On “Inception:” a meditation on trust and sacrifice. Those issues are explored through faith and reason. The movie is filled with extraordinarily clever and competent people and a curious device that allows them to give someone a dream, go into that dream with themselves and the recipient of that dream as actors, “extract” information and plant ideas.

Underlying the Inception project is the mixture of dreams and reality – the mixture is destined to be a mess, as it depends on untruth in its very, um, inception. It is no surprise the one man best at navigating others’ minds drove his own wife insane by implanting the idea that they were together in a dream world when they really were in a dream world. Brought back to reality, she wondered if that too was a dream and killed herself assuming it was. That’s not Inception gone wrong: that’s the very nature of the project and how DiCaprio’s character knows Inception will work, especially for planting ideas.

But the movie is nowhere near as nihilistic as “The Prestige,” where a fatal conflict between old and new has a Hollywood ending slapped on. There, the “new” wins because of “family,” never mind that the “new” drove one of his wives to hang herself through his purposeful neglect. Underlying faith and reason here is memory, the want to believe and trust, the guilt we feel that we must reckon with, not simply recollection. His dead wife, as a subconscious projection of his, only wants him. He’s the anchor to reality; the dream world only includes one other person for her. The twistedness of trust as blind loyalty/mental projections begins to disappear when one realizes that if it weren’t for being forced together in a dream world, all the insanely clever people we’re presented would be trapped in their own little worlds. It is no surprise the idea DiCaprio and friends are supposed to implant is that of breaking up a monopoly in an heir’s mind. The father, dead for years to/in reality, had through his cunning and power near complete control of the world’s energy. One wonders how much they deceive the heir, given that the heir’s placement of his childhood as central seems a self-realization. The plan that called for creating two dreams within a dream was ultimately about seeing what would make the heir happy. Money and power were never terribly important to him even before the dreaming began.

What is surprising is how much trust invading others’ dreams takes, how only a thief – a liar – can be the surest safeguard for everyone else who needs to be involved. The thief and crew are employed by the very first person targeted; he probably set himself up to see what they could/would do. He is most likely testing their loyalty/ethics with the confrontation before the helicopter ride. We get different examples of “faith” (spoken 3 or 4 times at decisive moments) throughout the movie: a team that trusts each other despite violent disagreements (at least two members know full well how threatening DiCaprio’s subconscious is), the girl in love with the dream world who ends up believing more in the thief and his techniques than he himself; a belief by the thief that he still has a family despite a wife screaming in his head that he doesn’t really. But the trust a corporate executive puts into a fugitive who broke into his mind is the strangest of all, yet yields the greatest reward for all involved. DiCaprio’s hero understands more than his mentor that faith is faith in something, someone. The memory of the wife shows “only one” can be just as lost as being alone. Two may not be enough. What “reality” is: the everyday trust a CEO may have in his workers, his reputation, yes, his money, driving him to incredible acts of heroism. Recall how much pain he endures throughout the dream, for a chance at normalcy.

If you haven’t seen the film, all you need to know is that in the future, the President is a professional wrestler, there’s trash and dust clouds everywhere, we try to feed crops a Gatorade knock-off instead of water, there’s a whole channel entitled “the masturbation channel” which has a 300 year lifespan, food and sex are merged in the most stomach-churning way, and oh yeah: everyone is as dumb as a post.

We can go a step farther and say all of this seems to be happening because of one critical factor: the rise of the corporation as culture. Why do we feed plants Gatorade, even though Gatorade is bad for them? Because their slogan, which is scientific-sounding, is all we can recite. (Also, the company that manufactures the stuff bought the FDA and replaced them as an authority.)

I think one can explain having a President who was a professional wrestler the same way. Cicero and Lincoln don’t sell in terms of rhetoric when we want culture dictated to us by corporations. A wrestler’s microphone skills are consistently tested by focus groups of sorts around the country.

The food/sex convergence also makes sense within this framework. Gratification is an immediate benefit and sells well. If companies can reduce what we take pleasure in to one concept – if they can get rid of that pesky notion of “the beautiful,” which in Plato drives no less than Socratic eros – it is much easier to provide for consumers and maximize profitability. They can give us a sham diversity (i.e. Maxim is “reading” and Debbie Does Dallas is a classic) and not have to think themselves at all. One corporation’s computer, in the movie, has an “auto-layoffs” function when profits decrease. It is notable that people work in the dystopia: in fact, quite a lot of people seem employed.

2.  You’ve probably noticed I don’t rant too much about people being dumb. When I link to something like Bauerlein’s discussion of the subject, I’m more interested in what’s wrong with modern education. How can you have kids in an American history class, 40 minutes a day, 180 days a year, and they don’t know who the Vice President is? I don’t even get how this is possible.

I’m much more interested in factionalization/polarization, and not the way most political scientists are (i.e. the parties are much more partisan than they’ve ever been). The real issue to me is whether we’re respecting each other as Americans, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I say that.

