Little Teaser #2

The official hype campaign for The Dark Knight Rises escalates with a teaser poster. This is the second image released for this film, following the publicity shot of Tom Hardy as Bane released a few months back.

As is par for any good teaser key art, we are being treated to a highly conceptual representation of the film that tells us much by not showing a lot at all.

It looks as though Gotham is to be put through some serious trials in this film; visually it appears to be orders of magnitude even worse than either the chemical attack or domestic terrorism that befell Gotham respectively in the last 2 Nolan films. The initial impression from the artwork is of some sort of catastrophe set upon the city, however after some reflection, I can't help but notice a distinct lack of fire and/or explosion, like the DVD key art for The Dark Knight. So what we could be seeing isn't so much the catastrophic destruction of Gotham but rather its decay, perhaps in Batman's absence (which the newly minted teaser trailer seems to imply).

I would also deduce that the decay of Gotham (violent or otherwise) portrayed in this key art represents the internalised drama of the film in which Bruce Wayne's resolve to serve justice is crumbling. We are being shown a rather bleak aesthetic with a heavily subdued (virtually a greyscale) colour pallet

and the artwork's edges receding to an infinite blackness. We are no doubt being sold that this film will be Bruce Wayne's darkest hour; it is a common, yet essential dramatic convention, signifying and justifying the conclusion to an ordeal - as Harvey Dent said in The Dark Knight, "The night is darkest just before the dawn." In the darkness and destruction apparent in the artwork, the only light is cast from the sky - ostensibly the Batman symbol - ultimately Batman is the only hope for the city. I would even go so far as to say also that the persona of Batman could be the only thing to save Bruce Wayne from his own personal turmoil.


Likening this poster to the graffitied wall teaser for The Dark Knight - which represented so well that film's idas of anarchy - I'm sure that there are deeper thematic delineations in this key art, ones that I doubt I could put my finger on without knowing more about the film.

I am greatly looking forward to future key arts for this film, to see where we are going to be taken thematically and artistically by Nolan's final story for Batman, and on a personal note to see how accurately I may be over analysing what may have just been a really cool way to show us the Batman logo.