Christopher Nolan (2012)
In this month’s Sight and Sound Nick James’s editorial begins as follows:
‘Appropriately enough in this Olympic month, when the eyes of the world are turned on London, two London-born filmmakers dominate this issue: Alfred Hitchcock … and Christopher Nolan …, who like Hitch has succeeded in the rare feat of conquering Hollywood while remaining faithful to his distinctive creative vision. …’
Hitchcock and Nolan seem to me to have little in common as film-makers – Nolan, if he has a sense of humour, either can’t or won’t express it on screen. But perhaps they do share a propensity for never letting the people in their stories upstage a movie’s technical brio, even when there are first-rate actors and high-wattage stars involved. This is sometimes thanks to dull performances, like Christian Bale’s as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and sometimes because the characters are in a situation that puts them at the film-maker’s mercy, like James Stewart in Vertigo. The upshot of this is that a Hitchcock or Nolan film registers primarily as the work of the director and substantiates the auteurist view of cinema. The effect of the two men’s work is very different, though. The predicament of the people in a Hitchcock movie is often perversely enjoyable and they still have a personality, even if their director has a stronger one. The cast in The Dark Knight Rises includes four Oscar winners – Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard and Morgan Freeman, as well as Bale – and the likes of Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They are flyspecks in the vast technology that Christopher Nolan constructs so meticulously and keeps trashing (along with people) with such solemn aplomb.
In The Dark Knight there was at least one actor who was far from eclipsed in this way. Heath Ledger was remarkable as the Joker, even if the power of his presence derived partly from his untimely death shortly after completing the movie. That unhappy connection now pales into insignificance beside the events in Aurora, Colorado on 20 July, which will ensure an enduring notoriety for The Dark Knight Rises beyond its commercial and ciritical success and the prizes that may come its way. The Wikipedia article on the movie includes the following statement by Christopher Nolan in response to the Aurora shootings:
‘I would not presume to know anything about the victims of the shooting but that they were there last night to watch a movie. I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me. Nothing any of us can say could ever adequately express our feelings for the innocent victims of this appalling crime, but our thoughts are with them and their families.’
What happened in Aurora must be terrible for Nolan but nothing in his somewhat pompous response acknowledges the possibility that the shootings could have had anything to do with the material (or materiel) of The Dark Knight Rises. For me, the soulless monumentality of Nolan’s movies makes for one of the most depressing experiences currently available to a filmgoer (and the competition is strong). I can’t understand how anyone can take pleasure in these pictures. I keep wondering (cluelessly) if the fan base for Nolan’s Batman triology is more used to watching video games than films containing people and whether the pyrotechnics on display here are therefore a more sensational kind of excitement for them. It’s possible for cinema to be dehumanising and fun at the same time if the director has a playful, cartoonish approach but that approach is what’s so utterly lacking here. Of course, I’m not a Batman (or superhero) fan anyway. I used to enjoy the half-hour television series when I was a kid and it’s because that was my first experience of Batman and Robin that the idea of taking the thing seriously still, at some level, puzzles me. The ‘darkness’ of Batman is something I can read about with interest but don’t much want to see dramatised.
Again according to Wikipedia:
‘In reaction to fan backlash to some of the negative reviews, Rotten Tomatoes had to disable user commentary for the film leading up to its release. Some fans had threatened violence against critics while others threatened to take down the websites of movie critics who had given the film a negative review.’
The fascist intolerance that suggests and the wanton destruction of human beings in The Dark Knight Rises aren’t an explanation of what James Holmes allegedly did on 20 July but they make me wonder if the raving loony wing of the Batman fan club and the film-makers themselves shouldn’t think twice before they describe Holmes’s act as ‘senseless’. After not very long, I was so stultified by and cut off from The Dark Knight Rises that I knew the only way I could keep my mind active was by thinking about the relation between what was on screen and what happened in the Aurora cinema. I didn’t want to do that and walked out with the best part of two hours of the film still to go.
18 August 2012