If we use the framework I’m suggesting we get from Idiocracy, we can see an enormous problem looming. You’ve got two cable networks, at least, with profit-seeking agendas that play an explicitly partisan game for both Left and Right. I say “game” because if you think Bill O’Reilly and Olbermann care in the least if you’re an educated, thoughtful voter you’re an idiot. It isn’t that money motivates them solely, but it motivates them enough that they’re willing to dumb us all down for a few tenths of a ratings point.

It’s bad enough the one time people are interested in issues and seeking information on candidates occurs every four years, in the guise of a campaign. That’s already frighteningly close to Presidential elections being a pay-per-view of sorts: inasmuch as campaigns fulfill an educative function – and the way things work now, they have to fulfill this function, we don’t care about self-governance at any other moment – they work like WWE’s “Smackdown” and “Raw:” regular advertisements for the sake of getting you to do one thing. Perhaps we can charge people $39.99 to vote and throw in a complimentary t-shirt for the candidate’s brand.

3. Notice I’m not ranting at corporations explicitly. I’m more fascinated by the logic we’re using as individuals and private associations. Corporations make money. Money is good (or, in Idiocracy: “I like money,” said in the slowest slack-jawed drawl possible). Therefore, the more we emulate corporate behavior or think like they think, the better we are. Heck, maybe we should think like they want us to think – they spend all this time researching what we want, maybe they know something about ourselves we don’t.

Which brings us to the Internet. What if there was a faction dedicated to stupidity (bad question, I know: what faction isn’t dedicated to such a thing)? But you know what I mean – people who are proud of being dumb, and finding smart-sounding ways of tearing others down? We note that one thing being online does to nearly all of us is make us very, very rude, no matter how educated we are. (I grant I am not exempt from this critique).

I suspect one reason why people feel free to be so much more vicious here is that the bandwagon tendencies are pronounced, so much so it is hard to feel heard. If you’re chiming in agreement and feeling part of a community, you can definitely feel drowned out by the 29384792749 other people chiming in. If you disagree, obviously, you’re going to feel like singular subatomic particle responsible in large part for the Big Bang that scientists will never find because you’re doomed to disappear upon sight. You must carry your message of truth loudly and obnoxiously and make sure that everyone who disagrees with you is revealed to be a child molester.

All of this is to say that the bandwagon tendencies one sees online are just one step away from becoming formally corporate culture, if they aren’t products of that culture already. Those of you on Digg or Reddit know how much pride some users take in their “community,” and I put that word in scare quotes because given some things said, it isn’t clear those people are housebroken yet.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind – I think online culture carries the real danger of making us a bunch of drones who only respond to slogans and immediate gratification. The key isn’t the dumbing-down, but the nature of the dumbing-down: group identity is established by a streamlining of pleasure (let’s all agree and hate anyone who disagrees!), and it doesn’t matter that one can get a bunch of newspapers, the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia, poems, classics, Frankfurt School philosophers on Twitter, etc. All that “smart” junk isn’t needed when we have the masturbation channel in place already.

Still, I’m probably going to go see this. I must have seen every episode of “The A-Team” something like 4 times each. Notable, from the commercials:

• The guy playing B.A. seems to have gotten his role down. The “I’ll kill you fool” after the destruction of the van sounded exactly like it should. The “I’m B.A., you’re going to be unconscious” is growing on me.
• I’m not thrilled with the forced laughter and chuckles that end most of the commercials.
• I don’t know how sold I am on Liam Neeson as Hannibal. The smile looks thin and creepy, and what made George Peppard awesome was how natural he was. There was one episode I remember where Peppard was explaining the risks and responsibilities of a task that needed to be done to some 19 year old girl that was a journalist and or Face’s girlfriend. Given how campy “The A-Team” was, I didn’t expect him to be as convincing as he was – he brought a seriousness to the talk that made me feel “yeah, this guy is a commander.” – Still, if anyone knows how to act, it’s Liam Neeson. -

Anyway, that’s about all that’s on my mind right now. An A-Team trailer that’s halfway decent.

From Daniel Carlson’s review on Pajiba:

Docter introduces a token villain, the crazed former explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), whom Carl had admired as a boy, but Muntz’s attempts to interfere with Carl’s journey and abduct an exotic bird adopted by Russell start to feel rote after a while. It’s not that he’s a flimsy villain: If anything, he’s creepier and colder than any Pixar bad guy since Sid, the boy in Toy Story who got his rocks off by melting and exploding his action figures. Muntz travels with a pack of attack dogs that have been outfitted with collars allowing them to talk, and he’s definitely psychotic. But Muntz’s real purpose is to allow Carl to see what he might become if he continues to remain emotionally isolated from the world. It’s a smart move that really helps the story hit home. Russell is obviously going to be the driving force that pulls Carl pack into the world, giving him someone to care about, but it’s the darkness in Muntz that catalyzes Carl’s steady change from withdrawn hermit to functioning member of humanity.

