Thanks to my friend Dessiree McFarland for sending this my way!
Let me begin by saying that I really liked The Dark Knight, which I thought had sophisticated writing and three-dimensional acting. However, I totally agree with Jim Emerson that this action scene was hopelessly confusing. His analysis is spot-on, although I think it’s a little bit of a cheap shot to blame editor Lee Smith, who after all has very limited ability to change the screen direction of a shot once it’s in the camera.
On the one hand, I’m glad Emerson is bringing the nuances of screen direction to the public’s attention, because he’s absolutely right that it affects us deeply on a subsconscious level. But I think there’s a more fundamental issue here: what’s the most important element of a movie?
By coming down so hard on this action scene, the implication is that Christopher Nolan doesn’t know how to film one and therefore he’s not a particularly good director. I don’t know if that’s fair. I’m really fond of the sequence where the Joker makes Batman choose between Rachel and Harvey; it’s not a tenth as technically complex but it’s ten times more emotionally resonant and important to the success of the movie.
The truth is that a lot of modern action sequences are just a mishmash of explosions and quick cuts, and screen direction often gets thrown to the wind. I picture an executive declaring that the audience doesn’t really care.
Do I care? Well, an action scene for the sake of an action scene, like the one Emerson dissects, bores me. Even if it had been perfectly comprehensible, it wouldn’t have done much to make me like the movie; that’s how I felt about most of the battle scenes in Avatar.
But an action scene that pushes the narrative forward and (more important!) has an emotional hook, like the other one I mention, will keep me spellbound. Walter Murch has a sort of facetious pie chart where he divides up what’s important to an edit: 51% emotion, 23% story, etc. The point he’s trying to make is that emotion trumps everything—even story—and that things like continuity and eye-trace and screen direction (all single digits) are actually a very minimal part of the success of the edit.
Of course, we’re aiming for 100%, so when we cut, we don’t want to give up that 5% if we don’t have to. There’s a scene in The Incredibles where Mr. Incredible faces the apparently invincible, run-amok, steel turnip of a robot. It’s extremely exciting, visually beautiful and funny, too–-Mr. Incredible throws out his back while fighting the robot. The entire scene never violates a single petty rule and as a result it’s one of the most comprehensible and enjoyable action scenes anywhere.
