The Dark Knight Rises, and the Cinema of Christopher Nolan

It had been building up to this for a while—not just for Batman, but for Christopher Nolan.  With The Dark Knight, he barely pulled it off.  Inception was a bit wobbly, but it was about dreams, so we forgave it.  But with The Dark Knight Rises, in his noble quest to fashion a true comic book epic, Nolan finally bit off more than he could chew.

This is not to say that it's a bad film.  I believe (like some believe in Harvey Dent) that there is a cut of The Dark Knight Rises out there that is everything it claims to be, that does justice to all the plot threads and topical ideas it brings up—only it's four and a half hours long.  What we get instead, running a lean 165 minutes, is a jumbled flow of sequences and characters (all intriguing, half-cohering) that too often acts as a bullet-point summary of itself, and arrives only breathlessly over the finish line.

And so we find Batman eight years after we left him, now retired, leaning on a cane, and walking alone through Wayne Manor.  Gotham City, it seems to him, no longer needs Batman.  Except a rebellion is brewing under the city, led by the masked, hulking, and mostly-decipherable Bane, a villain from the League of Shadows (remember the first movie?) that wants to reduce Gotham to rubble.  Added to the list of plotlines: the beautiful Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who is partnering with Wayne Enterprises on a green energy policy and may be a good love interest; Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, a professional thief (and potential love interest number 2) who's after a computer program called the "clean slate", which doesn't exist, only it does; the myth about the death of Harvey Dent (remember the second movie?), which has created a new era of strict law enforcement but is in danger of being exposed; Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a policeman and Batman's heir apparent, who intuited his secret identity; a daredevil opening sequence involving a scientist, a plane hijacking, and an actor from The Wire; Bane's corporate sponsors, who are angling for a hostile takeover of Wayne Enterprises and will undoubtedly get more than they bargained for; Bane's deceitful plan to "liberate" Gotham, which he announces after blowing up a stadium; and, for good measure, Matthew Modine.

This is a lot of material, and Nolan moves quickly, cross-cutting back and forth in a style that scarcely follows an act-based structure, and more or less prides the moment-to-moment impact of each scene over a grand, overarching cohesion.  Characters barely register before they become the subject of surprise twists.  Batman gets across town in an instant, and is injured in one scene only to be fine a few seconds later.  The main villain is dispatched so abruptly that it took me and my friend a moment to realize it had actually happened.  Climax is given short shrift—there's little time for it before the next bomb threat—and the editing compresses time and space in frequently disorienting ways.

But if The Dark Knight Rises is an ungainly beast, that also means that there's a lot here to enjoy.  It's never boring or less than interesting, and even when the story is at its least airtight, Nolan knows how to keep you on the hook for the pay-off.  And the pay-off, while vaguely wonky, does complete a three-movie-long arc in a way that few franchises attempt.  This is, to me, easily Nolan's single weakest film, neither as tight as Batman Begins nor as centered as The Dark Knight.  But if all blockbusters were up to this level of atmosphere and intrigue, I'd go to the multiplexes a lot more.

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Now, there's one aspect of the film that should be mentioned, as it's getting a fair amount of ink, and that's the film's politics.  The Dark Knight very much played as a post-9/11 allegory, posing the question of how far we'd be willing to go to keep ourselves safe, and effectively raising troubling ideas about the interdependence between heroes and villains.  Similarly, The Dark Knight Rises tackles the issue of a rough economy in a stratified society, and the question remains how well it does that—and what it's actually saying.

Take, for instance, Bane's "liberation" of Gotham, which leads to literal class warfare and a French Revolution-style Reign of Terror.  In the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement, this sounds like a reactionary vision, translating very reasonable real world concerns about income inequality into an apocalyptic madhouse, where proletariat rage is channeled by shadowy supervillains.  (If Glenn Beck were in Gotham City, he'd have been right).

But then consider the amount of earnest populism on display, the skepticism towards corporations, and the fact that Gotham's "liberation" never makes a huge amount of sense, and what you get is a much more conflicted reading, without a coherent philosophy.  Nolan himself has denied that the film is political, telling Rolling Stone:

"We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of interesting questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop for the story. What we're really trying to do is show the cracks of society...We're going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things. It's just telling a story."

And this gets at both the defining trait and principle drawback of the cinema of Christopher Nolan.

For starters, few phrases are as irksome as classifying a film as "just a story."  Stories can be stories and still have a message—in fact, you can argue that stories have messages whether they want to or not, so you'd better consider them.  But this ambivalence towards subtext deflates any grander meaning.  It suggests that the Joker's existential nihilism in The Dark Knight and the ambiguous ending of Inception both mean exactly the same thing: that is, nothing at all—they're simply intellectual garnish to make an adventure story more interesting.  And I would go so far as to say that Nolan's last two films owe a lot of their appeal to this garnish, and to the fact that few adventure movies or blockbusters attempt to have any.  This would mean that, for all their appearance of seriousness—the quality that makes them stand out in summer blockbuster season—they really aren't that serious in the end.  After all, Inception is a psychological thriller where the deepest layer of the human mind is a level from Goldeneye.

I remember that when Inception came out, an idea circulated around the internet that all this business about creating dreams was Nolan's metaphor for filmmaking.  It's an intriguing thought, and I'm all for meta-subtext in pop culture, but I would argue that The Prestige (still his most underrated film) fulfills this role in a more forceful way.  It's there in Hugh Jackman's dying speech, when he explains the drive of a magician:

"You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you got to see something really special...it was the look on their faces..."

On my way out of Inception, it struck me that this speech was Christopher Nolan's films in a nutshell.  He's a magician, an illusionist, a narrative sleight-of-hand artist, a man we pay to toy with our minds.  Nothing more, perhaps, but then the ultimate question becomes: isn't that enough?

If I had to think of a director from the pantheon to compare Nolan to, it would be Fritz Lang.  Both established a directorial signature within a big-budget studio system; both had a knack for the creative application of special effects; both have been accused of emotional coldness; and most of all, both specialized in noir-ish tales about dark, obsessive, often vengeful anti-heroes who are halfway to being their own worst enemy.  (For any adventurous souls wondering where to go after Nolan's Batman trilogy, I'd recommend checking out a film called The Testament of Dr. Mabuse).  The difference is that Lang's films, even the weakest, betray a particular worldview.  Nolan's are often a magic act—or, to be reductive, "just a story."

But give the man credit: his strongest films are clever, excellent works of narrative construction, with attention paid to tone and atmosphere, and far from tossed-off.  Even with the relatively disappointing finale of The Dark Knight Rises, his first two Batman films are highlights of Hollywood cinema in the last decade, and enough to solidify his trilogy in the record books.  As always, I look forward to seeing what he does next.  Some of the requirements of a blockbuster franchise, particularly the need for comical one-liners, never quite suited him.  I hold out hope that he has a film in him with the real-world implications of M.  He certainly has the talent.

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The Dark Knight Rises is currently in theaters—you've probably seen it.