The attempts didn’t feel as rote to me, maybe because I’m watching others and myself grow older, and I’ve been watching others deal with loss and isolation and wondering how I myself will deal with it. Part of me feels that 99% of the “drama” we see, for example, politically has less to do with the state of the economy and more to do with us simply not being happy in the land of plenty. That sounds idiotic, until you realize that we’re talking about people wanting to find newer and newer conspiracy theories, using the fact their vote counts merely as a way of expressing their dignity, and many times just flat-out ignoring the pain of others. I don’t want to go too far with this, because a theory of political behavior can’t be existential ultimately. But it is true that the way we relate to each other in a democracy is shaped by the very modes and orders we have. As Clifford Orwin notes:

Mme de Sévigné, he [Tocqueville] tells us, was a kind and loving woman, but in context this very allegation serves to distance us from her and aristocracy. The letters he quotes, written from the country to a grown daughter, contain much affectionate chitchat. In the same breath, however, they describe the miseries imposed upon the local peasants by a ruinous tax increase, and the atrocious punishments inflicted on resisters. And Mme de Sévigné not only states her satisfaction at the salutary example thus being set, but even worse, jests at the expense of the wretched victims. Tocqueville does not just note but compels us to feel the difference democracy makes. For it is almost unthinkable, he notes, that any of his readers, a century and a half further along the road to democracy, should respond so callously to human suffering, and simply unthinkable that any who did would so openly express it: “the spirit of the age would prevent him.”

Mme de Sévigné, Tocqueville insists, simply did not regard peasants as members of the same species as herself. She related to them as servants, as responsibilities, as threats, but not as human beings. Her compassion, like her loyalties, was immured within the walls of class. She lacked all humanity in the strict sense of that term: her fellow-feeling was not available to human beings as such.

With democracy, by contrast, the tight bonds of caste having fallen away, we respond to one another directly as human beings. Where all are more or less the same and equal, each readily identifies with the other, and so with his misfortunes. (Tocqueville was a profound student of Montesquieu and Rousseau, and there are few passages of his work where their influence is so evident.) Few things so impressed Tocqueville about Americans as their ready sympathy with each other’s troubles. Of all peoples the Americans could most be counted on to come to the assistance of their fellows, at least in cases involving no great inconvenience to themselves (II.iii.4).

The qualification is significant. Not democracy but aristocracy is the home of heroic, self-sacrificing virtues. Democrats are good-hearted, but they’re also people in a hurry, necessarily preoccupied with their own business. The obverse of compassion is what Tocqueville calls individualism. As men become more equal and alike they also become more isolated, more preoccupied with their own affairs. Tocqueville presents enhanced compassion as merely the most attractive aspect of that loosening of bonds that is the fundamental social fact of democracy. It’s because we all know what it is to bowl alone that we commiserate readily with solitary bowlers. If in aristocracy conventional bonds of caste enjoyed a more than natural force, in democracy the natural one of common humanity proves fleeting and frail. Compassion is particularly to be cherished as the sole force tending naturally to unite human beings whom almost everything else in democracy conspires to dissociate.

If you say Muntz is an aristocratic villain, you’re missing the point – all of democracy is aristocratic in the sense that it’s about the “spirit of adventure.” You’re free to love here, free to discover what’s truly good and worth preserving for yourself. And yet we are presented with a villain that seems shockingly real in his willingness to kill for a stupid goal, and he seems real not because he’s been dishonored or isolated from others for years, but because he’s old. This is not to condemn the elderly, not one bit: we all have this in us, and we should be frightened of it. But what is “it?” What drives one man to isolate himself for years hunting for a bird, another to hang on to every piece of junk from the past as if it were his wife? These themes in “Up” are given younger counterparts that don’t share the stage: our scout’s Dad wants nothing to do with his own son; the younger, modern world can find no other use for the old than to provoke them and stick them in a home. It’s in the stories of the younger – which frame the story of our hero and villain – that we find the ability to love implies the ability to reject, that love entails loss. Hence, the fundamental issue is whether you recognize yourself as a moral actor, or completely independent. Only one of these is really compatible with the “spirit of adventure.” We note Mme de Sévigné was tied to the land that gave her leisure, and could never truly lose in her order.

I think I’ll leave this comment there. It sounds weaker somewhat because I’ve talked about politics, and these issues are so, so personal. But in a way, the move from the parable to who we are now is part of the case “Up” quietly makes about looking beyond oneself.

Pajiba’s review of “9″ covers what’s wrong with the movie: the dialogue is the most pressing problem, and the story is perhaps not as well-crafted as it could have been.

