A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

“I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop men like him.”

That one line from the trailer sums up what The Dark Knight wants to be about — Bruce Wayne’s internal battle over whether he really wants to turn into the kind of person he’d have to become to defeat the likes of the Joker, and by extension the larger question of just how much good has to compromise in order to defeat evil. It’s a question which really connects with the zeitgeist right about now, what with all the fear and scare-mongering over terrorism and the justifications being thrown around for torture, rendition, spying and so on, which is one reason the movie is doing so well at the box office.

Note, however, that I said that’s what the movie wants to be about. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely hit the mark.  No process of internal change or growth happens all at once; it inevitably involves a series of steps.  In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of a character arc — the steps the character takes in growing and changing over the course of the story. Good screenwriting involves (among many other things) dramatizing all the important components of the protagonist’s arc in a smooth, believable and interesting fashion. In The Dark Knight, though, one of the biggest and most important steps happens entirely offscreen!

A little background. The Joker has announced that he’s going to kill someone new every day until Batman comes forward and unmasks himself, and he’s begun to deliver on his threat. Bruce decides he can’t take the guilt anymore, so he tells Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s crusading District Attorney, to call a press conference at which he’ll announce that he’s Batman and turn himself in to the police.  Batman hanging up his cowl and going to jail — pretty dramatic, huh?  Of course, we know it can’t happen because then there’d be no sequels and probably no movie either, but it’s a great idea because it creates a ton of tension: we’re dying to see what happens to change his mind and how much the decision to keep being Batman and risk the lives of more innocents costs him.

At the press conference, though, Dent is the one who announces that he’s Batman and turns himself in, and Bruce Wayne just stands around on the sidelines looking rich and lounge-y. WTF? Seriously, OMGWTFBBQ? Well, later we find out that Dent persuaded Batman to use him as bait to trap the Joker instead of just turning himself in and trusting the Joker to stop killing people. (Like that was ever a good plan anyway.) This makes for a decent moment of surprise at the press conference when the wrong Batman steps forward, but it comes at the expense of the most important turning point in Bruce Wayne’s entire character arc — when he decides not to give up and to keep fighting no matter the cost.

Look at it this way: for Bruce Wayne to decide to give in to the Joker’s demands, he should have reached the point of ultimate despair. He should have put everything he had into the fight against the Joker, and yet the Joker should have utterly defeated him. Giving up should have seemed like the only viable option remaining, because it should’ve been absolutely clear that there was just no conceivable way he could ever win without either killing a whole boatload of innocent bystanders in the process or turning into a monster even worse than the Joker — or more likely, both. Then surrendering would almost make sense, and we’d share Batman’s despair.

The problem is that at this point in the movie, we haven’t yet seen him give his all against the Joker. In fact, we haven’t even seen him come close. They’ve really only just begun to scuffle, and their biggest encounters are yet to come. So what does that make Batman, a quitter? A wimp? A loser?

Now think about what it should take to change his mind at this point. Remember, the Joker should have beaten him at every turn and left him with nothing but the nuclear option, becoming even worse than the Joker in order to defeat him, which would be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. Given the theme of the movie, there are really only two basic options. First, something or someone could restore Bruce’s faith in himself, his confidence that he can win and his certainty that he’s inherently good enough that he could never become truly evil like the Joker. Or second, it could become clear to him that however horrible the collateral damage caused by his battle against the Joker might be, the damage done by a Joker unrestrained by the Batman would be far, far worse.

What The Dark Knight offers us, though, is Harvey Dent coming up with a new plan. This suggests that Batman’s despair was pretty shallow and unnecessary — that all he actually needed to do was put a little more thought into the problem, but that he decided it would be easier to just give up. It makes Batman look even look more like a quitter. And it also makes him look kind of stupid.

Luckily, most of the rest of the movie is so crackerjack-super-fantastic-awesome-good that it’s possible to sort of gloss over this flaw while watching it, but there are some other problems I’ll talk about in future posts.

A German who was a child during WWII and witnessed American bombing raids on his own country at very close range immigrates to the United States, signs up to be a Navy pilot and gets shot down while flying a top-secret bombing run over Laos during the Vietnam War. He’s captured by the Viet Kong and endures all manner of torture and privation at their hands, but he organizes an escape with his fellow prisoners of war and, with great difficulty, makes his way through the deadly jungle until finally he’s rescued, whereupon he immediately returns to active duty as a pilot.

Sounds tremendously interesting and exciting, right? Sadly, it’s not, or at least it’s not nearly as interesting and exciting as it should have been.

I’m writing, of course, about Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a dramatic retelling of the story of Dieter Dengler, which Herzog first told in his excellent documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Herzog is one of my absolute favorite writer-directors, responsible for masterpieces like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, and Rescue Dawn would seem to play to his strengths. The cruelty and power of nature is a recurring theme in his work, showing up in every single one of his films I’ve mentioned and many more, and so is man’s inhumanity to man, which is also prominently on display here. But Rescue Dawn is missing something. Of course we care for Dengler in the generic sense we’d care for anyone going through what we see him experience, and Herzog unsurprisingly does a terrific job of capturing those experiences on film. The problem is that Dengler starts off as a cipher and remains one through the bitter end. What motivates him? Who is he really? Why did he join the very military that obliterated his own home town, why did he bomb other people as he himself had been bombed, and why did he return to active duty after being shot down and experiencing firsthand the fear and hatred consuming his targets because of those bombings? The answers to those questions would surely be immensely compelling — the stuff of great drama — but they’re barely even hinted at, and so Dengler remains abstract, more like someone you’d hear about on the news than an individual you know personally and care about because of that relationship.

What’s needed is a character arc for Dengler, some kind of inner journey that gives form and meaning to his outer journey and provides a point, a reason to care about it all. The tragedy is that such an arc is alluded to in passing by the title card that ends the movie, informing us that Dengler left the military shortly after resuming active duty and took up a career as a test pilot. Perhaps he did this just because the fear of being shot down again was too great to overcome, but maybe he made that choice because it allowed him to satisfy his need to fly without requiring him to continue killing and maiming a bunch of hapless subsistence farmers.

The latter scenario is really the only sound option, because it’s already right there in the story’s DNA. As a child, obviously, Dengler saw the excitement and glamour of being a fighter pilot without gaining an adult’s understanding of the true consequences of war, and so when he grew up, he joined the Navy, eager to partake of that excitement and glamour and still not truly aware of the dark side of the job. But his experiences after being shot down had to have changed all that. You simply can’t get bombed, tortured, imprisoned, attacked by villagers who are terrified of Americans even when they’re practically just American corpses, and mistakenly shot at by your own people, without changing. And just as importantly, it’s human nature to prefer stories in which the protagonist changes and learns a lesson, because if he doesn’t, everything that just happened to him could happen all over again, and in that case there’s no point in wasting time on the story in the first place!

If Rescue Dawn had instead been a voyage of discovery, and if we’d seen Dieter Dengler coming to grips with what he’d learned during his ordeal and deciding he couldn’t remain in the military (particularly if we didn’t immediately learn of his subsequent career as a test pilot and so only saw him giving up flying, the most important thing in his whole life) it would have delivered a tremendously powerful emotional payload and it surely would have connected with a significantly larger audience than it has. Though Herzog certainly doesn’t have an unblemished track record, I can only wonder whether he feared the current political climate too much to risk questioning even decades-old US military policy… or whether he was unable to raise financing for a version of the film that would have asked those questions. As it stands, while Rescue Dawn has many incidental pleasures and secondary strengths, it’s ultimately a failure.