Through a Custom-Fit Looking Glass...

Rating: 10/10 (2 August 2008)

The theater is inordinately packed. I am twenty minutes early. That man, to my left, appears as if virility has left him. To my right a string of teenagers in sandals and yellow tees tries to maintain what-they-would-call equilibrium. They all look like bromidic parasites, potential hazards with tic motions and unbidden ejaculations  the type that maybe just smiled at my use of that word: puerile misfits.
They're too loud. I'm trying to read! Yeah, who brings a book to a movie theater? I do, since I'm to sit alone twenty minutes before the film starts. The book is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It's autobiographical, about Viktor's ordeal and eventual liberation from Nazi imprisonment. He spent the majority of his time in Auschwitz, the poor bastard. Ah, why am I reading this kind of book here? The thing I'm here to see  the thing which holds the collective testes of all the audience(s) that have shown up for this midnight premiere  is called The Dark Knight. While it's not uncommon to see a movie with a titular character, movies with heroes whose sobriquets find a home in the title are something of a rarity.
It's a comic book movie, no less, which, after a musical, is the most ostentatious type of cinematic conception there is. And that's not a good sign. Tim Burton has not made it easy to take a comic book movie seriously, even if his adaptations were good. Such blatant pretension can trigger a castigating force like bad word-of-mouth, wasting no time in splaying you naked for the mad crowds, with their opprobrious dismantling of what you are  if you're anything. Even the critic joins in on the fun, forgetting his phlegmatic roots, if he can be lively in that moment of presaged demagoguery.
I have my doubts about The Dark Knight. I really want to like it, I don't want to leave the theater, go home, and write a review that comes off like a solipsistic obloquy. I'd prefer the solipsistic panegyric. Let my readers rail against the orotund, onomatopoetic mire that is dragging down their high.
Ooh, here we go: the credits are dazzled in black fire and a desiccated fog, lucid logos flicker on the screen. The cheers are increasing, the cheers are increasing! It's so bright. Why'd it have to start so bright? This is a nighttime type of movie, right? Batman Begins was dark.
Guys in clown masks wearing beaten faux suede jackets and slacker jeans are all over the place. They're robbing a bank, they're killing people, pulling punch lines. And they're killing each other, too, you know. This looks violent. There's a lady leaving the auditorium, tightly holding on to a kid who can't be 7 yet. We're only 15 minutes into this thing, you can't leave yet! That pencil trick  nice. I laughed with everyone else. This Joker guy means business.... Whoa. How'd he survive that semi-trailer flipping forward onto its back? ... "As long as this machine is at Wayne Enterprises, I won't be." Hmm. Christopher Nolan's certainly not trying to turn this Batman movie into an anachronistic piece, is he? ... Oh! I get it now. I'm going to need to see this a second time to follow this plot more closely.... Man, the humor is so twisted.... Well, that ending was anticlimactic.
So I'm walking out of the theater, along with everybody else, filing out with a grin on my face  mostly because of the people I see, dressed up in costumes and with makeup on their faces.
Someone calls my name.
"Hey, how was it?" "It was good. Sorry you couldn't sit with us." "Yeah, well." I'm driving home now. It's past 3 in the morning as I pull into the driveway. Geez, and I don't even feel tired. I think about it some. And I decide that The Dark Knight is without a doubt the best comic book film I've ever seen. But that doesn't say much, does it? The list of great comic book films is not overwhelming.
It's easy to get caught up in set pieces and explosions. Character and depth can get lost with so many on-screen distractions. It's too easy to say that The Dark Knight transcends its genre. The film is too good to dismiss as better-than material  not to mention the insult that is to comic book fans. What I witnessed was far more visceral, some vestigial indwelling of classic gangster thrillers like The Public Enemy, mixed with a misanthropic cup of Alfred Hitchcock, and an ultimately quixotic clash of the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and William James.
But I'll have to see it again to be sure.