Those of you who have seen the movie, where dolls (named only with numbers) who are aspects of the soul/mind have to deal with the problem of a mechanistic intellect’s creation, are probably wondering how the dolls add up. Here’s a very provisional list of what I think at the moment:

1. caution
2. curiosity
3. memory
4. same as 3, given that memory is dual: one stores a memory, then needs to retrieve it
5. ?
6. mysticism
7. independence
8. will to power/agency
9. daring

I think you can see why I’ve chosen the terms I have: “caution” can rule “curiosity” and “independence” to a degree when the issue is survival only. It fails to rule them once a rough peace has been created, and 1′s fight with 9 is explosive. Moreover, “caution,” “agency” (8 – note how he is incapable of doing nearly anything without strict orders) and “mysticism” (fragmented knowledge of the past/future) combine to form the first political order of the movie. “Caution” claims rule with religious auspices (this seems alien to us, but it makes perfect sense in Greek tragedy), asserting that any desire for knowledge is an unnecessary risk. It is bolstered by a real fear of what’s out there, one that can easily turn superstitious, but in this case is perfectly justified.

For the other “order” is ignoring the issue of survival and thriving because of accidental neglect. I think that’s why 5 (?) and 2 (curiosity) are sticking with 1, 8, 6 initially: there’s room to build at least in the burned out church, and tinker and scavenge. That’s happening with 3 & 4, whom we assume are aided by 7 (“independence”) who has left 1. But again, this isn’t really an order: 7 has exceptional dexterity and agility and can fend off the beast – perhaps the last machine – that wishes to resurrect what may have been its “source” towards the opening of the movie. But the beast has no interest in destroying a dark library – yet – and “independence” can only fend it off without decoys, without someone ready to make a sacrifice. And there you have the first principle of order – not merely the willingness to use violence, but the willingness to accept the consequences of such a use.

1 comes off awfully in the movie, even as 9 causes death, something that for all of 1′s faults he could almost never be accused of (he does send 2 out on a risky mission and justifies this in the harshest way. How much of this is him trying to kill 2 is debatable, given that 1′s coldness can be called an awareness of risk). And the thing about death – despite the movie’s “they’re free now” line at the end – is that we, and perhaps the dolls, have the expectation that after being “trapped” in the machine they will rise again. That expectation is utterly foiled, leading one to wonder if 1 knew the truth all along: that death is final, life is a gift, and waiting out the beast that begins the movie is a perfectly sound strategy. What is not sound is to repeat the mistake of man.

What is the mistake of man? Is it simply ruthlessness, being bestial? The movie indicates this to a degree, but when one considers 9′s destructiveness, it isn’t that simple. It actually looks like the mistake is combining our destructive tendencies with our creative powers: in other words, order comes about because people understand limit, that violence has consequences. To combine creation and destruction is to suggest that there is no limit.

5 sits in the middle, with one eye, and only leaves the realm of caution because he owes another his life. He is responsible for creating the trap which kills the pterodactyl and many of the machines via the barrel bomb. He has to learn from 2, 7 and 9 how to handle himself, despite the implements and training he is equipped with from 2.  1, it should be noted, is very effective: he gets his cannon built and hurts the machine; he removes his cape and destroys the pterodactyl; he sacrifices himself and allows the final victory to be won.

I think 5 is the question of looking either at the past or the future, and it makes sense then that the list has parallels built into it: 1 and 9 parallel most sharply, as do 2 and 8; the two dolls dedicated to memory are what mysticism and independence depend on, they’re not actively seeking new knowledge although happy when they can get it. At the end, I think we’re left with 9, 7, 3, 4 only. The past is gone and so is the fearful piety that characterized it: the soul, no longer alienated from the earth, regenerates life anew. The movie is pious in the way Tolkien was: the remaining characters are now living their faith, no longer bound by superstition, and fully aware of their mortality and purpose.

1. “Star Trek” is a good movie, but not a great one. It is purposely not aiming to be great; given the “alternate reality” it claims to be, it could be treated as a stand-alone episode. It consistently recognizes the depth of the mythos, whether that is the fullness of the characters, the natures of those inhabiting the cosmos, the sense of value underlying technologies, and the themes already covered by previous adventures. Better “Star Trek” movies than this one include “The Wrath of Khan,” “The Search for Spock,” and my personal favorite, “The Undiscovered Country.” It is no surprise that Leonard Nimoy emerges in the midst of this movie and speaks with a gravity oddly missing from the opening sequence, and yes, this viewer did miss William Shatner and the rest of the old crew at that moment, even while loving what this movie was achieving.

This is a humble movie in a sense: it is meant to grab your attention and make you pay attention to all that has come before. We see this most easily in the rich characterization; even with limited lines and scenes, the crew of the Enterprise comes to life. But in another way – and this is no knock on the movie – bringing everything to life results in a lack of things to analyze. The dialogue is sharp, but one doesn’t have to think about every word. Imagery of light and dark, themes of faith and reason are flat-out obvious, if they go anywhere. What was maddening for me was how Kirk deduced the nature of the threat, and how that was almost a vision – a calling – and how that contrasted with the younger Spock, told by the elder at the end of the movie to have faith. I’ll have to check again, but there wasn’t nearly enough development of that theme, I felt, which could have made this movie one for the ages if developed properly.

