Plastic and Savages

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2009)

*** (out of 4) By Aaron Dumont
"I have a magic trick to show you," says the Joker in The Dark Knight, right before he takes out a pencil and drives it in to a bodyguard's face.
This scene sums up the looming sense of terror in the movie - or, more precisely, the attempt of a looming sense of terror. After the hype, as rigid as The Dark Knight's surface is, the movie doesn't quite pass for much more than a two-and-a-half hour-long series of poses and charades. As incredibly beautiful and wild as they are - it's difficult to make a magic trick when you're being too obvious, and it's difficult to make a joke when you're being too obscure.
In my view, it's too easy to label The Dark Knight a masterpiece. A masterpiece of what? Of action? Of suspense? It's more responsible to call it a work of new-found maturity and sophistication, but I'm still not getting the whole picture. Maybe I'm an idiot. Or maybe it's just a children's comic-book movie that wishes to be more. So, while it is honorable that this movie is taking a kind of artistic leap of faith, it's solemnized to death and drowned in a vat of pessimism. It is reality-distanced culture, and (worst of all) offers unenlightening "questions" and "observations" ad nauseum.
What worked was the movie's attempt to illuminate the flaws in its heroes - those saviours of the screen that, in some respects, are our modern, near-mythical figures. In this way, the movie stood true to its own philosophy. For that, I give it respect.
All the feral dynamics that the movie is so well-praised for don't seem to be more than second-rate. The politics are dress-up. The complexity of the city is blunted into the realm of foggy, somewhat-monotonous markers, blueprints and wasted-away commercial aesthetics (note the stylish-but-little-else car scenes between all the queasy monologues, and the 'fashionable' dark-azure tints, bleeding city lights and sledgehammer-composed skyline shots). While poetic, this treatment is little more than an abstraction. It alienates viewers from the movie's center and its creative structure.
However, I won't deny that, at parts, this movie gets to a haunting standpoint. There is visible inspiration and more of an open mindedness to new genres and styles. It comes across in places as feverish, even Sirkian melodrama. In many ways, this movie is an updated thriller, adapted to new forms and texture. It is more fast-paced and comparable to the whirring, unwieldy, surface-obsessed 'Brave New World', as Aldous Huxley put it. Even so, The Dark Knight does trip and stumble when juggling all these parts, and it slips between a Frankenstein mesh and epic ensemble. It many ways this movie is a glorious, incredible, highly fascinating mess.
For all the Biblical resonance and inferno-like, scorching moral plays intertwined through this grim trip, it's not without all its pop-mythology excess and pseudo-sophistication. It turns into a psychopathic, sugar-induced, one-note daze at times. All the artistry of the movie plays second fiddle to the premeditated, calculated and preachy aspects. Though the chaos, havoc and anti-city ideology isn't a stroke from the heart like one would expect it to be, it's all much more sing-song and a bit drained than memory would have one believe.
The Dark Knight at moments, can be pretentious and simplistic, which is too bad. The attempt was highly admirable and ambitious, though. All of the eye-popping, hallucinatory urban decay (visually, thematically and metaphorically) was impressive, but at moments it came across as thinly veiled and a smidgen shallow. It's a masterpiece of smoke and mirrors and a few dimes more. This movie is exhilarating to anticipate, but almost-but-not-quite-there when experienced.
In many respects, The Dark Knight is much like a mirror of our own culture of today. It's quite a coincidence, really, because, as noted by both its detractors and exaltors, it's one of the very things that defines it.