Recent absence notwithstanding, I really love working on this site. Besides allowing me to write about catalog films—which I way, way prefer to writing new movie reviews—the site also lets me spackle holes in my movie lore. If I hadn’t written about Arthur Penn, would I have seen Mickey One? Without the Stanley Kubrick Project, I could have missed Killer’s Kiss.
Lately, though, I’ve been feeling like I’m missing a part of my mission. The way I see it, I’ve got two major problems.
1.) The only directors I’ve written about are all obvious, expected guys–directors very easy to love.
2.) My list is just a bunch of old and/or dead white dudes.
That ends today. I think there’s room on this site for directors I’m just not that into, directors who may have the potential for greatness, but who are still struggling to get all of their gears turning in the same direction. How about directors who, although mired in B-movie budgets, refuse to settle for the paychecks of quantity and instead choose projects that speak to their passions? Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for that.
The Hughes Brothers fit that description. I was too young to see it, but I recall the excitement surrounding Menace II Society and the explosion of crime films and young, black directors that appeared in the early 90s after Spike Lee kicked open the door. Directors like the Hughes Brothers and John Singleton became synonymous with a new culture of filmmaking, deeply in touch with an underrepresented group of people, electric anger flying off the screens. I remember the murmur of surprise when they signed on to helm the adaptation of Alan Moore’s Victorian horror tale, From Hell, because it wasn’t the kind of film a “black director” would normally accept. I also remember the limp disappointment when that film failed to stick the landing, as if somehow the idiots had been proven right.
As the ghetto crime genre dissipated in a piff of cliché, the Hughes Brothers followed the career path of contemporaries like Singleton and even Lee by positioning themselves as purveyors of interesting genre films. Their movies generate conversation, but rarely widespread critical acclaim. The brothers are stylists, but as filmmakers, they’re still chasing the success of their debut film. They’ve rarely gotten further than “almost.”
Much of the Hughes identity is twined with their unique background. Sibling teams are not uncommon, but twins? Even better, black twins? You can almost hear Hollywood stumbling over itself to glomp such diversity, and that’s without the Hughes’ Armenian and Iranian heritage, which informs their work as clearly as their black roots and connections to L.A. culture. They defy simple definitions. There’s nothing Hollywood about the films they make; there’s nothing Hollywood about them. In a predominantly white business, the Hughes Brothers are the outsiders, and their resulting work feels unique, loud, and chunky, filled with conflicting influences, conflicting ideas, and, yes, even sibling rivalry and love.
Perhaps it’s this narrative that first attracted me to the Brothers. Even though I’ve never loved any of their films, I’ve liked a few and I’m happy to root for them. I’m a Hughes Brothers cheerleader. Albert Hughes was attached early to the threatened whitewashing of Akira, and his involvement gave me some reason for optimism. I believed that, no matter the quality of the result, it would at least be interesting. Once he left, news of the project became progressively dire until the film recently, mercifully, collapsed completely (for now, at least). In recent years, the brothers have worked more often apart than together and it’s at least possible that the days of the Hughes Brothers as a directing team are at an end.
So, before Hollywood realities sever the team forever, I’m making a commitment to the Hughes Brothers. As their career develops, I’ll add their new films to this project. But first, let’s review the story so far.
Name:
Albert Hughes & Allen Hughes
Birth:
April 1, 1972 in Detroit, Michigan (Albert is older by 9 minutes)
Parents:
Aida Hughes (mother)
Life:
The Hughes spent their early years in Detroit in the care of their Armenian-American mother, Aida, who divorced their father (a man Albert describes as a “street hustler”, and whose name I couldn’t find in my research) when the brothers were only toddlers. Aida moved her family to Pomona, California by 1981 to seek new opportunities, but the rough culture in Pomona threatened to draw the twins into drugs and gang activity. To give her boys a distraction, Aida acquired a home video camera and gave it to them to explore. The gift changed the course of their lives. Soon, the boys were shooting short films together, recreating moments from favorite movies and television shows. They caught the bug.
Aida moved the twins to the white, upscale LA suburb of Claremont to attend high school, and it’s here that the boys began to chafe with the reality of being the wrong color. Frustrated with the Claremont culture and the increased scrutiny of law officers and authority figures, the boys channeled their frustration into their films, producing a class project called How to be a Burglar and a homemade documentary about a real-life crack dealer.
