That’s fair enough. But virtually no one, I think, comes into a Batman movie knowing nothing about Batman — isn’t it counterproductive, even if it’s the standard of the discipline, to exclude the audience’s prior knowledge from analysis of the film?

But…isn’t it counterproductive to assume what the audience knows before they sit down to view a film?

Whether or not a method is “counterproductive” depends on what you want to produce. Right? So if people just want to talk about the movie, then anything goes. And certainly in Cinema Studies, the maker’s body of work is discussed. But yet, when you talk about A Film, and the narratives contained and messages shown in THAT film, yes, you do not assume anything outside the FILM. The piece being discussed. So that’s all I’m getting at. This is what I was taught. We can’t assume who saw what outside of this film, and why would we? We only would if the discussion was framed initially as an entire body of work, or The Batman Series, or something like that.

What I meant to say was not that Alfred relays falsehoods, but that he reveals himself not to be the morally upright character he’s been portrayed as previously. I understood this scene, in fact, as a point where Alfred is revealed not to be a “good guy”. He sees himself as one, and Wayne sees him as one, but I believe the audience is meant to look at him rather askance from that point on. Not to mention, burning down the forest to catch a jewel thief rather carries echoes of My Lai, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have said not that Alfred is trying to corrupt Wayne, exactly, but trying to convert him to a particular (dare I say Cheneyesque?) worldview, whose inbuilt assumptions about human nature and motivation Alfred himself may not be completely aware of.

In the context of today’s politics, “burning down the entire forest” can easily and without complication read as the ongoing debate about collateral damage and our oh so civilized observations of Geneva, etc, whereas the Turrorists do not have that restraint. Remember “They are not afraid of you, they won’t sell out the joker for you. You have rules. The Joker doesn’t have any.” These messages I brought up are not given only one time. If they were, I would not count them. That’s another rule of cinema. A message the audience takes away from the film will be reinforced multiple times before they do.

So, sure. It could be read as My Lai…but again, I am posing my reading as being reflective of the current political atmosphere and dialogue. Which makes more sense, I think, as the film was made this year, and not 40 years ago.

As for the larger message about the nature of terrorism…I’m afraid I’m still not convinced, though I’ve only seen the movie once, and very likely missed things. The Joker is, certainly, precisely the kind of nihilistic, motivationless madman Alfred claims the Burmese “bandit” was, and the Joker does employ techniques “ripped from the headlines” so to speak, so of course I don’t dispute that the Joker is being linked here to al Qaeda, AQI, et al. But I don’t think Alfred’s story helps reinforce that link, and I’m not convinced the Joker is a cipher in order to say that terrorists cannot be understood — I have in my mind an idea that he may be a cipher because the movie is simply not about him, but about how Batman, and Gotham, react to him.

Well…”youre not convinced” and “you dont think” and “I have in my mind” and the movie is not about the Joker… You do see these are things I cannot address, right? They are just opinions. When we began critiquing film, the first thing we had struck from our vocab was “I liked it!” and “It sucked” and “I didn’t like it” or “Good film.” Because these are not ideas you can engage in film critique. They are just feelings. Should they be connected to concrete ideas, I can engage them and I hope I have to your satisfaction.

I’m just not sold on the claim that Nolan is promoting the notion of terrorists as motivationless and impossible to understand or negotiate with.

Again, you “not being sold on it” is not something I know what to do with aside think to myself I could have made a better case. And I probably could with a repeat viewing.

But Nolan’s intentions are not really salient in the frame I’m using. I know that may feel…counterintuitive. But the idea is that it really doesn’t matter what he intends—at least not to these points.

In Film school you are taught to be a communicator of your ideas. That’s something they did early on. Strip us of the glorious artiste notion and tell us we were learning how to be communicators. And then taught us how to be effective communicators. An early and diffiicult part of that trial is making film, screening it for the class, and then everyone gets to tell you how they feel and think and react in detail (and yes, it is as painful as it sounds.) One of the first things you learn about making film is that you have the messages you intend (and when you are masterful, these are most of what the audience reads) and you have messages you did not intend. But in either case, once a film is out of your hands, it is out of your hands. You can’t run around telling people what you intended, nor make them read it that way.

The point I’m getting at here is that I was discussing the film as a message medium, irrespective of the maker’s intentions. A commenter above also began defending Nolan and his body of work…but that really doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m talking about.

Maybe I can give the film another close watch (in my own home) soon and have a more detailed and nuanced reading for people, as well as either bolster my original reading, or argue against it myself. Depends on what I end up seeing.

I appreciate the thoughtful talk. I hope all my reference to my education doesnt sound terribly boring and didactic; I only do it because we began talking about what frame/standard of measurement is being used to look at the film, and others may find it useful, as well.

I should have avoided the temptation to use the term “unreliable narrator”. I am familiar with its use in literary criticism (not my field, but I’ve studied it somewhat), and knew that it wasn’t quite right for Alfred, so I tried to modify it by sticking “morally” on there; as usual when I try to sound smart, it backfired

What I meant to say was not that Alfred relays falsehoods, but that he reveals himself not to be the morally upright character he’s been portrayed as previously. I understood this scene, in fact, as a point where Alfred is revealed not to be a “good guy”. He sees himself as one, and Wayne sees him as one, but I believe the audience is meant to look at him rather askance from that point on. Not to mention, burning down the forest to catch a jewel thief rather carries echoes of My Lai, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have said not that Alfred is trying to corrupt Wayne, exactly, but trying to convert him to a particular (dare I say Cheneyesque?) worldview, whose inbuilt assumptions about human nature and motivation Alfred himself may not be completely aware of.

