I would argue that Metropolis is mostly follows the idea of Myth as a strategy and technique. Constructed in 1927, after the first world war and the middle of the Weimar republic it uses the machine cult aesthetic of his time and place that becomes vehemently anti war, and suspicious of how is consuming and who is literally being consumed.
This can be found in several places. He literally calls the machine that eats the workers Moloch (screencap of Moloch Image), another word for Ba'al, who was what ancient Jews called a Hittite God that was fed babies. This image of Moloch was used frequently by socialists in Europe from the 1900s onward, for example this 1901 issue of the socialist journal The Daily People (Link). It was later used by Ginsberg in the second part of Howl. Ginsberg's parents were Russian Jews, who were familiar with this kind of language, as he hinted in Kaddish.
Moloch is the most literal of the signifier that suggest that Lang's creation “goes into the world and maintains, legitimates certain social structures, and dismisses others” (From the lecture notes). He follows the woman he saw into the underworld against his father's advice, and he negotiates with the woman Maria. It sounds like the beginning of a Campbellite monomyth, a sort of Deco Eurydice and Orpheus. But that she seeks to wait for labour mediators, for the liberation of her (seemingly) permenat withering away of the state suggests that Lang viewed this as a reconstruction of that myth for ideological means. This was noted by the critic Axel Eggelbert in 1928, when he called t he film “an unshakeable dialectic of the class struggle” (quoted by Andreas Hellesson in The Vamp and The Machine, Technology, Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (link)
Hellesson's use of sexuality indicates in general how myths of heterosexual romance are co-opted by a system of narrative ideology that “makes certain things true and certain things false. “ (lecture notes) The leader of the upper classes Federson's chief rival for the affections of Feder's mother, who created a robot that looks like her. This robot recasts the primal scene as a Promethean narrative,(screencap) or in other words a mechanical simulacrum of flesh. In this way even sexuality itself is sublimated by the machine. This fear of mechanical reproduction suggests that Lang is using mythology already founded to push an anti technocratic agenda.
From that point on the myth is used to recreate Lang's idea that the machine, and industry, make flesh indistinguishable from flesh, and it corrupts both of them. For example, the robot goes on to dance erotically in a night club; Maria is caught and imprisoned by Federson's heavies and then is basically raped. The robot's dance causes a riot and the sensuous dancing of Maria extends this idea that the flesh of a woman or the flesh of a machine work in conjunction to force workers into a fury. (the idea of a woman sexually exciting workers to riot seems more palatable, more politically acceptable then the workers rising due to more economic conditions, though the results are the same) . That the robot ends up pushing the workers into even greater levels of frenzy, into erotic excess and as a result the workers break down, furthers the idea that Lang is using this text as a way of making flesh flesh, of being worried about what this new industrialism would do to common workers.
The central thrust of Helleson's article points out the difficulty of this crafting of ideology use function into classical myth or biblical myth (the already mentioned Promethean and Eurydice references, but also belly dancing scene that reminds one of Orientalist visions of Jezebel, the Edenic garden scenes of the upper classes before we are introduced to Maria, and that Federson's temple is called New Tower of Babel) Helleson continues: “The imagery of the tower of Babel relates to the technology to myth and legend end The biblical myth is used to construct the ideological message about the division of the labour into the hands that build and the brains that plan and conceive...(ibid, 35). This sense makes eternal, iconic, and formal problems that are about daily life, democratic, and often lack a visual focus.
Lang does not “assume that myths are self evident” and he does use them as a technique or strategy which enacts his own agency, but he does not realise that how he uses these myths for his own purpose can have a problematic history past what the author intended. Myth has a habit of being a bogey man, not easily killed and popping out where it might not belong. In this case, the film is worried about women, (cf Helleson's discussion of technology bringing creation with out the presence of women, ibid 234) paradoxically, and uses two of the central myths about the concerns about women, that they will be created without the presence of men, and that they cannot be controlled when men love them, into a text that allows for the destabilizing power of female flesh, but reinforces traditional attitudes around them. In this way. Lang as the amalgamation and producer of this myth, allows the Weimar lust for and fear of the machine to be imprinted into an already presence fear of women's autonomy. The ideology then becomes fascinatingly accidental.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
sometimes i feel a need to own things made of ostritch leather.
indie pop from Brisbane band The Horses, really sweet sort of jangly single with a great message (it's okay to fall down/its okay to crumble)
on nyu and beards
Telex, Eurovision, from 1980, to mourn the death of high meta from the contest.
Tim Horton, Louis Jaques, 1962, from the national archives of canada, that red background, the blue uniform, and the early 60s colour seperation make thei mage pop.
Ruth St Denis was a coregrapher and dancer from the 20s and 30s, her costumes were loose, stately, eccentric, bangled, beaded, and befeathered, with a strong neo-classical and oreintalist influence. nypl has digitized more then 600 photos of them, and they are awesome.
james jaimeson american scupltour from Los Angeles, makes specific objects that have the material fetish of judd, with a more recent abstracted pop sense, they have bulbous corners, weird pulsed out shapes, hyper minimal curved shapes, and acid bright colours. nice reworking of what minimalism 3.0 can mean.
wikileak on the candian conserative policy, including impt documents on crime.
Jack Layton at a Trek Conference in the mid 80s
danger mouse is indie as fuck, and hates emi as much as the sex pistols did.
speaking of indie as fuck, i always thought of corot as one of those mid level french painters who did pleasent landscapes for the borgies, (in fact i must have seen a dozen b/w the frick, the met, the national gallery in ottawa, the ago, the new orleans musuem of art, etc this year, and the best bit of them how i kind of liked how he feathered the leaves of trees, but how this seemed to be his only innovative technique, reading this was hysterical: A
you can shoot hogs out of helicopters in texas now
Still from Angels and Demons, it won't be a great movie, but scenes like this make me think it will be a high camp ecclestical delight.
doors open toronto next week.
who knew that baby tapir's were spotted.
paul chaat smith is a comanche writer, who's new book of essays Fear of a Red Planet, looks really angry, and really well written.
A $26 million yacht with Versace interiors owned by cab driver-turned-fertilizer king Tamir Sapir - who lives in Manhattan's famed Duke-Semans mansion (above) - was seized by customs officials in Miami this week over trophies made from the skins of endangered animals. The yacht, named the Mystère, was found to contain zebra skins, a jaguar skin rug, Bengal tiger and African lion heads, cigar boxes covered in elephant hide, a reticulated python cigarette holder, and large carved ivory tusks, the Miami Herald reports.
leonard cohen in friesan
The only problem with George Eads (and this would prevent him from being my husband) is that his chest isn't hairy enough, but oh that smile.
dollhouse renewed for a second season.
Jarvis Cocker, Angela in PAris, new single and Cocker's new album in its entireity.
obama is trying as hard as he can to appear as close to george w bush as possible, disappointment and sadness.
trekkie convention ca 72.
hadid's major structure in gaungzhoa up in smoke.
fantastic decimation of Carrey and people with autsim.
The popes, detail of the Ghent Altarpeice.
40 photos of the St Louis Taxidermy site.
Chanel Four on the Tamil Massacare in Sri Lanka., with live footage on the scene, will make you feel hopeless.
Robert Beachy, the queer historian of the weimar, got a guggenhiem to finish his book "Long Knives: Homosexuality in Nazi Germany". he is a fantastic writer who combines economics, social history, queer theory, gender politics, and traditional history into problematized narratives of class, sexuality and small scale intersections between self and state.
danish folk costumes are exciting!
Surfing off the coast of ireland.
indie pop from Brisbane band The Horses, really sweet sort of jangly single with a great message (it's okay to fall down/its okay to crumble)
on nyu and beards
Telex, Eurovision, from 1980, to mourn the death of high meta from the contest.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Tim Horton, Louis Jaques, 1962, from the national archives of canada, that red background, the blue uniform, and the early 60s colour seperation make thei mage pop.
Ruth St Denis was a coregrapher and dancer from the 20s and 30s, her costumes were loose, stately, eccentric, bangled, beaded, and befeathered, with a strong neo-classical and oreintalist influence. nypl has digitized more then 600 photos of them, and they are awesome.
james jaimeson american scupltour from Los Angeles, makes specific objects that have the material fetish of judd, with a more recent abstracted pop sense, they have bulbous corners, weird pulsed out shapes, hyper minimal curved shapes, and acid bright colours. nice reworking of what minimalism 3.0 can mean.
wikileak on the candian conserative policy, including impt documents on crime.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Jack Layton at a Trek Conference in the mid 80s
danger mouse is indie as fuck, and hates emi as much as the sex pistols did.
speaking of indie as fuck, i always thought of corot as one of those mid level french painters who did pleasent landscapes for the borgies, (in fact i must have seen a dozen b/w the frick, the met, the national gallery in ottawa, the ago, the new orleans musuem of art, etc this year, and the best bit of them how i kind of liked how he feathered the leaves of trees, but how this seemed to be his only innovative technique, reading this was hysterical: A
lfred Robaut tracked down fakes as early as 1875 while Corot, years before his death, executed many paintings
with the help of aides and did not hesitate to add his signature on copies which were submitted to him by many of his admirers. Therefore Corot made apparently no fuss about the many forgeries that were circulating by 1875 perhaps finding amusing to be so much copied.
you can shoot hogs out of helicopters in texas now
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Still from Angels and Demons, it won't be a great movie, but scenes like this make me think it will be a high camp ecclestical delight.
doors open toronto next week.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
who knew that baby tapir's were spotted.
paul chaat smith is a comanche writer, who's new book of essays Fear of a Red Planet, looks really angry, and really well written.
A $26 million yacht with Versace interiors owned by cab driver-turned-fertilizer king Tamir Sapir - who lives in Manhattan's famed Duke-Semans mansion (above) - was seized by customs officials in Miami this week over trophies made from the skins of endangered animals. The yacht, named the Mystère, was found to contain zebra skins, a jaguar skin rug, Bengal tiger and African lion heads, cigar boxes covered in elephant hide, a reticulated python cigarette holder, and large carved ivory tusks, the Miami Herald reports.
leonard cohen in friesan
 |
| From Untitled Album |
The only problem with George Eads (and this would prevent him from being my husband) is that his chest isn't hairy enough, but oh that smile.
dollhouse renewed for a second season.