Albert eventually attended film classes at Los Angeles City College and used this experience—as well as their short film The Drive-By—to land the brothers a job producing music videos at Hollywood Records. Their talent and unique perspective earned them jobs with a number of high profile West Coast rap artists, most notably Tupac Shakur.Their friendship with Tupac helped open doors for the brothers, and their debut feature, the violent Menace II Society, premiered in 1993 to critical acclaim and notoriety. Unfortunately, behind-the-scenes conflicts derailed their relationship with Tupac. The brothers had originally promised Tupac a significant role in the film, but attempted to recast the rap star in a smaller role. Tupac responded by sending a group of Crips gangsters to assault the brothers. Tupac was arrested and served jail time for the incident.
After the success of Menace II Society, the Hughes Brothers remained in the crime genre for their followup, Dead Presidents, and the documentary American Pimp, before moving into horror with the adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell. The twins took a long hiatus before their next project, The Book of Eli, a move Albert attributed to sibling fatigue.
First off, when you live the life of a two-headed mutant monster, you both must agree on one thing before you can do it. That said, these mutants really needed a break from each other and, figuratively speaking, we went to the doctor and were surgically removed from one another. We’ve both led different and separate lives since that point, working apart for a bit and, in general, finding ourselves without the confusion of people lumping our personalities together. This sometimes is the most difficult thing about being a twin.
Trademarks:
As a directing duo, the twins split duties. Albert handles the camera and the technical production issues, while Allen works with the actors
Drawn to stories about urban culture, crime, and poverty
Heavily stylized visual design with deep, saturated colors and exaggerated cameras.
Influenced by 1970s western/kung fu/action cinema
Number of Eligible Films:
5
What’s Out:
Although the Hughes Brothers have made their name as a co-directors, they’re branching further and further into solo territory. While I may eventually include solo Hughes films—such as Allen’s Broken City, due sometime next year—solo TV movies and TV shows are, as usual, out.
Therefore, the joint Hughes TV show Touching Evil or Allen’s Knights of South Bronx won’t be a part of the project. Future films will be considered on a case-by-case basis, but for now I’m inclined to include anything directed by the pair or by either brother alone, as long as it’s theatrically released.
Connection to the Previous Project?:
Want to stare at the internet until your eyes bleed? Try to find an simple connection between Arthur Penn and the Hughes Brothers. After hours of looking and scrolling through IMDB, this is all I could find:
Penn was in California in 1965 for photography on The Chase, and he got caught in the Watts Riots. Years later, the Hughes Brothers used the Watts Riots as historical context for their film set in Watts, Menace II Society.
Arthur Penn’s favorite editor, Dede Allen, also worked on Denzel Washington’s John Q. Washington later starred in The Book of Eli! So Penn and the Hughes’ are at least two degrees of separation away!
Notes:
This is a short project, based entirely on my belief that the Hughes Brothers have great films in them, regardless of their relative successes and failures thus far. In each of my write-ups, I’ll devote space to what works like crazy in the film and what falls flat. Later on, I’m thinking about doing something a little different, taking time out of the countdown at some point to post a long essay about one overlooked aspect of their work that I find really fascinating, but that requires its own full post to get at.
This piece began as something else entirely, an article inspired by a paragraph from Film Crit Hulk’s debut post for Badass Digest.
IT’S NOT A QUESTION OF IF THE DARK KNIGHT IS THE AWESOMEST MOVIE EVER OR IF IT’S OVERRATED, BUT THE MILLIONS OF OTHER THINGS THAT MAKE THE FILM INTERESTING. LIKE ITS TREATMENT OF JOKER AS THE ULTIMATE ANARCHIST, THE LOGIC OF WHICH TAKEN TO ITS FURTHEST POSSIBLE POINT…..THE DARK KNIGHTHAS A MILLION GREAT CONVERSATIONS WE’RE NOT HAVING BECAUSE WE’RE TOO BUSY TALKING ABOUT ITS WORTH!
I wrote an article about The Dark Knight a few months ago, but Hulk’s comment gave me an urge to revisit it. Whatever you think about Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, he certainly produces work that rewards repeat viewership, huge sandboxes of ideas to sift through and explore. I had an idea to take a another look at one of the movie’s weaker choices—the Joker’s convoluted plan.
