The Dark Knight Rises and Forestalls Revolution

It’s hard not to miss the theme of class warfare in The Dark Knight Rises, the third of Christopher Nolan’s masterful trilogy bringing Batman back to the silver screen, but what does the movie really say about it? When I watched the film again recently on DVD, there was more there and it was more nuanced than I remembered.

On a first viewing, the movie seemed to merely have a thin subtext along the lines of Occupy Wall Street: Isn’t it unfair how some have so much while others have so little?

 

When the villain Bane raids the Gotham Stock Exchange, a stock broker outside is distraught, claiming, “It’s not our money, it’s everybody’s,” a skeptical police officer nearby says, “Really? Mine’s in my mattress.” This and several dialogue exchanges highlight the difference between those who make their money on Wall Street and those who labor for wages.

Later, Bane locks most of Gotham’s police officers underneath the city, turning the city over to the common people. The result is instant revolution, with the masses dragging the rich from their homes and expropriating their wealth.

The point’s been made, but I can’t help but mention one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Bruce Wayne attends a ball, where he dances and verbally spars with Selina Kyle (Catwoman), one of Gotham’s marginalized living in a rundown apartment in a seedy neighborhood. With touching sincerity and anger, Anne Hathaway delivers a number of lines on economic injustice, among them the following:

“You think all this can last? There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, ’cause when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Slovenian philosopher and self-professed “some kind of a communist” Slavoj Zizek (video), however, has expressed disappointment with the film for its anti-revolutionary tenor. The film quite firmly states that if the people are given control of themselves, the result is violence and chaos:

There is this side to the film, and it has clearly drawn inspiration from some of the bloodier incidents of the French Revolution, even making them more sinister. At least the storming of the Bastille was an expression of outrage against the Crown’s practice of taking political prisoners, whereas the prisoners Bane frees from Blackgate Penitentiary appear to be mostly violent offenders. And the movie turns the Committee of Public Safety, which presided over the Reign of Terror, into mere sentencing hearings ruled by a bona fide lunatic, the Scarecrow, who only hands down one of two sentences: death or exile by death.

The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t seem to have much faith in revolution.

But something tells me that’s because Nolan is not trying to side with either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat over and against the other. To return to the man with his savings in his mattress at home, the stockbroker has an immediate rebuttal to this that I don’t take as a defense of status quo capitalism with all its failings so much as a statement highlighting the realities of today’s economy:

 

“If you don’t put those guys down, that stuffing in your mattress might be worth a whole hell of a lot less.”

Nolan’s Batman films are about many kinds of people--rich and poor, law officer and civilian, white collar and blue collar--working together each in their own way for better communities against forces that seek to bring out the worst in us. Consider the scene in the previous film, The Dark Knight, when the Joker plays a ferry full of regular citizens against a ferry full of prison inmates. Each group has the choice of blowing up the other and thereby saving their own lives, but they don’t do it.

The world of Batman is rich in villains, perhaps because the unsavory in human nature is so easy to come by, but Nolan’s films are at least equally populated with heroes, and these heroes go beyond Batman and Jim Gordon to district attorneys, entrepreneurs, police officers, charity directors and the common man, whatever his place in society.

In a sense, anyone can be Batman--we are all Batman, potentially--and each is responsible for doing the Right for the greater good:

“A hero can be anyone, even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy’s shoulders to let him know the world hadn’t ended.” (Batman himself)

Zizek is not satisfied with this vision of society, and I’m not sure I am, but it has its benefits, and in the absence of a revolution, it provides a ghost of a chance for a somewhat better world in which to live.

It's Okay Not to Have an Opinion About Syria

Now that President Obama has decided to ask Congress’s permission for military involvement in Syria (article), the same polarized invective with which Americans engage in every public debate has found a new outlet. It is possible, however, not to have a strong opinion about some issues, and Syria seems to me a likely candidate for this treatment.

Since I have a tendency to take an interest in ideas, politics and world events and to speak my mind on them, I’m sure there are some who think, “Man, that guy has an opinion about everything!” But I don’t really. I'm well aware that some issues are so large and complex as to defy definitive analysis leading to one sweeping conclusion for or against.