Jarvis Cocker, Angela in PAris, new single and Cocker's new album in its entireity.
obama is trying as hard as he can to appear as close to george w bush as possible, disappointment and sadness.
trekkie convention ca 72.
hadid's major structure in gaungzhoa up in smoke.
fantastic decimation of Carrey and people with autsim.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
The popes, detail of the Ghent Altarpeice.
40 photos of the St Louis Taxidermy site.
Chanel Four on the Tamil Massacare in Sri Lanka., with live footage on the scene, will make you feel hopeless.
Robert Beachy, the queer historian of the weimar, got a guggenhiem to finish his book "Long Knives: Homosexuality in Nazi Germany". he is a fantastic writer who combines economics, social history, queer theory, gender politics, and traditional history into problematized narratives of class, sexuality and small scale intersections between self and state.
danish folk costumes are exciting!
Surfing off the coast of ireland.
According to Blade Runner what does it mean to be human? Is this a locative or utopian definition?
There are two major indications of Humanity in Blade Runner, the first is that Replicants do not feel emotions at all, and that Replicants were programmed to have a four year life span. When they escape to earth, and try to exceed that four year span, they are tracked down and killed. These two can work in opposite manners, so the film can function as both utopian and locative. Hiring assassins to maintain these four year life spans would be an indication of a locative desire to maintain borders. That they are escaping to Earth, suggests that the replicants are wishing to transcend one's place in in the world. That the replicants fear death so much that they are willing to escape and be tracked down, suggests the locative belief that death is the worst thing that could ever happen but that Dekker is a replicant, falls in love with a replicant, and escapes himself, suggests that death is the ultimate boundary which might be over come, a utopian attitude if there ever was one.
It is not only death that places Blade Runner in the liminal space between utopian and locative space. To feel at all, is to be human these feelings are not about seeking order and they cannot be programmed. That replicants do not feel but have the fear of death is the strongest indication of a desire to transcend ones place in the world, that desire is the clearest example that Scott intended this to be a utopian text. Though the city is not a good place in most senses of the word, it seeks an extreme kind of order . That everything from the animals eaten, to the leather worn, to the toys played with are created by machine and that the creators are not beyond the world, but within the context of daily life, tells the viewer that God is not beyond the world but in the world. The binary between locative and utopian then is a false one, it is possibility that both of those world views can exist with one world, espeically a world t hat is as chaotic as the one found on Blade Runner.
How does the film depict death and dying?
Humans die after their usual three score and ten. Replicants die after four years. Replicants fear death and seek to escape by going back to earth, where they have to be tracked down and killed. Within that four years replicants lose their programming, to a process called accelerated decrepitude. This decrepitude is not one of shutting down or mechanical failure but one where the qualities of humanity loosen more and more, they become more savage, less moral, more willing to commit violence. The programming that keeps them in check is lost slowly but effectively.
The best example of this, is the character of Roy Batty. At the end of his lifespan, being chased down by Dekkard, he manipulates the genetic monitor Johann Sebastian, visits his creator in order to kill him, and chases the blade runner throughout old mansions. He is almost like Frankenstein in the sense that farther he goes away from the intentions of his creator, the less he is able ot be be controlled, the more damage he does.
The creator, realises that this decay (that dying makes replicants lose the simulacrum power of their humanity, in a similar way that death cancels our humanity) and talks about this when Batty asks him to add more memory, to program him in such a way that he will be constantly renewed. “The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.”
To live for a replicant, and almost by extension, by humans, is to live through a coding sequence. As humans once our coding system is established (ie by being born), we cannot revise it, we cannot alter it in a significant way. He continues: “ Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation, and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.” Though Tyrell plays God, creating copies of humanity, he cannot perfect God, and replicants like humans life depends on the mutations of DNA sequencing.
What is the Realtionship between Creator and Created in this film:
Animals and now humans are created by machines. The creators are attempting in their own perverse way to create perfected beings. Tyrell, the CEO of Tyrell Corporation says as much, when he talks about the desire to make Replicants (programmed android like creatures) “more human then human”. But there is the assumption that one of the artefacts of being more human then human is to lose the autonomy that allows human beings to make their own choices. In this sense the ultimate human is one that is obedient, at first to his creator, and later to who his creator sells work to. They want the results of their creation to be as complacent as the oxen or snakes that can be basically genetically Xeroxed in the marketplaces Dekkard visits.
In this way, the ideal of creation in the world of Blade Runner is one that is divorced of self knowledge. To speak of it in strictly Judeo-Christian terms, it would be edenic if Eden did not have the garden of good and evil. To continue and complicate that image though, they are already cast out, they are sent to the off worlds to do dangerous and unpleasant work and they are outlawed from being on earth. To return to earth, to return to the garden becomes fatal.
In this way, the film becomes a discussion of how to liberate oneself, how not to be human, but how to become human. If Dekkard is a replicant, his eventual relationship with Rebekka becomes the first step of self creation. His refusal to hunt her, and there eventual status as fugitives, even how they have sex with each other, is the first indication that these programmed creatures have developed the sense of self that pushes them away from their creator. They do not become more human then human, but as human as human. Not quite the same thing, a different species perhaps, but defiantly not created.
When Rachel asks Dekkard in the film “"what if I go north, disappear, would come after me, hurt me" She is asking what happens if I create myself. Whether she realises that Dekkard is a replicant himself, the fear of getting hurt, and the desire for liberation tells us of the possibility of emancipation from the creator.
As You Watch the Film, Try to Keep You Eyes Open for Images of Nature (espeically birds and animals. What do you think these represent of symbolize in the film?
The most important symbols in the film are the silver origami ones of an owl and an unicorn. The owl origami shown in the first few minutes of the film, is foreshadowing to our encounter with Rachel, where Dekkar interrogates her, hoping to find if she is a replicant or not, we see a replicant owl, almost identical to a live creature, except for the dead eyes. During that interrogation we also have him asking her questions about a calfskin wallet. Real animals are so rare that making them into leather or fur is horrific. To not be horror-stricken at the idea of leather is a mark that she cannot feel empathy, a requirement to be human. In this sense, the origami owl works as a metonyomy for the replicant owl, who becomes a larger symbol of the differences between humans and copies of humans. It becomes a stepping stool. The folded paper owl is a less real copy of the replicant owl which is a less real copy of a flesh owl, a creature that does not exist anymore.
The other origami animal that you see is a unicorn, first in the hand of the investigators, later dropped by Dekkar. He dreams of a unicorn through verdant fields, and at the very end of the movie, the commander tells him that of this dream. That unicorns are totally mythical, adds another layer of strangeness to this. Plugging it into the previously held formula. The folded paper unicorn is a symbol of a purely mythical being, a being that is unreal. The replicant is unreal. To create an image of the unreality of dreams, to be able to reproduce it, allows the viewer to understand what is real and what is a copy of reality. The replicants dreams then are a copy of the unreal, and are made flesh by representation, and not mechanical reproduction, like the expensive owl or even the taxi dancers snake.
That both origami animals are silver, the traditional colour of robots and electronics, are also symbolic of a historically material culture, an awareness of what automans used to look like, and this history adds to the the fake/real dialectic that exists throughout the film.
How is history and memory understood by characters in the film?
Memory and history in this film are best understood using the replicants, as what they know is central to the whole context of the human characters. Replicants have fake memories, they are imprinted, programmed by their creators. All of the memories are created, from the banal qoutadian details to the most traumatic secrets that are not told to anyone. In fact, the way to tell the difference between the creator (ie human) and created (ie robots) is that the robots memories are shared between who invented them, police who hire blade runners to return them, and the robots themselves. You can see this in the scene where Harrison Ford tells Rachel she is a replicant by repeating two stories from her childhood, stories that Rachel has told no one, stories that feature animals born and consumed by their mother, stories that mark her as not only having public memory but having memories that lack the empathy required to be fully human. To be human is to remember, to keep secrets, and to use those memories and secrets as source codes for feelings.
This memory, this history that cannot be fully integrated in the replicants is also found in a few scenes with Harrison Ford. When he collects hundreds of family photos, and places them unframed around a piano, so that it obscures the sheet music, he is getting the idea of memories and history, but he does not understand the full picture. The photos are not of him and his family, they are of other peoples, and mirror Dr Tyrell's line to Rachel, that what she considers fully formed around her life “are not your memories, they are someone else's” It is not made clear whose they are.
This idea of public access to private memories, or that the replicants have nothing but a public interior life suggests the strongest evidence that Ford is a replicant himself, that how Gaff is able to out him as such by telling him the dreams he has had of the Unicorn. In this way memory and to a lesser extent history becomes a way to tell what is real, and who is not real. It is a unique extension of the belief that those who have control and power, can craft narratives that suit them the best. That Rachel and Dekkar leave their controllers is in this sense, not a liberation for the sake of love, but of their memories, to create histories of their own. Or to put it more plainly, for Blade Runner, what makes us human is the ability to create and control narratives of our own history.
What elements of the film do you think correspond to Campbell's notion of the monomyth?
Campbell defines the monomyth as “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”1
Dekkar could be considered a hero that ventures forth, but he does not move from a world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Like the Chandleresque noir heroes that he is emulates, he ventures into a world of everyday dirt and grime, filled with corruption. That he feels the need to escape this world with dreams of verdant fields and unicorns suggest that he might be self aware of how little supernatural life there is in his life.
Though we do not have mechanical humans, fake animals, and other such tropes of science fiction in our world, they are banal in the world of Blade Runner. He makes no decisive victory, he kills some replicants, lets others escape. He realises his self hood, but Campbell's myths are externally motivated and any ways, discovering the self hood was not decisive, we are not sure what happens when Rachel and Dekkar become fugitives. There are also no boons at all granted to Dekkar. Campbell's over arching reaching fails to function here, because there are no heroes here, and if there were heroes they would have these functions implanted by them, or would do the implanting themselves. Somewhat regressively Campbell requires not only the liberation of self, but an autonomous repsect for the liberaiton of others, that those who are controlled or those who control.
All of that said, there is something suggested in the last scenes. Where Boffo knows that Dekkar is a replicant and allows him to leave, to seek that quest might just possibly be considered a hero quest, but that would be stretching fairly far, and surmising with too little information.
