Little bit more on teaching The Dark Knight

What's the point of cataloging film and comic conventions in a composition course?  Students should leave my class knowing that the mechanics of a film or comic reveal the intentions of the mechanic.  Am I doing an end-around theoretical objections to authorial intent?  I certainly am—because I want to instill in my roomful of future rhetors that they need to pay attention to the effect their prose will have on their audience.  I want to slow down the process whereby they make claims, and the best way to do that is to explain the joke.  Consider the fundraiser scene in The Dark Knight.  I start shortly before the Joker puts the knife to Dawes' throat.

Here he is approaching her:

It's a medium long shot with a slightly shallow focus.   Viewers know who to focus on, but are also given a strong sense of the mise-en-scene.  This frame belongs to a fairly long and unbroken tracking shot:

Note how the camera moves back more slowly than the Joker moves forward, transforming the medium long into a medium shot:

As the camera follows the Joker, the crowd slips off the frame—but we know what the mise-en-scene contains.  The camera moves with the Joker until this moment:

Now it swings to the left and begins to bring the crowd back into the frame.  As the camera pivots the frame momentarily centers on Dawes before returning the Joker.  The immediate intent is fairly straightforward: Nolan wants to keep the attention focused on the Joker.  Viewers now must gauge how Dawes reacts by how the Joker or the crowd reacts to her reaction. 

The camera continues moving left until the entire crowd is back in the frame.  Note that over the next three frames Nolan will show the crowd assembled behind the Joker in its entirety: 

For those shots the camera traces a circle around the Joker.  The viewer attends to his face because the camera gravitates around him like the Earth around the sun.  The camera moves behind Dawes's head and brings them into profile:

At this point it begins to describe a circle around her instead of him.  The effect is delicate if disorienting.  Note that over these three frames Nolan shows the entire crowd behind her in its entirety:

We now know who is behind her as well as him.  Nolan again uses the profile shot to switch dance partners.  The camera now circles the Joker again and again Nolan uses the attention on the Joker to scan the crowd behind him in its entirety:

Why all the circling?  The first reason is kinetic: a shot and reverse shot combination would have settled the action down by introducing a conversational rhythm. 

The second reason is temporal: once a director starts reversing shots the audience begins to experience time as a function of narrative.  The first person says their say.  The second person says their say.  The first person responds.  The second responds.  I should note that this is a natural reaction only because it has been naturalized by film convention in a way that the tracking shot hasn't. 

With tracking shots the narrative is subordinate to the frame.  A tracking shot is conspicuous because it constantly reminds the viewer that what they see is mediated.  Consider the opening of The Player or almost every Scorsese film: people pass through the frame as the camera moves around them.  The audience is contantly reminded that it is an audience.  Nolan attempts to avoid this by creating a conversational pattern to the circle he describes—the purpose of the dance is to replace the harsh cuts of the reverse shot with a more graceful exchange of the faces in the frame. 

As my emphasis on the crowd in these shots likely indicated, the third reason Nolan circled around them for so long is because the punchline requires him to.  For the joke to work the audience must be reminded of who is and who is not in the crowd.  The only way to do that is to show the crowd.  Note that he started with the crowd behind the Joker, then to the one behind Dawes, then back to the one behind the Joker.  Now the camera settles into sequential reverse shots.  For the sake of space I'll skip over the first few.  They cover the beginning and middle of the Joker's story about his scars.  Now note how tight the composition is when the camera turns to Dawes:

And compare it to how loosely the composition frames the Joker:

The frame provides no information about who is in the crowd behind her, but quite a bit about who's behind him.  As the story nears its conclusion the camera tightens into a close up.

The Joker delivers his punchline: "Now I'm always smiling."  Dawes promptly knees him in the balls:

The viewer can see behind him, and because he's looking right at Dawes, the Joker can therefore see everything behind her.  Now the Joker plays the straight man.  He says: "You have a little fight in you.  I like that." 

An off-camera Batman bat-growls: "Then you're going to love me."  Then:

Is it just me or is there no Batman in that shot?  How about we zoom in on that frame?

I see no Batman.  What about the next frame?

Batman!  But remember what I said about the Joker looking right at Dawes not but two seconds ago?  How exactly did Batman come to occupy the area immediately in front of the Joker without the Joker noticing?  And why does the Joker look to his left when Batman is in directly front of him?*  Did the Batman tiptoe through the crowd?  Why didn't the crowd react to Batman inching his way next Dawes?  The answer to all these questions is that Nolan threw realism out the window here. 

All that circling wasn't intended to show the audience who was in the mise-en-scene—it was intended to show them who wasn't.  In retrospect those tracking shots read: "No Batman no Batman no Batman no Batman no Batman."  Then Batman appears not where we expect him—that would be the crowd behind Dawes, as Nolan only showed viewers them once, then deliberately kept them off-frame when he went to reverse shots—but where he cannot possibly be: immediately to the left of Rachel, right in the Joker's line of sight.  Why does Nolan do all this?  In service of what profound thesis have I wasted all these words? 

The Batman is really fast.

If this is what's required to demonstrate the obvious, imagine what it takes to prove something legitimately complex.

---

*In a blog post one of my students offered the following explanation: "Would it benefit the Batman to learn how to throw his voice?  It would.  Q.E.D."**
**I do so rue the day I taught them what "Q.E.D." meant.  I can't count how many times I've had to Q.N.E.D. a student's Q.E.D. at this point.

Comments

[todd.]

Posts like this make me want to go back and take more undergraduate lit courses.

