Dark Knight's Screenwriting Lesson

Hey guys,

I would’ve posted this sooner, but I got hit by a bus.

Yes, I’m fine, thank you.

The bus company is paying for all the damages to my beloved sports car. Just so you know, in the world of insurance, you can’t cause an accident by avoiding an accident. Just as an FYI.

Okay, let’s talk Dark Knight. Seen it twice. I went to a special Imax screening and saw it over the weekend in Digital Projection. Imax is the way to go. This movie’s too damn big for a regular screen.


THE KILLING JOKE

I also managed to read The Killing Joke. What a fabulous comic book. I’ve always had mixed feelings about comics because the crappy dialogue drives me crazy. Everything is so on-the-nose and everyone’s always stating the obvious. But The Killing Joke’s dialogue was simply electric. Not only that, and I never thought I’d say this about a comic book, it had sensational transitions between scenes.

While Joker’s origin story wasn’t used nor would any other aspect of Killing Joke’s story be found in the film, the Joker’s character, on the other hand, the point behind his terrorism, Joker’s philosophical views about humanity, were absolutely incorporated. Listen to what he tells Batman as he’s being chased in a fun house in the third act. To set this up, Joker had murdered Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, kidnapped Gordon, and tried to make him go insane. And he says all these things as Batman races through this fun house narrowly escaping booby traps while passing giant mirrored reflections of Joker’s face...

“You see, it doesn’t matter if you catch me and send me back to the asylum… Gordon’s been driven mad. I’ve proved my point. I’ve demonstrated there’s no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. You had a bad day once, am I right? I know I am. I can tell you had a bad day and everything changed. Why else would you dress like a flying rat? You had a bad day and it drove you as crazy as everybody else… only you won’t admit it! You have to keep pretending that life makes sense that there’s some point to all this struggling!

“God, you make me want to puke. I mean, what is it with you? What made you what you are? Girlfriend killed by the mob, maybe? Brother carved up by some mugger? Something like that, I bet. Something like that… Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!

[Which explains why he had different stories about his scar.]

“By my point is… My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was, I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can’t you? I mean, you’re not unintelligent! You must see the reality of the situation... Do you know how many times we’ve come close to world war three over a flock of geese on a computer screen? Do you know what triggered the last world war? An argument over how many telegraph poles Germany owed its war debt creditors! Telegraph poles! HA HA HA HA HA! It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?”

I love it. You can almost hear Ledger’s voice behind those words.


BATMAN BACKLASH

As with anything popular, there will be a backlash.

Here’s Dave Kehr:

The Dark Knight is Dirty Harry stripped of Don Siegel’s ambivalence and ambiguity. Here again, one madman (Christian Bale’s Batman/Clint Eastwood’s Harry) is posited as the only effective way of combating another (Heath Ledger’s Joker/Andy Robinson’s Scorpio). The two figures are identified as morally equivalent (”You complete me,” says Ledger to Bale, nastily referencing Jerry Maguire), but where Siegel’s camera literally recoils in horror at the moment Harry leaps into madness (when he steps on Scorpio’s wound in the football stadium), Nolan seems to embrace, and even romanticize, his hero’s obsessive, abusive behavior. Is the Dark Knight just George Bush with a better outfit, demanding that he be allowed all of the available “tools” to combat terrorism, even if they include torture and eavesdropping? Like Bush, Batman has his own warantless wiretapping program, but Nolan is kind enough to assure us that, once his goal is accomplished, the superhero will blow it up. Is he suggesting that we can count on the Dark President to do the same?

And here’s Keith Uhlich:

Now you see it, now you don’t. That about encapsulates the depths of feeling and artistry in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan and company’s sordid exercise in avert-your-eyes sadism, a work at best inelegant and at worst inept. The film would have us believe it’s about dualities and polarities, the so-called Dark Knight of Gotham (Christian Bale as billionaire Bruce Wayne and vigilante alter-ego Batman) compared and contrasted with White Knight—soon-to-be literally two-faced—Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), both of them joined in messily chaotic battle with the facially-scarred villain known as The Joker, whose mid-film “You complete me” declaration to Batman is less Jerry Maguire-jest than Matrix-like pseudo-philosophy.

