Esai:The Glare is Back!

You’ve seen that glare in Stanley Kubrick’s films. The main characters usually squint into the screen with contempt. Even the supercomputer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey gave such impression! The last time you saw this glare was when a rich doctor named Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) was glaring at the screen expressing his sexual desire to an anonymous person in a masked-orgy. It was in 1999 Eyes Wide Shut, and Kubrick died shortly after finishing the filming .

Stanley Kubrick is known for mastering to portray elegantly and beautifully how humanity falls. Kubrick did this through references on classical music (2001), painting (Barry Lyndon), stage performance (Clockwork), technology (Clockwork and Dr. Strangelove), crossed with cinematic possibilities, including characterization. Characters in his films – Alexander DeLarge (Clockwork), Barry Lyndon (Barry Lyndon), Jack Torrance (The Shining), Gomer Pyle (Full Metal Jacket), and Bill Harford (Eyes Wide Shut) – made that glaring expression, which could also be seen in many of Kubrick’s pose in his portraits. Genius and insanity sometimes mixed up within the creator and his or her creations.

Now look at this clown in purple garb and painted face in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. He walks in dancing, his metal stick screeches as he drags it on the floor, similar to when Alex DeLarge from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange enters luxurious mansion to perform his vicious deeds. “Beautiful” was the adjective used to describe what Alex did with his stick in Clockwork. But with similar kind of worship toward violence, this painted-face clown has outdated Alex. The sex element in this clown’s deed is not a physical one that could be depicted frontally on screen, but an almost irresistible temptation in Jungian mode of thinking challenging established mind and humanely order. He believes that deep down within human’s existence lies chaos; and human being has a very strong desire to go with that.

He paints his face like a Native American in his war-mask. He does it to match his nemesis, a man wearing black mask and bat-shape garb made of Kevlar, titanium, and other expensive materials. Only by wearing freakish outfit could this unnamed person dubbed as The Joker match the psychopathic ‘batman’ who goes out of his mansion every night dropping mob boss from four stories building and doing other extreme violence to scare criminals. This obsessive Batman has been using psychological warfare to his enemies, and this could only be matched with the same apparatus. And the unfunny Joker-character knows his tools pretty much. Even a pencil could be used in an extremely out-of-the-box fashion.

We used to call people painting their faces and turning them as war-mask savage or barbarian, yet the term must be reviewed seeing how The Joker’s self-awareness apparently belongs to post-modernist mode of thinking. He is not only calling himself ‘ahead the curve’ instead of a monster to describe self-awareness of his monstrosity. Self-awareness being the landmark of modern human mind is mocked by his seriousness when saying ‘why so serious?’ He even refers jokingly to one of the most quoted lines in cinema history, Jerry Maguire’s ‘you complete me,’ to describe his position as the film’s antagonist.

The war then became so severe. Batmans has cornered the criminals and they pushed back through Joker. Is Joker a supervillain? Well, the question should be: is Batman a superhero? Violence bears violence and Joker has made clear his message that he is only a consequence, not the cause of this war. He experiments in every level of human consciousness, positioning himself as a broker between a human being and his or her worst nightmare, which is to be the executor in an assassination or an almost-random massacre.

Then we come to the list of victims in this war. The first and the foremost is sanity. Batman, The Dark Knight, is not alone in Gotham City knighthood war against crime. There are knight-with-a-badge named James Gordon and The White Knight Harvey Dent on his side . Batman and his fellow knights believe they are on the sane side of the war since they are for the law and order. But they’re wrong. Batman is the prima-causa of this insanity when he pushes the band of criminals to their fear with his crime-fighting obsession. Then the determinedHarvey fuels up the feud, making apoint-of-no-return for the crime to fight back with desperation. The Joker intervenes, and the war is no longer one of crime versus law and order. The unstoppable force versus immovable object has caused damageto the surrounding, and Gotham’s White Knight – who represents order and sanity – is the first to fall.

Harvey Dent turns into Two-Face, half-monster half-pain. A man with an obsession of his kind just needs a little push, and the clown dressed in a nurse uniform armed with remote controlled-bomb has effectively turned chaos into a new order. Harvey gives in to The Joker’s rule of the game and leaves for his own vengeance scheme. There is only The Dark Knight left with his knight-with-a-badge sidekick to give Gotham protection and desperation at the same time.

The film believes there’s no such thing as heroism. Nolan uses this superhero material as anti-heroism statement and that is the amazing thing of it. Its comic fans might not be surprised by this. Such bold choice to present Batman story to adult readers has been started with band of mavericks and geniuses such as Grant Morrison, Frank Miller and Allan Moore and the likes. The question for the comic book fans is what it would be like if Jonathan Nolan were given a chance to write the comic book.

Now Christopher Nolan has brought back the glare to the screen, and surely he couldn’t do it without the assistance of the late Heath Ledger. However, Ledger wouldn’t have any chance without Nolan providing the stage for him. And this stage has the complexity multiple to what Kubrick has done. The grey area in war between good and evil is dominating the landscape. This is The Joker’s playground and nothing would fit better for Ledger to steal from what Malcolm MacDowell has done as Alex in Clockwork. The shadowy Gotham City in The Dark Knight is even a better social-landscape than the dystopian London in Clockwork, especially with a range of insane individual characters in stock, including the protagonist and his sidekicks.

Definitely with the new genius glaring from the screen, The Dark Knight has given one authentic cinematic experience after a long absence. It was a great one with bitter aftertaste about humanity.

The Dark Knight (2008). Director: Christopher Nolan. Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gylenhall, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman.