Aug
15
The Decline and Fall of Woody Allen
Filed Under movies, philosophy | 1 Comment
Everything that follows is not meant to be terribly serious; there’s only so much one can read into an article, and I’m reading an awful lot into this one. I should say that I saw Scoop recently and thought it awful. Curse of the Jade Scorpion wasn’t bad, but the whole time during Scoop I wondered why Woody Allen was making movies as quickly as he was.
Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask…
1. Even though I love The Dark Knight and The Departed, and assert that they deal with grand themes well in the tradition of political philosophy, I’ll be the first to say that tragedy is easier than comedy. What makes Stardust Memories and Manhattan so difficult to pull off is that they are comic: the truth is bittersweet, not fatal, and love can be had once certain things are realized. I hold that Stardust Memories is the finest film I’ve ever seen - it is a whimsical and dark meditation on whether a creator can love or be loved.
So one has to wonder what happened to the Woody Allen who could see deeply into the nature of things, pull out serious questions, and develop them well. I think I have an an answer: New York, more specifically, The New Yorker. Read more
Jul
27
Addendum to “Justice’s Required Redeemer: On The Dark Knight” (spoilers)
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Elizabeth Wolcott has noted that if Joker’s knives are his use of words, then we can account for Joker’s scars. Presumably the scars came from a knife; given that he describes his father cutting him up and him cutting his wife or himself up (I’m not sure of the latter, I forget what happened), and each actor in the story has something to say ending with “let’s put a smile on that face,” it’s pretty clear there’s a teaching at stake here.
We noted earlier that justice conducted via procedure is merely people making plans, people telling one another “it’ll be ok” no matter what awful thing happens because there’s a plan.
Words and knives are the exact same thing - you can kill with words, people who make plans do so every day. The Joker’s scars come from the words/knives. The difference between him and his victims is that he survived such an attack. He became ugly seeing ugliness.
The point might be that he thinks he’s doing the people he’s killing a favor by giving them a horrible, brutal experience before their death. He’s showing that some scars aren’t worth surviving, quite literally. Again, you can contrast with the battered, bruised Batman out of uniform we always see. You can also contrast their relation to money, too. Then you can see yet again why Joker’s point in the holding cell to Batman is accurate - all will turn on you too when they feel you have no use.
Jul
23
Justice’s Required Redeemer: On "The Dark Knight"
Filed Under batman, movies | 6 Comments
Note: Spoilers galore ahead. The movie is well-paced, incredibly dense, and very tense. Please do not ruin it for yourself if you have not seen it - this movie probably cannot be hyped enough.
However: if you can learn what justice is, why so serious about a mere plot?
for Peter Lund
1. Does justice require redemption? Batman Begins assumed this and ran into a problem: how do we know who the redeemer is? Ra’s Al Ghul’s anger at Gotham was perfectly justified, and it was sheer chance that Batman found one good cop - Jim Gordon - who was able to stop Al Ghul from killing him and then causing fear to annihilate the city for good.
Socrates would never demand that we look into necessary causes: those are divine matters, and those who look into the heavens for answers are most unnecessary when our concern is earthly. They would assert that justice is merely conventional anyway, a construct we use to keep ourselves from a more difficult truth. The joke’s on them: they have no clue what willing tools they are when push comes to shove, how ugly the truth actually is.
Jul
28
On Werner Herzog’s "Rescue Dawn"
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Couldn’t say it much better myself, but I’ll try:
The opening scenes of the movie seem to be archival footage taken from a bombing pilot’s cockpit. We watch huts explode slowly, almost rhythmically, as the plane flies by. At first, one thinks “wow that’s beautiful,” and the music reinforces that sentiment.
Then one has to ask: What kind of sick people are we that we can watch explosions knowing others are burning alive down there, and say that such a thing is beautiful? We should be quaking, knowing the same could be done to us, wondering how we have the capacity to do anything like that to another. The archival footage ends with being on the deck of a carrier over the ocean, presumably safe.
That tension between comfort, fear and survival evident in the mere viewing of the opening continues throughout the whole movie.
Our hero is a German, now American, who as a child saw an American pilot fly and shoot at him, and somehow “wanted his job.” He says he will be forever grateful to the country which “gave him wings” (he says this, btw, to the actor who played Vagabond in the Wing Commander PC game series, and I wish I saw more of that actor, because he was badass in the games). A refusal to renounce his country lands him in prison camp.
In prison camp, he meets Dwayne and Eugene. Dwayne has something in common with our hero: both men, at various points in the movie, literally shit their pants. I use the cruder phrase because it’s the one the movie uses, but as corny and vulgar as this may sound, the phrase has significance. Pajiba’s review talks about our hero always being hopeful. That’s true, but hope doesn’t mean fear magically dies.
It is tempting to say that Christian Bale’s character is hopeful to the point of not fearing. Contrast him with Eugene, who is scared for his life and “hopeful” about coming peace talks that’ll free him. Eugene threatens to squeal when Bale’s character, Dieter, plans an escape. In the end, Eugene gets on board with the escape but doesn’t follow orders - he steals some of the stuff the prison guards had while Dieter and Dwayne do the work of rounding up the guards, and the last we see of him is his moping “what do I do now,” as if prison was all he could conceive, a mental comfort that can only be added to by physical comforts.
If Eugene represents a mind trapped by the order that society imposes, then his fear is linked to the fear society uses to keep us in line. It is a fear that has a hope purely contingent on what another does. The hope involves no “flight,” no believing in oneself, and ultimately no fraternity.