Let me allow the internet to say its piece:
“Then, while the whole town is on alert, we go ahead and have our henchmen kidnap both Dent and Rachel Dawes and strap them in with the bombs in the two abandoned buildings. Then I’ll send Batman after one of them, knowing that this will result in Rachel being killed and Dent being a certain distance from the explosion as to become grotesquely injured and disillusioned. Then I’ll blow up the jail without accidentally killing myself. Gentlemen, it couldn’t be simpler.”
My question was this: If, as Hulk suggests, Joker represents the purest form of anarchy, then why are his plans so ridiculously organized and over-planned?
So, my wife and I grabbed a notebook and charted the Joker’s actions and statements from the beginning of the movie to the end, weighing his deeds against his words, and parsing out exactly what he seems to be thinking at any given moment.
What we learned is that the Joker’s plan isn’t nearly as complex as it seems. Oh, sure, there are complicated parts, but almost none of the Joker’s wins (the Dent/Dawes scenario, the hospital bombing) appear to be part of some master plan that’s clicking into place. He’s never really outsmarting his opponents. After every event, he seems to retreat to assess the playing field and improvise a new strategy. He occasionally hedges his bets, but he’s rarely thinking too many steps ahead. He has a goal, definitely, but like any great chess match, he rethinks his attack after each of his opponent’s moves. To give him credit for some kind of perfectly-executed master plan is a huge stretch. He’s good, but he’s not Deep Blue.
Maybe because of this, as I watched the film from his perspective I became less interested in the details of the Joker’s plan and more interested in who the Joker is and how he’s presented. Slowly, I hit upon an unexpected thought.
The Joker’s not an anarchist, not really. He’s a populist.
True, that’s a strange thing to call a character as hellbent on destruction and murder as the Joker, but the recently revealed teaser for The Dark Knight Rises convinced me that I might be on to something. That trailer recasts classic Batman villains Catwoman and Bane as champions of the workers, inciting violence, dragging the wealthy from their ornate apartments, and generally flipping Gotham into some kind of October Revolution. No matter what else The Dark Knight Rises is about, clearly it will have roots in the gulf between the rich and the poor.
The thing is, I believe that story of class warfare began in The Dark Knight, hidden beneath the caked makeup of a killer clown and his bullets and drums of gas.
This idea came while I struggled to piece together what we actually KNOW about the Joker. He’s designed as a cipher, a complete unknown, but Nolan’s Gotham is built to resemble the real world, and in our world, a lack of clues is still a clue.
What do we know about The Joker?
He’s smart—like next-level smart.
He’s been scarred, but used to look like Heath Ledger.
He has no criminal record or fingerprint on file
The first two points are intriguing—before he was the Joker, he was smart and attractive, two things society tends to reward. We can speculate about what this means (was he wealthy? successful?) but by itself it’s pure guesswork. We’ll have to look elsewhere.
The third point has more potential. The Joker has no fingerprint record. He has no criminal record of any kind. For someone with a passion for loud crimes and mayhem, that’s got to be incredibly rare. If the Joker were a career criminal—a lowlife thug who laughed at the wrong joke, let’s say, and got sliced for his gaffe—we’d have to assume he’d been picked up at least once, right? Even as a juvenile? A mugging, simple burglary, lighting a fire, stealing a car stereo, something. But before the events of the film, the Joker never entered the system, not even once.
That suggests, at least to me, that the Joker is not a career criminal. Crime is a new pursuit, one at which the Joker excels thanks to his unhinged mind and natural talents. In any case, the Joker was once anonymous, one of the masses, and he’s made himself special, mostly in response (as the ending of Batman Begins heavily implies) to the appearance of Batman.
I’ll get back to that later. For now, accepting the idea of the Joker as a talented newcomer to crime, I examined the way Nolan presents him. The Joker’s anonymity informs everything about him, including how he makes an entrance. For example, the film opens with a shot of the Joker standing still on a street corner, his back to us, clown mask in hand and (presumably) makeup on his face. It’s broad daylight in a heavily populated city, but nobody seems to notice. He’s invisible. Despite his ghoulish appearance, he’s one of them. And then he steps forward.
