this requires my squee.
Dec. 1st, 2011 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_ragnarokSo, last night I read this article speculating about what Nolan intends to do with his last Batman movie. (Link contains spoilers for previous Nolan Batverse movies, and speculation about the next one.)
THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS OK.
My favorite thing about The Dark Knight was the ending. I literally left the theatre going HOLY SHIT THIS WAS PERFECT. PERFECT I SAY.
Because the thing is? For ages before that movie, I craved an ending where the hero chooses to do the greater good by shedding his humanity. There's always that conflict, isn't there, "Do I choose my loved one or do I choose the good of the world?" "Do I choose my friends or humanity?" And the hero is always expected to pick the first. Because by doing so, he is choosing to be human; we are animals who live in packs, after all.
But so long as you go for the myth of the Sole Savior, the one person on whose shoulders everything rests - then he's not really subject to human herd behavior anymore. He doesn't "get by with a little help from his friends": at best, his friends get a token moment to show their usefulness, but they're never his (and it's nearly always a he, isn't it?) full partners; they're his sidekicks. Assistants. He doesn't work as part of the grand machine that is society. He is apart from it. Above it - in Batman's case, very often literally so.
When someone like this "chooses their humanity", it seems to me... condescending, in a way. He's just a man! You know, better than you in every way, but here, he chose his girlfriend over the fate of the world, so you must sympathize with him!
But TDK went a different route. In TDK Batman chose humanity in general over his own humanity. He chose to become a tool, an instrument of justice. He's not better than you because he just is, he's better than you because he became so specialized at his chosen task that he left behind all these meaningless trifles known as human emotions.
I really, really want to see more movies doing that. Where, if we have a main Big Heroic Hero, then he's literally set apart from humanity, and it's not really his story anymore; he's transformed from a charater into a (scary-effective) plot device, and we're getting the story of his support crew, of the villains he faces, of the city he saves.
(This is why Sherlock Holmes is so effective as a protagonist. Or the Doctor. They're the heros, but their companions are the ones telling the story. In all honesty, I'd prefer the other way around with less One Big Hero, more One Big Team with no real defined hierarchy. Where shit what needs doing just gets done by whoever's best at it. Global Frequency did it really, really well.
But I digress.)
So I truly, dearly hope that TDKR takes the path aligned in the article. Both because the sheer meta of it makes me intensely happy, and because, on a perfectly shallow level? The possibility it suggests for John Blake is just YUM. :D
THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS OK.
My favorite thing about The Dark Knight was the ending. I literally left the theatre going HOLY SHIT THIS WAS PERFECT. PERFECT I SAY.
Because the thing is? For ages before that movie, I craved an ending where the hero chooses to do the greater good by shedding his humanity. There's always that conflict, isn't there, "Do I choose my loved one or do I choose the good of the world?" "Do I choose my friends or humanity?" And the hero is always expected to pick the first. Because by doing so, he is choosing to be human; we are animals who live in packs, after all.
But so long as you go for the myth of the Sole Savior, the one person on whose shoulders everything rests - then he's not really subject to human herd behavior anymore. He doesn't "get by with a little help from his friends": at best, his friends get a token moment to show their usefulness, but they're never his (and it's nearly always a he, isn't it?) full partners; they're his sidekicks. Assistants. He doesn't work as part of the grand machine that is society. He is apart from it. Above it - in Batman's case, very often literally so.
When someone like this "chooses their humanity", it seems to me... condescending, in a way. He's just a man! You know, better than you in every way, but here, he chose his girlfriend over the fate of the world, so you must sympathize with him!
But TDK went a different route. In TDK Batman chose humanity in general over his own humanity. He chose to become a tool, an instrument of justice. He's not better than you because he just is, he's better than you because he became so specialized at his chosen task that he left behind all these meaningless trifles known as human emotions.
I really, really want to see more movies doing that. Where, if we have a main Big Heroic Hero, then he's literally set apart from humanity, and it's not really his story anymore; he's transformed from a charater into a (scary-effective) plot device, and we're getting the story of his support crew, of the villains he faces, of the city he saves.
(This is why Sherlock Holmes is so effective as a protagonist. Or the Doctor. They're the heros, but their companions are the ones telling the story. In all honesty, I'd prefer the other way around with less One Big Hero, more One Big Team with no real defined hierarchy. Where shit what needs doing just gets done by whoever's best at it. Global Frequency did it really, really well.
But I digress.)
So I truly, dearly hope that TDKR takes the path aligned in the article. Both because the sheer meta of it makes me intensely happy, and because, on a perfectly shallow level? The possibility it suggests for John Blake is just YUM. :D
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Date: 2011-12-01 03:14 pm (UTC)