..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Musings On
The Dark Knight
by Larry Gross

On the issue of The Dark Knight's models – There is the sublime, unbelievably ahead of its time, 1928 Fritz Lang silent movie thriller, Spies, an astonishing techno thriller about a maniacal chaos spreading agent, infiltrating every sector of Weimar society.  The image of Joker burning a mountain of money is an inspired commentary on the opening image of Spies where a banker has gone insane while being surrounded by piles of devalued currency. 

That and the better known 1932 follow-up, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, are the films that Nolan has studied up on and absorbed down to his finger tips.  And it was in the genre cinema of the 20s, 30s, and 40s, that you can see film makers gracefully moving back and forth between fantasy and realism in ways that we have more or less lost the art of doing.

What Lang was in a position to understand the necessity of doing in both those films was to appropriately, subtly, downplay the "hero-function" in the story.  It exists.  There are good guys who prevail in both movies, but there is never this lumbering servicing of the franchise.  These good guys are plausibly one step above the audience but they are "behind" the quasi-supernatural bad guys, and they "endure" their demonic uniqueness.

- Larry Gross
July 18, 2008

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore. He is also the author of The 48 Hr Diaries, currently appearing weekly on MCN

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