The following sequence—in which the Joker pretends to be a simple bank robber when he’s anything but—ends with the Joker merging a school bus into a street jammed with the same. He blends back into the anonymous crowd. How does someone like the Joker not stand out, all the time? Gotham PD should be flooded with calls and tips about psychotic clowns driving school buses, but once he blends in with the people, he’s gone. Each appearance of the Joker in the film begins with him returning from that hiding place, not simply from nowhere but specifically from the ranks of the working class.
Disguised as a nurse in the hospital
Hiding behind a trucker in a big rig
Hiding out in a warehouse near the shipping docks
Masquerading as a cop
Dragged into Gambol’s bar in a garbage bag, supposedly killed by common gang bangers
Emerging from a restaurant kitchen
It’s this last scene I want to explore. The Joker’s “magic trick” is the most famous part, but a lot of interesting little details go mostly overlooked. Here’s the scene again.
OK, let’s unpack this a bit. First of all, the guys at the table aren’t common crooks. They’re the best of the best, the heads of their various crime families and organizations. These guys are rich, well-known, and (at least before Batman) completely untouchable. The conversation is about their vast stores of cash money and how to protect it. What’s at stake is the wealth and power they’ve spent decades of hard work acquiring. For criminals, at least, these guys are the 1%.
When the Joker gets a mention, the mobsters dismiss him. Not for his actions or his insanity, mind you, but because he wears “a cheap purple suit.” He’s “a nobody.” He’s dismissed because he’s not in the class of the men in the room.
A moment later, the Joker appears, walking out of the shadows like he’s part of the kitchen crew or the help interrupting the boss’s party. Sure, he earns a seat at the table through a show of force, but the mobsters smirk at him. From their perspective, they’re simply humoring a bad gag.
But then the Joker talks sense, and it worries them. He casts doubt on the security of their money, and they react. He tells them that he’ll kill the Batman (who, in this case, represents government oversight about as clearly as he represents anything) and that gets their attention. And what does he want?
Half.
The Joker asks for half of their accumulated wealth. He did nothing to help them earn their money, but now he wants an equal share. Sure, he’s contracting a job, but it’s a job he never actually performs. Eventually, he’ll take that money and fritter it away on a bonfire (“If you had our money, you’d just waste it!” you can almost imagine them moaning), while doing nothing at all to earn it. The deal he made was to kill Batman, not to find the money or silence Lau. And yet he takes it anyway. He rises up from the anonymous, from the working class, from being a “nobody” in a cheap suit, and he takes half of the wealth from the special elite and sends them on the run.
In fact, the Joker seems to have a particular taste for putting wealthy people on their heels, as well as for attracting help from Gotham’s blue collars. The Joker’s most visible minions in the film are the insane idiots the cops keep catching (the schizophrenic shooter, the fat guy with the cell phone in his belly) but the Joker only uses nutjobs when he expects—actually, when he requires—them to be caught. The jobs that call for more reliable help wind up in the hands of corrupt cops on the mob payroll, cops like Ramirez whose struggle with an expensive and oppressive medical system (a flashpoint for the 99%) put her in desperate need of cash. It’s these cops who kidnap Rachel and Harvey for the bomb dilemma, who poison the Police Commissioner, and who put the judge into her rigged car.
But Dent’s bigwig fundraiser in Bruce’s penthouse? For that The Joker shows up personally, and he takes special delight in putting the in-crowd in their place. See, the crooks were right. Despite his obvious talents, the Joker was a nobody, and he displays a unique rage against the people who had the opportunities, who were too wealthy and powerful to be anonymous.
This isn’t the pattern of an anarchist, but rather the pattern of someone with an axe to grind, someone who wants everyone to suffer, but who wants the rich to suffer more than their fair share.
Many people point to the Joker’s speech at Harvey Dent’s bedside as the truest manifestation of his philosophy. The Joker talks about the pointlessness of plans and the blissful beauty of anarchy. But, remember, the Joker lies. All the time. It’s what he did for breakfast this morning. So why give his hospital speech more weight than any of his other, conflicting rants? When he tells the crooks that he wants to kill Batman, that’s clearly a lie, and when he tells Harvey that he believes in anarchy, that’s also a lie. He doesn’t put the gun in Harvey’s hand to bring anarchy into Gotham. He does it to destroy Harvey, because that serves the Joker’s purpose and gets him a step closer to the goal. There’s nothing anarchic about Joker’s action as it leads one step closer to a specific, calculated result–equality
The only time the Joker tells the entire truth is exactly when you’d expect the villain to spill his beans, the finale confrontation on the high rise platform. What he wants, more than anything, is Gotham’s soul or, as Batman puts it, to prove that everyone is as ugly as he is.