There are two major indications of Humanity in Blade Runner, the first is that Replicants do not feel emotions at all, and that Replicants were programmed to have a four year life span. When they escape to earth, and try to exceed that four year span, they are tracked down and killed. These two can work in opposite manners, so the film can function as both utopian and locative. Hiring assassins to maintain these four year life spans would be an indication of a locative desire to maintain borders. That they are escaping to Earth, suggests that the replicants are wishing to transcend one's place in in the world. That the replicants fear death so much that they are willing to escape and be tracked down, suggests the locative belief that death is the worst thing that could ever happen but that Dekker is a replicant, falls in love with a replicant, and escapes himself, suggests that death is the ultimate boundary which might be over come, a utopian attitude if there ever was one.
It is not only death that places Blade Runner in the liminal space between utopian and locative space. To feel at all, is to be human these feelings are not about seeking order and they cannot be programmed. That replicants do not feel but have the fear of death is the strongest indication of a desire to transcend ones place in the world, that desire is the clearest example that Scott intended this to be a utopian text. Though the city is not a good place in most senses of the word, it seeks an extreme kind of order . That everything from the animals eaten, to the leather worn, to the toys played with are created by machine and that the creators are not beyond the world, but within the context of daily life, tells the viewer that God is not beyond the world but in the world. The binary between locative and utopian then is a false one, it is possibility that both of those world views can exist with one world, espeically a world t hat is as chaotic as the one found on Blade Runner.
How does the film depict death and dying?
Humans die after their usual three score and ten. Replicants die after four years. Replicants fear death and seek to escape by going back to earth, where they have to be tracked down and killed. Within that four years replicants lose their programming, to a process called accelerated decrepitude. This decrepitude is not one of shutting down or mechanical failure but one where the qualities of humanity loosen more and more, they become more savage, less moral, more willing to commit violence. The programming that keeps them in check is lost slowly but effectively.
The best example of this, is the character of Roy Batty. At the end of his lifespan, being chased down by Dekkard, he manipulates the genetic monitor Johann Sebastian, visits his creator in order to kill him, and chases the blade runner throughout old mansions. He is almost like Frankenstein in the sense that farther he goes away from the intentions of his creator, the less he is able ot be be controlled, the more damage he does.
The creator, realises that this decay (that dying makes replicants lose the simulacrum power of their humanity, in a similar way that death cancels our humanity) and talks about this when Batty asks him to add more memory, to program him in such a way that he will be constantly renewed. “The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.”
To live for a replicant, and almost by extension, by humans, is to live through a coding sequence. As humans once our coding system is established (ie by being born), we cannot revise it, we cannot alter it in a significant way. He continues: “ Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation, and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.” Though Tyrell plays God, creating copies of humanity, he cannot perfect God, and replicants like humans life depends on the mutations of DNA sequencing.
What is the Realtionship between Creator and Created in this film:
Animals and now humans are created by machines. The creators are attempting in their own perverse way to create perfected beings. Tyrell, the CEO of Tyrell Corporation says as much, when he talks about the desire to make Replicants (programmed android like creatures) “more human then human”. But there is the assumption that one of the artefacts of being more human then human is to lose the autonomy that allows human beings to make their own choices. In this sense the ultimate human is one that is obedient, at first to his creator, and later to who his creator sells work to. They want the results of their creation to be as complacent as the oxen or snakes that can be basically genetically Xeroxed in the marketplaces Dekkard visits.
In this way, the ideal of creation in the world of Blade Runner is one that is divorced of self knowledge. To speak of it in strictly Judeo-Christian terms, it would be edenic if Eden did not have the garden of good and evil. To continue and complicate that image though, they are already cast out, they are sent to the off worlds to do dangerous and unpleasant work and they are outlawed from being on earth. To return to earth, to return to the garden becomes fatal.
In this way, the film becomes a discussion of how to liberate oneself, how not to be human, but how to become human. If Dekkard is a replicant, his eventual relationship with Rebekka becomes the first step of self creation. His refusal to hunt her, and there eventual status as fugitives, even how they have sex with each other, is the first indication that these programmed creatures have developed the sense of self that pushes them away from their creator. They do not become more human then human, but as human as human. Not quite the same thing, a different species perhaps, but defiantly not created.
When Rachel asks Dekkard in the film “"what if I go north, disappear, would come after me, hurt me" She is asking what happens if I create myself. Whether she realises that Dekkard is a replicant himself, the fear of getting hurt, and the desire for liberation tells us of the possibility of emancipation from the creator.
As You Watch the Film, Try to Keep You Eyes Open for Images of Nature (espeically birds and animals. What do you think these represent of symbolize in the film?
The most important symbols in the film are the silver origami ones of an owl and an unicorn. The owl origami shown in the first few minutes of the film, is foreshadowing to our encounter with Rachel, where Dekkar interrogates her, hoping to find if she is a replicant or not, we see a replicant owl, almost identical to a live creature, except for the dead eyes. During that interrogation we also have him asking her questions about a calfskin wallet. Real animals are so rare that making them into leather or fur is horrific. To not be horror-stricken at the idea of leather is a mark that she cannot feel empathy, a requirement to be human. In this sense, the origami owl works as a metonyomy for the replicant owl, who becomes a larger symbol of the differences between humans and copies of humans. It becomes a stepping stool. The folded paper owl is a less real copy of the replicant owl which is a less real copy of a flesh owl, a creature that does not exist anymore.
The other origami animal that you see is a unicorn, first in the hand of the investigators, later dropped by Dekkar. He dreams of a unicorn through verdant fields, and at the very end of the movie, the commander tells him that of this dream. That unicorns are totally mythical, adds another layer of strangeness to this. Plugging it into the previously held formula. The folded paper unicorn is a symbol of a purely mythical being, a being that is unreal. The replicant is unreal. To create an image of the unreality of dreams, to be able to reproduce it, allows the viewer to understand what is real and what is a copy of reality. The replicants dreams then are a copy of the unreal, and are made flesh by representation, and not mechanical reproduction, like the expensive owl or even the taxi dancers snake.
That both origami animals are silver, the traditional colour of robots and electronics, are also symbolic of a historically material culture, an awareness of what automans used to look like, and this history adds to the the fake/real dialectic that exists throughout the film.
How is history and memory understood by characters in the film?
Memory and history in this film are best understood using the replicants, as what they know is central to the whole context of the human characters. Replicants have fake memories, they are imprinted, programmed by their creators. All of the memories are created, from the banal qoutadian details to the most traumatic secrets that are not told to anyone. In fact, the way to tell the difference between the creator (ie human) and created (ie robots) is that the robots memories are shared between who invented them, police who hire blade runners to return them, and the robots themselves. You can see this in the scene where Harrison Ford tells Rachel she is a replicant by repeating two stories from her childhood, stories that Rachel has told no one, stories that feature animals born and consumed by their mother, stories that mark her as not only having public memory but having memories that lack the empathy required to be fully human. To be human is to remember, to keep secrets, and to use those memories and secrets as source codes for feelings.
This memory, this history that cannot be fully integrated in the replicants is also found in a few scenes with Harrison Ford. When he collects hundreds of family photos, and places them unframed around a piano, so that it obscures the sheet music, he is getting the idea of memories and history, but he does not understand the full picture. The photos are not of him and his family, they are of other peoples, and mirror Dr Tyrell's line to Rachel, that what she considers fully formed around her life “are not your memories, they are someone else's” It is not made clear whose they are.
This idea of public access to private memories, or that the replicants have nothing but a public interior life suggests the strongest evidence that Ford is a replicant himself, that how Gaff is able to out him as such by telling him the dreams he has had of the Unicorn. In this way memory and to a lesser extent history becomes a way to tell what is real, and who is not real. It is a unique extension of the belief that those who have control and power, can craft narratives that suit them the best. That Rachel and Dekkar leave their controllers is in this sense, not a liberation for the sake of love, but of their memories, to create histories of their own. Or to put it more plainly, for Blade Runner, what makes us human is the ability to create and control narratives of our own history.
What elements of the film do you think correspond to Campbell's notion of the monomyth?
Campbell defines the monomyth as “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”1
Dekkar could be considered a hero that ventures forth, but he does not move from a world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Like the Chandleresque noir heroes that he is emulates, he ventures into a world of everyday dirt and grime, filled with corruption. That he feels the need to escape this world with dreams of verdant fields and unicorns suggest that he might be self aware of how little supernatural life there is in his life.
Though we do not have mechanical humans, fake animals, and other such tropes of science fiction in our world, they are banal in the world of Blade Runner. He makes no decisive victory, he kills some replicants, lets others escape. He realises his self hood, but Campbell's myths are externally motivated and any ways, discovering the self hood was not decisive, we are not sure what happens when Rachel and Dekkar become fugitives. There are also no boons at all granted to Dekkar. Campbell's over arching reaching fails to function here, because there are no heroes here, and if there were heroes they would have these functions implanted by them, or would do the implanting themselves. Somewhat regressively Campbell requires not only the liberation of self, but an autonomous repsect for the liberaiton of others, that those who are controlled or those who control.
All of that said, there is something suggested in the last scenes. Where Boffo knows that Dekkar is a replicant and allows him to leave, to seek that quest might just possibly be considered a hero quest, but that would be stretching fairly far, and surmising with too little information.
Friday, May 15, 2009
The photobook : a history /
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.
Imprint
London ; New York : Phaidon, 2004-
v. <1- > : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.
Language
English
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N7433.3 .P38 2004 v.1
IN
Robarts
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N7433.3 .P38 2004 v.
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.
Imprint
London ; New York : Phaidon, 2004-
v. <1- > : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.
Language
English
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request
save
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text
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include holdings To:
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IN
Robarts
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N7433.3 .P38 2004 v.1
IN
Robarts
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N7433.3 .P38 2004 v.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV068_E2I94&feature=player_embedded
John Mayer did this live in LA last week, and it combines all of the things I love about early 70s singer songwriting:
a) solid melodic singing
b) easy chords on the acoustic guitars
c) this seductive style, where he pretends he doesnt really care, but he gets all the pussy anyways, and he subtly insinuates this to the woman he is fucking (compare Gordon Lightfoot's Beautiful, Loudon Wainwright's Say That You Love Me, Harry Nillson's Without You; John Lennon's Jealous Guy, or any number of Dylan's track)
d) The casual drug references.
i kind of like and kind of hate Mayer's public personae, and i sort of hate the misogyny found in a lot of javascript:void(0)those tracks, and yet, when someone sings about lonlieness and love, it has this comnforting sadness, this blanket of meloncholy and i feel seduced. Mayer knows how to play this game, and it makes me think he is a much better song writer then he has been given the chance to be.