The war in Afghanistan is a good example of this, even though it now appears that the U.S. will mostly be out by the end of 2014. The debate always seemed to play out--and still does to some extent as the U.S.'s role in future years remains under consideration--between those wanting to stay for many years to come and others crying because we weren’t out yesterday.

But it should be clear to everyone that both of these options are highly problematic, in whichever overseas military action you choose. Staying means more death--of soldiers, of civilians--and, of course, a significant financial burden on the nation. That last is no small matter when there are serious problems at home that could be alleviated with some of the money used for war.

And the problems of leaving are equally clear. To stick with the example of Afghanistan, the return of the Taliban to dominance would be a humanitarian tragedy--think of Aesha Mohammadzai (graphic image) and the many like her--and likely mean the return of Al-Qaeda or similar groups seeking the next 9/11 or Madrid train bombings.

Neither option sounds very good to me, so when I ask myself whether we should stay or leave a country like Afghanistan or Iraq, I have no strong opinion. And that’s okay, not just because I don’t have to make the decisions and don’t have enough information to do so anyway, but because it’s better to think critically than to bleat one’s favorite political narrative.

I do have a modest opinion on Syria--one that I mostly adopted because of French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s arguments for humanist intervention (interview)--and it’s that a no-fly zone early on would have done much to aid the rebels and hasten Bashar al-Assad’s fall.

But it’s too late for that now, isn’t it? Now it’s more of a mess than it was before and I have no idea what Obama or Congress should do about it. Having been at war for well over a decade now, we are all too familiar with the pitfalls of military entanglements, and whatever helps the rebels is likely to benefit some terrorists. But staying out also means the continued slaughter of the Syrian people--slaughter the U.S. and other nations have the power to stop.

So I say consider the situation, and if you see no clear answer, reserve judgment. Sometimes it’s okay, even commendable, for regular people like you and me not to have a firm opinion about everything--and to spare the world a little partisan vituperative.

 

When I'm Outraged and When I'm Not

The Huffington Post declared Day Above Ground’s video for “Asian Girlz” to be “ridiculously offensive” and “quite possibly the most racist thing to happen to music since ‘Accidental Racist.’” (article) Apparently a lot of people agreed, because after intense condemnation, the band was forced to do some talking (if not exactly apologize) and make an effort to get the video off the internet. This got me to thinking about outrage--when I’m outraged and when I’m not.

I should be clear that even apart from the offensive content, it seems obvious to me that the song and video are shockingly bad, and apparently Day Above Ground is the name for a bunch of dipshits. As for the lyrical content, it consists of a stream of stereotypical references to Asians and Asian culture mixed in with how much the band members want to do it to Asian “girlz.” I find it distasteful, but I don’t find myself outraged.

Why is that? After thinking about it, I realized my outrage increases the bigger, more brazen, and more harmful the offense. I’m outraged when the U.S. government spies on its citizens and the president goes on television and lies about it, when the killing of an innocent black person by a white cop or vigilante is turned into an occasion for whites to complain about how persecuted they are, when politicians want to legislate who you can fall in love with, who you can marry, and what you can do with that person in bed. These are egregious offenses carried out systemically and openly and to the very real suffering of real people. The release of a music video clearly intended (however ill-conceivedly) to be humorous by a relatively unknown group is a small thing by comparison.

That isn’t to say that a music video can’t be wrong, offensive or even cause real hurt--it can and should be condemned accordingly--but emotionally, it’s not going to get me waving my arms and ranting. I remember a few years ago when I noticed that most of the stand-up comedy on The Comedy Channel used stereotypes to poke fun at a wide variety of ethnicities. I don’t like it, so I’ll change the channel, and maybe blog about it later, but I’ll save blowing my top for something worse, say, the GOP’s next voter suppression effort.

My criteria, however, are clearly not others’. Liberals have a reputation for freaking out over every offense, but during a Democratic presidency, the conservatives are the new liberals with their freaking out. I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon on Facebook. Every now and then, I will run across a conservative’s laundry list of beefs against Obama (example) posted by someone usually described as having great courage, and then reposted by others, who encourage others to have the guts to Share or Like it. They’re mostly full of junk, often incoherent, and always full of outrage.

