The 25th of July marks ten years since the UK release of The Dark Knight, the second of Christopher Nolan’s three Batman films and inarguably one of the most significant and influential films of the young century so far.

Over the course of its record-breaking box-office run, it permeated pop culture on every level, to the point where even those who hadn’t seen it ended up absorbing the lines (“Why so serious?”), the imagery (a school bus crashing through the wall of a bank), and the debates (Is it too long? Is the 12A certificate too lenient?) by osmosis. Amplified by an emergent internet culture that quoted and meme-d it to death, The Dark Knight was near ubiquitous throughout 2008, right up to awards season, where its absence among the Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards was deemed a serious snub (and may have contributed to the implementation of a ten-nominee system) and Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor win made him the first Oscar winner for a comic-book movie. Whether or not it was the best film of its year, it was certainly the film of the year, spawning endless cosplays, parodies, and political dissections.

On the tenth anniversary of such a significant film the most obvious question to ask is how it holds up today – which to my mind is rather well. It remains a dazzlingly well-crafted study in rising intensity, a symphony of tension that steadily builds and builds and doesn’t let you breathe until after its crescendo. Put it on today and it’s still absorbing, exhausting, and wickedly clever in its construction, shot through with a relentless urgency and sense of grand tragedy that overcomes the film’s short-comings (chiefly the choppily-edited and haphazardly shot action scenes, the use of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes as a prop to motivate the men around her, and some clunky spell-out-the-themes dialogue). But to talk about The Dark Knight in 2018 is to talk about more than the quality of one film: rather, it is to enter into a (heated and highly contentious) dialogue about the state of contemporary film culture, a world reshaped in the image of Nolan’s film – and largely for the worse. Looking back today, it is clear that – aptly, for a film so concerned with the unintended consequences of well-intended acts – The Dark Knight has left behind it a terrible cultural legacy.

The most obviously negative impact of the film we can point to is, of course, the many which tried and failed to imitate it. As is so often the case with a trend-setting hit, executives hungry to repeat the success lazily replicated its most surface level attributes in (often futile) hopes of making lightning strike twice: in this case, it quickly became conventional wisdom that the film was a hit because it was ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ and so now every franchise that studios didn’t know what to do with was to get a coat of jet-black paint.

The film’s cultural-event status might have been down to an impossible-to-replicate confluence of factors – the popularity of Batman Begins, the dynamic trailers, the increased media curiosity following Heath Ledger’s tragic death in January 2008, a director in the midst of a hot streak – but that didn’t stop studios from trying, often to disastrous results. The most obvious cases of such are the recent DC Films’ efforts Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (both of which, ironically enough, were produced by Nolan and partially scripted by Dark Knight co-writer David S. Goyer), which tried to replicate the brand’s prior success by layering dour affectation over their inane, incoherent plotting and characterisations—the cinematic equivalent of a teenager convinced that their leather jacket makes them a grown-up. There are countless other examples in the intervening decade of would-be tent-poles that hoped if they just ramped up the violence and desaturated the colour palette enough that they would be taken seriously: The Fantastic Four, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, The Mummy, the list goes on.

Last week, just a day after the ten-year anniversary of The Dark Knight’s US release, the first trailer was released was released for Titans, the forthcoming TV show based on the popular DC comic Teen Titans. With its murky look, comically overwrought tone, and gratuitous violence and profanity, the trailer was, as if on cue, a perfect snapshot of all the wrong-headed ways in which later works have embarrassed themselves trying to be The Dark Knight. This trend is not as all-pervasive as it is sometimes made out to be – the Marvel films, Fast & Furious franchise and Mission: Impossible series are all varying levels of colourful and self-effacingly funny – and The Dark Knight does not bear sole responsibility for it (many of them were just as influenced by Bourne), but the notion that grimness equates to quality and the snickering that now accompanies the phrase ‘gritty reboot’ are now an inescapable part of the film’s legacy.