Yes, we’re back in the realm of “awesome!” anagrams and pothead palindromes that the Wachowski Brothers popularized nearly a decade ago, only now they’re spoken with a solemnity and verbosity borne of a beat-down Western warrior spirit, and lent gravitas by a cast only stellar in theory. But then it hardly matters if The Dark Knight’s dispiriting view of a city at war with itself doesn’t hold together, not when you have Morgan Freeman (as Wayne Enterprises liaison Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (as stalwart manservant Alfred) spouting gloomy old man platitudes about the culture of surveillance, and everyone else monologuing ad nauseum about various and sundry long, dark teatimes of the soul…

Dawes returns in The Dark Knight (this time the paramour of Dent and in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal), but now she’s little more than bait, a damsel-on-the-railroad-tracks plot device. I’m certain Nolan thought he was being transgressive by killing Rachel off, but her death packs zero punch because it’s so blatantly a screenwriter’s contrivance—mainly to motivate Dent’s split-personality revenge—and one executed with the same amount of “Gotcha!” shallowness as an earlier fake-out murder featuring not-yet-Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).


Dave, the point was, know your limits. I would respond to Keith, but I think the 310 angry comments said it all. On a lighter note, DK Holms, in his article in the Vancouver Voice, brought up an interesting point about “The Curious Case of the Dogs on the Knight.”

“How did there get to be so many canines in this movie? I can’t think of another recent film in which dogs figured in the plot so much. Though here, they don’t figure in the actual plot so much as they add more texture. The vigilantes at the beginning have dogs; The Joker has three dogs (a mythological reference?), and in the dreamy time-shifting ending Batman is pursued by police dogs through an industrial section. Bruce Wayne even has a chat with his “Q” (Morgan Freeman) about improving the bat suit to withstand dog attacks (which inspires an allusion to a possible Catwoman presence in a third film, as various talkbackers have ejaculated). These dogs are vicious but controlled, synecdoches of the ideal Gotham, creatures who are loyal, unlike cops and gangsters, and not subject to corruption except by those who train them, the corruption lying on the next level up of power.”

The dogs are a great allusion to the gangsters, certainly. In various mythologies, they were the guardians of the Underworld. The dog-headed deities in Ancient Egyptian art had the duty of “imprisoning and destroying the enemies of light” and of standing guard at the gates of holy places. Ancient Germans had a terrifying hound, Garm, which guarded the entrance to Niflheim, the realm of the dead, a land of frost and darkness. The Vikings had the myth of Garmr, “the greatest monster,” who was bound before Gnipa's Cave.

But from a storytelling perspective, I think it’s all simpler than that. You have to start from the ending and work your way back. When Harvey Dent shoots Batman, you want the audience to gasp and feel “Oh no.” Well, how do you do that, because the suit would protect him? You have to setup that moment properly with a discussion about the suit. He has to want to change his suit, which means, he’ll want it to be lighter, and thus, someone will talk about how he’ll be more susceptible to bullets. So what would give him problems to make him want to change his suit and be more flexible? Dogs. This also solves another problem, that is, how can Joker get the upper hand in a fight against Batman in the third act? He can’t use drugs, because we saw that in the last film. He can’t really take him in a fight, either. We’ve seen Batman take down multiple tough guys all throughout the film, so how can you show something different? Dogs. You setup first how much dogs give him trouble, and thus when he has difficulty because he’s being attacked by Joker’s three dogs, we buy it, and we know he’s in trouble.


DK’S SCREENWRITING LESSON

Ya know, one could point to so many strengths of the film, especially the characters and their distinct voices in the dialogue, the superb tension, the bravura filmmaking, the twists, the action sequences, etc. For me, there is one great screenwriting lesson in DK that’s above all its other strengths, that really sets it apart, and that is the power of inner conflicts. Nolan said he wanted to “push these characters and test them in new ways.” How do you do that? Inner conflicts. And not just any inner conflict but GREAT inner conflicts. I think this is what shaped the story overall, that is, the desire on the part of the filmmakers to give every character an inner conflict of some kind. By doing that, you can easily come up with a lot of material that might push a story toward 2 ½ hours. And (I know this is an unfair blanket statement, but) I get the impression from all the scripts I read that too few writers actually care about or even try to master inner conflicts.