Or as ugly as they are. See, the Joker’s actions in the finale and at the peak of his plan convince me that he’s telling at least a half-truth in an earlier scene, the police interrogation scene. There, the Joker describes how Batman changed the rules in Gotham between the oppressors and the oppressed. Now that Batman, supposedly one of the oppressed, has risen up to fight back, there must be a Joker to meet him. Two sides of the coin, yes, but both exceptional. The rest of the movie is spent trying to get the people of Gotham to act as the Joker does, to shake off the chains of anonymity and become nihilistically exceptional in the Joker’s own image, to destroy one another using their rational self-interest.
This is why he points the ferries at one another, why he forces Gambol’s men to kill or be killed, why he feeds the drug lord to his own dogs. In a way, the Joker speaks for the 1%, for the followers of Ayn Rand who believe self-interest is the only real motivation. But where the Joker veers off is the application of this philosophy. He can’t stand the idea of remaining exceptional.
Batman was born into wealth and spent and spent his billions to become exceptional. The Joker, on the other hand, rose through his own ingenuity and natural talent. They’re both elite, but The Joker’s sin is that he doesn’t want to keep the status he earned to himself. No, the Joker wants to share.
See, just as he drags the wealthy elite (both the criminal and the legitimate) down into the gutter, he attempts to bring the gutter up to the elite. He seeks a balance, a beautiful nightmare where Gotham burns and all are equal because all life is worth exactly the same–nothing. There is no wealth in Joker’s heaven, no elite class. There is only alive or dead, and every citizen either kills or is killed. The Joker hopes to convince the city to destroy itself by either compromising Batman’s moral strength (which he fails to do, even though he’s willing to die to do it) or by corrupting the incorruptible symbol of hope, Dent (which he succeeds in doing before Batman hides his victory.) The Joker seeks equality and balance between all layers of Gotham society, but he wants it in a way that creates a hell in which nobody can possibly be happy.
By now you’ll realize I’m presenting a wildly warped view of the populist philosophy behind the Occupy movement and other rallying points of the 99%. None of this represents the actual, on-the-ground thinking behind last year’s widespread protests. Am I reading too much into what I’m seeing? Perhaps twisting the goals of the 99% to fit some intriguing accidents in the way the film depicts the Joker?
Maybe. But I don’t think so.
The thing is, the Chris Nolan Batman movies, as they’ve so far developed, are turning into an oddly enthusiastic endorsement of the fascistic, right-wing policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations. Critics like Devin Faraci have noted that the ending reads like a pat on the back for the Patriot Act. “I’m not thrilled,” Batman seems to be saying “that I have to spy on every free citizen of Gotham to find this terrorist, but I saved lives and so the end justifies the means.” And then Morgan Freeman smiles wisely, destroys the system that we’ll never use again (unless we need it, right?), and we fade out. Writers long ago made the connection between superheroes and fascism—a subject most notably explored in Alan Moore’s Watchmen—but Nolan seems to be gift-wrapping this philosophy, barely disguised, as consequence-free entertainment. I have no idea about Nolan’s personal politics, but his Batman films have championed the notion of the exceptional exercising rich man’s burden to keep the poor from destroying themselves—class was a central theme in Batman Begins and it appears to be a major, major part of The Dark Knight Rises.
(Nolan even considered filming at an actual Occupy protest, and it now seems possible, even probable, that those scenes would have been connected to the civil unrest Bane and Catwoman unleash. In other words, the real-world Occupy protestors would be painted as either villains or pawns of the villains, which might explain why Nolan eventually shied away from the idea.)
I’m not saying that The Dark Knight script was written to paint the Joker as a populist rabble-rouser; the Nolans and David Goyer may have actually believed they were writing a pure anarchist. But if the Occupy movement has its roots in the unrest over foreign wars—and it does—then those ideas were already bouncing around our culture and starting to form and may have found their way into the screenplay unintentionally, sprouting from the same garden as the decidedly intentional “truckload of soldiers” comment Joker uses to point out Gotham’s hypocrisy. If the Joker is mad about wartime apathy, then what else might he be mad about?