Yet most of the accusations in these posts don’t amount to much. Despite trying really hard to list as many offenses as possible, there’s a curious sparseness of things that actually hurt real people. They’re outraged about what they see as disrespect to the military, apologies to foreign nations, and not giving enough props to the Christian god, but show little concern for policies that have actually done real damage. If Obama bows to the king of Saudia Arabia this is an outrage, but killing innocent Pakistanis in drone strikes elicits no mention.

I hope nobody buys Day Above Ground’s stupid song, but I hope even more strongly that we could work up some widespread outrage over a lot of the worse things going on.

Critical Theory, Emo Music and the Struggle for Transcendence

Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s The One Dimensional Man discusses the way modern-day society and the way it is administered limits human beings, reducing what they are capable of doing and even thinking. There is an established order, an enforced order, and having grown up within that order, we are incapable of seeing outside it, do not even want to, and do not even consider the possibility of other orders.

A quote:

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal 'to go along' appear neurotic and impotent.”

I am reminded of the reaction against emo music. When emo became a designated genre, I lived in Japan, mostly unplugged from American popular culture. After some years back in the U.S., I began to run across the term, always used disparagingly, and I gradually came to realize that some bands I liked were considered emo--My Chemical Romance, Saosin, Paramore, Thirty Seconds to Mars--even though the bands themselves often reject this label and declare emo to be crap.

What’s so bad about emo that even emo bands hate it?

Part of what stirs revulsion is the emotional displays from which the genre has received its label. The bands wear their hearts on their chests and accentuate this with their own style, a mix of Goth, punk, neon pop and teenage bric-a-brac, making a spectacle of and confronting us with their disaffection with the world. They care too much, show it openly, often with fatalism, while ours is a society that prefers to confess caring only in measured tones and hidden behind success and aloofness. But how much do you really care if you’re aloof?

Emos are despised as a defense mechanism against the reproach their refusal casts at the status quo--the people who have it together that we fancy ourselves to be or be on the way toward becoming. Identifying real problems and sincerely bemoaning them is so gauche.

Another quote from The One-Dimensional Man:

“‘Romantic’ is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term ‘decadent’ far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth.”

Replace “Romantics” with “emos” and the passage above is perfectly applicable to the sneering attitude many have toward emo music and its fans. Yet it is the emos and Goths and punks and what have you--the subcultures, the counterculture--who, finding themselves deeply out of place in society, struggle most viscerally for a critique, for a measure of transcendence beyond the pressures forcing them into a single acceptable mold.

No doubt, however, their endeavor is a confused one from the get-go and largely doomed to failure. They too, like those who turn their noses up at them, will one day be working stiffs, whether as slaves in a cubicle, slaves behind the broad desk of a CEO, or a slave scrounging away in the margins of society.

A final quote:

“They [the Romantics/emos] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. . . . What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content--their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture?”

No effective means of protest is open to most of the disaffected but what finds approval in the mass market. Think of image makeovers effected through trips to Hot Topic. Their means of resistance against the system, our means of resistance, are all part of the system. It will take a much more massive and painful effort, and a more coherent message than recent countercultural movements have provided, to open up multiple dimensions for humankind.

Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial

Continuing a series of somewhat light blogs, I have a few things to say about the 2012 movie Total Recall, a reimagining of the 1990 film of the same name, itself based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

The basic premise of the movie is that memories can be artificially inserted into the human mind. Douglas Quaid (played by Colin Farrell) goes to a company named Rekall to spice up his humdrum existence as a common factory worker by gaining memories of being a double agent. Something goes wrong, however, and he finds himself caught in the center of a struggle between the only two inhabitable places left on Earth after chemical welfare has ravaged the planet: the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and the Colony (Australia).

Most of what I heard about the film when it came out was negative, but I can’t see what’s wrong with it. Sure it’s pulp, but it’s pulp done well. What stood out most to me--besides the hilarious and brutal crotch smack Kate Beckinsale delivers to Colin Farrell’s face (video)--is the socio-political drama.

