The Dark Knight

I’m off to see The Dark Knight tonight, so I’m wearing a black t-shirt and trying to work up some self-analytical angst. Heh. I’ve just read an interesting commentary on the film from Kultureflash, which is a weekly email digest that anyone (anyone!) who follows this either on my site or through the LiveJournal feed should be both subscribed and addicted to. Anyway, this gives me great expectations for the film:

In case you’ve been asleep, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is released this week. Hysterical plaudits and talk of posthumous Oscars aside, what Nolan’s take on the Batman franchise offers is a chilling depiction of the post 9/11 landscape and a dark insight into the way the Western audience is beginning to see itself. The references to 9/11 are there, as are those to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. But what sticks in the mind is the depiction of the city itself. Be it Gotham or Hong Kong, the city is turned into a hall of mirrors, a space filled not with buildings but what Jean Baudrillard in America called millions of “vertiginous glass facades”. In countless scenes, the characters’ reflections are caught in these mirrors, all the while images of the actors playing them are refracted through the giant screen of the cinema. This is a film all about simulacra: Batman is plagued by doubles, while he and the Joker are flipsides of the same coin. Baudrillard famously pointed out in the aftermath to 9/11 that reality had absorbed the energy of fiction to become fiction; Nolan’s film, ostensibly an elaborate fiction, is so mired in our dismal reality that its spectre of menace feels all too disturbingly real.

I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan. I haven’t seen The Prestige, but I did see The Following, his pre-Memento debut film which was, incidentally and somewhat awesomely, a Soho based project filmed largely in the restaurant at my old Framestore office, and in the flat that Nolan used to share with one of my colleagues from there (I am reliably informed). Obviously the project is close to home so I’m bound to be bias, but I do think that it was up there with Memento in terms of twists and originality, and I’m happy that he seems to be taking a large part of his subtlty and style to a big franchise like Batman.

There is a trailer for The Following here. It’s worth a look.