Why do we fall? So we can learn to Rise.

Spoilers for The Dark Knight Trilogy ahead.

 

Christopher Nolan's Batman films are kids movies for adults.  They are comic book movies after all, and we tend to think of comic books as an art form primarily directed at children.  And yet, as every comic book fan knows, comic books are not always intended for children.  There are certain forms of storytelling that we tend to think belong entirely to certain age groups.  We enjoy comic books and fantasies when we're young, but when we get older, we'll move on to more serious things.  We won't need comic books anymore.  Based on his Batman films, Christopher Nolan seems to think differently.

 

Even though these movies are not really for kids, children are everywhere in Nolan's Batman trilogy: the kid who watches Batman climb a building from his balcony in Batman Begins and the two kids playing in a car as Batman drives by in The Dark Knight are two examples, but they are even more abundant in The Dark Knight Rises with its orphanage full of children.  The series is all about children and their relationships with parents or parental figures: mentors, policemen, superheroes.  That is to say, it's about comic books.  It makes perfect sense that when John Blake was a kid, he was able to figure out something that never crossed the mind of any adult: that Bruce Wayne is Batman.  And of course, the kids in the orphanage still believe in Batman, despite what everyone says about him.  Adults often marvel about how dark Nolan's Batman movies are.  Comic book movies shouldn't be this dark.  They should be for kids.  But no kid ever gets confused between Batman and Superman.  They all know that Batman is the darkest and most mysterious of all superheroes.  When I was a kid, I remember that every time we would pretend to be Batman, we would say something along the lines of: "I'm your worst nightmare" (I think this was a reference to the animated series).  This was never something that made me scared of Batman.  I always knew that Batman was a good guy.  But somehow, this made Batman a much more exciting superhero than all the others.  Batman was scary, but he didn't scare me.  He scared the bad guys.  Think of how comforting that can be for a child.  When kids are scared of something, they don't want a protector who's going to be nice to the bad guys.  They want a protector who's going to make the bad guys scared.

 

Thomas Wayne: "All creatures feel fear."

Bruce Wayne: "Even the scary ones?"

Thomas Wayne: "Especially the scary ones."

 

The early scenes in Batman Begins set the foundations for the Batman legend: Bruce Wayne falling down a well as a child and encountering a frightening batcave, followed soon by the murder of his parents in an alley.  For Nolan, the focus in these scenes is on four father figures in Bruce's young life.  The first is his actual father who says with his dying breath, "Bruce, it's ok.  Don't be afraid."  The second father figure is Jim Gordon who, in a police station after the murder, wraps Bruce in his father's coat "to let him know the world hadn't ended."  Significantly, like Bruce's father, Gordon tells Bruce: "It's ok."  The primary purpose of these two father figures is to comfort young Bruce in a moment of extreme fear and despair.  However, the other two father figures are not simply there to provide comfort.  Alfred is a comforting figure after the funeral, but he also tells Bruce something extremely important when Bruce starts saying that his parents' deaths were his own fault: "It was nothing you did.  It was him, and him alone."  It is interesting that Alfred doesn't specify who "him" is because Bruce's mentor and fourth father figure Henri Ducard/Ra's Al Ghul tells him: "Your parents' death was not your fault.  It was your father's."  Bruce's journey from the alley of his parents' murder to becoming Batman is journey between parental figures.  Even his parent's never really leave him.  Bruce constantly worries about what his father might think of him throughout Batman Begins.  The pearls that Selina Kyle steals in The Dark Knight Rises are not just any pearls; they are his mother's pearls.  And the reason why Bruce becomes angry at Ducard's words about his father is because a parent (especially for children, and especially for Bruce Wayne) is more than someone who creates a child.  A parent has to raise that child.  A parent is a hero.

