Film Thoughts: The Dark Knight Rises and the Post-Nolan Era

Spoilers follow.  Seriously.  If you haven't seen the movie, watch it, then come back.

If you're looking for a review of The Dark Knight Rises, here it is: go see the movie.  Pay for the ticket, watch and enjoy the film, go home and give it some serious thought.  Then, go again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Nolan's scope is epic and his project more than ambitious, capping his trilogy in spectacular fashion.  From the moment Bane first spoke in the opening scene until the final scene at the cafe, I never felt bored nor did I feel that the movie moved too slowly--which, considering the film's just under three-hour running time, is quite a testament to Nolan's script.  In fact, after leaving the theater, my friend and I agreed that we could have watched another solid ten or fifteen minutes of Bruce Wayne's training in the pit.  But the most commendable achievement of the film is that it brings Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy full circle, providing closure to his Batman universe in the best way possible.  In time, we'll likely come to think of the Dark Knight movies, much like we do the Star Wars Trilogy, not as separate entries but as parts of one grand story.

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about what I think Nolan was doing with his trilogy.  To summarize that post, I find Nolan's films to be one of the most interesting experiments with the Batman mythos that has ever been attempted.  By putting Batman in a real-world setting, Nolan proposes that the introduction of the Batman to an already complex system of criminal activity and corrupt social structure (Gotham City) would result in unpredictable consequences that ramify in increasingly dangerous ways--the apotheosis of which would be the Joker in The Dark Knight.  The only way to reset the system, therefore, would be for Batman to die, the created symbol serving to inspire but no longer actively affecting the system he meant to save.  He dares to ask, "Would Gotham have been better off without the Batman?" without providing an all too clear answer.  I think what I said in that post still holds weight, so, instead of beating a dead horse, I wish to take a slightly different approach and talk about the film in terms of its legacy.  From now on, Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy will (and should) be the standard for how to create a superhero film.  In the words of the Joker, "...I know the truth, there's no going back. You've changed things, forever."

The Dark Knight Rises, more so than any of its predecessors, is a film about superhero films.  It's comic book elements are more overt than The Dark Knight's, having a very clear act structure that felt like a comic book series.  Issue one ends with Batman re-donning the cape and cowl.  Another issue ends with the broken Bat, and yet another issue would be devoted to Wayne's training in the pit.  The structural integrity of the movie draws clear inspiration from comics like No Man's Land, Knightfall, and The Dark Knight Returns among numerous others.  And was it just me, or is the pit/prison analogous to Ra's Al Ghul's Lazarus pits (falling in and climbing out to achieve some transcendence or chance at immortality)?  Maybe, maybe not.  My point is that this film had much more in common with Batman Begins in terms of its comic book elements than it dead with the erasure of such familiarities in The Dark Knight.  I think this is by design.

The character of Bane, for instance, is pure comic book villain, falling somewhere between a Bond mastermind and a tornado.  He's fast, brilliant, exact, calculating, and brutal.  He's a faceless force of nature and conviction, something straight out of a weekly serial brought to terrifying life.  While the Bane of Knightfall is equally brilliant and powerful, the violence of the comic does not match the brutality we see on screen because of Nolan's choice to set his trilogy in a realistic world.  A proposed "real" Bane terrifies more than the fantastic comic book monster ever could.  Tom Hardy's Bane, while not as interesting as Heath Ledger's Joker, still commands the screen with savage intensity, giving the viewer a comic book powerhouse with just enough realism to make him a threat instead of a caricature.  The mask he wears dehumanizes him by obscuring his face and muffling his speech, but when his eloquence emerges, it returns some humanity to the behemoth so the viewer knows that he was a person who became a monster rather than just a hulking pile of muscle.

Realistic or not, he's still 250 pounds of f*ck you up.

The comic book world seems to intrude into the real world on such a massive scale, though, that the film calls attention to itself.  It's easy to point out parallels that exist between the Occupy Movement and Bane's goal of giving Gotham back to the people, and the film seems to have a conservative slant that Mark Fisher points out in his article for the Guardian, saying that "the new film demonises collective action against capital while asking us to put our hope and faith in a chastened rich."  His analysis is fair, I think; the connections are there.  This interpretation would be fine, for me at least, if the movie were simply holding a cliched dark mirror up to contemporary issues, but the blending of the real world with the artificial (in terms of the comic's relationship with realism in film) seems to turn the issue on its head.  The film becomes less about the actual plot because the plot is easy--the film stresses the relationship of the real with the imaginary.  The film strives to be, in the words of Alfred Pennyworth (who, by the way, has more pathos in this movie than any other character) "something more."

