Lessons from the DARK KNIGHT

I just finished watching THE DARK KNIGHT, and yesterday I saw BATMAN BEGINS, and I feel my head is in a little bit of a fuzz status, I think I need to watch the second movie again to fully grasp some of the subtler points of the plot.

But already I can tell a couple things about these films, without spoilers. Here, in a stream-of-thought format, more or less, is what I've learned so far about THE DARK KNIGHT:

• The Nolan Brothers know no fear. Remember how we've said a couple times on the radio that Hollywood is town dominated by fear? In a way, what we're saying is that there are millionaire bets being made with each production, huge gambles that make or break entire careers; the stakes had never been higher. Our normal human response to high stakes and high uncertainty, is to look for data, any data, any sort of information to reduce the uncertainty even just a little bit. Omens and supersticion are simply the last resort for things simply too unforeseeable to analyze more scientifically. One such thing is people's tastes. So these people, who are gambling their entire livelihoods on their ability to correctly predict people's tastes, look for signs of stability, and this is how conventions are born. Conventions. Action movies must be heavy on action, not so much on plot. Comic based movies must live in a world cheesy enough for crime fighters to wear tights. Movie villians must be morally simple: evil for evil sake, or at most, some misguided excuse. Humanity (or at least a big city!) must be at stake at one point. Movies must have a happy ending. Well, the Nolan Brothers know no fear, and conventions are their bitch:

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   1. They spent a HUGE long time in BATMAN BEGINS just setting up Bruce Wayne.
   2. They didn't give us a clear villian from the get-go, Ras-a-ghoul starts in fact as Batman's mentor.
   3. They had THREE (count'em!) Inciting Incidents, all powerful, and none of them pointed towards the climatic ending (well, maybe the third, but its a stretch). For the DARK KNIGHT, man I'm not even sure.
   4. They did not aim EITHER movie to children. The Dark Knight, at places, is almost like a horror film.
   5. And yet, they know how to game the system. They wanted a PG-13 rating, because everybody knows this makes more money than R, so if you pay attention, there's no blood in this movie. No gore, no guts, no cussing. The joker waves his knife on people's faces all the time, but the fear comes from what he MIGHT do, not what he's actually doing on camera, as far as gore. Its a violent film. But with the right manuevering, they squeezed a PG-13 rating out it.
   6. They stayed on message. This movie is a treatise on vigilantism, and on what to do when the System is corrupt.
   7. They stayed realistic. It's entirely possible, in a hypothetical world, for someone to have never heard about the Batman character (no comics, no TV series, nothing) and see this movie, and think this is perfectly feasible in our real world given only a few nudges. They found perfectly reasonable explanations for why two-face is burned down the middle, why batman has all his gadgets, where does the batcave come from, the batcomputer, the suit. Its all realistic, and never comes out of thin air.
   8. The Joker is a FORCE OF NATURE. I had never seen a character like this. So personal, and yet at the same time, he's like chaos given flesh, an avatar, a symbol, an idea even more than Batman himself is.
   9. They dared to go for the ironic endings (in McKee's book, there's three types of endings, uppers, downers and ironics, in increasing degree of difficulty).

Ah, I'll come back to this post later. I need to grok a little bit more on this topic. Cookies to whoever catches where the word grok comes from without resorting to google :)