order to come to terms with their marriage issues.

I'm always fascinated by these kinds of shared structures in unrelated films. Both Inception and Eyes Wide Shut play with the concept of oneiric interiority and infiltration of the subconscious -- the padlocked bank vaults and sacred spaces of the protected mind.

Inception: the elusive architecture of the mind

Okay, I think Inception warrants a series of blog posts. I'm doing my best to resist blind fandom, but I thought it was a brilliant movie, rival to The Prestige, Nolan's other personal masterpiece. Still, I have to make a number of remarks that don't have much to do with each other, and unless I split this endeavor into a few different critical exercises, my thoughts will end up sounding as fragmented as these films I've been reviewing lately.

On that point -- I've been watching films that replicate the dreamlike experience, and writing about them, over the past week or two. Originally, that was because I wanted to see some films by Terrence Malick, and "dreamlike" seemed like a good access-point for his work. However, after seeing Badlands, Days of Heaven, Inland Empire (Lynch), and Heart of Glass (Herzog), it seemed appropriate that the series would culminate in a discussion of Inception, which leans heavily on dreaming as a plot device. It didn't hurt that I've been excited about Inception since the first trailer hit.

Now, having seen Inception, I've realized (drumroll) it is NOT a dream-film in the way those other films are. Lots of reviewers mention this in the course of their reviews. It's true... directors like Lynch and Malick recreate the hazy, loopy experience of oneiric unreality, and Nolan simply doesn't do it, probably because he's not really interested in it. He's less a poet than a crypto-mathematician engineer of narrative architecture, a speculative baroque fabulist whose aesthetic is becoming more focused with every film. There's nothing deeply intuitive or organic about Nolan's worlds. It's all lucid, logical, and aestheticized, without the murky inscrutability of images from the subconscious. Indeed, in Nolan's world, the subconscious is embodied as generic bystanders or militarized Agents (*coughmatrixcough*), prone to hostility if anything breaks the glassy surface of the world they've been placed in.

How different from Lynch, whose worlds are the product of many significances but no clear connections or translations! Whose language is an organic mass developing on a scene-by-scene basis, rather than a streamlined structure of jargon giving names to the rules of a complicated, unwinnable game! But despite their vast difference in tone, Nolan and Lynch are kindred spirits in some ways -- both love creating puzzles for us to solve, fractal structures of mutually-referential ideas. Both love narrative mobius strips and recursive motifs. Both have an unmistakable style that acts like a signature on their most important films. And some day Nolan, like Lynch, will have an adjective of his own (Nolanesque -- I'll explore this idea more in my next post).

If you'd like an academic-sounding way to describe Nolan in general, and especially Inception, I'd say "Baroque" is your best bet. According to Webmuseum, baroque art and culture is defined by its self-confident aesthetic, its dynamic movement and emotional intensity. It's an inarguably ornate, dramatic, uninhibited style that (like all broad artistic styles) was expressed in painting, music, literature, sculpture, and especially architecture. It's the forerunner to the formalism of neoclassical and modernist styles, more sweeping, less focused, but absolutely distinctive.

Baroque was an unapologetic "stylistic" style, focused on appearance and decoration, on outward displays of opulence and complexity, and on overwhelming sensory effects. Read over the features listed on Wikipedia: it was all about spectacle and display and illusion. Inception follows the same sort of philosophy, presenting dream-space as a series of nested interiors for the display of different sensory experiences: a gritty urban landscape, opening up into a 5-star hotel, whose rooms contain a snow-covered mountain fortress, which contains a vast blank canvas, reconstructed by the protagonist's imagination.

Normally, the building/mind metaphor is articulated in terms of levels, from elevated to subterranean. Zizek's analysis of Psycho using Norman Bates's house as a metaphor for his mind is the perfect example of this kind of reading: the top floor represents the superego, the ground floor the ego, and the basement the id. Inception has a much more explicit treatment of the "mind as building" metaphor, but it doesn't just structure this as a question of elevation. It also structures it as a question of container/contained, of security and vulnerability, and of infiltration. In Inception, the mind is a stage for theater (the theater of con-games), an archive, and a bank vault, something to be deciphered, navigated, and penetrated.

