So. Finally, after all the hype and the waiting, I’ve seen The Dark Knight. I’ll be seeing it again, and may have more to say about it after a more careful viewing, but here’s my gut response:
Awesome movie.
It did things I really didn’t expect, and what I expected was done so well as to be nearly seamless (no such thing as a perfect movie…) For me, this film comes closest to the essence and impact of Frank Miller‘s graphic novel. It’s not all a big party in Gotham, you know? Things happen to people.
It’s not so easy to balance the psychological exploration of what comes when people encounter a monster and find a little of themselves looking out of the eyes of chaos, and the blow-it-up fast-moving fun of a summer movie. But that’s what you get in The Dark Knight, and the ultimate coolness of this film is that you don’t get it in alternate jangling layers, but in an integrated structure that brings you deeper and deeper in, gradually, the way good wine changes as it breathes.
The writing… well, new benchmark for me, for sure. Lots there to learn from about structure, plotting, economy of exposition, showing versus telling, pacing…. And the direction and the performances lift the marvelous words to the place story always wants to go, into the realm of Well, it couldn’t have been any other way than this.
And then there is Heath Ledger, whose performance is absolutely fearless. Never mind the fences — he is swinging for the moon every second on screen, and damn near making it. Brilliant, riveting work, just electric. He found his way into a place that most actors don’t go with their villains — absolute joy. Not the movie cliche of capering gleeful inhuman evil, but the very human abandonment to that which we can no longer resist. In one scene, the Joker says I am an agent of chaos. He’s not kidding: but when he says chaos, he doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what happens — he means that whatever happens is Nothing But Good. Nothing But Joy. All outcomes equally compelling, equally desired, equally embraced. The difference between the monster and the heroes is that the monster has a pure super-oxygenated joy in whatever the next moment brings.
The next time I write story — screenplay, fiction, whatever — I will think of Heath Ledger and hope to be as fierce and as fearless, to write with the same tight balancing act of skill and abandon, the controlled recklessness, the what the fuck of it all.
So. Wow.
And the audience behaved beautifully. The popcorn was fresh. And I wore my special movie t-shirt:
(Click on the image to enlarge — but be warned, it’s called “Spoilt” for a reason…)
It was a good afternoon.
