A few thoughts on The Dark Knight

I'm in Pasadena at the moment visiting a friend. Earlier in the day after we visited Silver Lake's hipsters at Intelligentsia (yes, it's spread from Chicago), we went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was incredibly sketchy to say the least. Among the myriad of jugglers, rappers hawking their CDs, and performers dressed like movie characters, I saw the Joker. Well, a poorer, taller imitation of him. But no mistake, he was Heath Ledger's Joker, not the iconic Jack Nicholson joker of the first Batman movie. My first thought: "Well that's awfully quick—the movie came out last week." The other characters—Gene Simmons, (a drunken) Spiderman, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Tinman—somehow seemed more appropriate, not only because the movies have been out longer, but because Ledger's joker, a sociopath, seems too dark, too psychotic to be juxtaposed with French tourists and vendors selling Maps of the Stars.

I saw the movie for the second time tonight (at double the price of my Illinois matinée), and I was as taken with it the second time as the first (especially the chase scene on lower Wacker Drive.) I won't review it for you here—there's a litany of reviews online. (I'm fond of Thomas Hibbs's piece in First Things). But in spite of Christopher Nolan's brilliance, I think he could have taken notes from the Coen Brother's film, No Country for Old Men.

As one reviewer aptly noted:

Imagine No Country for Old Men, change the plot some and throw in people dressed up as bats and clowns and that's the sort of sandbox of ideas and areas of darkness that The Dark Knight plays in. Without a doubt, if you combined the film's interpretation of Two-Face and The Joker you would have Anton Chigurh.

And while No Country for Old Men revolves around the same themes of chaos and destruction (though it should be said that the crushing blow it delivers to determinism manages to destroy any potential hope; The Dark Knight manages to keep hope alive, as Hibbs notes in the aforementioned review), it does so in a more subtle manner than The Dark Knight. Here I am referring to the scene between the Joker and Two-Face in which the Joker.....dare I use this line....seduces Harvey Dent to the dark side. The Joker says something to the effect of "Unlease a little anarchy," and "Chance is fair." In this scene, with both villains present, we have a glimpse of Anton Chigurh from No Country. But Chigurh's character is all the more disturbing because he never mentions the word anarchy, never goes into a detailed discussion of his morality of chance save to say that the coin he uses got there the same way he did.


My second qualm with the movie is that the score can be a bit too much. I can only handle the dramatic music for, I don't know, 2 hours, not 2 and a half hours. There are moments, especially in the latter hour of the film, where the intensity or horror of the moment are detracted by the music, which depending on your theater's sound system may overpower the dialogue. Recall No Country, which had no soundtrack whatsoever, making the film somewhat less human. I do not think that Nolan should have jettisoned the entire soundtrack of The Dark Knight. On the contrary, I think the music is quite helpful at times. I do think that it could have been regulated more.


Of course, one could argue that subtlety is not the mark of a movie in which the main character is wearing tights. But Nolan's movie is too clever to be lumped with other comic book movies. His treatment of Two-Face, for example, He eschewed the heavy handedness of the George Clooney Batman films in which both villains seem to play an equal role, which led to the dismal failure of the characters. Allowing Dent to metamorphose into Two-Face in the last 1/4 of the film does not distract from the Joker, and more importantly, from Batman's internal struggle between good and evil and the sorrow and loneliness that accompany it. It would be foolish to say that the director was incapable of being subtle. I would perhaps be willing to buy the argument that the heavy-handedness was needed for the general audience of the film, though.

Reading Lolita in Wheaton, Illinois

Is awful.

As this post hints at [and yes, here I am shamelessly shuttling you off to my commonplace book], Lolita is known as a dirty book. When I was in high school, not having read the book, I thought it akin to literary porn.

Of course, the old Vintage International Cover doesn't help:



















[seen here as the cover of the audiobook]


So of course, I'm quite embarrassed when I take this out of my bag at coffee shops in Wheaton, Illinois, where it often seems like the majority of coffee shop patrons are there for Bible studies. I quickly break open the book, hiding the cover and the spine. I think that's easier than saying, "But no, no, no....do you know how beautifully Nabokov writes?"

What it means to be human

Recently, at the World Science Festival in NYC, a group of scientists and social scientists gathered together to look at the question, "What does it mean to be human?" Wired has taken the panel's answers (or lack of an answer, in the case of Paul Nurse and Harold Varmus) and condensed them for readability. Here's they are:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can't: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. "The planet has grown a nervous system," he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We're uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A "human program" begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it's our size that is unique. What we don't find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells -- but as for what that means, we don't know. It's important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

Jim Gates, physicist: We are blessed with the ability to know our mother. We are conscious of more than our selves. And just as a child sees a mother, the species' vision clears and sees mother universe. We are getting glimmers of how we are related to space and time. We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?