However, it is not so much in other films that the dark side of The Dark Knight’s legacy lies, but in how we receive and discuss them. It’s not cynical or hysterical to note that film discourse, particularly online, is not exactly in a healthy place right now, and this climate is at least partially the product of a sea change brought on by the film. For a generation of (mostly white, mostly male) geeks, the film represented a kind of ‘vindication’, treating a comic-book superhero – Batman, no less, perhaps the ultimate figure of fanboy power fantasy – with the utmost seriousness and filtering its four-colour source material through a variety of stylistic and intellectual influences (noir and Nietzsche) that gave it a sense of legitimacy. The prevailing notion in ‘nerd culture’ was that, after years of (perceived) disrespect, The Dark Knight had finally shown that their interests weren’t so silly after all: now they were ‘owed’ adaptations that validated their love for their favourite properties, and that any (again, perceived) deviation from such was not just a choice they disagreed with, but a personal insult, and one that had to be avenged. Writing in The Guardian earlier this year, Ben Childs analysed the divergent fan responses to Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Avengers: Infinity War, pondering why the former was so divisive and the latter mostly uncontroversial given their apparent similarities. He concluded the following:

“The difference between the two films… is that Infinity War rarely sends up its most preposterous excesses…The Russos resist the temptation to lampoon (Thanos) himself, his gauntlet, or any of his deeply silly minions. All are treated with a reverence that will have helped to keep fans of the comics, and the wider MCU, feeling like their much-loved source material is being respected.’

The picture of contemporary (superhero) movie fandom painted in Childs’ article is dispiriting to say the least. Anything deemed to treat a nerd-beloved property without the appropriate level of reverence risks falling afoul of rabid fanboys who shout loudly enough to end up dominating the narrative, a suffocating mentality which, as Logan director James Mangold noted on Twitter, is only making studios more likely to leave these films to ‘hacks and (corporate) boards’ – and which has lead to ugly real-life consequences. We saw a manifestation of this hyper-defensive mindset in the days before The Dark Knight’s release, when fans rushed to ‘defend’ the film (which they had not yet seen – such was their attachment to what the film represented) by sending death threats to critics like The New Yorker’s David Denby who reviewed it unfavourably, and then again with the release of the film’s follow-up The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, when Rotten Tomatoes had to shut down the comments section for their page on the film such was the level of vitriol directed at critics, like the Associated Press’s Christy Lemire, who criticised the film. From conspiracies about critics paid off to pan DC Films (trust me, no-one needs a pay-out to give Suicide Squad a bad review) to the racist harassment and hacking of Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones, the examples of entitled, vindictive fanboy behaviour played out publicly in recent years are many and awful. It would perhaps be hyperbolic to draw a direct line from The Dark Knight to GamerGate and the radicalisation of many of its members into the alt-right, but only a little: it is amid the hype surrounding The Dark Knight and the ardour with which many fans loved it that the violent, bullying face of contemporary geek culture was formed. Ironically for a film which ultimately posits that people are generally good and decent even in trying circumstances, The Dark Knight made a significant portion of fans show their worst selves.

None of this is to say that the film should not have been made or is retroactively made worse. The film is the film regardless of its legacy, and art should not be penalised for the sins of the worst people in its audience. Nor is to say that the film’s influence is without positives – it served as a reminder of the utility of practical effects, helped popularise the use of IMAX cameras and promote the artistic worth of shooting on film, and gave Nolan the clout to get the ambitious likes of Inception and Dunkirk made. Yet, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the film and its reception have been genuinely damaging to wider popular culture. It is not just the progenitor of a legion of lazy imitators, but also of a film culture dominated by the ‘movie bro’, one that hates being challenged, hates diversity, and views film seemingly only in terms of indulgence and validation; one that harasses, abuses, and makes the world of film an ugly, stifling place. That’s not the film’s fault, any more than the most toxic responses to Fight Club and Breaking Bad (you won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a huge cross-over between adolescent idolisers of the Joker, Tyler Durden, and Walter White) are the fault of those works, but it is a part of the film’s legacy that it is necessary to reckon with.

At the time, The Dark Knight – with its stunning technique and emphasis on character and theme over spectacle – felt like the hero mainstream cinema needed and deserved, but now it may have lived long enough to see itself become the villain.

Written By Milo Farragher-Hanks

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