Batman : The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight: Batman is a Hamlet for our times

If Shakespeare had been alive today, he would have found abundant raw material in this most reimagined of comic book characters

An icon for our times ... Batman (Christopher Nolan version)


As the new Batman film - The Dark Knight - grinds towards us, like some slow-moving juggernaut whose driver isn't strong enough to turn the wheel, it occurs to me that the Caped Crusader is really something special. Batman is the icon for our times, Shakespearian in his ability to withstand multiple reinterpretation, a Hamlet or Lear for the 21st century.

In this, Batman is by far the most resonant superhero - far more fertile ground for modulation and restyling than that doughty veteran Superman, or that hyperactive new kid on the blockbuster block, Spider-Man. Johnny-come-latelies like X-Men, Hellboy or Iron Man are, frankly, knee high to all this.

Batman

In the same way that any given Shakespeare text is remodelled, refurbished and redesigned for one generation or another, so too has been Batman. The character is now part-way through its fourth serious movie phase. (Like another popular, but lesser, icon, Doctor Who, Batman regenerates as and when necessary.) The "Nolan" Batman is a serious-minded work, preoccupied with the inner life of the vigilante, and does its level best to ground the traditional tales of supervillains and hi-tech gadgetry in some kind of coherent sense of reality. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight share much with high-testosterone action thrillers like Die Hard and The Terminator: a high-myth narrative superstructure bolted on to a recognisable quotidian milieu.

Do you see this?!!!

How do we enumerate the Batman phases? The first, we can call the "Pop Art" Batman - Adam West and Burt Ward, fight-noise cards, and mini-skirted go-go dancers. Played strictly for laughs, they come from an era that couldn't take kiddie superheroes remotely seriously. The "Burton", or "neo-gothic" Batman, taking its cue from the Frank Miller graphic novels, inhabited a patently artificial and aestheticised universe, inspired by New York art deco, black-and-white gumshoe movies and trace elements of German expressionism. The third Batman phase - the "Schumacher" or "uber-camp" - concentrated on extravagant architectural design, fetishist rubberware, and narratives of sugar-rush complexity. (The original model, the first folio if you like, is of course the prewar Bob Kane comic strip.)

It's fair to say that the current Batman phase is a determined reaction against the Schumacher couplet (Batman Forever and Batman & Robin), which aroused deep hostility with its ill-judged foray into camp mannerism just at the point that, culturally speaking, the world was looking for something more serious. Nolan's films, whatever we think of them are giving us what we want.

Dark Knight’ : A Movie for the Times
By Stephane Dunn

I exercise my deepest hero longings by escaping into the fantasy ones on the big screen. Unsurprisingly then, I am especially drawn to Marvel’s unlimited vault of superheroes whose mission is to save the world or at least their city from hopelessness or the bad guys.

So I braved the crowded parking lots and lines and dragged along a reluctant, anti-Batman lover to see Dark Knight.
It would be too easy to get sidetracked by the tragic aura surrounding this newest Batman flick. Heath Leger’s tragic death at twenty-six has naturally stirred up more hype than Marvel’s big budget superhero flicks usually already do.

Before his death, word was already circulating around Hollywood that Ledger had turned in a stunningly brilliant turn as ‘the Joker’ a role imbued with more of the dark psychotic edge of the original comic strip’s character. The hype about that performance is true so much so that the fact of his death adds pathos amid the bleak, edgy undertones of the character but does not overshadow the fact that Ledger makes the Joker alone stand out.

Yet, there’s more to appreciate about Dark Knight beyond, even, the record breaking $166 million plus that it took in at the box office during this first weekend out. The action sequences, character complexity and fine performances all around from Christian Bale (Batman), Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart (Harvey Dent) and of course Ledger’s movie stealing Joker performance are but a few more reasons why this latest Batman film is a stand out. Sitting at the movie last Saturday night, I alternately cringed, laughed, and became just plain enthralled by the sophisticated treatment of that almost clichéd good vs. evil staple that defines superhero comics and films.