Auteur No More
Chris Nolan’s Shallow Bat Magic
(From Hollywood Vs. Dogville, © by Jake Horsley)
“It’s that kind of thinking—you’re in a desperate situation, you gotta
have a job, you’re offered a lot of money… It affects you. . . . The key to
that kind of system is, ‘What’s his price? How can he be had? How can we get
him interested?’ And there are a lot of people a lot smarter than I am who
think about nothing else twenty-four hours a day. I’m smart enough to know they
might find some way to get me. You just try to keep on a different road.”
—Brian De Palma
It at least took Hollywood a few movies and almost ten
years to bury Lee Tamahori; Chris Nolan, on the other hand, looks set to go
under after only three movies, swallowed up by the shadow of Batman. Yet a mere
seven years ago, in 1998, Nolan made his obscure debut with Following,
breaking through onto the indie scene in full glory two years later with the
much-celebrated Memento (which took over a year to find a distributor in
the US, but finally became a hit in 2000). Memento led to Nolan’s
signing up with Soderbergh and Clooney’s Section Eight and making Insomnia in
2002, a more or less mainstream Al Pacino thriller that artfully subverted the
cop genre and became one of the most powerful auteur works of recent years
(albeit based on a Norwegian movie of the same name, and from a script by
Hillary Seitz). Then, in 2005, along came a dark knight; though only time can
say for sure, judging by Batman Begins, Nolan’s development as an auteur
filmmaker has ended with only his fourth picture.
Memento was based on a short story by Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, and was a
measured work of quiet intensity. It concerned Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a
one-time insurance agent suffering from short-term memory loss. As the
character explains over and over again, he is “unable to make new memories.”
His memory functions much like a goldfish in a bowl, like a tape that is
continuously rewound and erased to make space for new memories. The twist is
that Leonard is on a revenge mission, seeking his wife’s killer. A revenge
drama about “the futility of revenge,” as Nolan put it, Memento was a canny meditation on the nature of perception, memory,
delusion, belief, and emotional need, and the real fascination of the movie had
less to do with the plot than with observing, and gradually coming to grasp,
the nature of Leonard’s condition. A clinical study of dementia dressed up with
guns and car chases and femme fatales, the film achieved a haunting, hypnotic
quality as rare and precious in movies as it is central to their essence.
Though it was anything but leisurely paced, Memento
had some of the trancelike fascination of Vertigo.
It was film noir eating itself, a postmodern, Surrealist puzzle par excellence.
Nolan followed Memento with Insomnia,
for Section Eight, seamlessly fusing a mainstream, star-studded genre piece
with his own unmistakable cinematic vision. In the course of the film, Will
Dormer (Al Pacino) went from being a good cop to a bad cop, and in the process
(less than half an hour into the film), Insomnia
mutated into something way beyond your average Hollywood police drama. The film
positively reeked of Patricia Highsmith and the psychology of complicity—a
post-modern, post-Memento Strangers on a Train, it fulfilled the
promise of every cop n’ killer doppelganger/shadow Hollywood chase revenge
movie ever made, and though it wasn’t as tricky or as ingenious as Memento, it was an even more affecting
work. With moral depths closer to Dostoyevsky than Die Hard, Insomnia took the basic components of an
Al Pacino policer and rearranged them, subtly and with disturbing ambiguity,
into poetry; in the process, it
completed its own journey of transformation from a bracing psychodrama into full-blooded
Shakespearean tragedy.
All of these attributes made Nolan ideally suited for
his fourth movie, Batman Begins, a movie which hurled him into $180
million blockbuster terrain. Watching the film, it’s easy to imagine how Nolan
and his co-writer David S. Goyer started with a vision, determined to create a
rich and imaginative reworking of the all-too-familiar Batman mythos that would
be acceptable to Warner Bros. and justify the enormous budget with a big action
summer smash hit to resurrect the franchise. Along the way, all Nolan and
Goyer’s best intentions were waylaid, shackled to a Hollywood franchise based
on a beloved comic book character that (for most audiences) was always going to
be closer to action hero cliché than mythological Jungian archetype.
Using what we can only suppose passes for depth
psychology in Hollywood, Nolan made a valiant but vain attempt to inject
dramatic authenticity into the old familiar tale; but since he was
contractually bound to cut to the chase and deliver the goods (Batman franchise
product no. 5), the philosophy felt rushed, cursory, contrived. There isn’t a
single scene in the film that exists for its own sweet sake, or that is allowed
to play at a leisurely pace and unfold at a natural rhythm, so developing some
depth. It’s all there to keep the motor turning and get the movie where it’s
going: Batman kicks ass. The characters and the story—the
archetypal/psychological underlayers that Nolan works so hard to get in there,
finally even Nolan himself—are steamrollered by a big blind machine of a movie,
moving relentlessly forward with no more purpose than any other Hollywood
blockbuster—thrills, spills and big summertime profits. Audiences expecting
another Hollywood action flick may have been pleasantly surprised to find a
little more depth, realism, character development and archetypal resonance to Batman
Begins than your average comic book movie. Those expecting to see the
latest auteur work from Christopher Nolan, however, can only have left the
theater wondering what the hell happened. The answer was simple: another auteur
down.