Strange, isn't it, that there's no comfort zone, anywhere in Inception's myriad dreamscapes? If the mind is a building, a space to be penetrated, shouldn't it feel like a place where the dreamer can be at home, at least until the thieves arrive? In the spaces Ariadne designs, there is never a sense of true safety: from the urban landscape to the busy hotel to the mountain fortress, and even in Limbo, which was Cobb's own creation, there is never a place where we, the audience, identifying with one of the dreamers, feels at home. Vigilance is a constant requirement in the dream-worlds of Inception, even though they're in our own heads.

I was tempted, at first, to say this is a side-effect of Nolan's large-scale, high-stress baroque narrative constructions, his drama and stylistic flair getting the best of him. But then I think about it, and realize something that Nolan already seems to know, and that David Lynch certainly realized long ago: there is no safe space in dreams, either. According to my sources (okay, I only really have one source), anxiety is the most common emotion experienced in dreams. And maybe Cobb and his team could steal something from a euphoric dream, but it doesn't seem too likely, when their strategy is clearly to make the mark feel paranoid, off-balance, and intensely aware of the secret that's supposed to be stolen.

By and large, the insides of our heads are actually twisted, hostile, and unknowable places, steeped in uncertainty, the expressions of voices issuing from so deep in our minds that they may feel entirely alien. And these are some of the central motifs of Inception: when so many of our thoughts come forth from beyond our reach, can we really trust them to be our own? How much of ourselves can we access, and how hard should we try to do so?

Intimate May: Following (1998)

Before The Dark Knight and The Prestige -- even before Memento -- Christopher Nolan had a first feature, his proving ground for his directorial skill. In this debut, the tight, twisted neo-noir Following, Nolan exhibited the first traces of his special touch. The plot is convoluted, fraught with betrayal, and revealed in a succession of game-changing expositions. It's a seedy, non-linear drama with just enough of a psychological edge to demand interest in its characters. In Following, you can see the seed of Nolan's career, which is escalating to this day.

The initial premise of Following, its titular obsession, is that the main character (the Young Man) follows people around the city in order to research characters for his writing. On the streets of London, he has turned people-watching into voyeurism. When he meets Cobb, a young fellow Londoner, he discovers a kindred spirit, a man who burgles houses for the sake of getting inside his victims' lives and changing them. If the narrator is a pathological people-watcher, Cobb is a pathological rifler through peoples' bookshelves and DVD collections. His profession -- stealing and selling CD's -- is secondary to his mission, just as the main character's writing is secondary to his own obsession with people.

This plot thickens quickly with jarring changes in loyalty and intriguing treatments of perspective. Following is ostensibly told from the point of view of the main character, the nameless young man who narrates the story to a police officer. However, as the film goes on, we learn things in a different order, seeing certain scenes that are beyond the narrator's range of awareness, and grasping certain twists before the main character; this is especially true of the final betrayal, which we discover before the narrator could possibly know it.

Following is a film about digging into peoples' lives and getting to know them; interestingly, by the end, we know the least about Cobb, one of the three main characters. We get at least a reasonable picture of the main character, who gives us some fragments of his background, and we get glimpses into the life of his love interest. However, Cobb's story is always undermined by his enigmatic self-presentation. Even to the end of the movie, we aren't sure if he's a professional cat-burglar, a hit-man, a broker for illegal goods, or something else entirely. We just know he's the only guy who was able to keep track of the situation, when the pathways of loyalty and communication were shifting.

This lack of insight actually becomes a core concept in Following, which, for a movie about uncomfortable proximity and fixation, actually feels rather remote. The film starts with a montage of the Young Man following random pedestrians, and he explains why he does it, but on-screen, it's surprisingly mundane; if there's something about these people that continues to fascinate the Young Man, we the audience don't get access to it.

This remoteness could be construed as a weakness of the film, but it can also be argued as an ambiguous strength: in the end, Cobb shows the main character the danger of reaching too deeply into dark places, of getting too comfortable with your obsessions and fixations. For a character like the Young Man, who's not prepared to deal with true manipulation and betrayal, intimacy leads to vulnerability, and rather than discovering the truth about a few interesting people, he gets himself entangled in a web of lies that he ultimately can't escape; he digs himself his own rabbit hole, and he's left there.

Thus, one of the movements of the film becomes the move from scrupulous voyeurism to self-involved intimacy, and the danger of the predatory unknown when you try too hard to bring it to light. In fact, the last illuminating moment of the film is one of the most personal: the Young Man's confession to a police officer, his decision to finally come clean and straighten out the situation he's in. Unfortunately, this final revelation is also the final step into a trap that's been comprehensively set and baited.

INTIMATE MOMENT: Someone else's stuff