Seeing that film made me regret not having blogged more about inner conflicts. A great inner conflict is the heart and soul of high-quality dramatic writing, isn’t it? This heightens emotions in scenes beyond the norm. It’s what keeps a story consistently compelling from scene-to-scene. It’s what adds tension in the sense that this thing could go wrong in so many ways. It’s what gives actors the opportunity to shine even if they don’t have a lot of face time on screen. Plus, to a large degree it’s what makes an ending more satisfying, because it is make or break decision time for all those conflicted characters.

So what inner conflicts did we have in DK?

Bruce: Reveal himself to Gotham or endure the terror? And that’s a conflict rooted in his origin story, too. Because we understand now his dark, inner needs to put fear into the hearts of the criminals. I think he knew the truth about his unlikely future with Rachel, too, but he couldn’t face it. And there’s also Harvey Dent. Should he fight or support him? He's a good guy, yet he'd love to knock his teeth in. Later, should he save Rachel or Harvey? Well, that wasn’t much of a conflict. He told Gordon he was going to save Rachel, but the Joker had switched the addresses. There were conflicts about Bruce’s limits, too, his physical and moral limitations as Batman. And we also sense that he was conflicted about his one rule – should he kill the Joker?

Rachel: Bruce or Harvey? Accept the proposal or not?

Harvey: Should he work with or against the Batman? Should he arrest him? He, too, faced his own inner conflicts about staying within the ethical limits of his power. Remember that scene where he tried to interrogate one of Joker’s minions? He wanted to go too far and Batman stopped him. And later in the third act, shoot or not?

Gordon: Should he work with or against Harvey Dent?

Alfred: Share or destroy Rachel’s letter?

Lucius: Help eavesdrop on the city in a way he doesn’t approve?

Lau: Cooperate with Harvey or face the Joker?

Salvatore Maroni: Work with or turn in the Joker?

People on ferries: Turn the pins or not?

It’s amazing how many characters had inner conflicts and also how many inner conflicts existed in the main protagonists, like Bruce. Even that little accountant that wanted to blackmail Wayne Enterprise $10 million a year had his own inner conflict: reveal Bruce Wayne or face the wrath of a notorious, brutal, and wealthy vigilante?

The only one who didn’t have an inner conflict was the Joker, because he had no rules, although he seemed to be of two minds about the Batman. He first hated him and wanted to destroy him and reveal to the city what a farce he really was. But then he changed his mind. He wanted to prove his point to him, practically convert him, and perhaps bridge a partnership. I loved the fact that the ending was rooted in the characters. The idea about the two ferries not only had great tension but it was rooted in the Joker and what he was trying to prove about humanity, that when the chips are down, “these civilized people will eat each other.” And in that moment when the people choose to not blow each other up, we see a brief inner conflict in the Joker.

Harvey, of course, proves the Joker correct. As a society, we can rise above this, but individually, we can fall so easily from a bad day.


Okay, so, for all the newbies out there (and those in the middle east, eastern Europe, and Africa reading my blog), let me ask the question: what is an inner conflict? It’s not simply putting a character into a position where they have to make a very difficult decision, although it is that, and we saw a lot of that in The Dark Knight. In great characters, though, it is also designing that tragic flaw and putting them in a position where they are forced to face that flaw. In non-tragic contemporary terms, this could be weaknesses of heroes, the internal obstacles of characters that keep them from achieving their end goals. You can read more about inner conflicts here.

There was a great post by Nienke Hinton over at the Writing Life on Inner Conflict. I still love this quote from Caro Clark:

“A character's inner conflict is not just being in two minds about something, not just being torn between obvious incompatibles (“I want to be a priest, and yet I love her”) but is about being in a new situation where old attitudes and habits war with and hinder the need for change. For instance, a man who drives himself to succeed because he doesn't want to be like his happy-go-lucky father is suddenly confronted with a situation where he isn't winning. Or an executive discovers that her ambition to be vice president of her company is being thwarted by her own self-doubt. This war inside each of your characters makes them act and react in complex ways.

“You show these internal conflicts not by means of internal dialogue (which is a cop-out and is dull), but by showing your characters responding to their own inner compulsions. She, for instance, decides to confront her own self-doubts by taking on a no-win project where the local people are opposing a development. She is determined to be hard-nosed, prove she's vice-president material. He is always confrontational, fearing that one minute of negotiation would be the first step to becoming a wimp like his father. You have a grade-A opposites-attract situation here, yet it is believable because we understand why each of them is acting the way they do, why they are foolishly stubborn, by it's important for each of them to win.”