[Sisyphus]

Don't you mean more undergraduate _film_ classes?

It's interesting how Nolan uses a really high key light, almost overhead, to help turn the Joker's eyes into pits (the black makeup is not in and of itself enough, as we can see from that shot of the Joker with his head tilted back a bit). To do that he had to risk Maggie Gyllenhal really not looking attractive (even ignoring the bad hairdo and scarily gaunt ribs poking through where there should be cleavage).

[Andrew R.]

Have you ever thought about doing a future course on the work of no-talent hacks? Because for every film director and comic-book writer/artist team that's really good, there's a lot of dreck. And then you could actually deal with theoretical objections to authorial intent.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

But Andrew, then I'd have to spend the quarter teaching dreck produced by no-talent hacks. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that too much.

Thanks, todd.! Are you an institute of higher learning, and if so, you don't happen to be hiring, do you?

Sisyphus, I love the fact that, objectively, there should be cleavage. The lack! The lack! And what's odd is that Gyllenhal was criticized for breast-feeding her kid on the set. (Or so I half-remember from one of her Daily Show appearances.) I didn't focus on the lighting here, but throughout the film Nolan uses really high key lights: he lines the the righthand side of the bank in the opening scene with a on-screen explanation of them, then reuses them in the bat-cave. They're in Bruce's penthouse too. Honestly, he's a little obsessed with putting in-frame lights that'll plausibly create the effects he desires. (He did it in The Prestige too.)

As for whether todd. would enjoy my composition course if it were a literature course, I'll say this: one of the reasons I've written these posts is that, unlike when I teach literature, I don't have a ready-to-hand toolbox for discussing film or comics, so I've had to build one. But I consider what I'm doing here a close-reading akin to what I'd do to a work of literature were I happen to be teaching Huck Finn. The historical audience and rhetorical devices would be different, but the process would be the same: how does this work, what does it tell us about the author's expectations of the reader, &c.

[JPool]

So my new question, in which I reveal that I don't really know what goes on in a composition course, never having taken one:
Are your students making films/comic books as part of the course, so that they can try out these various visual devices and see if/how they work for them?

As your thesis/conclusion, "The Batman is really fast," I would rephrase it slightly, "It is the nature of Batman to be Batmannish" or "Batman is Batman." See?

[JPool]

So my new question, in which I reveal that I don't really know what goes on in a composition course, never having taken one:
Are your students making films/comic books as part of the course, so that they can try out these various visual devices and see if/how they work for them?

As your thesis/conclusion, "The Batman is really fast," I would rephrase it slightly, "It is the nature of Batman to be Batmannish" or "Batman is Batman." See?

[Andrew R.]

Well, Scott, I've always thought that a fun course in intellectual history would be to teach something of an "anti-Great Books" version of Western Civ. The idea would be to take works that are pretty clearly not very good and yet were very popular at the time that they were written. But of course that course will have to wait many, many years, especially since to date no search committee has chosen to do the right thing and employ me.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Andrew, I've taught that class! Started with Looking Backward, on to The Iron Heel and Sister Carrie, threw in some Silas Weir Mitchell and Thomas Dixon, &c. I think most classes on American realism and naturalism end up like that.

That said, my inner-intellectual historian thinks popularity should matter when we talk about particular cultural moments, but disciplinary history dictates we teach works which model complexity, and rarely do those twain meet. (Like, in Twain.)

JPool:

Are your students making films/comic books as part of the course, so that they can try out these various visual devices and see if/how they work for them?

They do. Their first assignment is the R.A. (or rhetorical analysis), their second the unfortunately acronymed R.I.P. (or rhetoric in practice). They write their own comic, script, review, &c., the thinking being that the lessons will stick better if they apply the techniques they've learned to identify.

[Jonathan Dresner]

That said, my inner-intellectual historian thinks popularity should matter when we talk about particular cultural moments.

Ironically, that's precisely what I emphasize when I'm teaching cultural moments in my surveys: the high culture which we now consider removed and abstruse often had mass audiences.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Same here, Jonathan. However, that fact is lost upon the professional gatekeepers, which is odd, because some of them are Dickensians, so they know this intellectually, but Dickens still feels like literature to them, so anyone who writes about Silas Weir Mitchell is a populist in the derogatory sense (i.e. such persons want to open the quarter with Mitchell and finish with four episodes of Charmed).

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

(And that should not have been one sentence.)

[Jake]

The Batman is really fast.

He sure is! I like how with all that heavy gear and large cape he is able to silently disappear from people mid-conversation. It's a good thing the "wraith-like" aspects of Batman are somewhat intact in the newer movies, which seemed to be inhibited by a police procedural-like realism.

That gala scene was one of my favorite bits in the movie. I like how the spinning camera, the score, and the Joker's spooky story makes the scene all disorienting, and then the scene rests on the words "One day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries..." Sends chills down my spine!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

It's a good thing the "wraith-like" aspects of Batman are somewhat intact in the newer movies, which seemed to be inhibited by a police procedural-like realism.

But, as Q.E.D.'d above, it's a realism whose tenets are continually violated. I mean, he falls 90 some-odd stories, lands on his back and walks away in the first half of the film; but at the end, he's nearly killed by a three-story drop? Say what?

I like how the spinning camera, the score, and the Joker's spooky story makes the scene all disorienting, and then the scene rests on the words "One day they carve her face. We have no money for surgeries..."

That's the real problem with my analysis here, isn't it? I don't account for the score---how Nolan titters on the edge of key with his harem of shrieking cellos.