The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone

Author:Tom Shone [Tom Shone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571348008
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The scene in question occurs at just past the seventy-four-minute mark. To satisfy the Joker’s demands, Gotham’s new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has decided to identify himself as the Batman. Taken into protective custody by an armored SWAT vehicle, he is driven across the city, accompanied by half a dozen police cars and helicopters in a convoy. It is dusk, almost nightfall, the city streets bathed in cool blue shadow. From an aerial tracking shot looking down, we see the convoy making its way along the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers, in single file, like wagons in a Western, a shot so classically elegant that we almost don’t notice what looks to be a wall of fire about a block ahead of the convoy, at the top of the frame. It’s around now that you notice the sound, or lack of it. As the convoy crosses the bridge and swings a left, spotlit by the helicopters, the sound of their blades drops away and we hear the single sustained cello note, played son filé, that we have come to associate with the Joker’s chaos.

“What the hell is that?” asks one of the cops as they get closer to that wall of fire blocking the street, now revealed as a burning fire truck—unattended on an empty street, the sight is surreal—and the convoy is diverted to the underpass. “Lower Fifth?” complains the cop. “We’ll be like turkeys on Thanksgiving down there.”

Sure enough, as the convoy takes an exit ramp underground, losing its helicopter cover, one of the police cars is suddenly knocked out of the way by a garbage truck swinging in from nowhere. One of the police vans is sent hurtling into the river that runs along one side of the underpass as an eighteen-wheeler pulls up alongside the SWAT van. Dent is now boxed in on two sides. The door of the eighteen-wheeler—which bears an advertisement for Hyams Amusement Park, reading “Laughter is the best medicine,” except an S has been added, so that it reads “Slaughter is the best medicine”—slides open to reveal the Joker and his men, all in clown masks, hanging by straps from the roof. Casually, as if indifferent to the exact start of festivities, the Joker raises a small pistol and starts firing. Then someone hands him a sawed-off shotgun, which leaves great dents in the side of the SWAT van. Finally, someone hands him a bazooka, and he picks off the police cars, flipping them like dominoes, one by one. The score has disappeared entirely. What we have instead is a percussive drumbeat of squealing tires, torqued metal, and gunshots reverberating cavernously throughout Lower Wacker Drive, one of Nolan’s most distinctive spaces, appearing in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight: an underground cavern with overhead lighting and heavy concrete pillars that turn it into an Escher-like recursive grid, confining yet deeply recessed, with parallel lines stretching to the vanishing point, its overhead lights conveying a visceral sense of speed as the combatants race beneath it.

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