John Mayer did this live in LA last week, and it combines all of the things I love about early 70s singer songwriting:
a) solid melodic singing
b) easy chords on the acoustic guitars
c) this seductive style, where he pretends he doesnt really care, but he gets all the pussy anyways, and he subtly insinuates this to the woman he is fucking (compare Gordon Lightfoot's Beautiful, Loudon Wainwright's Say That You Love Me, Harry Nillson's Without You; John Lennon's Jealous Guy, or any number of Dylan's track)
d) The casual drug references.
i kind of like and kind of hate Mayer's public personae, and i sort of hate the misogyny found in a lot of javascript:void(0)those tracks, and yet, when someone sings about lonlieness and love, it has this comnforting sadness, this blanket of meloncholy and i feel seduced. Mayer knows how to play this game, and it makes me think he is a much better song writer then he has been given the chance to be.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
According to Batman: The Dark Night, what is the role of good and evil, How is the dualism complicated:
The role of good and evil in the Dark Night is about the preservation versus destruction of general order. The crimes that Batman commits are set aside because he is cleaning up Gotham. That he kills innocents, works without due process, and is repeatedly viewed as a vigilante all acts that could traditionally be considered evil are ignored because of his skills at crime fighting. It becomes a kind of ideological reach, where there is an attachment ot the idea of justice more then the small timers and citizens that get in the way.
What is complicated about this, is that the central villains: Joker and Two Face and to a lesser extent Batman himself are exempted from the dialectic of good and evil because they are considered mentally ill. They have internalized the idea in our culture that those who are incapable of making choices because of what could roughly be called mental illness. The Joker claims it for himself repeatedly, and has it claimed for him, that his main operative principal is one of “craziness”---from the beginning scenes with the bank robbery: “is the Joker as crazy as they say?”, or when the Joker meets with Gotham's crime leaders, and asks “Group therapy sessions" in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night. “, or his first discussion of how he got the scars, an almost parodic violation of Batman's primal scene: “Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...” 1
If the Batman is not evil because he is working on preserving the moral order (and he makes this explicit when he claims himself as an outlaw, and says “we can make the choice no one else can make” , and the Joker is not evil, because to be evil is to control one's actions, and he is incapable of doing so, then that leaves us with Harvey Dent. He begins by worrying about his morality and the morality of Gotham. He is the one who claims that the police should be doing the job that Batman is doing, and he is the one who attempts and fails at a legal, state based solution to the problem of crime in the city.
His belief that morality and good order can be achieved not through individual work, but through the police, the court, and his role as district attorney is destroyed by the violence for those who are unmoored by traditional anchors of morality, the state, or even mental health. Dent's quickly developed nihilism results from the betrayal of ordinary ideas of good and evil being successful. In the amoral badlands of Gotham, where crime is controlled by one man who is barely hanging on, and which is destroyed by another who's entire purpose is a purposeless desire to destroy everything with in reach, the only logical response is a complete lack of logic.
This is the complication then, that good and evil suggests an explicit belief structure. There are rules that should be followed in order to externalize what is good. There are rules that should be avoided in order to externalise what is evil. These externalisations function as ways to construct relationships and communities. There is nothing being done in this film, post Dent's transformation, that works for the community well being or sickness.
What is Harvey Dent's perception of the role of fate? How does he embody and subvert this understanding of fate?
Dent was low key about fate before, his use of the coin was playful, and almost seductive, the scene where he meets his lover in a bar, he flips the coin as a provocation, an almost seductive wink against his usual desires for order, good government, and the lack of randomness. He is handsome, successful, well-off, and ambitious, plus he has reason to believe that ambition will be rewarded. He has all the reason in the world to believe that he is control of his own fate, or that fate does not exist at all. Rachel, his lover, confirms this when she says over and over again, I make my own luck. What changes then, is the death of the woman he loves by someone who has no control, and who seeks randomness at all costs.
He embodies the idea of fate, in that lack of control. When Rachel dies, the only thing that can occur is for him to seek vengeance. But how he sought it before was in an attempt at making right what was wrong through his job and his political ambitions. When it was proven that he had no control over his own life, that his previous thoughts on control were taken from him, he moved into a belief that he had no control. This embodied the nihilism that he had previously had no belief in. His embodiment of fate then becomes an embodiment of loss.
The Joker never believed in fate, only believed in creating the most chaos as possible, so he is not random. Harvey Dent, being half grotesque and half human, being half rational and half random, having the id and the super ego explicitly found in his physiognomy is the opposite of the Joker, who makes stories about his scars, and his surgical grimace, and who makes himself up or the Batman who places vestments and masks on before he does his work for the night. There are two subversions then. It is almost that Two Face cannot make a choice, though the film constantly is all about choice, he did not have a choice to be marred, and for the woman he loved to be murdered. That is the first subversion, one against choices or autonomy.
The second subversion is made explicit when he states “ou thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” That his previously held beliefs in his vocation have been broken, and what is viewed as his central quest is perverted. The idea that the only thing that is fair, that is without prejudice is that which is beyond his control, mocks the obsessive clean streets campaign of both Bruce Wayne's soft power and Batman's hard violence.
The last subversion, unrelated to the previous two is that on at least one occasion, when he has captured the family of Commissioner Gordon, it appears that he flips his coin twice, in order to get the result he wants—to save Gordon's young son. That he is incapable of killing a child, or even Gordon himself, suggests that he still has a good side, literally and metaphorically. That he is unable to fully commit, suggests that he is more stable, more connected to the real people he can control then either Batman (who is unable to do anything but fulfil his ideological goals) and Joker (who has no central guiding principal except for spectacled violence.)
To be only random, to only be a vigilante, is to live such a singular purpose that denies the bifurcated existence that Two Face has decided to pursue. This bifurcation places him as the middle position though, the belief in fate is a belief in options. The Batman and the Joker have no such belief in options, in choice, no matter how many speeches that they both make about the ethical possiblities contained there in. Dent is the only one in the film then who has a choice, he makes the choice to flip a coin, and he makes the choice to flip that coin, every time he flips the coin he also makes the choice to follow it, or to flip it again. If he does this is up for debate, but these choices, even in their binary state are more then either the main hero or villian allow themselves.
In what ways does Batman: The Dark Knight cause us to be critical of our own (North American) culture?
I have my doubts that a film that cost 185 million dollars, was financed by the largest media conglomerate in the world, and made more then a billion2 could be truly critical of anything, in our or anyone else's culture. The pieces of the film that seem critical, including the Joker's You Complete Me speech, his burning a pile of money, Lucius Foxes nervousness about surveillance, among others can be explained away and at the end of the film, you have a tale of American exceptionalism embodied in a billionaire playboy who plays armed vigilante in the evenings., a figure that was so comfortable to the right wing in the united states that the Wall Street Journal used it as a defence of Bush's War in Iraq. 3
The You Complete Me speech is seductive, it has the radical allure of anarchic violence that seems reasonable, that makes you want to follow him. Think of it as the psychotic remake of Valerie Solenras writing the SCUM manifesto, some good points, some unhinged theatre, and enough charisma for you to be a child following the Pied Piper. But, the Joker is not a sympathetic character, his behaviour and his desires cannot be followed. Not in any moral, or social sense, but in that he is a singular creature working independently for the destruction of the human race. His monologue in the interrogation scene is not critical of the general culture, because it's intentions are outside any real rubrics of change, however utopian.
His burning the money to the ground is a similar situation. The Joker is not making a Burn, Baby, Burn outsider gesture against the luridness of late capitalism, he is a crazy person being crazy, suggesting the contempt he has for the world. As an audience we are more sympathetic to the aspirational life style porn of Bruce Wayne's expensive dinners, chicly minimal batcave, his mansions and penthouses, then we are of anything that the Joker can offer.
Speaking of Batman, he is a vigilante, and the official policy is to arrest him on site, but they call on him daily, and expect him to be there. This look one way, and do another is American foreign policy, a metonymy of Gautonomo Bay and the extraordinary rendition program where government officials tell us that America does not torture, that it has laws against torture, but that these people are so evil and so unable to be controlled that the only way to get information is to engage in what is called enhanced interrogation techniques. Batman with his physicality, his weaponry, and his lack of jurisdiction is a one man apology for the politics of American foreign policy in he first decade of the 21st century. That some of that weaponry comes from the CIA and that he feels no compunction about spying on every citizen of Gotham, and that even Fox is willing to do this, just one time, like the supposedly temporary allowances of the patriot act, hint heavily that Nolan was aware of what he was doing, that there was nothing accidental about these parallels.
In this capacity Batman is an American project. The people who are not fully assimilated Americans from the villains that Joker meets with, to the Hong Kong Bankers are ethnic or social others. With one important exceptions. Alfred the Butler, who convinces Batman after his small moral breakdown, that he is the only one who can save the entire city, that his business is one of saving lives. In this way, he becomes the supporter for an untenable policy. In fact, there are few people of colour in this film, few women who work as anything but a love interest. No queer voices, no voices of people who make under 6 figures, it is a movie that continues the idea that American idealism is a gift for the upper classes, and especially the white upper classes.
To make a movie that truly challenges the status qou is impossible when the ruling elite is funding it, and it expects that funding to result in some serious return on capital, even the joker masks, t-shirts, and other accessories are a cynical marketing ploy, encouraging especially adolescent males to capitalize on this sort of spectacle.
Do you find the two ferries scene realisitc:
The film is about what it means to make a choice, and whether making choices are even possible. The Joker has created a series of set pieces, that are increasingly spectacular. The two ferries scenes are not to be judged by the standard of verisimilitude in another kind of film, they are not intended to be be hyper realistic, it is intended to be over the top, to eschew realism for awesome special effects. To have a large scale prisoners dilemma, is in the rubric, theme and structure of the film. The dialouge, and the choices that the prisoners make, that they chose not to blow anything or anyone up, allows for Batman to argue for the essential goodness of every day citizens, which is important later on, because it gives him a moral ground to debate the Joker about the essential nature of humanity, which gives the audience an out, allowing them to enjoy the movie and still think of the psychotic Batman as someone who still protects everyone he can, while portraying the Joker once again, as someone who refuses the basic contract of what makes us human.