In Nolan's Gotham, the actions of Bane will have a much more lasting impact than the actions of Batman.  The guy blows up half the city, for God's sake!  There's no going back from that.  If not for the actions of the privileged class's poster child, the mob would have never turned to the Joker in The Dark Knight. This is the same world where the rich are fat cats, the common people are terrorists, and those caught in between suffer while the city falls around them.  When the only hope for a real city lies in the hands of a guy in a batsuit, the world will burn long before it gets better.  It's the scenario that Nolan had been building since the beginning, whether he knew it or not.  He had to provide an answer for how a world with Batman could keep going, and that answer was that the Batman had to die.  When the fantasy of the comic book world meets the realism of the actual world, there will be drastic consequences.  The binaries of rich and poor, hero and villain, become simple plot points amid a chaotic world of structural collapse.  The ending of the film, then, with John Blake's (or Robin, in the most dissapointingly handled bit of fan service in the movie) discovery of the Batcave strikes me with some ambiguity.  He hasn't yet learned the lesson Wayne has, but, should he choose to follow him, he will.

I think it's safe to say that in the wake of Nolan's movies, we can all say goodbye to great comic book films for a while.  We'll get the awesomeness of Marvel's Phase 2 and maybe some solid entries in the X-Men, Superman, Spider-Man franchises, but I'm putting my money down that there won't be anything that elevates the genre to such heights as Nolan's Dark Knight movies.  They make me think deeply about what it is about superheroes that draw us to them.  Nolan has cemented himself as an adaptation auteur willing to blend thematic complexity and blockbuster action like few have done before, and it will likely be a long time before we see something like it again on this scale.

Cheers,

--David

P.S. In my last Batman post, I mentioned that I had a Batman wedding cake.  Here you go, internet:

"It's simple. We eat the Batcake."

Heroic Violence in the God of War Franchise: The Ultimate Postmodern Myth

I knew I loved God of War from the very first moment I made the pale barbarian Kratos pick up an undead warrior, dig his massive hands into the monster, and savagely rip it in half, showering himself with an arc of red blood. The motion was smooth and brutal, and the ripping, crunching, tearing sound that wretched from the rotting corpse made the beast's execution all the more satisfying. From that moment, I knew that I was in store for a whole new world of video game violence. I enjoy the over-the-top combat and epic battles of the game, and, yes, I freely admit to being fascinated by the spectacle of violence. While the franchise sometimes catches hell for being too violent, I don't think its goal is simple shock value. The game asks us to dare to enjoy the bloodshed while also punctuating the combat with moments of genuine discomfort. Over the course of five games, players have steered Kratos on his quest for revenge and see him fall more deeply into a hate-soaked frenzy, so much so that he eventually unleashes plagues on mankind that can only result in genocide. But Kratos doesn't exist in any real universe. His is the realm of Greek myth (albeit modernized) where heroes could be vicious and brutal. The result is a postmodern version of a very old world, where the violence of the tales the rhapsodes sang are given visceral life in the new medium of gameplay.

"Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, / hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, / great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, / feasts for the dogs and birds, / and the will of Zeus was moving towards its end."

So begins Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's Iliad, the chronicle of the Trojan War of Greek (and later Roman) myth. We all know the story more or less, despite the mediocre Wolfgang Petersen film, but I want to call attention to the fact that the first lines of the poem, in its earliest written form, translate to an invocation to a muse to sing specifically about rage bears significant influence for situating Kratos in the epic tradition. His ethos stems from the aristocratic warrior archetype in Greek myth; princes and generals are the heroes of ancient Greece, and, since Kratos is the son of a god and a general in the Spartan army, it's easy to find his locus in ancient Greek literature. It is also easy to see why the Greeks looked to violent figures as heroes because it became a cultural necessity. Torture and gladiatorial combat were state-sanctioned in Athens and Sparta, and violence served as the most powerful political tool in antiquity, despite advances in philosophy that led to establishing schools of rhetoric. It's almost refreshing, then, to see a character that so perfectly embodies this cultural ethos. We'd like to believe that Achilles is as good looking as Brad Pitt or Hector as handsome as Eric Bana, but Greek concepts of beauty rarely intersected with what they thought of as "heroic." In a gaming landscape filled with handsome lovable rogues (Nathan Drake), dashing demon hunters (DMC's Dante), and attractive androgynous adventurers (pretty much any guy in Final Fantasy), it's refreshing to play as character who is ugly as sin and pissed as all hell.

