Dark (K)night

The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.

The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.

Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a. zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"

At the center of all this is the character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)

The Joker is not so much as person as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their motivations to us.

By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."

A few other striking elements of this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless city.

Finally there is the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're too far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.

August 01, 2008 in Commentary on Current Events

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The superhero in Bushian times: A relentless and sadistic symphony of horror for moral degenerates, 9 December 2008

Author: Benoît A. Racine from Toronto, Ontario, Canada


I used to feel nothing but contempt for film adaptations of comicbooks. I felt they were aimed at a public so illiterate and lazy, they preferred to have their little superhero stories read to them to the sound of big things blowing up. I was right of course but little did I suspect the depths of depravity this genre (representing, along with films about hired killers, roughly 90 % of the current US box office) could sink to. This film hires competent actors and competent special effects teams to tell a story of sadism unparalleled in the archives of degenerate entertainment. It's one gruesome act after another for two and a half hours.

But it's not just escapism for the dumbed-down, atavistic, high-fructose corn syrup-fed diabetic video game generation. It has a political message that faithfully reflects the mood of Bush's America, pre-Obama. Batman, the unelected people's hero, commits every imaginable unethical act imputed to Bush: illegal invasion of privacy, torture, lying, betrayal, cowardice, multiple cover-ups, manipulation of information, you name it. He's a hero for our times. The authorities are corrupt or corruptible. No one cares about human life. Everyone is told to "stay the course" in their war against profiteers, terrorists, maniacs and mobsters, whatever the cost. The question of torture comes up often, as does the torture itself. Everyone is fallible. Everyone is tempted. No one is admirable. Every one is contemptible and no one is saved. It's the realization of one sadistic and spectacular adolescent revenge fantasy after another. The Joker is the only approximately "moral" character of the lot because he doesn't care about money. Like a Muslim terrorist, he only cares about blowing things up real good and getting his rocks off. Every attempt at showing the "human side" or the "moral dilemmas" of the protagonists in the course of those mostly muddled and incomprehensible two hours and a half fails because it just feels tacked on and there is simply no room for such subtlety. This is not what the blood-hungry teenage ghouls who paid good money want to see. They want blood, torture porn, revenge, guts spilled on the sidewalk, dismemberment, broken bones and disfiguration. God pity America in its more dire hour of moral decrepitude!

In cinematic terms: Except as a useless metaphor of America's moral and financial decline, it's the end of cinema as an ethical medium - monkey "Saw", monkey did, monkey started throwing feces back at the spectators. To speak the language of the scriptwriters: Everyone involved in this film deserves an end like Heath Ledger. To speak in Freudian terms: With the sheer amount of firepower and cars in this film, can you imagine the lilliputian endowment of the people who actually enjoy this kind of entertainment? In physical terms: If you have the slightest thread of decency in you, this film will make you feel like the innocent starlet wiping the cocaine and the body fluids from her face after being defiled by a mob of slimy Hollywood producers. In musical terms: This film is one continuous, distinctly unheroic ode to fear. P.S.: Maggie Gyllenhall is one cold, ugly, talentless broad and Batman's asthmatic voice was embarrassingly ridiculous, lending the only note of "humour" to an otherwise stomach-churning odyssey.