In this sense, it also states explicitly what has been implied from the beginning, that it takes someone outside the usual status to do what is nessecary. Ordinary people are unwilling or perhaps unable, even people who have killed before, to “get their hands dirty” to make the difficult choices, and they require strong leaders to make those choices for them. The Joker then mocks both Batman and the prisoners/good citizens as weak and unable to control their lives. The scene then, in it's obsessions with power, control, desire for a strong leader, and the critical attention to preventing chaos by any means necessary is both textually and subtextually realistic to the structure of the film, and Nolan's outstanding goals.
What does the Joker mean when he tells Batman you complete me?
The Batman commits violence in the dark, at night, in costume and a mask. The Joker commits violence in the dark, at all hours, in costume and a mask. Batman only commits violence against those who he thinks deserve it. The Joker commits violence against everyone. The Batman's essential goal is to perserve order. The Joker's essential goal is to destroy order. They work in conjunction, one without ideology and one with ideolgy. Without Batman, Joker would have no reason to live, and without the Joker (and the other, more florid villians) Batman would have no reason to live. Their existence depends on each other. They are the yin/yang of Gotham. If the Joker stops, then Batman loses his reason for living.
There are also issues of Normality. Batman, and not Wayne is closeted, he attempts to be normal on his days off, his role as a costumed superhero only happens in the off hours. His ordianriness and his power allow him to cosset the strangeness of the Joker. Joker does not remove the mask, does not live in the corridors of power, and refuses the obsession with normality, with fitting in that Wayne holds onto as an example of his superiority to the other scum. In that scene, Batman says that the Joker is “garbarge that kills for money” but the Joker kills for reasons that are his own, just as Batman began the quest for justice for reasons that are personal and are slightly cryptic.
In this sense, that not only is the Joker saying you and I have the costuming, the masking, the personal quest that cannot be contained, that are broken forever and no matter how much justice seeking or chaos making that we do, we will forever keep doing it, if Batman loses that thin veneer of civiliazation, if he loses the excuse for going out and killing people, even if he stops feeling bad about it, then he will be the Joker. The Joker is a complete Batman in the sense that he is the logical extension of Batman's obsessive quest, or at least he is Batman with out any of Bruce Wayne's morals, status, position in society, power, or self control.
Assuming that Lyden's use of Geertz to equate the function of films and religion is correct, comment on the way which Geertz's definition of religion might relate to Batman:The Dark Knight in its presentation of a “general order of existence”
There are three ways that Lyden's summary of Geertz can intersect with the Dark Knight's belief in the General Order of Existence. The first is when Lyden says that “religion recognizes the inescability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole” 4 Batman's obsession with righting the world, from the beginning of his primal scene, to the capturing criminals but not killing them, from his suspicion of the justice system to the five days where he does nothing, where he fails to put his Bat suit on at all, suggest that he and suffering have become one. The Joker continues to bait him with the idea that the world is irrational, that it has no order, and that chaos would be the best state, the most natual state for the world to be in. The pain of the Batman, and the fevered chaos seeking of the Joker work in conjunction, as a singular narrative.
There are other connections to this quote, it is not only about suffering. One of the more interesting is the idea of ignorance. In the original texts, it is ambiguous if anyone knows that Batman is Bruce Wayne, and the assumption is basically that no one knows, or if anyone does, it would be Alfred, his manservant. But this movie, it almost seems like an open secret, Rachel most likely knows, Commissioner Gordon most likely knows, the Joker might know, Harvey Dent wants to know, and assumes that information has been hidden from him. The ignorance then is not one of pure factual interest, but one of knowing oneself. The Batman and Bruce Wayne are almost seperate creatures, with there own assumptions and operating principals. The lack of integrative awareness suggests that the order of things is not one of transparency but of oblique hiding, of official secrets and dark rooms.
The logical consequence of this kind of information hiding comes with how they solve t he problem of injustice. Injustice can only be solved by the man who sees it being done, and the seeing can be done in the dark. A well ordered world, one that is without injustice, is not considered, because they are living in a culture of extreme violence, that perputates itself. This self-perpetuating cycle secrets and vengeance, messes cleaned instead of prevented, truths held instead of told, are not only inescapable but lack desire to change.
When Lyland talks about how religion “clothes these conceptions with an 'aura of factuality' This means that religion deals with the 'really real' in asserting that its conceptions are not ficitons but are descriptive of (or, in the case of ethics, normative for) the actual nature of the world. This requires a bit of a meta analysis. The history of Batman has been a swinging pendulum between the camp outrageous that refuses any reality (cf Batman and Robin; the 1960s Batman TV Series) and the hyper real (cf the comics Arkham Ayslum, The Killing Joke, the two Nolan movies).
Nolan uses the tropes of noir, of crime ficition in general both formally and narratively to distance himself from the previous series. Even the casting of Patrick Bateman, an actor with a reputation of method seriousness, whose role as Patrick Bateman in the Mary Harmon adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American psycho suggests that not only is he attempting to be dark with a capital D. It is assumed that verisimilitude is present more often in material that is dark, that shows singualr justice against terrified evil. But the order of our world is not present in Batman. Though Gotham has some elements of late 70s New York, the terrorists who bomb do not dress in Nurse uniforms when doing so, to name only one example. What is the order of the Gotham universe, or what order could be restored in Gotham, then. Could Nolan's vision of the world ever be ordered or clean?
Later on in this discussion Lyand qoutes Gertz again “in ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world” 5
In the Batman universe there is not a single set of symbolic forms, there is some continuity (the bat signal, the bat mobile, the bat cave) but in each text swings between the hyper unreal, and the hyper real, means that the world that is lived, and the world as imagined are two separate poles, that cannot be fused, because they require a sort of renewal, the silly comes after the serious and vice versa. The ritual might be then, and this is outside Geertz's text or Lyands interpretation there of, is the continual attempt by the audience to construct a singular response to a text that is so unhinged.
This call of the audience, leads to the the last point: “The world-view they expect to see in films, however is one that reassures them that justice will be served, even if life experience contradicts this” 6
The they here is the general audience, and I think that the Nolan film fulfils the expectation of the audience quite well. Though the Joker is released, and Harvey Dent as Twoface is still current, justice is served in two ways that are consistent with the universe. The first is that the villains are integrative to the text, to have them disappear would do irreparable violence to the text. So, Batman through the Two Ferries scene proves that humanity is good, he is allowed to continue his quest, Dent does not kill Gordon's child, and he can live to avenge Rachel's death, which because she was Bruce Wayne's love interest, this vengance is something that they share. In fact because Batman is still too busy avenging his parents death, he can allow Dent to do that work. That the villians and the victor work together, that they are complete seems to be the opposite of the restortive work that Gertz excepects, but it does allow for a heremtic, simple narrative, sealed outside any of the larger problems, randomness or chaos in the world.
The Joker's attempts to destroy the order of the world are stopped, and the continual desire for Batman to be a hero is returned. This order is explained by Lyand again, when he qoutes Geertz: “religion...can provide a sense that justice and order exist, ven though particular events remain unexplained or seem unfair”7 Even in the filthy, criminal ridden world of Gotham, then the mere presence of someone like Batman can allow for a reassurance that those who are evil will be destroyed. The religion here then, is not one of grace of happiness, or redemption, or joy, but a puritian desire to see evil punished regardless of who or what is in the way. This justice and order then becomes a humourless and obsessive one. Batman then is without God, and really without belief in the democratic system ordinary citizens believe will protect him. The events do nto need to be fair to have this comfort constructed.
The role of good and evil in the Dark Night is about the preservation versus destruction of general order. The crimes that Batman commits are set aside because he is cleaning up Gotham. That he kills innocents, works without due process, and is repeatedly viewed as a vigilante all acts that could traditionally be considered evil are ignored because of his skills at crime fighting. It becomes a kind of ideological reach, where there is an attachment ot the idea of justice more then the small timers and citizens that get in the way.
What is complicated about this, is that the central villains: Joker and Two Face and to a lesser extent Batman himself are exempted from the dialectic of good and evil because they are considered mentally ill. They have internalized the idea in our culture that those who are incapable of making choices because of what could roughly be called mental illness. The Joker claims it for himself repeatedly, and has it claimed for him, that his main operative principal is one of “craziness”---from the beginning scenes with the bank robbery: “is the Joker as crazy as they say?”, or when the Joker meets with Gotham's crime leaders, and asks “Group therapy sessions" in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night. “, or his first discussion of how he got the scars, an almost parodic violation of Batman's primal scene: “Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...” 1
If the Batman is not evil because he is working on preserving the moral order (and he makes this explicit when he claims himself as an outlaw, and says “we can make the choice no one else can make” , and the Joker is not evil, because to be evil is to control one's actions, and he is incapable of doing so, then that leaves us with Harvey Dent. He begins by worrying about his morality and the morality of Gotham. He is the one who claims that the police should be doing the job that Batman is doing, and he is the one who attempts and fails at a legal, state based solution to the problem of crime in the city.
His belief that morality and good order can be achieved not through individual work, but through the police, the court, and his role as district attorney is destroyed by the violence for those who are unmoored by traditional anchors of morality, the state, or even mental health. Dent's quickly developed nihilism results from the betrayal of ordinary ideas of good and evil being successful. In the amoral badlands of Gotham, where crime is controlled by one man who is barely hanging on, and which is destroyed by another who's entire purpose is a purposeless desire to destroy everything with in reach, the only logical response is a complete lack of logic.
This is the complication then, that good and evil suggests an explicit belief structure. There are rules that should be followed in order to externalize what is good. There are rules that should be avoided in order to externalise what is evil. These externalisations function as ways to construct relationships and communities. There is nothing being done in this film, post Dent's transformation, that works for the community well being or sickness.
What is Harvey Dent's perception of the role of fate? How does he embody and subvert this understanding of fate?
