Knights - Dark and Pale: Deshay Basara

The super hero tale needs to connect at two levels – one personal and the other heroic. The heroic component is an aspiration the entire audience has. Who doesn’t want to make 90 degree turns at high speed on a bike? Who doesn’t want to play million dollar poker hands without batting an eyelid? Who doesn’t want Anne Hathaway’s, and for that matter Eva Green’s, attentions? Who would not want to save Gotham?

The personal story may or may not have an equally widespread connection. Only a small portion of the audience is likely to relate to a David Dunn like experience. The odd person in the audience thinks back to the morning when her school bus rolled off the road embankment killing a few children on her bus, when she was herself found without a scratch sitting on the culvert. But when this rare connection does occur, the super hero becomes closer to heart. Audiences may also be prone to establish that connection, however stretched and contrived it may be.

For example, the dark knight’s “pain and suffering” has an appeal most adults would readily relate to. Emotions associated with risk-taking find resonance in how the little child or indeed the dark knight dealt with the pit they found themselves in. Safety nets and mediocrity may be close cousins. Credible commitments and their value in strategic games goes back a long way, to when the commander burnt the boats (bridges), and that was a good thing to do in preparation for bitter and equal battle. The common man (like the one Fawaz saw on a train, in the mid nineties) who is reflective may look back on instances of such close competition in his own life and relate to the super hero’s travails. The super hero’s afterglow helps him become a little less common.

The pale knight, Andres Iniesta (AI), looks back to his deep-into-injury-time goal at Chelsea a couple of years back (that hauled FCB to the CL final which they won) and says, “That was a brutal moment”. It stands to reason that it is a moment whose chief protagonist has revisited time and again, and found that the best perspective to describe it in is its own and not one of the teams’. While this is just ESPN it is still Nolanesque, the heroism is obvious and plain to see (CL, Europe and World champions). By assigning primary importance to the moment, his encapsulation goes beyond FCB and Chelsea fortunes, the pale knight connected with the wider audience at a personal level.

Mr. James Bond loses his woman tragically, Batman cannot have the nice happy life Alfred wants him to lead, AI continues to be plagued by injury and therefore the ordinary man may imagine himself to be dapper, knightly and off exercise only due to injury. Three act phenomena have a long history of making and annealing how mankind looks at itself – be it magic (pledge, turn and prestige) or riverboat card games (flop, turn and river) or FCB’s pale knight (CL, Europe, and World). Nolan’s chronicles of the events leading up to “Deshay Basara” may have, for better or for worse, ordained batman with the three-acts which he richly deserves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK4h9xR7Dec&feature=fvwrel