So, no, the actual real-life Occupy protestors and supporters of the 99% wouldn’t support the Joker or his actions. But I’d remind you that if these Batman films are truly from the point of view of the 1%–and our main character is in the 1% of the 1%–then it stands to reason that the Joker’s actions are seen through that point of view as well. And we already know how the elite class sees this movement:
Is this guy a sociopath just itching to spray down a row of peaceful people because, fuck, pepper spray is really fun? Maybe. It’s possible. I don’t know the guy. But it’s just as likely to me that this image resulted from the collision of two ideas. The people on the ground had the idea that they were protesting peacefully as the Constitution allows, and the guy with the can of spray decided that their protest represented something he’s employed to fight—anarchy. To the people in charge of defending the gates, challenging the system looks an awful lot like terrorism, and the America the Occupy protestors want to see looks an awful lot like hell. Specifically, it looks like Joker’s dream, with the world turning on itself and drowning in poisonous ideas because we can’t all be exceptional. The Joker’s brand of terrorism may not resemble the actual populist movement, but it comes mighty close to how that movement appears to the people who have all the money and the power and stand to lose it. The elite no longer snort and call these people nobodies. No, instead they’re passing laws.
We won’t know Nolan’s plans for sure until his trilogy’s conclusion, but I’ve got a fairly good guess about how it’s shaping up. The first film was about burdens of the wealthy, and the last film appears to be about the misguided, manipulated poor attempting to destroy their wealthy protectors. If that’s right, and if The Dark Knight is really only about an anarchist, then the excellent, middle film no longer has an organic purpose in the trilogy Nolan has built. I don’t think that’s the case. To my eyes, the Joker represents the first volley towards equality in Gotham, but it’s a failed equality built on extremism and terror, and Batman’s next battle is to prevent a more organized, crystallized version of Joker’s ideal from coming to pass. To most, the Joker is simply a terrorist, but I have a feeling that when Bane throws Gotham into a shooting war, and when the poor drag the rich from their houses, and when expensive furniture burns in the street, the Joker will peek through the window of his Arkham cell and smile.
Who wants to talk about The Dark Knight for a minute?
A lot of chatter circulated in the movie-nerdist blogosphere last week concerning Jim Emerson’s video critique of the truck chase in Christopher Nolan’s second Batman epic. Much of the attention focused around Emerson’s notion that Christopher Nolan is overrated and/or awful as a film director, and also Batman.
I thought Emerson’s video was interesting, if deeply flawed, but I hadn’t planned to weigh in; way smarter people already had the issue very well covered by the time I arrived. As the articles poured in, however, In noticed one important piece of the puzzle that was being overlooked, a piece crucial to understanding the full context of the argument.
First, some background. Emerson is a critic and the founding editor-in-chief of rogerebert.com, and I’ve linked to him here ever since hanging up my net shingle. He’s a hyper-intelligent critic with strong opinions, and he occasionally drives me completely batty with rage. In other words, he’s a good read. Anyway, Emerson launched a new series of videos a couple of weeks ago, videos intended to dissect and analyze the craft of editing action scenes. For his first video, Emerson gave us this:
It’s long, I know. But it’s still The Dark Knight, and most people love that movie, so you should click.
Did you watch it? Pretty crazy, right? By the time Emerson is done, it’s like, holy crap is that scene hard to follow, or what? And since one of the laws of the internet is that any post involving Batman will have an equal and obstinate reaction, the anger began to build. Intellectual, persnickety, movie-nerd anger. We’re weird critters, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, Emerson’s video popped up at Devin Faraci’s BadassDigest, and the comments there led me to a fabulous three-part mega essay by Film Critic Hulk about the proper cutting of action sequences…
(By the way, do you read Film Critic Hulk? Because you totally should be reading Film Critic Hulk. He’s quickly turning into one of the most thoughtful and thorough critics on the internet, which is insane because he writes posts in all caps with broken English and his word count is apocalyptic. Still, awesome.)