2. Still. Where this movie was most thoughtful was in the development of the villain. Nero captains a mining vessel; he’s angry that he lost his wife and home planet because Ambassador Spock promised to save them and failed. The theme is that of the everyman vs. heroes – do we need heroes? The same acts of daring that characterize heroes also have enormous costs, and even while they may not have to be paid, the mere existence of heroes means that we can think ourselves able to control everything. Nero is coming from a perspective where Spock must be held responsible – heck, the whole heroic ethos must be held responsible – for attempting to conquer pain.

Nero’s anger, then, can be molded into this counterfactual: What if we could destroy heroism? After all, the power of the future is inevitable, we will progress. The Romulans who are miners are bigger and stronger than everyone else; the mining vessel is huge with incredible technology, able to obliterate an entire armada and drill to the center of any given planet. If progress could wage war on heroism on its own grounds – if progress could go back and annihilate the foundations of myth – wouldn’t the world be a better place? Nero can go and share his pain with the cosmos, and yes, this is a thoughtless vengeance of his, but perhaps it can remake the universe into something better.

The sign that it can make the universe into something else is the impact the bodily/emotive (miners) has on rationality (Spock). The younger Spock is the key whose significance Nero is aware of, although Nero has no clue why. We viewers know better: Spock, after losing his planet, doesn’t do anything crazy. He wants to rendezvous with the fleet and stop Nero according to a more typical plan. He wants to show that the ways of people as a whole, of bureaucracy, of accepted wisdom, of following orders works. In other words: not daring is an acceptance of pain, a hope that progress can continue without any major striving. Spock’s passivity is exactly what Nero’s vision, if we can say he has a vision, demands – no more heroes, just a world where we feel each other’s pain, make no pretense to be better, and accept our roles.

3. This is the movie where Kirk teaches Spock; Ambassador Spock is necessary because the situation is so dire, but Kirk’s faith isn’t really faith in the sense of conventional piety. He’s more than willing to learn, contrive and execute as needs be. Nor is his love particular: command includes securing the welfare of those who had beaten him to a pulp previously. The younger Spock is trapped within the dictates of the personal and familial; reason was a tradition for him, and he could excel because of that circumstance.

But Kirk here represents nothing less than the awakening of another side of human reason, the willingness to explore. I don’t believe J.J. Abrams for one second when he says he wasn’t too into this series – this is just too well-done, too thoughtful for a leading-in, an invitation to explore the rest of Star Trek on our own.

The film begins with… a simulation called the Kobayashi Maru, a test required of all command cadets, a test that cannot be won. The importance of the test is gradually revealed over the course of the film and dovetails with the plot: the contradictory need both to face death and to refuse to believe there is any such thing as a no-win situation….

The battles between the two ships have a tension to them, a gravity, enhanced by the film’s clever decision to establish that the Enterprise was on a training mission with an entire crew of half-trained cadets. They’re terrified, undisciplined, make mistakes, die by the dozens in fire and vacuum. Survival becomes dependant on the intelligence and tactics of their commanders. Strategy makes sense throughout the film, emphasizing guile and logic in the place of technobabble.

The duality of life and death runs through all elements of the film: the polar opposites of the scientists and the fleet officers, Spock dying so that everyone else may live. And running through all of it the Genesis device: creation through destruction.

1. The plot of the film is simple enough: some time before, Captain Kirk had an encounter with a genetically engineered superman – Khan – who got one of Kirk’s crew to fall in love with him and tried to take over the ship. She, Khan and a few others failed in their mutiny upon the Enterprise and were banished to a remote planet. A Federation starship some years later stumbles upon Khan and is taken over; he wants revenge for his sufferings – including the misery and death of his wife – on a harsh, nearly lifeless planet.

The Federation starship stumbled upon Khan because it was helping do research for Project Genesis, a device that can make dead planets abound with life. Khan sees the potential for a super weapon in this device. The Federation, not knowing what happened to their starship, sends out now-Admiral Kirk to find out. One of the scientists who made Genesis is Kirk’s ex-wife: his son is working on the project: all are in danger because of Khan’s wrath.

2. The characters follow a classical division: one (Kirk/Khan, those who rule), few (scientists), many (crew of the Enterprise). What is most curious is that “one” destroys, but creation (Project Genesis) is the preserve of the few.

In order to figure out what’s going on, one has to concentrate on the “one.” Khan is easy enough to figure out: he’s someone who believes power exists to benefit him. Spock’s The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few makes no sense for him. One who is entitled to rule would betray weakness by conceding that other opinions mattered.

The question is why this viewpoint has any credibility that the film would have to treat it at length. It seems insanity, but remember that Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test. The point of the test is to face death, to face a no-win situation. Kirk cheats on this test, saying there’s no such thing as a no-win situation – in employing this logic, he is most certainly a hero. He is also mirroring Khan’s tyranny.