For Dwayne’s fear - a fear centered on survival - ultimately turns into a gratefulness for those who make life better. Dwayne moves from hope for survival to hope for freedom as he attaches to our hero. What is key for one who wants to survive is not that one survives merely, but that the will survives. A will is only something if it embraces freedom in the deepest sense (those of you who know me know there is a very biting critique of libertarianism here).
Ultimately, the movie brings out a Rousseauian worldview that is gorgeous to behold and maybe even true. Man in regressing just a bit to his animal self - in finding ways to survive and bonding with others to survive - might open up more possibilities for friendship, love and even duties worth executing than man who is bound entirely by convention. “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” - well, that’s all contingent on “everywhere.” The true promise of being an American is that we are born free, and can stay free, as long as we see our fellow Americans and fellow humans as they truly are.
Technorati Tags: rescue dawn, movies, film, herzog
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May
31
On "Batman Begins"
Filed Under batman, movies | 5 Comments
Note: Spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen it. This is an essay, not a review. Originally published on WritingUp some time ago.
Synopsis: In this movie, a man dresses up as a bat in order to fight ninjas.
Commentary: The central question of the movie is “What is Justice?” The movie gives us two answers to this question: one is Katie Holmes’ District Attorney’s simple pronouncement that “Justice isn’t Vengeance.” That would seem to be the essential difference between Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) & Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson)’s characters: Liam Neeson blames Gotham for the death of his wife, and his want to destroy the city means he has confused justice and vengeance. Christian Bale’s loss of family led him to what is truly justice, as he rejected vengeance as something worth having.
But that answer is too simple to explain everything that goes on in the movie, starting with the part where Batman leaves Ra’s Al Ghul to die. “I don’t have to save you” seems a pretty cold act, even if it isn’t directly killing. The truly just man does no harm, and regrets deeply that any harm has to happen. Slick one-liners don’t quite make Batman perfectly just, in one sense of justice. Further, the bad guys consistently have the best lines in the movie, the lines that ring in our heads with a seriousness that cannot be dispelled. The mob boss is a perfect example of this: responsible for killing the killer of Bruce Wayne’s parents, thus interrupting Bruce’s attempt at vengeance, he tells Wayne to grow up and learn that the world doesn’t care what one stupid vengeful kid thinks. Power trumps obsessing over oneself, and while both activities can said to be selfish, it is true that the desire for justice wrongly directed will always be subordinate to a criminal understanding of the world, which exerts power, ironically enough, because it is more dispassionate.
The real answer to the question lies in the movie’s development of the theme of fear. The bad guys speak about this both directly and indirectly: Ra’s Al Ghul is the one who has mastered fear, and in teaching Bruce Wayne, his entire education is about overcoming fear. When Al Ghul says invisibility is a product of patience and agility, he means that control of fear is an active and passive phenomenon: one must be agile so as not to be seen, and thus not provoke another’s fear; one must be patient so one doesn’t give oneself away because of fear of already having been seen. The mob boss’ speech also speaks to this theme - why does he hold so much power? And note the mere existence of Scarecrow, a villain who holds all of Gotham scared by himself, even as merely a tool, because of his control over fear.
Bruce Wayne’s own take on fear is the central moment in the movie: asked by Alfred why he chose the bat as his insignia, when he is scared of bats, he answers (roughly) “I wanted my enemies to share my fear.” Despite all of Al Ghul’s training, he’s still scared, even of bats. What differentiates him from the criminal who trained him - Al Ghul showed him how to be Batman, in essence - is that he’s scared of himself. The problem with criminals is that they’re scared of nothing. Justice, then, is fear of what one is capable of. To be unjust is to try to lack all fear.
It is at this point we can see a crucial error in the second half of the movie, when Al Ghul becomes a raving lunatic as opposed to a man with an iron will. For Batman’s education, contra Katie Holmes’ character, has come about entirely through the bad guys. The most just man is he who can look into the abyss and see as they see, and turn away at the last second. But it isn’t because of anything rational that the just man turns away. Al Ghul is right - Gotham is corrupt and deserves to be destroyed. It killed Wayne’s family, and permits innumerable injustices every day at the expense of its citizens and others. Justice on a cosmic scale demands that Gotham die. Further, who cares about procedures in the case of the farmer that had murdered (the final test for Wayne to graduate from Al Ghul’s academy is the killing of a man that might be innocent. It is at this point Wayne runs away, becoming Batman)? Even procedural justice isn’t perfect: we have the procedures so we can ignore the bigger question about whether every procedure is perfect. If we thought about justice all the time, we wouldn’t be able to act. In the end, it is Wayne’s faith in Gotham that saves him: the one good cop, the Commissioner, is the difference in the battle between Al Ghul and Batman.
But that dodges the central question, and makes Al Ghul worse than he is: the writers have to have him say crap like “I have a city to destroy” and have to have him be a scumbag who, having been saved by Wayne once, still shows his ungratefulness by trying to destroy the city. We have to make him wholly bad, after all, so we can have a happy ending. This is Hollywood. The definition of anything that has a happy ending, btw, is “comedy.”
I hold that the movie should have been treated tragically. Al Ghul should have been a scumbag who got rescued by Wayne and was ungrateful. But when confronted by Wayne regarding his plans to destroy the city, he shouldn’t have sneered, but merely made the appeal to the fact that forces are in motion that neither understand. That’s the more consistent and fundamental teaching about justice: we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t even agree on it. But it is the most important thing in a Fallen world.