 

Nolan's interpretation of Batman takes place in a world with people in dire need of comforting.  Much has been made over the "realistic" approach that Nolan takes with the material as well as the many references to contemporary issues.  Yet, it is important to note that Nolan's Batman films don't actually take place in the real world.  In his review of The Dark Knight Rises at the AVClub, Scott Tobias describes the series as a "nightmare of the early 21st century."  Nolan's trilogy is the worst kind of nightmare: the kind that seems real.  The films are realistic (whatever that means), but they are not actually real.  They take place in a nightmare world that is frighteningly similar to our own.  While Tim Burton's interpretation does have occasional real world elements involving urban crime, they almost exclusively take place in a fantasy world  (To be clear, these are both legitimate interpretations).  Burton sees Gotham City as an enormous freak show (hence all the circus imagery) with these larger-than-life characters living their own twisted lives separate from reality.

 

In contrast, Nolan's Batman films take place in a nightmare that looks and feels just like the real world.  While Gotham City appears to be a real city, it isn't quite real.  It has a shifting geography, at different times resembling a different American metropolis.  In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, the city was distinctly Chicago, but in The Dark Knight Rises, it begins to resemble New York City.  When people refer to it, they say the name of this city as if it is a bad word.  "I never wanted you to come back to Gotham.  I knew there was nothing here for you but pain and tragedy."  "Innocent is a strong word to throw around Gotham."  Gotham is more than a city.  It is a place in the mind and the soul for these characters.  It is a nightmare city, and it looks just like one of ours. 

 

The events in this nightmare world are exaggerated worst-case-scenario versions of real world fears.  In The Dark Knight, the Joker is a terrorist with an almost superhuman ability to be anywhere in Gotham, who engineers destruction across the city and cannot "be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with."  And the only way to catch him is to violate the individual liberties of Gotham's citizens.  The Dark Knight Rises depicts a class war similar to the French Revolution, and just like in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Nolan doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of either the oblivious aristocracy or the mob that replaces it.  Some have criticized Nolan for "muddled" politics: the film seems to take both sides of the issue.  The Dark Knight seems to do something similar with the issue of warrantless wiretapping: Batman does this in order to find the Joker, but Lucius Fox destroys the eavesdropping machine at the end of the film.  I don't find this criticism particularly compelling.  Part of this could be because I'm not very interested in a movie (or any work of art) with an obvious message (especially a political one).  I get excited when a movie doesn't present easy answers or when the hero does something that the movie itself does not necessarily condone.  I walk out of the theater thinking about what I've just seen, asking myself what was the right thing to do, rather than simply having the movie answer those questions for me.  But what might be the most important aspect of the trilogy's seemingly contradictory politics is that they enhance both the nightmarish and realistic aspects of this world.  One of the most frightening situations to be in is one in which you cannot be sure what the right course of action is.  And even more frightening is realizing that this situation does not only belong in nightmares; it happens all the time in reality.

 

One of the other major aspects of Nolan's Batman nightmare comes from his visual style.  Nolan usually makes films about loners, about people who are cut off from their fellow human beings, and his visual style reflects this.  He often uses the frame to isolate characters.  Rather than having a dialogue scene done in one medium shot showing the characters talking, he often cuts between close ups of the characters.  It's as if the frame is a prison cell keeping these people from really interacting with each other.  Even though they may seem to be in the same room as each other, these characters are alone.  Of course there are exceptions, and it is usually important when they happen.  One of the most significant examples of this is a dialogue scene between Batman, Harvey Dent and Jim Gordon at the Batsignal early in The Dark Knight.  The scene is done almost entirely in one shot as the camera slowly circles around them, as if to stay away and just let them talk with each other, even going behind the Batsignal at one point.  Even though Gordon and Dent argue with each other, the three of them are united in a common purpose, and Nolan places all of them in the frame at once to show this.  Contrast this scene with the final confrontation between these three characters at the end of the film as Harvey/Two-Face threatens to kill Gordon's son.  They are all in separate frames.  Each character is alone, and the unity that made them so strong at the beginning has now disappeared.  But when Batman and Gordon stand over Harvey's dead body contemplating their seeming defeat at the hands of the Joker, the two of them are back in the same frame again.