Dent was low key about fate before, his use of the coin was playful, and almost seductive, the scene where he meets his lover in a bar, he flips the coin as a provocation, an almost seductive wink against his usual desires for order, good government, and the lack of randomness. He is handsome, successful, well-off, and ambitious, plus he has reason to believe that ambition will be rewarded. He has all the reason in the world to believe that he is control of his own fate, or that fate does not exist at all. Rachel, his lover, confirms this when she says over and over again, I make my own luck. What changes then, is the death of the woman he loves by someone who has no control, and who seeks randomness at all costs.
He embodies the idea of fate, in that lack of control. When Rachel dies, the only thing that can occur is for him to seek vengeance. But how he sought it before was in an attempt at making right what was wrong through his job and his political ambitions. When it was proven that he had no control over his own life, that his previous thoughts on control were taken from him, he moved into a belief that he had no control. This embodied the nihilism that he had previously had no belief in. His embodiment of fate then becomes an embodiment of loss.
The Joker never believed in fate, only believed in creating the most chaos as possible, so he is not random. Harvey Dent, being half grotesque and half human, being half rational and half random, having the id and the super ego explicitly found in his physiognomy is the opposite of the Joker, who makes stories about his scars, and his surgical grimace, and who makes himself up or the Batman who places vestments and masks on before he does his work for the night. There are two subversions then. It is almost that Two Face cannot make a choice, though the film constantly is all about choice, he did not have a choice to be marred, and for the woman he loved to be murdered. That is the first subversion, one against choices or autonomy.
The second subversion is made explicit when he states “ou thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” That his previously held beliefs in his vocation have been broken, and what is viewed as his central quest is perverted. The idea that the only thing that is fair, that is without prejudice is that which is beyond his control, mocks the obsessive clean streets campaign of both Bruce Wayne's soft power and Batman's hard violence.
The last subversion, unrelated to the previous two is that on at least one occasion, when he has captured the family of Commissioner Gordon, it appears that he flips his coin twice, in order to get the result he wants—to save Gordon's young son. That he is incapable of killing a child, or even Gordon himself, suggests that he still has a good side, literally and metaphorically. That he is unable to fully commit, suggests that he is more stable, more connected to the real people he can control then either Batman (who is unable to do anything but fulfil his ideological goals) and Joker (who has no central guiding principal except for spectacled violence.)
To be only random, to only be a vigilante, is to live such a singular purpose that denies the bifurcated existence that Two Face has decided to pursue. This bifurcation places him as the middle position though, the belief in fate is a belief in options. The Batman and the Joker have no such belief in options, in choice, no matter how many speeches that they both make about the ethical possiblities contained there in. Dent is the only one in the film then who has a choice, he makes the choice to flip a coin, and he makes the choice to flip that coin, every time he flips the coin he also makes the choice to follow it, or to flip it again. If he does this is up for debate, but these choices, even in their binary state are more then either the main hero or villian allow themselves.
In what ways does Batman: The Dark Knight cause us to be critical of our own (North American) culture?
I have my doubts that a film that cost 185 million dollars, was financed by the largest media conglomerate in the world, and made more then a billion2 could be truly critical of anything, in our or anyone else's culture. The pieces of the film that seem critical, including the Joker's You Complete Me speech, his burning a pile of money, Lucius Foxes nervousness about surveillance, among others can be explained away and at the end of the film, you have a tale of American exceptionalism embodied in a billionaire playboy who plays armed vigilante in the evenings., a figure that was so comfortable to the right wing in the united states that the Wall Street Journal used it as a defence of Bush's War in Iraq. 3
The You Complete Me speech is seductive, it has the radical allure of anarchic violence that seems reasonable, that makes you want to follow him. Think of it as the psychotic remake of Valerie Solenras writing the SCUM manifesto, some good points, some unhinged theatre, and enough charisma for you to be a child following the Pied Piper. But, the Joker is not a sympathetic character, his behaviour and his desires cannot be followed. Not in any moral, or social sense, but in that he is a singular creature working independently for the destruction of the human race. His monologue in the interrogation scene is not critical of the general culture, because it's intentions are outside any real rubrics of change, however utopian.
His burning the money to the ground is a similar situation. The Joker is not making a Burn, Baby, Burn outsider gesture against the luridness of late capitalism, he is a crazy person being crazy, suggesting the contempt he has for the world. As an audience we are more sympathetic to the aspirational life style porn of Bruce Wayne's expensive dinners, chicly minimal batcave, his mansions and penthouses, then we are of anything that the Joker can offer.
Speaking of Batman, he is a vigilante, and the official policy is to arrest him on site, but they call on him daily, and expect him to be there. This look one way, and do another is American foreign policy, a metonymy of Gautonomo Bay and the extraordinary rendition program where government officials tell us that America does not torture, that it has laws against torture, but that these people are so evil and so unable to be controlled that the only way to get information is to engage in what is called enhanced interrogation techniques. Batman with his physicality, his weaponry, and his lack of jurisdiction is a one man apology for the politics of American foreign policy in he first decade of the 21st century. That some of that weaponry comes from the CIA and that he feels no compunction about spying on every citizen of Gotham, and that even Fox is willing to do this, just one time, like the supposedly temporary allowances of the patriot act, hint heavily that Nolan was aware of what he was doing, that there was nothing accidental about these parallels.
In this capacity Batman is an American project. The people who are not fully assimilated Americans from the villains that Joker meets with, to the Hong Kong Bankers are ethnic or social others. With one important exceptions. Alfred the Butler, who convinces Batman after his small moral breakdown, that he is the only one who can save the entire city, that his business is one of saving lives. In this way, he becomes the supporter for an untenable policy. In fact, there are few people of colour in this film, few women who work as anything but a love interest. No queer voices, no voices of people who make under 6 figures, it is a movie that continues the idea that American idealism is a gift for the upper classes, and especially the white upper classes.
To make a movie that truly challenges the status qou is impossible when the ruling elite is funding it, and it expects that funding to result in some serious return on capital, even the joker masks, t-shirts, and other accessories are a cynical marketing ploy, encouraging especially adolescent males to capitalize on this sort of spectacle.
Do you find the two ferries scene realisitc:
The film is about what it means to make a choice, and whether making choices are even possible. The Joker has created a series of set pieces, that are increasingly spectacular. The two ferries scenes are not to be judged by the standard of verisimilitude in another kind of film, they are not intended to be be hyper realistic, it is intended to be over the top, to eschew realism for awesome special effects. To have a large scale prisoners dilemma, is in the rubric, theme and structure of the film. The dialouge, and the choices that the prisoners make, that they chose not to blow anything or anyone up, allows for Batman to argue for the essential goodness of every day citizens, which is important later on, because it gives him a moral ground to debate the Joker about the essential nature of humanity, which gives the audience an out, allowing them to enjoy the movie and still think of the psychotic Batman as someone who still protects everyone he can, while portraying the Joker once again, as someone who refuses the basic contract of what makes us human.
In this sense, it also states explicitly what has been implied from the beginning, that it takes someone outside the usual status to do what is nessecary. Ordinary people are unwilling or perhaps unable, even people who have killed before, to “get their hands dirty” to make the difficult choices, and they require strong leaders to make those choices for them. The Joker then mocks both Batman and the prisoners/good citizens as weak and unable to control their lives. The scene then, in it's obsessions with power, control, desire for a strong leader, and the critical attention to preventing chaos by any means necessary is both textually and subtextually realistic to the structure of the film, and Nolan's outstanding goals.
What does the Joker mean when he tells Batman you complete me?
The Batman commits violence in the dark, at night, in costume and a mask. The Joker commits violence in the dark, at all hours, in costume and a mask. Batman only commits violence against those who he thinks deserve it. The Joker commits violence against everyone. The Batman's essential goal is to perserve order. The Joker's essential goal is to destroy order. They work in conjunction, one without ideology and one with ideolgy. Without Batman, Joker would have no reason to live, and without the Joker (and the other, more florid villians) Batman would have no reason to live. Their existence depends on each other. They are the yin/yang of Gotham. If the Joker stops, then Batman loses his reason for living.
There are also issues of Normality. Batman, and not Wayne is closeted, he attempts to be normal on his days off, his role as a costumed superhero only happens in the off hours. His ordianriness and his power allow him to cosset the strangeness of the Joker. Joker does not remove the mask, does not live in the corridors of power, and refuses the obsession with normality, with fitting in that Wayne holds onto as an example of his superiority to the other scum. In that scene, Batman says that the Joker is “garbarge that kills for money” but the Joker kills for reasons that are his own, just as Batman began the quest for justice for reasons that are personal and are slightly cryptic.
In this sense, that not only is the Joker saying you and I have the costuming, the masking, the personal quest that cannot be contained, that are broken forever and no matter how much justice seeking or chaos making that we do, we will forever keep doing it, if Batman loses that thin veneer of civiliazation, if he loses the excuse for going out and killing people, even if he stops feeling bad about it, then he will be the Joker. The Joker is a complete Batman in the sense that he is the logical extension of Batman's obsessive quest, or at least he is Batman with out any of Bruce Wayne's morals, status, position in society, power, or self control.
Assuming that Lyden's use of Geertz to equate the function of films and religion is correct, comment on the way which Geertz's definition of religion might relate to Batman:The Dark Knight in its presentation of a “general order of existence”
There are three ways that Lyden's summary of Geertz can intersect with the Dark Knight's belief in the General Order of Existence. The first is when Lyden says that “religion recognizes the inescability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole” 4 Batman's obsession with righting the world, from the beginning of his primal scene, to the capturing criminals but not killing them, from his suspicion of the justice system to the five days where he does nothing, where he fails to put his Bat suit on at all, suggest that he and suffering have become one. The Joker continues to bait him with the idea that the world is irrational, that it has no order, and that chaos would be the best state, the most natual state for the world to be in. The pain of the Batman, and the fevered chaos seeking of the Joker work in conjunction, as a singular narrative.
