Of Darkness and Dawn

I am an absolute and total physical coward.  Seriously.  I had a blood test before my wedding, and then one about six months after, and at the second one the lab technician remembered me and how close I had come to fainting the first time.

So, naturally, I write a lot of war movies, I've read everything I can find about Saint Isaac Jogues, and one of my favorite scenes on film is the climax of The Last King of Scotland.  (For those who don't get that reference, and feel inclined to check it out, you have been warned.)

I am deeply ashamed of my cowardice.  And that's why I am so fascinated with violence on film.  Because I agree with Flannery O'Connor that violence wakes us up, returns us to reality, and because I believe that we show who we truly are by how we handle suffering.

I don't get courage.  I don't get how people can handle pain.  So I feel drawn to every example of pain I can find, in the hope that by seeing it and writing it, I may learn it to some small degree how to cope with it.

Which brings me to The Dark Knight Rises.  It seems to me that Christopher Nolan's violence is so hard to watch precisely because it is personal.  The midpoint, the anticipated fight scene between the Batman and Bane, is not the big, exciting showdown of a comic book movie.  It's not "cool."  It is messy and dark and brutal.  And the Nolan brothers' genius is in putting Selina Kyle into that scene as an observer.  As she realizes that she is watching Bane break, not the Batman, but Bruce Wayne - that maddening man with whom she has danced, and flirted, and dueled - she also realizes that she has hurt - maybe killed - not a symbol, but a person.  And she realizes who that person really is.

The Dark Knight trilogy is, ultimately, about pain, and most of its grace is grace refused.  It is Harvey Dent, after all, who promises us that the dawn is coming.  For the Christian, that is the ultimate truth, but it is equally true that no one of us is guaranteed that dawn.  We have the terrible power to flip the coin.

In fact, one can argue that the entire creation of the Batman is grace refused.  In an interview published with the screenplay for Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan said of Bruce Wayne: "There is this hollow quality to him.  He's damaged goods…. Christian manages to make him funny and charming, and there is a good sense of humor there, but you never forget what happened to him as a child.  It hangs in everything he does.  There's a burnt-out quality, in moral terms."  Contrast Bruce's refusal to move on  - from his parents, from Rachel - with the future Alfred wants for him.  Even though he channels his anger to do good, Alfred suggests that it would be healthier if he just let it go: "I never wanted you to come back to Gotham.  I knew there was nothing here for you but pain and tragedy."

Darkness is the absence of light.  These are films that make us feel that absence very keenly.  And when the dawn peeks through - when a man wraps a coat around a little boy to tell him the world hasn't ended - we want it that much more intensely.