 

Nolan continues using this technique in The Dark Knight Rises, but there seem to be more shots featuring two or more characters.  Even though things have never been more grim in this series, people seem to be more connected with each other.  One of my favorite moments comes when Batman has decided to use the Bat to fly the nuclear bomb away from Gotham.  Selina Kyle walks with him, asking why he came back to the city, and Nolan cuts between two shots tracking alongside them, each shot favoring one of the characters over the other.  But when they stop and kiss, the camera swings around to look at both of them in profile as they embrace, capturing both of them equaling in the frame.  Yet, the most important use of this technique comes near the very end as Alfred, Gordon, Fox and John Blake stand beside the graves of the Wayne family: Bruce and his parents.  Nolan shows them all in a wide shot with the characters framed against Wayne Manor in the background.  There is a low metal fence surronding the graves, almost like a cage.  The world may be a prison, but at least they are all together in the same cell: the young and the old, the living and the dead.

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of the nightmare world that Christopher Nolan has created is that the fears that fuel it belong to both children and adults.  But many of these fears are directed in such a way to appeal mainly to adults, especially the references to major contemporary fears: terrorism, economic troubles, class conflict, enemies with goals and motivations that we don't understand, who "just want to watch the world burn."  And of course, adults fear being alone in the world just as much as children do.  Perhaps the biggest difference between Nolan's interpretation of Batman and all of the others is that Nolan's films are not really about the masked weirdos who run around doing outlandish things.  Nolan's Batman films are about the normal people who have to live through this nightmare, people that these movies believe are flawed, perhaps selfish and easily led, but are essentially good: the people on the ferries in The Dark Knight and the people emerging cautiously from their homes at the end of The Dark Knight Rises.  "People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy."  People need heroes. 

 

The key scene for Nolan's interpretation of Batman comes at the end of The Dark Knight.  Bruce does not really mention his parents during this film, but the film recalls their memory during the scene when Gordon returns to his family after faking his death.  As he sits beside his son's bed, the music that plays on the soundtrack is the same theme that played during Bruce's memories of his father's stethoscope in Batman Begins.  Parents and children are everywhere in these movies: Bruce and his parents, Gordon and his children, Ra's and Talia Al Ghul (watch the way that Nolan uses editing and camera movement to mirror his behavior in hers and the climax of The Dark Knight Rises becomes even more powerful), the orphans who are searching for a hero and see Batman (not Bruce Wayne, of course) doing the most heroic thing anyone can do.  These children look up to their parents as heroes because they need someone to guide them, someone to tell them that everything's going to be ok, someone to perform the same function that comic book superheroes perform.  After Batman saves his life, Gordon's son asks why Batman is running away.  Gordon responds very simply: "Because we have to chase him."  But as he continues talking, it doesn't really sound like he's talking to a child anymore: "Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.  So we'll hunt him.  Because he can take it.  Because he's not a hero.  He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector.  A dark knight."  Gordon is not just comforting his son here.  He is comforting himself with the thought that there is someone out there willing to sacrifice everything, even willing to sacrifice being a good person in order to protect him and his children and ensure that they can be good people.  He is telling himself that everything is going to be alright, just like he told his son "It's going to be alright" as Two Face held a gun to his head.  This entire series could be summed up in a parent telling a child, "It's ok.  Don't be afraid."  And the important thing is that this parent is saying the same thing to himself.  This is the same thing that comic books do: they give kids a hero, a protector and tell them that everything's going to be alright.  Maybe that's not quite true, but the kid needs to hear it.  With his Batman trilogy, Christopher Nolan is saying that adults need comic books, too.

The Greatest Films of All Time

As Sight and Sound Magazine unveils their list of the Greatest Films of All Time today, I thought it would be a good idea to publish my own list.  It's in alphabetical order, so it's not ranked.

Citizen Kane (Welles)

