Is Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy Over-Hyped?
The Dark Knight. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
After the success of Memento, it was clear Christopher Nolan was a hot talent with innovative, stylish ideas. He followed up with Insomnia, a taut psychological thriller starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams. It was a solid success - nothing great, but a good stepping stone from indie hot-shot to franchise mastermind. But it was really 2005’s Batman Begins when Christopher Nolan became Christopher Nolan.
It’s actually a pretty straightforward origin story for how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman and saves Gotham from Ra's al Ghul. The film’s main innovation was a conscious grittiness. It repudiated the kitsch and fantasticality of Burton’s Batman, as well as Bryan Singer’s more traditionally comic booky interpretation of X-Men. Instead it went for a washed out aesthetic meant to capture the moral vacuum and rot at the heart of this Gotham, a society no longer capable of upholding the Lockean social contract.
This visual style underlined the need for a vigilante dressed like a bat to exist outside the boundaries of the law and maintain order. It’s debatable how far you want to take such an analysis, but the visual grittiness and the washed-out aesthetic helped complement the story they were telling and the film was very popular, although I always thought the Tumbler looked ridiculous.
After taking a break to make The Prestige, Nolan came back in 2008 with The Dark Knight, universally agreed to be the best film in the trilogy. It is an epic film with one of the all-time great performances by Heath Ledger as the The Joker. I think there is no doubt that this is a great film. But my gripe is that Nolan fan boys (and by 2008 he had an Elon Musk-like cult following already) often hold The Dark Knight up as a deep and meaningful meditation on the surveillance state, on the meaning of law and order in an anarchic world. They would have you believe Christopher Nolan is the Alexander Wendt of the film world.
But I don’t buy it. Like a lot of Nolan’s work (and this includes his brother as well), on the surface it gives the appearance of complexity and depth. One reviewer referred to it as a “pessimistic thesis on the state of western civilization.” But scratch beneath the cool looking veneer and the thing doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. The Joker’s plans, while looking very cool when executed on screen, are a nonsense. Everything he says, while sounding cool, is gibberish. He’s an agent of chaos - OK. That’s what you want in a supervillain. But that doesn’t mean we should draw meaningful connections between that and any kind of cogent analysis of the decay of modern society. In the end it looks cool but it’s just so much sound and fury, and you know the rest.
By then, however, many had already sipped the Kool-Aid and they believed Christopher Nolan was the next Kubrick. Nolan followed up The Dark Knight with Inception, a film where many of his worst impulses converged - a fractured narrative structure that desperately wanted little thoughts to masquerade as big ideas. And these failings really reached their absurd apotheosis with Interstellar, but I’ll get to those in a later post. After Inception (which, for all its faults, is actually still a fine movie) Nolan came back to make the final installment of the Dark Knight Trilogy, the Dark Knight Rises.
Generally considered the weakest of the three films, it has been suggested that the Dark Knight Rises is some kind of commentary on authoritarianism. I think it’s just an excuse for Tom Hardy to walk around dressed like The Gimp and talking like a Weirdo while Batman follows a fairly standard hero’s journey - defeated by Bane, he overcomes his personal doubts to rise to the challenge and save the day. There are some very cool visuals along the way - like when the football field literally falls apart behind the running back, or when an airplane gets dissected in mid-air.
But again, I must come back to the same point - these films are enjoyably dark comic book blockbusters. Stylistically, they offer a nice alternative to the whiz-bang pop anthems of the MCU. They have cool villains (DC always had cooler villains). But my enjoyment of the films stops at the waters edge. To think that this trilogy has something important to say about society is just, to me, a rather silly delusion. But it’s a delusion that has persisted throughout Nolan’s career, with people attaching great weight and significance to what is, for the most part, just clever narrative and visual trickery. And as we will see when discussing Interstellar, at some point Nolan began to believe the hype - and that became a liability in its own right.