Nikolas Rose, sociologist: Language and representation. We are the kind of creatures that ask those questions of ourselves. And we believe science can help answer. We've become creatures that think of ourselves as essentially biological -- and I think we're more than biological creatures. I'm not sure biology has answers.

Ian Tattersall, anthropologist: It's not "what is human," but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition.

Francis Collins, geneticist: What does the genome tell us? There's surprisingly little genetic difference between human and chimpanzee. Yet clearly we're different. There's brain size and language. A language-related gene, FoxP2, evolved most rapidly in the last few million years. How did we develop empathy? Appreciate our mortality? And we should admit that there are areas that might not submit to material analysis: beauty, inspiration. We shouldn't dismiss these as epiphenomenal froth.

Harold Varmus, physiologist: Intrigued by our ability to generate hypotheses and make measurements.

Paul Nurse, cell biologist: Is excited about the ability of science to answer this question.

Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist: The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We're probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds. I like to think of a generator of diversity in the frontal lobe -- and those initials are G-O-D.

Out of the panelists, Nikolas Rose, I think, gave the most satisfactory answer. I also found the answer of Francis Collins, who headed the human genome project, to be satisfactory. I've always gravitated to the idea that language was what made us human. That is, anyway, what most poets will tell us. However, I don't know that that answer will hold once A.I. develops to the point of language. I wonder, is it the knowledge that we will one day die, the knowledge of our own mortality? The Christian is obliged to say that humans are made in the image of God, but what does that mean?

Burn After Reading

After finally seeing the Cohen brother's film No Country for Old Men last week, I was delighted to see that they're coming out with a new film, Burn After Reading. Here's the trailer:




It seems like it's more in the vain of Lebowski rather than the bleak No Country.

The Right and Global Warming

I've just returned back from New York, where I didn't have a TV, so this might be old news, but I as I sat in my mom's family room where she keeps the Fox News Chanel running, well, pretty much all day, I saw this ad:



Now, I don't really like Pat Robertson, and I certainly don't like Al Sharpton, but this ad struck me for two reasons. First, and most obvious, is the non-partisan nature of the ad: we have both Republicans and Democrats getting behind a major cause. And it seems like that's been a while since that happened.

But what struck me more was Pat Robertson's presence in the ad. The Christian Right has been loathed to get behind the idea of conservationism, mostly, I think, because it has become such a political issue. To my mom, who if nothing else is a member of the Christian right, global warming smacks of Al Gore and leftists. The science of the matter (either way you look at it) doesn't interest her so much as the political nature of the problem. And I think that goes for many Americans, especially here in middle America. (Here I am reminded of my U.S. history class my sophomore year of high school, the same class in which we were forced to write an essay on why the Republican party was more biblical than the Democratic party, when I made some environmentally friendly comment and was accused by several kids of being a "tree-hugger.") S for Pat Robertson to get on board with climate change and global warming...well, that's a big deal.

We hereby award you this award

On Friday evening, after my school's baccalaureate services, I attended "Class Night." There the school handed out awards to the top achievers. There were 88 categories of awards, each with anywhere from 1-10 winners. I think at least 300 awards were given out. (The evening lasted 2 and a half hours, down from 3 and a half two years ago.) The upper and middle schools combined consists of only 350 students. Of course, many of the students won multiple awards. Many won none. But really? 300 awards for 350 students?

When I asked one of my colleagues why the evening lasted so long and we handed out so many awards, he smugly smiled at me and said that we don't want all the kids running around the dorms for hours on the last night before they move out.

Viewing Violence

I think Benjamin's post raises some good questions. I must admit that I watched the video for "Stress," not once but twice. The first time I grimaced. The second time, I was more intrigued. Of course it helped that between viewings I read a blurb or two about the video and discovered that it was directed with actors. (To the director's credit, I thought it had looked very authentic, especially after watching the video that Jason posted.) But still, I think this video does raise the question of how we should respond to extreme violence. At my high school, which was run by the Assemblies of God, I was continually subjected to debates on stupid question, "Is it okay to watch 'R' rated movies?" If you're curious, the leadership and those deemed pious answered "no." (Jason, you saw your first R movie at Princeton, didn't you?) Having sworn off the fundamentalist subculture, I have been tempted to give myself carte blanche in what I watch and what I listen to. Everything, after all, can provide some sort of instruction, whether it be in how to live or how not to live. I don't know that that's a satisfactory answer, though.