Yes, you knew it had to be on the list.  And it deserves to be on the list, not just for its technical and narrative innovations, but for the simple fact that it is just a fantastic movie.  I get the sense that many people who haven't seen it, but hear the phrase "greatest film of all time" are under the impression that Citizen Kane is long and boring.  On the contrary, it is less than two hours long and ferociously paced with scenes that jump through enormous spans of time in a matter of seconds ("Merry Christmas, Charles...").  The early scenes are wildly entertaining, but as the film moves on, the weight of years begins to sink in.  Not that it becomes boring, mind you, but we begin to get a sense of the fact that this movie is dealing with the full story of a man's life.  And though it's the story of an important (fictional?) public figure, it's not just the story of newspaper headlines, political campaigns, divorces and scandals.  It's also about the small moments that make up life: a child playing in the snow, a marriage falling apart over breakfast(s), shadow puppets on a wall, a girl with a white parasol.  At the end of the movie, there is a sequence showing a group of reporters picking through the last remanants of a man's life, things that have very little meaning to these people.  But we recognize them from earlier in the movie, and it feels as if they really are memories from a long time ago, instead of two hours.  And then there is that haunting shot when the camera glides through the great hall of Xanadu over statues, trophies, bed posts, and far more things beyond count, finally resting on the one object that everyone in this movie has been looking for, something that a man once lost and never recovered, something that explains everything and nothing about Charles Foster Kane.

A Hard Day's Night (Lester)

It's as if they took pure unadulterated joy and turned it into a movie.  The entire film is bursting with the energy and excitement of seeing and (as the film makes it seem) being The Beatles.  Even the camera gets possessed by this.  As the Fab Four run away from hordes of screaming girls, the handheld camera runs alongside them.  Who would even think of locking the camera down for this movie?  And what a daring movie it is.  Not content to simply coast on being a pop culture entity, the picture is filled with surprising, surrealist sequences that if only made a few years later would be termed Pythonesque: John disappearing in the bathwater; "She looks more like him than I do"; a marketing executive who claims to know what the kids like but doesn't recognize George Harrison.  And then there are the scenes that serve no narrative purpose but are absolutely indispensable: the boys playing in a field to "Can't Buy Me Love" and of course the lengthy (yet far too short) concert scene culminating in "She Loves You."  And while it's always great to see The Beatles performing, what makes this one of the greatest films of all time and not just an extended Ed Sullivan Show performance is intercutting The Beatles with closeups of the audience as they scream and cry because (why else?) IT'S THE BEATLES!

Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)

A vast and empty desert fills the 70mm frame.  The sun beats down mercilessly from the sky as a young man stares out into the emptiness, waiting for something.  Then, the young man starts moving forward on his camel, and just like him, the camera pushes forward into the desert, slowly at first, but soon it begins moving faster.  Suddenly, we realize that the desert isn't empty after all: there is a tiny dot on the horizon, and slowly but surely, this dot turns into a human being.  A bold, humanist statement done entirely with images and music.  This movie isn't about the desert; it's about that tiny dot on the horizon.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson)

The greatest cinematic fantasy, the standard-bearer for the best that CGI-aided cinema has to offer, and a testament to cinema's ability to create wonderful images and tell absolutely thrilling stories.  Using what is perhaps the greatest literary fantasy as its foundation, Peter Jackson brings a complete world to the screen, where every place and creature has a history, sometimes spoken of, but always suggested in the locations and the set design.  Think of the ruined Dwarf kingdom in the Mines of Moria, the enormous statues of the Argonath guarding the passage down the river, the cities of Edoras and Minas Tirith.  The entire trilogy is a work of beauty, but the first film in the series is the best: a film of joy and terror, an elegy, and a wonderful adventure, directed with the spirit of a Ray Harryhausen monster movie combined with Jackson's earlier horror/splatter pictures.  Yes, the story has not been finished after this movie is over, but I couldn't ask for a better ending: a gloriously pulpy third act; a mighty, yet flawed character who redeems himself in death; a man who finally decides to accept his destiny; and a hobbit who realizes he can't really continue his journey alone; and of course: "We travel light.  Let's hunt some orc."  Every time the end credits roll after this movie, I remember what it was like to be nine years old, seeing it for the first time, and not being able to wait until I could either see it again or see the rest of the story.  You mean there's still more adventure to come?  Yes!