There are other connections to this quote, it is not only about suffering. One of the more interesting is the idea of ignorance. In the original texts, it is ambiguous if anyone knows that Batman is Bruce Wayne, and the assumption is basically that no one knows, or if anyone does, it would be Alfred, his manservant. But this movie, it almost seems like an open secret, Rachel most likely knows, Commissioner Gordon most likely knows, the Joker might know, Harvey Dent wants to know, and assumes that information has been hidden from him. The ignorance then is not one of pure factual interest, but one of knowing oneself. The Batman and Bruce Wayne are almost seperate creatures, with there own assumptions and operating principals. The lack of integrative awareness suggests that the order of things is not one of transparency but of oblique hiding, of official secrets and dark rooms.
The logical consequence of this kind of information hiding comes with how they solve t he problem of injustice. Injustice can only be solved by the man who sees it being done, and the seeing can be done in the dark. A well ordered world, one that is without injustice, is not considered, because they are living in a culture of extreme violence, that perputates itself. This self-perpetuating cycle secrets and vengeance, messes cleaned instead of prevented, truths held instead of told, are not only inescapable but lack desire to change.
When Lyland talks about how religion “clothes these conceptions with an 'aura of factuality' This means that religion deals with the 'really real' in asserting that its conceptions are not ficitons but are descriptive of (or, in the case of ethics, normative for) the actual nature of the world. This requires a bit of a meta analysis. The history of Batman has been a swinging pendulum between the camp outrageous that refuses any reality (cf Batman and Robin; the 1960s Batman TV Series) and the hyper real (cf the comics Arkham Ayslum, The Killing Joke, the two Nolan movies).
Nolan uses the tropes of noir, of crime ficition in general both formally and narratively to distance himself from the previous series. Even the casting of Patrick Bateman, an actor with a reputation of method seriousness, whose role as Patrick Bateman in the Mary Harmon adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American psycho suggests that not only is he attempting to be dark with a capital D. It is assumed that verisimilitude is present more often in material that is dark, that shows singualr justice against terrified evil. But the order of our world is not present in Batman. Though Gotham has some elements of late 70s New York, the terrorists who bomb do not dress in Nurse uniforms when doing so, to name only one example. What is the order of the Gotham universe, or what order could be restored in Gotham, then. Could Nolan's vision of the world ever be ordered or clean?
Later on in this discussion Lyand qoutes Gertz again “in ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world” 5
In the Batman universe there is not a single set of symbolic forms, there is some continuity (the bat signal, the bat mobile, the bat cave) but in each text swings between the hyper unreal, and the hyper real, means that the world that is lived, and the world as imagined are two separate poles, that cannot be fused, because they require a sort of renewal, the silly comes after the serious and vice versa. The ritual might be then, and this is outside Geertz's text or Lyands interpretation there of, is the continual attempt by the audience to construct a singular response to a text that is so unhinged.
This call of the audience, leads to the the last point: “The world-view they expect to see in films, however is one that reassures them that justice will be served, even if life experience contradicts this” 6
The they here is the general audience, and I think that the Nolan film fulfils the expectation of the audience quite well. Though the Joker is released, and Harvey Dent as Twoface is still current, justice is served in two ways that are consistent with the universe. The first is that the villains are integrative to the text, to have them disappear would do irreparable violence to the text. So, Batman through the Two Ferries scene proves that humanity is good, he is allowed to continue his quest, Dent does not kill Gordon's child, and he can live to avenge Rachel's death, which because she was Bruce Wayne's love interest, this vengance is something that they share. In fact because Batman is still too busy avenging his parents death, he can allow Dent to do that work. That the villians and the victor work together, that they are complete seems to be the opposite of the restortive work that Gertz excepects, but it does allow for a heremtic, simple narrative, sealed outside any of the larger problems, randomness or chaos in the world.
The Joker's attempts to destroy the order of the world are stopped, and the continual desire for Batman to be a hero is returned. This order is explained by Lyand again, when he qoutes Geertz: “religion...can provide a sense that justice and order exist, ven though particular events remain unexplained or seem unfair”7 Even in the filthy, criminal ridden world of Gotham, then the mere presence of someone like Batman can allow for a reassurance that those who are evil will be destroyed. The religion here then, is not one of grace of happiness, or redemption, or joy, but a puritian desire to see evil punished regardless of who or what is in the way. This justice and order then becomes a humourless and obsessive one. Batman then is without God, and really without belief in the democratic system ordinary citizens believe will protect him. The events do nto need to be fair to have this comfort constructed.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
According to Batman: The Dark Night, what is the role of good and evil, How is the dualism complicated:
The role of good and evil in the Dark Night is about the preservation versus destruction of general order. The crimes that Batman commits are set aside because he is cleaning up Gotham. That he kills innocents, works without due process, and is repeatedly viewed as a vigilante all acts that could traditionally be considered evil are ignored because of his skills at crime fighting. It becomes a kind of ideological reach, where there is an attachment ot the idea of justice more then the small timers and citizens that get in the way.
What is complicated about this, is that the central villains: Joker and Two Face and to a lesser extent Batman himself are exempted from the dialectic of good and evil because they are considered mentally ill. They have internalized the idea in our culture that those who are incapable of making choices because of what could roughly be called mental illness. The Joker claims it for himself repeatedly, and has it claimed for him, that his main operative principal is one of “craziness”---from the beginning scenes with the bank robbery: “is the Joker as crazy as they say?”, or when the Joker meets with Gotham's crime leaders, and asks “Group therapy sessions" in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night. “, or his first discussion of how he got the scars, an almost parodic violation of Batman's primal scene: “Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...” 1
If the Batman is not evil because he is working on preserving the moral order (and he makes this explicit when he claims himself as an outlaw, and says “we can make the choice no one else can make” , and the Joker is not evil, because to be evil is to control one's actions, and he is incapable of doing so, then that leaves us with Harvey Dent. He begins by worrying about his morality and the morality of Gotham. He is the one who claims that the police should be doing the job that Batman is doing, and he is the one who attempts and fails at a legal, state based solution to the problem of crime in the city.
His belief that morality and good order can be achieved not through individual work, but through the police, the court, and his role as district attorney is destroyed by the violence for those who are unmoored by traditional anchors of morality, the state, or even mental health. Dent's quickly developed nihilism results from the betrayal of ordinary ideas of good and evil being successful. In the amoral badlands of Gotham, where crime is controlled by one man who is barely hanging on, and which is destroyed by another who's entire purpose is a purposeless desire to destroy everything with in reach, the only logical response is a complete lack of logic.
This is the complication then, that good and evil suggests an explicit belief structure. There are rules that should be followed in order to externalize what is good. There are rules that should be avoided in order to externalise what is evil. These externalisations function as ways to construct relationships and communities. There is nothing being done in this film, post Dent's transformation, that works for the community well being or sickness.
What is Harvey Dent's perception of the role of fate? How does he embody and subvert this understanding of fate?
Dent was low key about fate before, his use of the coin was playful, and almost seductive, the scene where he meets his lover in a bar, he flips the coin as a provocation, an almost seductive wink against his usual desires for order, good government, and the lack of randomness. He is handsome, successful, well-off, and ambitious, plus he has reason to believe that ambition will be rewarded. He has all the reason in the world to believe that he is control of his own fate, or that fate does not exist at all. Rachel, his lover, confirms this when she says over and over again, I make my own luck. What changes then, is the death of the woman he loves by someone who has no control, and who seeks randomness at all costs.
He embodies the idea of fate, in that lack of control. When Rachel dies, the only thing that can occur is for him to seek vengeance. But how he sought it before was in an attempt at making right what was wrong through his job and his political ambitions. When it was proven that he had no control over his own life, that his previous thoughts on control were taken from him, he moved into a belief that he had no control. This embodied the nihilism that he had previously had no belief in. His embodiment of fate then becomes an embodiment of loss.
The Joker never believed in fate, only believed in creating the most chaos as possible, so he is not random. Harvey Dent, being half grotesque and half human, being half rational and half random, having the id and the super ego explicitly found in his physiognomy is the opposite of the Joker, who makes stories about his scars, and his surgical grimace, and who makes himself up or the Batman who places vestments and masks on before he does his work for the night. There are two subversions then. It is almost that Two Face cannot make a choice, though the film constantly is all about choice, he did not have a choice to be marred, and for the woman he loved to be murdered. That is the first subversion, one against choices or autonomy.
The second subversion is made explicit when he states “ou thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” That his previously held beliefs in his vocation have been broken, and what is viewed as his central quest is perverted. The idea that the only thing that is fair, that is without prejudice is that which is beyond his control, mocks the obsessive clean streets campaign of both Bruce Wayne's soft power and Batman's hard violence.
The last subversion, unrelated to the previous two is that on at least one occasion, when he has captured the family of Commissioner Gordon, it appears that he flips his coin twice, in order to get the result he wants—to save Gordon's young son. That he is incapable of killing a child, or even Gordon himself, suggests that he still has a good side, literally and metaphorically. That he is unable to fully commit, suggests that he is more stable, more connected to the real people he can control then either Batman (who is unable to do anything but fulfil his ideological goals) and Joker (who has no central guiding principal except for spectacled violence.)
To be only random, to only be a vigilante, is to live such a singular purpose that denies the bifurcated existence that Two Face has decided to pursue. This bifurcation places him as the middle position though, the belief in fate is a belief in options. The Batman and the Joker have no such belief in options, in choice, no matter how many speeches that they both make about the ethical possiblities contained there in. Dent is the only one in the film then who has a choice, he makes the choice to flip a coin, and he makes the choice to flip that coin, every time he flips the coin he also makes the choice to follow it, or to flip it again. If he does this is up for debate, but these choices, even in their binary state are more then either the main hero or villian allow themselves.
In what ways does Batman: The Dark Knight cause us to be critical of our own (North American) culture?
I have my doubts that a film that cost 185 million dollars, was financed by the largest media conglomerate in the world, and made more then a billion2 could be truly critical of anything, in our or anyone else's culture. The pieces of the film that seem critical, including the Joker's You Complete Me speech, his burning a pile of money, Lucius Foxes nervousness about surveillance, among others can be explained away and at the end of the film, you have a tale of American exceptionalism embodied in a billionaire playboy who plays armed vigilante in the evenings., a figure that was so comfortable to the right wing in the united states that the Wall Street Journal used it as a defence of Bush's War in Iraq. 3
The You Complete Me speech is seductive, it has the radical allure of anarchic violence that seems reasonable, that makes you want to follow him. Think of it as the psychotic remake of Valerie Solenras writing the SCUM manifesto, some good points, some unhinged theatre, and enough charisma for you to be a child following the Pied Piper. But, the Joker is not a sympathetic character, his behaviour and his desires cannot be followed. Not in any moral, or social sense, but in that he is a singular creature working independently for the destruction of the human race. His monologue in the interrogation scene is not critical of the general culture, because it's intentions are outside any real rubrics of change, however utopian.