It’s a cliché one, to be sure. The richer UFB exploits the poor Colony for cheap labor, and the UFB’s chancellor colludes with a manufacturer of robotic soldiers for a full-scale invasion of the Colony. Class warfare coupled with a military-industrial complex--an old story we are familiar with in works of fiction since at least World War II.

What amazes me is that while anyone saturated in Hollywood can easily identify the villainous forces in these movies, a great number of those same people leap to the defense of the government, the military, and giant corporations when they behave similarly in real life, and they are eager to attack those who resist those forces.

We are all familiar with the scene at the end of the movie when a document or video or voice-recording is uploaded to the internet, broadcast on television, or simply revealed to a room full of people, providing proof of the dastardly deeds of those in power and setting off a firestorm among the people. The movie usually ends there, with the certainty that the mighty and corrupt will fall and justice will be served. Audiences of all stripes are moved by this.

In real life, however, the people can barely stir themselves off the couch even when provided with hundreds of thousands of pieces of damning evidence--such as through WikiLeaks. We now live in an age when everyone knows that the military-industrial complex exists, that corporations buy votes in Congress, that the government is spying on us, that our leaders take us to war on false pretenses, that we hold innocent men prisoner and torture them for years without trial or even pressing charges, and that our soldiers gun down civilians. None of that is a radical accusation--everyone knows these things are fact.

When it comes to the NSA scandal, no one questions the authenticity of the documents leaked by Tony Snowden, no one questions the veracity of Glenn Greenwald’s reporting for the The Guardian. Yet many Americans think Snowden did the wrong thing in blowing the whistle. We all know our government is committing the crime, but some look for excuses to sweep it under the rug.

I suppose I shouldn’t be amazed at this. Psychoanalysis would suggest that repression is at work. Toward the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud touches upon what he calls the cultural superego--prevailing mores in civilization. America’s cultural superego insists that America the Beautiful does not do such things as unleash airstrikes on Reuters reporters, yet we all know it does. Threatened, some egos cave, and the truth is squelched.

The objection will immediately be raised that fiction and reality are two separate things. I agree. Only the crimes committed in reality are often much worse--and all too often we care less than we do when they’re committed in fiction.

A Casual Review of the Todd La Torre-fronted Queensryche’s Debut Album

The latest Queensryche release, self-titled, is by one of two bands currently operating under the band’s name. This Queensryche is composed of all the band’s recent members except vocalist Geoff Tate, whom the band replaced with Todd La Torre. The other Queensryche is Geoff Tate and whomever he chooses to work with. I haven’t listened to the Tate Queensryche’s first album, Frequency Unknown, but my expectations for the La Torre Queensryche’s first album weren’t disappointed.

The early releases “Redemption,” “Where Dreams Go to Die” and “Fallout” all immediately suggested the Queensryche fan’s Queensryche circa Empire (1990): heavy, melodic, lots of twin guitar riffs, tightly structured and radio-friendly. I was pleased to find that the other songs on the album were even better, immediately likable, lyrical, and always quintessentially Queensryche. Clearly, the drama of the past year has not taken anything away from this Queensryche other than Geoff Tate.

For some, the loss of Tate is a gain. Many longtime fans have been turned off by the group’s releases in the years since Promised Land (1994), the increasing control of Tate over the band, and a sound that hasn’t evolved so much as gone through mood swings. Dedicated to Chaos (2011)--with its funk, sax appeal and sometimes embarrassingly bad lyrics--was such a wild swing in weird directions that many would hesitate to call it Queensryche.

While I’ve had initial qualms with many Queensryche full-length studio albums, I’ve come to love almost all of those same albums. While they aren’t fan favorites, I consider Operation Mindcrime II (2006) and American Soldier (2009) to represent a Silver Age of sorts for Queensryche after they spent Q2K (1999) and Tribe (2003) finding their groove again, and I quickly realized that the unexpected sound of even Dedicated to Chaos is one I enjoy--once I learned which tracks to skip. Nonetheless, as a friend said after the release of Dedicated to Chaos, with a title like that, you expect some cool-ass heavy, and take the album or leave it, cool-ass heavy it is not.