My Darling Clementine (Ford)

The greatest film from the master of the Western, it is a retelling of the Wyatt Earp legend with Henry Fonda as the famous marshall and Walter Brennan as the head of the evil Clantons.  It's a classic Western in many ways, yet it stands apart even from Ford's other great films.  It's all there in the title, really.  The movie is named not for the Earps, the Clantons or the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but for Clementine, the young woman from the East who has come to Tombstone chasing after "Doctor John Holliday."  Even though Ford perfectly sets up the mythic confrontation between the Earps and the Clantons, the moments that I remember most are the quiet ones, the ones that suggest that the era of the Old West, the era of gunfights is coming to an end, and a new era is beginning.  One of the strangest and most poetic scenes in all of cinema comes when a Shakespearean actor visits Tombstone and drunkenly recites Hamlet's famous soliloquy in a bar at gunpoint; when he stops midway through, it is Doc Holliday who finishes for him, and the entire world seems to come to a halt as Doc recites these words.  It is his soliloquy, too.  But of course, the most important scene in perhaps any Western comes when Wyatt Earp escorts Clementine to a church dance.  As Ford's favorite hymn plays ("Shall We Gather at the River"), he pulls to a wide shot to show Wyatt and Clementine slowly walking together.  John Ford painted his Western mythology in larger-than-life images: think of his frequent filming locations in Monument Valley, or for that matter, his frequent collaborations with John Wayne.  Yet, in the stately way that these two characters walk to the dance in My Darling Clementine, Ford creates another kind of mythic image.  This time, it is to mark the end of a legend.  In these few shots, he marks its passing, but it is crucial that he is not really mourning it.  After all, they are not going to church for a funeral.  They are going there for a dance.

Nashville (Altman)

"I'm just trying to be heard."  It doesn't really matter which character in Robert Altman's masterpiece actually says this line because all of them are saying it in some way or another.  No filmmaker listens quite like Altman, and in this movie, he hears the voices of more than 20 major characters (he designed an entirely new sound system in order to do this).  The film is aimless and generally plotless, watching and listening as all of these characters go about their lives over the course of a few days in Nashville, Tennessee.  The first experience of watching the film creates that glorious feeling of being lost in the world of the movie, but when you watch it again and again (the film demands multiple viewings), try picking out a few characters that you hadn't really paid attention to before and follow their storylines closely.  Then, choose a different set of characters next time.  It's amazing how Altman juggles so many characters, and yet, if you watch closely enough, you'll see that he gives each of them their due.  He hears everyone singing (even the ones that don't sing), and even though not everyone is willing to listen to them, Altman is more than willing.  And when tragedy strikes at the end, someone who has never really been heard in her entire life has the chance (or maybe duty) to sing.  It's the most emotionally devastating ending in all of cinema, and perhaps the greatest American film ever made.  "Life may be a one way street.  It don't worry me."

Notorious (Hitchcock)

The Master's (not just of Suspense) most entertaining picture: a spy drama, a romance, a visual wonder, and an exploration of Hitchcock's obsession with the difference between a man's idea of a woman and who she actually is.  This is really a movie about irrational behavior; the entire plot is based on a decision that no rational person would make.  Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi spy who is recruited by U.S. Intelligence man Cary Grant to spy on some of her father's friends after her father goes to prison.  There is the suggestion that she is doing this to redeem herself for her country: patriotism, itself an irrational behavior.  But it takes more than patriotism for her to perform her assignment, which is to sleep with the head of a Nazi spy ring in Brazil.  She does this because she has fallen in love with Cary Grant and she thinks that he wants her to do it, very irrational indeed.  The movie is filled with sequences marked by Hitchcock's exhilirating visual style and scenes of incredible suspense.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that this movie is essentially a catalogue of behaviors that really should not make sense, and are therefore very human.  Alcohol plays an enormous role in the movie.  Wine bottles are not only the MacGuffin, but there is also a wonderful scene at a party where the stock of bottles acts as a kind of timebomb.  There is also an interesting connection between the enormous amount of drinking that Bergman does at the beginning of the film and the drink that the Nazis use to poison her near the end (which ends up confusing Cary Grant).  But of course, the movie is really about the most human and irrational feeling of all: love; how irrational it is to love someone who does not love you back (two characters are guilty of this) and how irrational it is not to love someone who loves you.  The climax of the movie is sequence in which two men both realize how irrational they really were.  And then it ends with one final irrational decision as a character walks up a staircase to his death.