…and then on Friday, the video gets totally BLASTED by Joseph Kahn, director of Torque and Detention. Kahn has a hard time finding ANY value in Emerson’s argument, which to me is a bit of an over-correction, because Emerson is definitely not all the way wrong. Emerson correctly notes several continuity errors, points out a problem with The Joker’s rocket aim, and correctly identifies a fairly muddy perspective glitch, where the Joker and Batman appear to be on a collision course, only to have Batman wreck into the wrong lane of traffic.
(Although one could argue that the cop repeatedly screaming “Look Out!” in the truck clears that problem up, but there’s still confusion in the cut.)
But, see, Emerson is also wrong a LOT. As Kahn notes, Emerson indulges in tangents about how HE would have directed the scene, a class felony in film criticism. He also sets up a slew of false arguments to fill gaps when there’s nothing to talk about, and it’s one of these arguments that I’m going to look at more closely.
One of Emerson’s big problems with the sequence begins at 02:50 in the video as Harvey Dent takes a seat in the back of the police van. We clearly see Harvey put his back to the passenger side of the vehicle while he shares dialogue with Rachel, just before the door shuts on him.
The very next shot we have of Harvey—and pretty much the only shot of Harvey we have for the rest of the sequence, a shot that Nolan returns to often—is this one:
Emerson argues that this is distracting for the audience because they can’t confirm where Harvey is sitting. Is he still on the passenger side? There’s no window, no context, and no establishing shot that confirms Harvey’s place in the van.
What Emerson is talking about is basic film language, the kind of shots that most moviegoers never notice, but if neglected can transform a good film into unwatchable junk. Basically, no single shot in any movie actually relates to any other single shot in the movie. Every shot in every movie is a snippet of disconnected time, and it’s how the shots are lined up next to one another that creates meaning for the audience. In this case, that second shot of Harvey could have been shot on a different day or in a different truck, or it could have been pulled from a totally different movie and jammed in there. It doesn’t directly confirm Harvey’s position in the space, and by itself, it means absolutely nothing. Emerson’s argument is that our minds are aware of this, even if we’re not, creating subtle confusion as our minds struggle to piece the action together in the background while our eyes constantly download new and sometimes contradictory information. It’s kind of like when you’re at work and you’re not done with Tuesday’s report, but then somebody drops Wednesday’s on your desk.
This is the first result for “semiotics” on Google Images.
What Emerson glosses over, however, is the inconvenient fact that this shot does NOT exist in a vacuum. If the truck chase was all the movie there was, as in the entire movie begins with the helicopter shot of the convoy, then Emerson’s right. Who is Harvey? Where is he sitting? What truck is he in? We’d have no way of knowing.
But that didn’t happen. Like 30 seconds earlier, the audience watched Harvey get into the truck and sit down on the passenger side during an important and memorable bit of conversation. THAT’s your establishing shot. Our brains didn’t reset when the truck started. Nolan relies on that earlier shot to make sense of this one. We already believe Harvey is on the passenger side of the truck, and the visual information in the shot reinforces our belief.
Let’s look at the image again.
Note that the camera shoots Harvey cheated to his left side, and that the truck’s light source shines on his right. Judging by the shadow on the wall, the light source appears to be positioned close and just above Harvey, which most of us would immediately (and probably subconsciously) assume to be some kind of ceiling or high light of the truck. Lights like that are usually placed in the center to maximize the lit area, and since Harvey’s right side is facing towards center, that means Harvey is most likely sitting, surprise surprise, on the passenger side, exactly where he’s supposed to be and where our minds already had him based on the earlier scene’s information.
At least, that’s how my mind works. Emerson’s apparently works like this:
Emerson has other questionable points in his video, but I chose to highlight this issue of Harvey’s seating arrangement because I think it’s a symbol for what’s really going on here overall. I’ve been reading Jim Emerson for years. He’s a really, really smart guy and he analyzes film with a gumshoe-like attention to detail that’s often fascinating. He knows his shit, so he should also be smart enough to know that he’s standing on some pretty weak legs here.
Unless, that is, he’s got some other agenda.