Alan Jacobs wrote on the fad of Discovery Chanel animal carnage shows in his 1997 article, "In on the Kill." We're not talking about animals, per se, but I think the article is helpful in sorting out some of the same issues. Here's a couple passages:

Such shows are, I believe, the modern equivalent of bear-baiting, or the educated middle-class counterpart to cock-fighting, only with several insulating layers between modern viewers and the violence they endorse:

1. We're just watching what others have filmed; 2. They're just filming what the animals are doing; 3. The animals are just following their instincts. This kind of argument is made possible by what Stanley Milgram called "the fragmentation of the total human act." Milgram's famous experiments on obedience revealed that people can justify participating in the most dreadful deeds if an authority commands their involvement and if they can understand themselves as caught in a chain of events over which they have no control. It seems to me that the modern display of nature's pornography is analogous: since we are neither the ones who kill nor the ones who film the killing, we have no moral stake in the events we watch. But by watching such programs we endorse what happens in them and bear a certain responsibility for them. We have not simply failed to turn off the TV; our sin is not merely one of omission. By watching we will the continuation of such shows and hence, inevitably, the acts represented in them.

Dante understood this peculiarity of human character perfectly well. In the eighth circle of Hell, he and his guide Virgil meet the Falsifiers- among them a thirteenth-century counterfeiter named Master Adam and the infamous Greek Sinon, who tricked the Trojans into allowing the fatal wooden horse into their city. Dante watches as Master Adam and Sinon fall into a bitter exchange of insults and vituperation. For thirty lines of verse they snarl at one another. Then Virgil, the personification of human Reason, turns to Dante and says, "Now keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you." Why is he troubled? Because, as he later explains, "the wish to hear such baseness is degrading." There are certain events and actions, Virgil seems to say, toward which the only proper response is to avert one's eyes. This need not be a denial of reality; in fact, it is an acceptance that reality is often terrible. Predation is of course unlike the bitter recriminations of Sinon and Master Adam in that there is no sin in it. But I cannot think of it as a good thing that some creatures live only by the dying of other creatures; and still less can I think a fascination with such killing good.

and later:

There may at times be reasons for us to force ourselves to look at the killing and eating of animals by other animals (just as there may be, and indeed are, good reasons for forcing ourselves to watch films of the Nazi concentration camps). But if we do not have to force ourselves, if we look upon such scenes with pleasure and fascination, something is terribly wrong.

The difference between the two videos, then, is that the Russian Neo-Nazi video serves an educational purpose. Or, there is a good reason for watching it. The Justice video, "Stress," serves a primarily aesthetic purpose. And certainly it's goal, at least on some level, must be to inspire delight?

Jacobs's response, though, seems to be suitable only in the Christian context. I am curious as to how one might take an ethical stance against such videos outside of a religious framework.


Benjamin also raises the question of the medium being the message. While I initially cringed while watching both videos—and the Russian video I could not bear to even finish—I don't think that I would have been particularly shocked if I had read about what I saw. Text, what McLuhan would call a "cold medium," cannot so easily cut me. The same, I think, can be said for music.

DM

Justice - Stress

apropos the russian hate-clips. the french indie-electronica groups Justice's new music video is stirring up controversy. i don't want to say to much, just watch it.
the russian youtube violence and this video taps into the same phenomenon. what do these new media do with us as observers (a question which is adressed in the last few seconds of this clip)? the distance and anonymity of the internet creates a habit of distance and allows people to bring that distance into their real lives and violate other people. the medium is the message?

b.

From Russia With Hate

Nearly three years ago, I had to make a decision. Either I would spend the next four years of my life studying Russian or German. Someone told me of the movement that was happening in Russia at the time, and now I'm ecstatic that I chose Germany. Does that make me a coward? Watch.

JMH

It's Official...

The United States is in a depression. The source? Sushi Park—Long Island's fusion of the American all-you-can-eat-buffet and Sushi. I drove several of my students there the other night, and as I entered the restaurant with its endless lines of overweight Long Islanders stacking sushi on their plates, I saw a sign announcing the restaurant's "Depression Sale," a drop of $5.

I have no idea if we're in a depression, but I do wonder if it's easier for an outsider or an immigrant to announce a depression. For many Americans, a depression is replete with the morbid connotations of the 1930's (or Prozac). Perhaps they're just not afraid to call it like they see it—they charge you extra for left-overs that you throw out.