A face only a mother could love...and he freakin' kills her, too. 

And it's only fitting that Kratos be so brutal. His story slides ride into the lexicon of Greek myth, but with a postmodern twist. As the ancient world's most adamant atheist, Kratos actively seeks the undoing of the entire Greek myth tradition. Since Kratos is a victim of control of gods, his character is also at the whim of the imagined worlds of Greek mythology. Killing the gods is not simply a fun narrative hook--it's Kratos' escape from the narrative itself. Greek mythology kills his wife and child because Ares makes Kratos kill his wife and child. Unlike every other hero in Greek mythology, Kratos sees the world he lives in for its ridiculousness. He is almost self-aware, as if he knows that he is trapped in the song of Greek poet--or in the case of the game, a narrator voiced by Linda Hunt. He kills to be liberated from the world of the game, not just for retribution or satisfaction. For this reason, Kratos' brutality increases with each installment and his goals become cloudy. First, he wants to kill Ares, then Zeus, then the Fates, then Zeus again, then Gaia, then everyone, then Zeus... It's exhausting and convoluted, and his motivations become less convincing each time he paints a new target, especially when the death of an Olympian means subjecting the innocent people of the world to plague and natural disasters. But whereas reviewers initially saw this dissonance as one of the game's flaws, I see it as part of the game's inherent design. Kratos' pathos erodes over time and he becomes increasingly alien to the player because he wants his freedom from the world that ensnares him, and the only way he can do that is through the tools the system and the ancient Greek tradition affords him: sheer, focused brutality.

Still, it's when that brutality is turned outward toward the player when the genre of the Greek myth really starts to break down. After all, by controlling Kratos, the player is complicit in this undoing of the Greek tradition. But it becomes doubly relevant when the player realizes that, though Kratos constantly tries to break bonds (bonds of humanity, of godhood, of fate, of Ares, of lineage), he simply can't because there's still someone yanking his metaphorical and literal chain: the person with the controller. Chains appear so often in the God of War that they become a recurring motif symbolizing not only Kratos' bondage to the gods, but also the bondage of video game architecture. When the player steers Kratos as he moves up and down (and eventually breaking) the Great Chain that connects Olympus, Earth, and Hades, it's a metaphor for his moving through (and sundering) the world of Greek myth recreated in game space. As the player is involved in the breaking of Kratos' universe, so too is he/she complicit in the violent atrocities Kratos commits. Killing a helpless caged warrior in God of War, two priests in God of War II, and a vulnerable woman in God of War III all in the name of Kratos' progress toward self and societal destruction issupposed to disturb the player and solidify his/her connection in the game's hero's quest. We're controlling Kratos, and we're the very apotheosis of the inescapable shackles he longs to break.

The game finally calls attention to this relationship in God of War III when Kratos kills Poseidon, and the camera shifts to the victim's perspective:

Here, we see firsthand the unflinching savagery of the monster we control, and that violence is projected out to the person with the controller. The player presses the buttons that makes Kratos attack the camera--a macabre act of self destruction. Kratos hates Poseidon, and he hates the player as they are both cruel masters and abusers of their power. This concept is reversed at the game's finale when the perspective is switched to Kratos' first-person view as the player fights the spirit of Zeus after Kratos' reconciliation. Both the player and Kratos know that the only way for him to truly be free is through his own execution. His only option, therefore, is suicide, and, with the player's help, Kratos delivers the coup de grace to both himself and to his slavery.

When I mention that God of War is the "ultimate" Greek myth, I dont' mean that it's the best; I mean that it's the last. It is a story constantly focused on its own terminus and the end of the Greek tradition. And only through gameplay could we enact this process of myth-destruction. I'm very eager to see if the newest entry in the God of War: Ascension follows the trajectory I've mapped out, but I'm betting it does. After all, can we really have Kratos without unspeakable violence that will lead to nothing but destruction? I really hope not.

So what do you guys think? Who's amped for Ascension? Do you buy my reading of the games? Let me know, and we'll get to talking.

Cheers,

--David