Emerson’s name has grown in infamy since this video appeared online, but for those of us who have been following him for a while, this is just the latest chapter in Emerson’s strange obsession with Christopher Nolan. The truth is that has been grinding an ax against Nolan for years, and this video marks the moment where it’s finally starting to seem a little weird. If you scour Emerson’s blog, you’ll uncover pages and pages of anti-Nolan writings. This link goes to a page full of stories bashing The Dark Knight, including at least two articles about Emerson’s distaste for a 4 second shot of a school bus leaving a bank.
Eagle-eyes will notice that he hasn’t posted a Dark Knight article since 2009. That’s because he had something else to write about. My favorite part of this article is the insecure bit at the bottom where he posts Roger Ebert’s “permission” for people to not like Inception, as if that permission were necessary. A preemptive defense from Nolanites.
Here’s a “review” of The Prestige where he admits to having no interest in the film, compares it incongruously to Shyamalan’s Signs, then dismisses it just as he predicted.
And when given the chance to write about any director he pleases for an entirely different site, Emerson chooses a familiar target.
Dude just genuinely doesn’t like Nolan. That’s totally his right, of course, and as long as his criticism is intelligent and informed, bring it on. Nolan’s not perfect, and as a developing filmmaker, he needs all the puncturing he can get. How else is he supposed to improve if he’s drunk off his own myth?
Unfortunately, Emerson’s rants are starting to seem less like valid criticism and more the guy at the end of Body Snatchers, telling us to watch the skies. I know it must be frustrating for a critic to watch as a director he doesn’t enjoy is gradually canonized into movie sainthood, as seems to be happening right now with Nolan. It’s only natural for Emerson to feel like his education places him in the unique position of being able to make a stand, to turn heads in the public and get a little balance back into the conversation. Unfortunately, I’ve seen this before.
It reminds me a lot of Bosley Crowther.
If you read the Arthur Penn Project, you may remember his name from my post about Bonnie and Clyde. Crowther was the old school New York critic who didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde and couldn’t accept that the general public did. He never missed an opportunity to bash the film and went out his way to engage with his readers even as the mud he threw just found its way back inside his door.
The comparison isn’t completely valid. Emerson isn’t attacking from a position of power as Crowther was, and Crowther was demonstrably wrong while Emerson is arguably right to call The Dark Knight overrated (I love the film, but there is an argument to be made.) Emerson is also unlikely to have his career totally destroyed.
“Unless I feel like it.”
He may be in danger, however, of having his voice as a critic mean something less than it should. Emerson went out of his way to launch an ongoing video series with a drive-by attack at a film against which he seems to have some kind of vendetta. His attack consists of weak arguments and strawmen designed to give himself a victory hash on the scoreboard. Even the very basis of the argument could be considered a strawman, because it’s not as if people even watch Dark Knight for of the action. Didn’t we already know that Nolan’s strength isn’t in his action sequences? Didn’t we establish this with Batman Begins? The draw of The Dark Knight wasn’t the action, it was Heath Ledger’s performance and, yes, the tight storytelling, and the way the film presents these cartoonish characters in a more serious, palatable way that appeals to a mass audience who wouldn’t be caught dead at a comic book convention. Attack Dark Knight for its action? Might as well call Se7en a rotten film because you don’t like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Emerson’s vendetta risks compromising his position as a critic. Armond White has written himself into the role of a contrarian so completely that his criticism carries no weight anymore. Like or dislike a movie, anyone who disagrees can just say “White just likes to be different.” Nobody takes his opinion seriously anymore. If Emerson keeps this up, he risks becoming “just that guy who has a hate on for Chris Nolan.” As soon as your readers don’t believe what you’re writing comes from a place of honesty, your value as a critic goes poof.
So let people have their Dark Knight, Mr. Emerson. You’ve made your point clearly, consistently, and persistently. Believe me, you’re on record, and if the world one day decides that The Dark Knight is the sloppy mess you believe it to be, then you’ll be vindicated, just like Pauline Kael was when she came down on the right side of Bonnie and Clyde. Do you hate the film? Then hate the film. Write your post and move on, because there’s nothing to be gained wasting so much time and energy simply trying to prove yourself right. There are plenty of other films in the sea.
Besides, if you want to analyze incomprehensible action scenes, you’ve only just begun to fight.
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Mission
I'm a writer and movie enthusiast. This site is my excuse to explore the complete works of really great or interesting filmmakers, from the forgotten stuff to the classics. And then I wreck it all by ranking them, just for fun.
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