It’s easy enough to see how an artist like Nolan might
have been drawn to a dark, complex myth like Batman. It’s also easy to imagine
how he might take the plunge—all the way into the Hollywood Trap—fired up by a
sincere and passionate desire to bring something new to the franchise, and by
the genuine though misguided belief that he could succeed where others have
failed. On the film’s release, Nolan remarked how, “Over sixty-six years, there
have been all kinds of things that were tried with Batman and didn’t stick.
Somehow they didn’t feed into the elemental mythology of what Batman is. For
me, it would be the mark of great success for this film if there are a couple
of things that do stick.”[1]
Not exactly the loftiest of goals, admittedly, but
with his sights set suitably low, Nolan attained his objective. Batman
Begins comes closer to understanding the Batman myth—and to translating it
into a Hollywood blockbuster for teen-heavy audiences to thrill to—than any
other Batman movie to date. A couple of things even “stick” (the bats, for one,
and Batman’s first time out, when he leaps from a rooftop and winds up clinging
to a drain pipe). But after $180 million and two years’ work, capturing on
screen a couple of moments of pop mythology already immortalized by two classic
graphic novels isn’t really what I’d call a “great success.” In the end, the
Hollywood machine is more powerful than any creative individual, and its will
is not for “elemental mythology” but for a big, dumb action blockbuster.
Hollywood’s will all but annihilates Nolan’s desire for a subtle, nuanced
psychodrama and leaves audiences with a slightly smarter big dumb action
blockbuster. How could a filmmaker as intelligent and sophisticated as Nolan
ever believe he could transform a Hollywood franchise with a little vision and
some good intentions? Probably, he never thought he could, and felt compromised
right from the start. But if he winds up doing two more Batman flicks, he may
as well kiss his gifts for subtly nuanced psychodramas goodbye, because
Hollywood will squeeze him dry. Whatever’s left of them will be used up raising
big dumb blockbusters out of the quagmire of terminal mediocrity.
Hollywood isn’t solely to blame for scuppering Nolan’s
vision and reducing it to its crudest elements, however, because that’s exactly
what most audience members want from a superhero flick. People don’t go
to a superhero movie for psychological realism or archetypal drama; they go to
see an escapist action fantasy of self-empowerment, to see good conquer evil in
as stylish and rousing a manner as Hollywood’s shallow magic can conjure.
Mythic underlayers are all very well, so long as they embellish the action and
give it an extra kick; when they threaten to impede it, however—or prove too
disturbing and thought-provoking to allow for the woozy bliss-out of escapist
fantasy—then those underlayers are quickly glossed over. In Batman Begins,
the supposed depth and realism is all on the surface, providing an artsy sheen
to the mindless action and making it a lot fresher and more vital than the last
couple of Batman duds. Nolan succeeds in that, but big deal. In the process, he
undermines his talent, and turns into a former artist reduced to comic book
mythologizing. If that was what Nolan was aiming for, he hit the bullseye. But
he never for a moment transcends the pulp roots of the material (as Frank
Miller did with Dark Knight and Year One); he just squanders $180
million transplanting them from one medium to another.
There is a common assumption that
comic books adhere to a lower standard—aesthetically and dramatically—than
other art forms, an assumption that Hollywood is temperamentally disposed to go
along with (having congenitally lower standards of its own). Judging by the
glowing reviews of Nolan’s film, any treatment of a superhero story that isn’t
basically sub-literate is greeted as if it were Shakespeare, and any summer
blockbuster that is halfway coherent, that is possessed of a rudimentary amount
of integrity and fidelity to its story and characters, and that doesn’t
actively insult audiences’ intelligence, is seen as a virtual revelation. Batman
Begins is good “sophisticated” action-fantasy fare for teenagers, and as a
dumb Batman flick smartened up by an auteur sensibility, it delivers the goods.
But coming from an erstwhile artist of psychological subtlety and depth—and one
of the leading talents in American movies supposedly on his way to
maturity—it’s a real bummer. Apparently Nolan couldn’t resist getting his hands
on that big Hollywood train set, even when the tracks were laid down and he
knew exactly where they would take him. Batman Begins may not have
insulted the audiences’ intelligence, but it sure as hell throws Nolan’s into
question.
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