3. So the question becomes: how do heroes grow? Spock – as human reason incarnate – is there to guide an almost everyman Kirk throughout every film. Human tenacity is shared by all, just to different degrees; still, Kirk is something special. He is philosophically courageous in seeing the idiocy of outright accepting death instead of trying something. This is perhaps why his ex-wife and son are militant about creation; they’ve settled on human making as the solution to a world where confrontation with death is inevitable. Khan’s progeny are more moderate than he is, but are united in their hatred. Khan only realizes he loves them when it’s too late.

Kirk doesn’t quite get the lesson that the power to destroy is the power to preserve until the end. There’s a reason why Plato and Aristotle (see esp. Aristotle’s “Poetics”) rate “making” below “discovery:” you need to understand and appreciate before you put your signature on everything. In a sense, without understanding, creation is just as good as destruction – we can conceive of faulty creation being murderous quite easily. Kirk can’t get this lesson immediately: his job forces him to focus on destroying Khan. The viewpoint that makes him good at his job doesn’t allow him to sacrifice or order others to their death; he’s a leader that treats his crew like equals.

But Spock understands the deep lesson of the Kobayashi Maru – you go out and get killed in the simulation because something precious is at risk, something worth dying for. That’s the real reason why there are no no-win scenarios: life isn’t about ourselves all the time.

The movie is too long, too disjointed, and has too much weak acting in places to recommend. It isn’t a complete failure: there are scenes of genuine horror, and you do end up rooting for one character who most doggedly pursues truth and justice. But $10? I mean, I’m going to raise the questions that matter here, and read the graphic novel at the soonest possible opportunity.

The central thesis of the movie is that something about heroism has changed. Let us say America won WW2 because it had heroes – superheroes even – that fought for ideals. Many have talked about the opening montage setting the movie up, an original group of “Watchmen,” recapping that “history” beautifully and tragically – I highly recommend any discussion of the themes of this movie start with Daniel Carlson’s take in Pajiba, where he rightly points out the power of that beginning.

The original group seems to have come undone because of a lack of moderation: the primary virtue they were trumpeting was freedom. For example, it led one to madness (Mothman), another to a then-shameful promiscuity that got her killed (Silhouette), still another to some sort of lust for nostalgia  (Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre I). That last character is a key link between the original group – and herein lies one of the key weaknesses of the movie, there isn’t enough back story in the film for me to really know what I’m talking about – and the new group.

The new group, composed of Nite Owl II (a Bruce Wayne type) and Silk Spectre II (daughter of Silk Spectre I), the Comedian, Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias, is actually linked to the old one in two important ways. The Comedian was a holdover from the original group who almost raped the original Silk Spectre. Somehow, she forgave him, and bore his child, who is Silk Spectre II, and who knows the Comedian almost raped her mother but doesn’t know her true father.

So in addition to the moral decay of America – can heroes really exist in a time where brother fights brother while the threat of nuclear annihilation hovers overhead – the heroes have questions about their own existence stemming from their very being.

The movie, as it develops, has us see heroes exist for different reasons. Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II literally are only able to have sex with each other after doing some act of heroism complete with an adrenaline rush. Justice and saving people do get blood pumping in all areas. The Comedian and Rorschach are the interesting pairing: there is only a story because the Comedian is murdered, and Rorschach wants the truth of why he was killed for the sake of justice. Silk Spectre II is most obviously able to live in ignorance as a heroine. Nite Owl II  has questions about his past, but his past as Nite Owl: he is asking questions of the retired Nite Owl when the movie begins, and confesses not understanding his father’s legacy as a corporate banker exactly.

The Comedian comes across horribly in the movie: he tries to rape, he murders a pregnant woman, his only redeemable aspect is shooting some hippies in front of Nite Owl who is in full “pansy” mode as riots break loose. He’s quite obviously too symbolic – the joke about being a hero is that you have to do things that are quite obviously unheroic, like beat the living hell out of people, and you have to be pumped about doing those things in order to be effective. Because you get judged after the fact, that appetite for violence means those of us who make the judgment may always be covering for you, excusing what is really inexcusable.

Rorschach is a welcome relief as he tries to figure out how it is exactly a hero confronts and engages humanity’s ugliness in his quest for the truth. He does kill and put people in situations where excessive harm is caused, but he’s deliberate. His brand of reason is the closest thing to what I’d call philosophic.

But the narrative is loaded with two other characters who use another brand of reasoning. Dr. Manhattan, who has true superpowers, is the complete scientific power of the Atomic Age: he wants to give the world energy, believing that the conflict between the US and USSR is over energy and not pride or ideology. Of course a scientist would be stupid enough to think that, so we have Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt), a corporate head who is really a political scientist, using a social science logic to determine what incident would cause peace between the superpowers. He decides the only way nations will know peace is through the horror of the Atomic Age: if they experience how awful it is firsthand, but can only blame something that approaches an abstraction, their martial energies are diverted away from each other.

The weaknesses in the narrative are apparent, and yes, they tick me off: we have a woman who accepts a potential rapist into her life, because she mourns her loss of being a heroine so much. We also have philosophy staying subordinate to the theoretical and practical import of science – after New York and other major cities are destroyed by Veidt using powers like Dr. Manhattan so as to frame Dr. Manhattan, and the two superpowers come to terms, Dr. Manhattan has to murder Rorschach who wants the world to know the truth.