The La Torre-fronted Queensryche has declared from the start that they intend to base the new Queensryche sound on the old Queensryche sound (Queensryche EP through Empire), and the new release has clearly been designed to sound as much like core Queensryche as possible, even with an appearance by Pamela Moore (Sister Mary from Operation Mindcrime I, II) and production by James “Jimbo” Barton (Operation Mindcrime, Empire, Promised Land). It rocks from start to finish and, simply put, is the Queensryche album many have been waiting for.

Still, it is also new. Scott Rockenfield sounds to have picked up some new moves, or at least a new spirit, spending much of the album pounding out staccato, tribal tattoos with an intensity that reminds me less of recent album performances than it does his concert drum solo. He also appears to have found some new drums. A favorite of mine sounds like a fine-tuned tin pail sounding from the distant corner of an aircraft hangar.

And then there’s Todd La Torre, who is, let’s face it, the make-or-break element of the new album. Longtime fans can be forgiven if they simply can’t accept a Queensryche without Geoff Tate, but La Torre is a competent replacement. He may not be as operatic and theatrical as Tate, but he does have the chops to pull off the soaring melodies, he contributed to the album’s impressive songwriting, and in interviews he comes off as a genuinely great guy.

At some point a judge will decide which Queensryche gets to keep the name, but whatever the outcome, I will be looking forward to this group’s further efforts under any name.

The Devil May Very Well Have Put Dinosaurs Here

One of my favorite musical comebacks in recent years was made by Alice in Chains, with Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009. I was sufficiently moved to blog about it at the time (on a MySpace page I can no longer access), and my enjoyment of the album has only grown in the years since. Thus, I have been eagerly awaiting a new release, and The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here does not disappoint.

Musically, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here grinds along to almost 70 minutes in inimitable AIC style: plenty of dissonance, sludgy guitars, thoughtful lyrics and healthy doses of acoustic chill and melancholy. The new AIC never comes screaming and kicking at you the way early releases like Facelift and Dirt did, but the band has mastered a polish that was inchoate before. Much more could be said about that, but it’s the album title I want to focus on.

The first thing I thought when I heard the title The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here was that according to the logic of common Christian apologetics, the Devil might very well have done just that. I’m referring to the cosmological argument for the existence of God, according to which everything is cause and effect, and since the chain could not go back to infinity, there must have been a First Cause, a Prime Mover, that got the whole shebang going.

Theologians have known for some time now that the argument doesn’t bear scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop Christian, Muslim and Jewish apologists from purveying its poor logic anyway. One of the biggest problems is that even if it proved the existence of a First Cause--and it doesn’t by a long shot, for reasons I won’t go into here--it would not tell us anything at all about what that First Cause was like. It wouldn’t tell us that the First Cause was good, still engaging with the world, or did things like send his son to earth to suffer and die for our sins. In other words, the First Cause could just as well be the Devil--and as Creator, put dinosaurs here.

The songwriters more likely had in mind the belief to which some fundamentalist types of Christian subscribe according to which the Devil put dinosaur fossils in the soil in order to deceive people about the true nature of God’s creation. They believe, according to a literalist interpretation of certain passages in the Bible, that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago. Since dinosaur fossils date many millions of years back, the Devil, the great Deceiver, must have put them there and made them look older than the Earth really is.

Obviously, not all Christians feel the need for such mental gymnastics to preserve their faith. I would guess that AIC count themselves atheists, but it doesn’t take an atheist to deplore the ignorance, money, hate and fear that come with some religious strains such as those of Westboro Baptist Church, which AIC clearly takes aim at in the song after which the album is named:

“The devil put dinosaurs here

Jesus don’t like a queer

The devil put dinosaurs here

No problem with faith, just fear.”

Okay, they’re just rock-and-roll lyrics, but I’ll take a voice raised for the side of Good anywhere I can find it, and I’ll add mine to it.