Blockbuster season is over and – larks! – what a camp old clutch of filmic fancies those Hollywood darlings graced us with this time around.
Let’s follow the majority of the British public and ignore the likes of You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and The Love Guru.
They’re candyfloss comedies, designed to dissolve in the mind (incidentally, anyone who wants to argue that Zohan’s stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict elevates it from this category needs to consider how hard it is to take Adam Sandler seriously at the best of times, let alone clad in super-short denim crotch cuddlers).
Instead, let’s search for campery in supposedly sombre features – those ’serious’ mega-flicks like Hellboy 2 or this year’s big daddy, The Dark Knight. Both are helmed by leftfield directors (Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan respectively) who have retained their critical standing during a seamless glide into the mainstream.
Both were reviewed semi-ecstatically by critics from across the political spectrum and both disguise a carnival of neon silliness behind their gruff, macho surface.
Of the two directors, del Toro is more willing to acknowledge his fluffy side. Through his other works, he has made an art of making the silly scary and vice versa. But in recent years the balance between the two has shifted.
The first movie of del Toro’s Hellboy franchise covered mental illness, minority rights and military propaganda. The second sees our cigar-chomping, beer-chugging hero immersed in tending kittens, resolving domestic arguments with his girlfriend and having a sing-song to Barry Manilow. Très macho.
Whereas del Toro recognises the rich source of humour in undermining his hero’s masculinity, Nolan’s po-faced portrayal of Batman in The Dark Knight serves to make the sporadic moments of anti-machismo unwittingly hilarious.
In a key scene, Gotham’s heroic district attorney, Harvey Dent, addresses his electorate after a terrorist attack. Dent delivers a rhetoric of Obamian proportions, climaxing with his rallying call: “The night is always darkest before the dawn”.
Stirring stuff… if the line hadn’t been cribbed pretty much wholesale from ‘Dedicated To The One I Love‘, a swooning piece of bubblegum-pop by fifties girl group The Shirelles.
It’s a subtler form of camp than bellowing drunkenly along to Manilow, but it’s there nonetheless. And it makes The Dark Knight a shade less dark and a lot more ridiculous. Which for a franchise with a pretty silly history is as exactly as it should be.