The primary weakness of the narrative is the idea that science eclipses our intuitive notions of heroism. It is true that the logic behind heroism can go to excess: Dr. Manhattan and Veidt want to solve all the world’s problems, nothing less. But you know what? I know people who are heroes, and they know full well they can’t solve everyone’s problems. You learn real fast – you learn by nature – that there are limits, and you work within those limits.

If one wants to contend that scientific and industrial know-how are America’s true heroism, and have this higher conflict that shapes the more basic notions of truth and justice, fine. That does end the age of heroes, sure, but it leaves us like Rorschach, dead, only an bloodstain where there was an inkblot. And honestly, it doesn’t take a narrative that is  so layered and complex to say that, because it isn’t really a contention. It’s an extreme that those of us who are more thoughtful invoke to deliberate higher issues about whether peace is really mere security, or heroes are those who wield theses about how people act effectively.

Of course, Rorschach ends up a martyr, while the two lovebirds conceive a new generation, and the two who would be gods isolate themselves entirely. It can be said the narrative is leading up to philosophy, but that’s just what’s so maddening for me. It’s like any question worth a damn was thrown away by the movie, and I realize why now: it took every bit of nutcase radical Leftist stupidity and called that history. Wars against fascists and communists were obvious and America could handle that, but hahaha Americans were so stupid and couldn’t handle civil rights and couldn’t see that the poor North Vietnamese were really nice people. So we elected Nixon, who everyone knows was an evil warmonger who didn’t seek detente or open up China to the world, and who uses Dr. Manhattan (by extension, nuclear weapons) to win in Vietnam. This leads America to abandon the Constitution, elect Nixon near President for life, and that militant mean world is the world Alan Moore is working with, not the one where anarchists and radicals started riots at the Democratic Convention because they could.

I’m not saying I have all the history right, but I am saying this: Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides spend lots of time trying to get the details right, and trying to articulate exactly why they feel a certain way about their age. What is striking today about many of my political opponents – and I have to say this because to challenge me outright is borderline insanity at this point – is how little they care to reconstruct the narrative properly, and this includes Alan Moore, whose “The Killing Joke” is one of the finest graphic novels written. Sometimes, like Children of Men, you can take extreme positions from both Left and Right and add it all up, because in that movie they’re doing justice to the truth, and asking whose concerns are ultimately going to be more pressing, while going back and forth between the issues raised.

Here, the foundation is faulty: the quick and dirty answer is that the age of heroes died because America was always in love with imperialism. That’s just not true: my friends aren’t taking bullets for Empire, and certainly not their private satisfaction. We never needed science to tell us what was truly good, to the degree it mattered.

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.

2. What destroyed Woody Allen is the intellectual culture of Manhattan, which sees only the glamour in making deep references and reading an occasional magazine about a philosopher. The trick is to sound smart so you can get people to sleep with you, give you money, or respect you for being clever. Worse, all of this depends upon as well as shapes contemporary academia. There are many literature professors who can go through a poem carefully and bring out important questions, but they don’t care to – there’s no money in starting a serious discussion about the themes which have shaped human existence through the ages. Philosophy is obsessed with atheism moreso than evangelicals, whom you would think have to be obsessed in order to combat what they perceive as the greatest evil, because with God out of the way more “serious” questions like whether robots can have feelings (I’m not kidding, see Colin McGinn’s “The Mysterious Flame”) can be addressed.

3. It’s all trendy crap, but Allen has been a step above it in some ways. After all, Manhattan identifies all that shallowness and eviscerates it:

In the interviews with Lax, Konigsberg states that his reading of philosophy and literature is mainly an attempt to help him answer the ultimate question about life: its purpose and values in its relation to death. “I think the most important issues to me are what one’s values in life should be—the existence of God, death—that’s real interesting to me. Whether it’s capitalist society or socialism—that’s superficial.”The task Konigsberg takes on is no small one for a comedian, let alone a philosopher! Konigsberg puts the problem into the voice of his character Allen when he says, “My view of reality is that it has always been a grim place to be . . . but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.” Variations on this theme appear throughout his writings: “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” Or, “Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you’re dressed for it.”

That Woody Allen goes for the larger question isn’t a small thing: most readings of other thinkers reduce those thinkers to only what we can conceive. If you’re aiming higher, you’ll see what others have to contribute that is higher, usually.

Unfortunately, while there is a sense in which philosophers are atheistic -  proper contemplation of something earthly means that referring everything back to Design must be suspended, at least for a moment – one can’t be a dogmatic atheist and be a philosopher. The reason has less to do with the atheism and more to do with a moralistic fundamentalism that assumes it knows everything already. Here’s Woody Allen arguing a distinct point of view:

To me it’s a damn shame that the universe doesn’t have any God or meaning, and yet only when you can accept that can you then go on to lead what these people call a Christian life—that is, a decent, moral life. You can only lead it if you acknowledge what you’re up against to begin with and shuck off all the fairy tales that lead you to make choices in life that you’re making not really for moral reasons but for taking down a big score in the afterlife.

