"There is a spiraling sense of doom in these films, the characters are under pressure, and you see how they react." - Nolan
NVDL: Below are a collection of quotes I've picked up today on Dark Knight noir.
Film noir, literally "black film," is a term coined in the 1940s by French critics to describe the dark, cynical American crime dramas of the era. The genre’s classic period, roughly 1944-1958, emerged from the horrors and cultural dislocations of World War II, and dealt with everything from the role of women in society to the ways in which returning veterans, some of them shellshocked and drug-addicted, attempted to fit into the postwar world. Noir movies often featured a private eye, a femme fatale and a sadistic hoodlum. Many were concerned with notions of identity, moral ambiguity and the search for the truth. Coupled with a high-contrast, black-and-white shooting style, noir movies seemed to capture the essence of the period.
"Noir is caught up with postwar disillusionment, and the coming of more explicit crime literature, like ’The Postman Always Rings Twice,’" says Paul Meehan, author of "Tech Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir." "It’s a study of nihilism, perversity, the darkness inside people."
NVDL: There is a warning of imminent danger (and subcoonscious awaresness of the threat we face) in the sense that Noir and comic book superheroes come into their own when the premise (and promise) of war is immediate.
This sense of noirish doom also has invaded the comic book and graphic novel, which have increasingly turned to bleaker themes and visual styles.
NVDL: It seems consciously we're not prepared to humor, consider or entertain doomsday concepts, but we are perfectly happy to be entertained and escape into these scenarios. It's a bizarre psychology.
"’The Dark Knight’ is a crime story," Nolan adds, "and not all crime stories are film noir. But I think you’re seeing a desire in storytelling to have moral ambiguity, and that’s been the basis of film noir."
"Noir will come in and out of favor," Nolan adds, "because the desire to see these stories depends on the world outside the movie theater. When you’re in unsettled times, that’s when the genre rises to the fore. Like the concern in ’The Dark Knight,’ the fear of anarchy invading society - that’s a very contemporary fear.
...there's no logic behind his [the Joker's] mayhem, he's also truly terrifying. The terror he inflicts on Gotham is meticulously planned (the opening bank heist, shot with IMAX cameras, is a marvel of timing) and yet his sole inspiration is to create chaos, then watch the city squirm and burn.
That his attacks grow larger each time, regardless of the collateral damage, makes him so genuinely disturbing. Ledger seems to have understood that, and brings an appropriate _ and riveting _ unpredictability to the role. It's also a neat touch that his makeup, which looked like a slapdash effort from the start, steadily deteriorates, streaking, cracking and peeling away as the film progresses; it's an outward manifestaion of his psychological spiral.
Even Christopher Nolan, director of "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight," had villainy in mind for Oldman, whom he was thinking of casting as a bad guy.
With his second turn as Batman ally Gordon in "The Dark Knight," Oldman, 50, feels as though he has finally broken ranks with the bad boys and put to rest his typecasting as a go-to guy when filmmakers needed a villain.
"No, I don’t hear it anymore. I mean look, Rolling Stone said, ’Oldman is so skilled he makes virtue look exciting,’" Oldman said in an interview with The Associated Press, quoting the magazine’s review of "The Dark Knight" from memory. "You know what? That’s the best review I’ve ever had. ... I’ll put that on my tombstone. ’Makes virtue look exciting.’ That’s pretty good.
"But meeting him, it just seemed much more interesting to get him to play a really good guy, which I hadn’t seen him do before," Nolan said. "He’s done plenty of roles in the past with an obvious degree of intensity, and he’s done it quite skillfully. To do it from the position of a very muted, restrained individual who’s very good, has a lot of integrity, but is struggling with the same things everyone else is struggling with in this story, that’s pretty amazing to watch."
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