“The Dark Knight” critique: A rebuttal

I posted this a few weeks back, wherein film essayist Jim Emerson critiques the directing style of Christopher Nolan:

This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River. It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would — but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time. At last, I now know exactly why.

Here is a video Emerson put together in which he describes the sequence from The Dark Knight as being a “visual mess”:

Now there’s a response from Joseph Kahn on his blog As Seen On TV:

A film critic named Jim Emerson recently deconstructed an action sequence from Dark Knight and claimed that it violated filmmaking rules and spacial relationships. He thought the sequence was indecipherable and that Christopher Nolan, when it comes to action, is essentially incompetent.

As gentlemanly as that sounds, the methodology he uses is inaccurate and misleading. I’m not out to destroy this guy, but his observations are so flawed it just can’t be left in the universe like that. With the internet being what it is, I’d rather not have this misguided laugh track become the Loose Change of film geeks. Plus, Emerson sounds like a prick.

I don’t have a problem of criticism. In fact, I love film criticism and think it is vital to the historical and cultural dialogue of cinema. Great criticism helps define our interpretation of art and is a canon of thought that shapes both future artists and audiences. A good critic is just as valuable to the cinema as the movies themselves, and I have learned as much reading as I have watching or making (note: criticism as in critical analysis is not always the same as “reviews”).

However, there is a point where criticism is so flawed and the author is pontificating on an area that is so out of his area of expertise, he is basically talking out of his ass. That is Jim Emerson’s knowledge of film space and the “rules” he has regurgitated out of a basic textbook.

I am going to go over his major points and explain the flaws. I’m going to skip over as many “opinions” as I can as he has every right to hold them, however smug they may be. This would be things like his personal preferences of how guns should fire, marksmanship, or how characters should act. Instead, I simply want to address points he explains as “rules” — which are not. Basically, anything he states as a “violation” is what I’m after here.

It’s a long post, which you can access here, replete with all sorts of images and video, and detailed analysis of individual shots in the sequence.

So have it, auteurs!

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