As for the larger message about the nature of terrorism…I’m afraid I’m still not convinced, though I’ve only seen the movie once, and very likely missed things. The Joker is, certainly, precisely the kind of nihilistic, motivationless madman Alfred claims the Burmese “bandit” was, and the Joker does employ techniques “ripped from the headlines” so to speak, so of course I don’t dispute that the Joker is being linked here to al Qaeda, AQI, et al. But I don’t think Alfred’s story helps reinforce that link, and I’m not convinced the Joker is a cipher in order to say that terrorists cannot be understood — I have in my mind an idea that he may be a cipher because the movie is simply not about him, but about how Batman, and Gotham, react to him.

I don’t want this to sound like a fullthroated defense of the movie; as I said, you’ve raised a number of criticisms that I think have considerable merit (there are others I disagree with, but they’re not what I wanted to get at here). I’m just not sold on the claim that Nolan is promoting the notion of terrorists as motivationless and impossible to understand or negotiate with.

(I should also mention that I enjoyed reading your discussion with SEK at Edge of the West.)

But Alfred is not actually an unreliable narrator (and this is a real device and term used in film critique, did you know?) He is in no way compromised in such a way that would lead us to reasonably assume he is unreliable. He is in fact, not a narrator, but a character. And he is on the inside. He is a good guy. Also, as you point out, this is not the only time the “burn down the whole forest to kill the bandit/terrorist” is furthered. Multiple layers of the same message provide a consistent theme to the audience. When you factor in the joker burning up stacks of money with the other dialogue that explains his nature (as not needing a reason, just wanting destruction), I don’t think your statement here can be defended.

And I’m glad you don’t let my education in film stop you from bringing up points. I don’t want that to happen. Almost every time I write on film, someone provides insight I did not, educated or no. But you are right, there is a certain convention for discussing film in certain ways. Which is why some critiques I can’t engage…it’s not that they are necessarily “wrong,” it’s that when you enter a Kung Fu tournament, it is assumed that fighters will practice Kung Fu as trained for and taught to a particular format and rules and boundaries. So you meet on that common ground. And yeah, someone coming in and just throwing wild punches would not be allowed to compete. It’s fighting, but it’s not Kung Fu.

I don’t have the film criticism background to engage with a lot of what you say here; but there’s one point on which I’d like to raise a disagreement.

a) Terrorists have no reasoning, nor any actual complaint. They simply want to see the world burn.
b) Those who would try to deal with the issue in terms of law and reason are using the wrong tools in dark and terrible time and will lose. [update as a reader reminded me below:] To win, you must “burn the whole forest down.”

I understood the “some men just want to watch the world burn”/burning the forest down exchange (which was between Wayne and Michael Caine’s Alfred, btw, not Gary Oldman’s Gordon) very differently. I think it tells us much more about Alfred than anything else. Bear in mind the context of his story: Alfred used to be a secret agent, Bond-like, for the British government (this is backstory from the comics and animated TV show; I get that, from a film crit perspective, what’s outside the film doesn’t, but I don’t know that it’s helpful to disregard such an enormous body of literature when the film is explicitly based on it…but as I say, I’m not trained for this). When he says he was in Burma “with some friends” working for “the local government,” he means he was there with other Brits, working for the British colonial government. The bandit he describes was stealing the gems the British wanted to use to buy the loyalty of the tribal leaders, and discarding them in the villages rather than trying to sell them (which could have been traced). Alfred means this to be an analogy to the Joker, an insane nihilist who wants nothing but to create havoc, but all he’s really told us is that this “bandit” stole from the British government, preventing their bribing local leaders, but didn’t do it for money. That he couldn’t imagine any other motivation but money, and so assumed the “bandit” was simply mad, and that he and his “friends” were willing to destroy the entire forest, with no thought for the life therein, or the people who might depend on the forest for their livelihood, speaks volumes about him. I do not think Nolan means the audience to take Alfred as the legitimate moral center of the film, however. (That position is, I think, shared by Dawes, Fox and Gordon, which is problematic in itself, of course.)

That exchange tells us Alfred is, below his kindly exterior, a monster, and that he’s trying to turn Wayne into a monster (or more of a monster) as well. It doesn’t, I submit, coming as it does from a morally unreliable narrator, constitute a message to the viewer that, indeed, “terrorists just want to watch the world burn.”

i’ve watched propaganda reach new blatant heights since the Bush administration stole the elections and had itself judicially installed by means of the crooked supreme court. since rumsfeld the war criminal declared our own populace was a valid target for PSYOPS; since massively popular networks became mouthpieces for the government.

the wider the divide is gouged between the have-souls and the have-nots, the harsher must come the means of control to prevent uprising and rebellion on many levels. included in that is deeper militarization of our culture, greater police powers and abuses, and media being taken over more and more by ulterior agendas.

Thanks again for commenting.