DARK NIGHT: The Tragedy Of American Lassitude

The decision to dramatise 21st-century tragedy is a perilous one, a dramatic path fraught with myriad pitfalls of public outrage and historical contention. In an attempt to obviate accusations of disrespect and exploitation, these films tend to go in one of two directions: to succumb to saccharine cod spirituality, or to valorise the desire for retribution.

There are exceptions like Elephant and United 93, but the ascendant form is the so-called ‘Docbuster’; a subgenre which melds docudrama authenticity with visceral blockbuster thrills, typically in furtherance of an explicitly right-wing conception of history. The Docbuster is exemplified in works like Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper and Patriots Day; offering its audience tacit license to both horror at and exult in the chaos and calamity.

For works ‘based on real events’ which aim for a less overtly ideological effect, there is still a danger of its becoming a rhetorical cudgel. This danger is particularly acute in films which deal with American gun violence; a perennial ‘hot button’ issue in US political discourse.  Writer/director Tim Sutton makes the bold choice of basing his third feature on the events surrounding the 2012 ‘Dark Knight’ multiplex shooting in Aurora, Colorado. But he opts to represent events in a way which precludes finger pointing or hand wringing.

During a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, James Holmes opened fire on the audience, killing 12 and wounding 70. Initially, the moviegoers believed what they were witnessing was part of the movie. It was this detail which suggested to Sutton that the shooting represented ‘a truly horrifying piece of very American performance art’. Dark Night is an attempt to extend a preexisting lexicon of malaise punctuated by violence.

A Conflict of Viewpoint

The predicate for Dark Night is clearly Elephant – both Van Sant‘s 2003 Palme D’Or winner and Alan Clarke‘s 1989 short film of the same name which served as Van Sant‘s inspiration. Indeed, the film is redolent of Van Sant‘s early ’00s ‘slow trilogy’ –  beginning with Gerry and concluding with Last Days. Like these works, Sutton chooses to articulate character detail with movement rather than dialogue, and values tone over narrative.

This places Dark Night in a lineage of slow cinema beginning with Antonioni and incorporating auteurs like Alonso, Tarr and Frammartino. It is a medium designed to lull the viewer into the rhythms of the everyday; to dig into the subconscious by capturing illustrative fragments and moments of vulnerability; to unearth character insight in expansive frames and extended takes. This is achieved in Dark Night through the routine of solitary rituals: taking a selfie, playing a video game, loading a gun.

These points of comparison serve to underline the chief weakness of the film. Sutton has a perceptive eye, but it is still in the process of being refined here. For all its skilful evocation of texture and atmosphere, Dark Night never fully settles on a viewpoint, a definitive form. It can never fully decide whether to maintain a distance or plunge into the maelstrom.

There are scenes when a character appears to be being interviewed by an off-camera interlocutor, which serves to puncture the otherwise carefully cultivated sense of detachment. Two characters are shown watching the Holmes trial on TV, throwing in an unwelcome referential note. The stillness and silence which haunts scenes of solitary driving and lonely wandering is undercut by Maica Armata‘s interesting but tonally jarring score.

Fulgent Yet Foreboding

Where Dark Night really excels is its aesthetic. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart has previously worked with the likes of Wim Wenders and Agnès Varda, and this is instructive in understanding the film’s fulgent yet foreboding tone. Its look combines a realist impulse with an ability to draw out the unreality inherent within these late capitalist landscapes. Louvart‘s work functions as the perfect expression of Sutton‘s thematic concerns, giving each character their own visual motif; be it a slow pan, roving track, or profile shot.

Equally impressive are the performances – though the cast could be said to behave rather than perform. Sutton cast non-actors chosen for their ability to function as ‘phantom versions of themselves’. It is a technique which is proving increasingly popular with indie filmmakers; most notably Andrea Arnold for American Honey. Dark Night is peopled with archetypes indicative of a facet of contemporary culture – ‘selfie freak’, ‘troubled teen’, ‘young Latina’, ‘war vet’. Sutton’s cast fill these moulds with a beguiling self-consciousness.

What is interesting about Sutton‘s choice of characterisation is that its lack of specificity makes the characters’ fates all the more senseless and arbitrary. It underscores how easily we become victims, and how our victimhood is largely a matter of blind chance and complete indifference. This sense of powerlessness is reminiscent of Fruitvale Station in its crushing inevitability, evoking the poignancy of seeing a person edge towards oblivion.

The Verdict

For all its formal ambiguity, the thing which truly resonates in Dark Night is its rendering of a culture captivated by its own reflection. Sutton‘s archetypes are adrift in a landscape mediated by images and spectacle. Dark Night depicts an atomised world whose denizens medicate a sense of inertia through violence turned inward and outward. The film’s most chilling message is that the shooter could plausibly be any number of its characters.

Sutton teases out this rampant affluenza in compositions which isolate the characters in brightly lit parking lots, big box stores, and suburban McMansions. One particularly striking scene shows the shooter standing in front of the mirror trying on masks – one of which is a Batman mask – while the Info Wars channel plays in the background. There is no better summation of where the film succeeds and fails – it gets to the heart of our confusing paradigm, but equally feels like a knowing play on the mirror scene in Taxi Driver.

Dark Night illustrates what is lost when the mediated space between screen and viewer is penetrated, building to a pitch of presentiment in a deftly executed final third. Sutton commendably refuses to engage with the violence itself, rejecting the Docbuster nostrum that violence has a cathartic charge which operates as a social palliative.

Dark Night‘s most substantive insight is its tracing of the minimal space that separates perpetrator from victim. Sutton‘s ability to get to the locus of this phenomenon suggests that his voice has yet to find its most satisfying expression.

What are your thoughts on Dark Night‘s representation of this event?

Dark Night opens at the Alamo Drafthouse in New York on February 3rd. Find additional release dates here.

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