The problem with this rant isn’t that Allen is wrong: he could be right. In fact, this is almost philosophic. This comes close to saying that real Christianity, real belief, starts with dread, moves to morality, and then and only then moves to the mythos purely. But he puts it so bluntly and so stupidly that he fails to provoke contemplation of a more serious problem. Really? the universe doesn’t have any meaning? See how long you last with that argument against Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger with that. They’ll only sort of agree, at best: what makes their work great is that they can see ways in which the universe does have meaning, and reject many, maybe even all of them eventually. But they can articulate why the “fairy tales” matter, and they don’t need an irreligious fundamentalism to declare religion evil. They don’t just have a character articulate “there is meaning,” and have every major event in the film contradict him.

4. So where did this dogmatism come from? The article moves ahead and says that for the atheist, “chance” replaces “design,” but that’s utter nonsense. Socrates isn’t exactly a theist in any conventional sense and yet he argues from design. You need design in some way in order to argue that there is such a thing as intelligence. The article then moves ahead and cites Woody Allen as saying he likes being a writer best, and pushes the idea that a writer has a sense of control.

But we began in this piece with a distinction between Woody Allen, a public persona that makes and stars in movies, and Allan Konigsberg, the actual person who reads lots of philosophy and has favorite films and all that. I think that was the writer’s way of saying “Woody Allen can stare nihilism in the face and present to us and make human life look pathetic as it really is, but Konigsberg is the guy who can see and contemplate more.”

Well, guess what: when you’re a dogmatist, you’re only as good as your persona. And I think it’s time to rip into the idiotic, unenlightening, shallow notion of philosophy that has crippled what could have been America’s greatest director.

5. The first major problem is this:

Konigsberg’s philosophical interests range from Plato to the German philosophers, but to him Bertrand Russell “makes much more sense, resonates much more deeply with me.”

Paul saw Russell’s History of Western Philosophy lying at Borders for $10 or something and I told him to stay far away from it. The trouble with Russell is how shallowly he conceives of philosophy: take a look at “The Problems of Philosophy” and you’ll see that it isn’t bad, but it assumes that progress can be had in philosophy. That’s a really problematic assumption – philosophic questions aren’t scientific questions nowadays, the ends are different. The question of science now is more or less explicit control; the question of philosophy is how to be happy with the least, if possible.

So if you start with an explicitly technical approach to the greater inquiry, one which you think challenges all religious myth, a problem arises. You’re going to be telling a story that looks like a real story, with fleshed out characters who reveal themselves through their choices, but is really something wholly different. You’re going to be talking past the myth and implicitly creating your own myth.

The irony is how close Allen comes to getting it right. His motivation for wanting to know more really is right out of Plato’s Symposium, as the article claims:

Konigsberg makes it clear that he started reading to help him with the girls he was going out with, girls who tended to regard him as an uneducated lout. “It was the very end of high school when I started going out with women who found me illiterate,” he reminisces. “I thought those girls were so beautiful. . . . One would say ‘Did you read this Faulkner novel?’ And I’d say, ‘I read comic books. I’ve never read a book in my life.’ I don’t know anything like that. And so in order to keep pace, I had to read. Hemingway and Faulkner.

Philosophy as eros is a great starting point – even if mistaken, it allows you to grapple with both the philosophic tradition and one’s immediate problems, the ones that lead you to think naturally about the bigger questions. From that starting point, it is easy to put technical considerations in their proper place, as Allen does in his “Critique of Pure Dread:”

In formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, “My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.”

It’s not that technical considerations don’t matter – a lot of good insight depends on word games and overexamination. It takes a lot to articulate the problem correctly and find the right methods for addressing it. Losing sight of what is aiming for, though, is what separates the second-rate philosophers from the best ones. Notice how mind/body became a myth in a sense and distracted from the problems it was meant to elaborate on.

The deep problem with Allen’s education is the lack of it, just like he says:

I think that had I been better educated, I could write poetry, because a writer of comedy has some of that equipment to begin with. You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry. In a very compressed way you express a thought or feeling and it’s dependent on the balancing of words.

It should not shock us that any philosopher worth his salt engages literature seriously, whether it is Plato on Homer or Kant on Genesis. What happens to the philosophy books a philosopher writes once he is gone is that they become literature in a sense, too. The lack of knowledge of the tradition, the lack of respect for it, is what makes Russell and Allen lack the ability for sustained, thoughtful inquiry. In the end, they’re not finding new questions or rediscovering the power of old ones. They’re just presenting the same ones as have struck them over and over, complete with their answer. It’s a tired act, and a sad one – it’ll get girls for a time, but not much more; eros is fleeting in an age when philosophy has fled.

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.