The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)

Every time I see this film, I am simply in awe of it.  It is without question the greatest action picture ever made, and maybe the greatest cinematic epic. The running time is nearly four hours long, and yet the film is paced so that it zips by faster than most 90 minute films.  The action sequences are breathtaking, the locations and situations so well-established beforehand, and the action so frenetically intense when it arrives.  The story of a group of samurai hired to defend a village from bandits is one of the most influential plots in all of movies.  Between this film, Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, American action pictures might owe their very existence to Akira Kurosawa.  Yet, The Seven Samurai is anything but simplistic.  The villagers are not innocent victims.  They don't trust the samurai who are dying to protect them, and they have their own secrets about past dealings with samurai.  When their samurai protectors find out their secret, one of them says, "I would like to kill every farmer in this village."  And yet, these samurai still fight to protect this village, even though they stand to gain nothing from it other than three meals a day.  They get no money and no honor.  In fact, most of them are ronin who have no honor anyway.  Even if they win, the victory will not really be theirs.  Yet, they fight and some die for villagers who aren't sure that they want the samurai.  The answer to this mystery may be found in the master swordsman who joins the group.  At first, he refuses because his only concern is in perfecting his craft.  Then why does he ultimately join?  Perhaps because this endeavor, fighting for a nearly hopeless cause that does not promise any reward, is the only way to truly perfect the craft of the warrior.

Sunrise (Murnau)

This silent masterpiece is often celebrated for its techinical excellence: the expressionistic images typical of F.W. Murnau, the use of few (and when used, often beautiful) title cards, the freely moving camera that seems to glide through the air.  But beyond these wonders, Sunrise is a demonstration of the emotional power of cinema.  The history of the medium has shown that cinema is far more adept at expressing emotions than ideas or messages.  Sunrise is 90 minutes of pure emotion.  There is no complex plot here, only the simply story of a man rediscovering his love for his wife after he has an affair.  Of course, the plot is a little more complicated (and darker) than that, but that essentially describes what happens in the picture.  The opening scenes do a fantastic job of establishing everything: the farmer and his wife, the small village they live in, the woman from the city, and the farmer's plot to murder his wife before he realizes his mistake.  The final scenes poise of the edge of heartbreak as the farmer fears that his wife has died in a storm.  But this all pales in comparison to the audacious middle section of the film in which the couple visits the city after taking a trip across the water.  There are few words here and really not much of a plot once the wife has forgiven her husband (this is after he breaks down in tears before her in a wonderful moment that would probably be over the top in a sound picture but is perfect in a silent).  The couple wanders aimlessly around the city for a long stretch of time, lost in the joy of being together.  They stop at a restaurant, a church and a barbershop.  They get a picture taken together.  And in one of the gloriously romantic moments in cinema, they stop and kiss in the middle of a street, causing a major traffic jam.  What a wonderful, bold and thoroughly cinematic idea.  Instead of telling a story with words, Sunrise tells a story with pure and simple emotion.

The Third Man (Reed)

For me, this film is the epitome of what cinema should accomplish.  That does not necessarily mean that it is the greatest film of all time, just that this movie represents everything that a movie should be.  It is non-stop excitement from the beginning to the end.  Yet, even though the movie is a wonderful entertainment, there is a deep and utter darkness beneath its surface.  The movie has the feel of a jaunty adventure at the beginning as a visiting American in postwar Vienna tries to solve the mystery of friend's death, but the more time he spends there, we begin to realize that he really does not understand this place.  Like many Americans, he thinks that the world is going to be like a bad Western: he'll ride into town, shoot the bad guy with the black hat and then ride out.  But postwar Europe is not nearly as simple as he thinks it is.  The film is really the supreme artistic work on American naiveté in foreign affairs and should probably be required viewing for anyone going into U.S. foreign policy.  It is also an interesting take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as our hero meets another visitor who has discovered and embraced the darkness in a place that has just recently endured hell on earth.  The movie is an exhilarating entertainment with the most gorgeous cinematography ever put on film.  And yet it also contains this speech on a Ferris wheel above a park: "Look down there.  Would you really feel anything if one of those dots stopped moving forever?  If I gave you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really tell me to keep my money or would you...calculate how many of those dots you could afford to lose?"