Hot Vigilante Sex: Part Two
So I’ve seen it! But before I start my non-review of The Dark Knight (a work of protean intelligence, talent and integrity, but seriously flawed in the last act, as the parts began to fly off quicker than an exploding Batpod. A more craven and condescending sensibility on the part of the director/screenwriting team would have perhaps tied the pieces up in a more conventionally satisfying way…), let me just say first how juiced I was - whilst searching the web for juicy Bat-related thoughts/reviews that I could lampoon - to come across a video on The Times home page that promised “Onboard footage of the Qantas 747 that dropped 20,000 feet in seconds.”
I clicked on to the link, preparing myself to experience a harrowing vignette of an airplane full of mortals encountering their deepest fears; only to see about a minute or so of shaky handheld evidence (that was okay, if you want to be real you have to be shaky…) of people sat dutifully in stoic fear, oxygen masks already attached. I saw no bug-eyed terror evinced by these Oxygenauts, no rapidly cartwheeling iPods striking old ladies in the myopic eye (“Howzabout that for a floater, Granny?”) as the plane plunged in its dizzying descent; heard no a cappella of screams (a minor variation on that classic: “We’re all voiding ourselves/Please don’t let the forensics team tell our children!”), no new-found invocations to the malign thug in charge of the cosmos, or even death threats leveled at the unknown perpetrator/device of the hold explosion.
It was a little disappointing, to say the least: here I was, gathered around the communal campfire of the Internet, in virtual congress with a bazillion other voyeurs, all of us ready to commit to the imagination of our storytellers and invest in this scenario, only to find out that - quite frankly -they’d dropped the ball. I wanted to find the director/cameraman - obviously no Chris Nolan - and remind him that concepts such as “gritty” “dark” and “real” were badges to be earned.
In case you think this is a tad harsh, let’s not forget that whomever shot this began rolling after the decompressive explosion (unless they held back the more dramatic footage of the actual descent and the dropping of the oxygen masks for the special features on the DVD); so they’d fumbled for their camera, or cell phone, or ceramic London taxi cab fondu set memento with 5 megazpixel lens attached, and started shooting once they already knew there was the likelihood of imminent fiery discorporation. In my book that makes you an Atheist with no craven idols to worship other than a potential YouTube profile. If you’re gonna talk the talk you gotta walk the walk: you should at least scream “Omighod look at the wing/engine peeling off we’re not gonna make it!” and try and get some terror roundelay going through the economy seats like a malignant Mexican wave, for a bit of extra dramatic tension.
The shit thing about the real world is it’s so goddamned hard to manipulate in the moment. Luckily, thanks to the heroes of the marketing department at Warner Brothers, they’re had three long years to control the horizontal and vertical of our responses to The Dark Knight. In the old-fashioned days of film tie-ins (I’m talking as long ago as, say, 2002) you had your usual duvet covers, figurines, and all the usual crap (let us not forget that the primary purpose of a superhero is to sell pillow cases and lunch boxes, and they’ve been doing so way back in the ‘50s when our parents were grooving on the adventures of pre-realistic space adventure Batman) but then we were still in a pre-metastasized world; before a film’s identity had irrevocably spread like a neon cancer through the body politic: from the colon of lunch boxes to the spleen of guerilla flyposting, up through the liver of food-giveaways into the kidneys of cell phones and mobisode previews, up into the lungs of advertorial yoof programming into the brain of saturation cross-platform presencing (don’t you just love how those cadres of MBAs can consistently turn nouns into verbs?).
Batman is less a simple movie now - and far far more than even the simple technical difference between frames-per-second or binary digital code; as if levers were that thing that built temples in the first place - than a full blown event, designed by a team of planners and lieutenants greater in number than helped co-ordinate the Allied Landings in Normandy in 1945.
This latest uber-iteration of the darknight avenger is a piece of conceptual art, something that Damien Hirst might title “I Want To Be Batman To All People At All Times And All Places; Irrespective Of Age, Intelligence, Reason, Predilection, Bum-Bandity, Female-Circumcision, Disability Or Whether You Can Afford To Buy Or Have To Mug A Pensioner To Get A Ticket To See It: Talking Of Heath Ledger’s Performance At The Water Cooler; Christian Bale’s Intensity Instead Of Making Love To My Wife; Even Thinking In A Quiet Private Moment On The Shitter That If Only Katie Holmes Had Only Returned To The Role That Maggie Gyllenhall Did So Much Better Because We Could Have Seen Her Blown Apart Instead. Dark Knight. Dark Knight. When You Sleep. Dark Knight.”
Now call me old-fashioned; but even Citizen Kane - no, let’s pick a true classic, something like The Godfather Part II, which was already highly anticipated in a pre-Internet era - might suffer from the gap between hype and product. Admit it, those of you who saw The Dark Knight: one thrilled to its intelligence, but secretly lamented that it was never quite as good as three years of drip-fed exposure allowed our mind’s eye to believe it could be.
Our expectations can never be exceeded. Which is a very sad thing, if you start to think about it.
This is the future for even all the good films (good films. Not the hack reboots which will similarly blunderbuss-marketed in the future. All those Terminator future-quels and John Carpenter remakes): that we be perpetually disappointed. Forever. In all times and places.
The strangest thing about The Dark Knight - weirder even than a man with half a face, or someone who flies through the air on bat wings - is that marketing department and filmmaker are now perpetually locked in a violent sexual synergistic embrace in order that we - the termite consumer - will continue to live in a state of perpetual expectation. Like the Batman and the Joker: they need each other if the extraordinary investment of production funds and the monumental recouping of ticket sales is to continue to fuel this passion play of madness and ethics. If either one dies, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down…
NOTE: for a more specific critique of The Dark Knight and why it wasn’t the greatest thing since the hard drive, go to the world’s greatest film critique program Filmspotting, for Adam and Matty’s always-incisive, passionate and accessible latest movie analysis. I cannot recommend these guys highly enough…