His burning the money to the ground is a similar situation. The Joker is not making a Burn, Baby, Burn outsider gesture against the luridness of late capitalism, he is a crazy person being crazy, suggesting the contempt he has for the world. As an audience we are more sympathetic to the aspirational life style porn of Bruce Wayne's expensive dinners, chicly minimal batcave, his mansions and penthouses, then we are of anything that the Joker can offer.
Speaking of Batman, he is a vigilante, and the official policy is to arrest him on site, but they call on him daily, and expect him to be there. This look one way, and do another is American foreign policy, a metonymy of Gautonomo Bay and the extraordinary rendition program where government officials tell us that America does not torture, that it has laws against torture, but that these people are so evil and so unable to be controlled that the only way to get information is to engage in what is called enhanced interrogation techniques. Batman with his physicality, his weaponry, and his lack of jurisdiction is a one man apology for the politics of American foreign policy in he first decade of the 21st century. That some of that weaponry comes from the CIA and that he feels no compunction about spying on every citizen of Gotham, and that even Fox is willing to do this, just one time, like the supposedly temporary allowances of the patriot act, hint heavily that Nolan was aware of what he was doing, that there was nothing accidental about these parallels.
In this capacity Batman is an American project. The people who are not fully assimilated Americans from the villains that Joker meets with, to the Hong Kong Bankers are ethnic or social others. With one important exceptions. Alfred the Butler, who convinces Batman after his small moral breakdown, that he is the only one who can save the entire city, that his business is one of saving lives. In this way, he becomes the supporter for an untenable policy. In fact, there are few people of colour in this film, few women who work as anything but a love interest. No queer voices, no voices of people who make under 6 figures, it is a movie that continues the idea that American idealism is a gift for the upper classes, and especially the white upper classes.
To make a movie that truly challenges the status qou is impossible when the ruling elite is funding it, and it expects that funding to result in some serious return on capital, even the joker masks, t-shirts, and other accessories are a cynical marketing ploy, encouraging especially adolescent males to capitalize on this sort of spectacle.
Do you find the two ferries scene realisitc:
The film is about what it means to make a choice, and whether making choices are even possible. The Joker has created a series of set pieces, that are increasingly spectacular. The two ferries scenes are not to be judged by the standard of verisimilitude in another kind of film, they are not intended to be be hyper realistic, it is intended to be over the top, to eschew realism for awesome special effects. To have a large scale prisoners dilemma, is in the rubric, theme and structure of the film. The dialouge, and the choices that the prisoners make, that they chose not to blow anything or anyone up, allows for Batman to argue for the essential goodness of every day citizens, which is important later on, because it gives him a moral ground to debate the Joker about the essential nature of humanity, which gives the audience an out, allowing them to enjoy the movie and still think of the psychotic Batman as someone who still protects everyone he can, while portraying the Joker once again, as someone who refuses the basic contract of what makes us human.
In this sense, it also states explicitly what has been implied from the beginning, that it takes someone outside the usual status to do what is nessecary. Ordinary people are unwilling or perhaps unable, even people who have killed before, to “get their hands dirty” to make the difficult choices, and they require strong leaders to make those choices for them. The Joker then mocks both Batman and the prisoners/good citizens as weak and unable to control their lives. The scene then, in it's obsessions with power, control, desire for a strong leader, and the critical attention to preventing chaos by any means necessary is both textually and subtextually realistic to the structure of the film, and Nolan's outstanding goals.
What does the Joker mean when he tells Batman you complete me?
The Batman commits violence in the dark, at night, in costume and a mask. The Joker commits violence in the dark, at all hours, in costume and a mask. Batman only commits violence against those who he thinks deserve it. The Joker commits violence against everyone. The Batman's essential goal is to perserve order. The Joker's essential goal is to destroy order. They work in conjunction, one without ideology and one with ideolgy. Without Batman, Joker would have no reason to live, and without the Joker (and the other, more florid villians) Batman would have no reason to live. Their existence depends on each other. They are the yin/yang of Gotham. If the Joker stops, then Batman loses his reason for living.
There are also issues of Normality. Batman, and not Wayne is closeted, he attempts to be normal on his days off, his role as a costumed superhero only happens in the off hours. His ordianriness and his power allow him to cosset the strangeness of the Joker. Joker does not remove the mask, does not live in the corridors of power, and refuses the obsession with normality, with fitting in that Wayne holds onto as an example of his superiority to the other scum. In that scene, Batman says that the Joker is “garbarge that kills for money” but the Joker kills for reasons that are his own, just as Batman began the quest for justice for reasons that are personal and are slightly cryptic.
In this sense, that not only is the Joker saying you and I have the costuming, the masking, the personal quest that cannot be contained, that are broken forever and no matter how much justice seeking or chaos making that we do, we will forever keep doing it, if Batman loses that thin veneer of civiliazation, if he loses the excuse for going out and killing people, even if he stops feeling bad about it, then he will be the Joker. The Joker is a complete Batman in the sense that he is the logical extension of Batman's obsessive quest, or at least he is Batman with out any of Bruce Wayne's morals, status, position in society, power, or self control.
The role of good and evil in the Dark Night is about the preservation versus destruction of general order. The crimes that Batman commits are set aside because he is cleaning up Gotham. That he kills innocents, works without due process, and is repeatedly viewed as a vigilante all acts that could traditionally be considered evil are ignored because of his skills at crime fighting. It becomes a kind of ideological reach, where there is an attachment ot the idea of justice more then the small timers and citizens that get in the way.
What is complicated about this, is that the central villains: Joker and Two Face and to a lesser extent Batman himself are exempted from the dialectic of good and evil because they are considered mentally ill. They have internalized the idea in our culture that those who are incapable of making choices because of what could roughly be called mental illness. The Joker claims it for himself repeatedly, and has it claimed for him, that his main operative principal is one of “craziness”---from the beginning scenes with the bank robbery: “is the Joker as crazy as they say?”, or when the Joker meets with Gotham's crime leaders, and asks “Group therapy sessions" in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night. “, or his first discussion of how he got the scars, an almost parodic violation of Batman's primal scene: “Wanna know how I got these scars? My father was... a drinker. And a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn't like that. Not-one-bit. So - me watching - he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it! Turns to me, and he says, "why so serious, son?" Comes at me with the knife... "Why so serious?" He sticks the blade in my mouth... "Let's put a smile on that face!" And...” 1
If the Batman is not evil because he is working on preserving the moral order (and he makes this explicit when he claims himself as an outlaw, and says “we can make the choice no one else can make” , and the Joker is not evil, because to be evil is to control one's actions, and he is incapable of doing so, then that leaves us with Harvey Dent. He begins by worrying about his morality and the morality of Gotham. He is the one who claims that the police should be doing the job that Batman is doing, and he is the one who attempts and fails at a legal, state based solution to the problem of crime in the city.
His belief that morality and good order can be achieved not through individual work, but through the police, the court, and his role as district attorney is destroyed by the violence for those who are unmoored by traditional anchors of morality, the state, or even mental health. Dent's quickly developed nihilism results from the betrayal of ordinary ideas of good and evil being successful. In the amoral badlands of Gotham, where crime is controlled by one man who is barely hanging on, and which is destroyed by another who's entire purpose is a purposeless desire to destroy everything with in reach, the only logical response is a complete lack of logic.
This is the complication then, that good and evil suggests an explicit belief structure. There are rules that should be followed in order to externalize what is good. There are rules that should be avoided in order to externalise what is evil. These externalisations function as ways to construct relationships and communities. There is nothing being done in this film, post Dent's transformation, that works for the community well being or sickness.
What is Harvey Dent's perception of the role of fate? How does he embody and subvert this understanding of fate?
Dent was low key about fate before, his use of the coin was playful, and almost seductive, the scene where he meets his lover in a bar, he flips the coin as a provocation, an almost seductive wink against his usual desires for order, good government, and the lack of randomness. He is handsome, successful, well-off, and ambitious, plus he has reason to believe that ambition will be rewarded. He has all the reason in the world to believe that he is control of his own fate, or that fate does not exist at all. Rachel, his lover, confirms this when she says over and over again, I make my own luck. What changes then, is the death of the woman he loves by someone who has no control, and who seeks randomness at all costs.
He embodies the idea of fate, in that lack of control. When Rachel dies, the only thing that can occur is for him to seek vengeance. But how he sought it before was in an attempt at making right what was wrong through his job and his political ambitions. When it was proven that he had no control over his own life, that his previous thoughts on control were taken from him, he moved into a belief that he had no control. This embodied the nihilism that he had previously had no belief in. His embodiment of fate then becomes an embodiment of loss.
The Joker never believed in fate, only believed in creating the most chaos as possible, so he is not random. Harvey Dent, being half grotesque and half human, being half rational and half random, having the id and the super ego explicitly found in his physiognomy is the opposite of the Joker, who makes stories about his scars, and his surgical grimace, and who makes himself up or the Batman who places vestments and masks on before he does his work for the night. There are two subversions then. It is almost that Two Face cannot make a choice, though the film constantly is all about choice, he did not have a choice to be marred, and for the woman he loved to be murdered. That is the first subversion, one against choices or autonomy.
The second subversion is made explicit when he states “ou thought we could be decent men in an indecent time. But you were wrong. The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.” That his previously held beliefs in his vocation have been broken, and what is viewed as his central quest is perverted. The idea that the only thing that is fair, that is without prejudice is that which is beyond his control, mocks the obsessive clean streets campaign of both Bruce Wayne's soft power and Batman's hard violence.
The last subversion, unrelated to the previous two is that on at least one occasion, when he has captured the family of Commissioner Gordon, it appears that he flips his coin twice, in order to get the result he wants—to save Gordon's young son. That he is incapable of killing a child, or even Gordon himself, suggests that he still has a good side, literally and metaphorically. That he is unable to fully commit, suggests that he is more stable, more connected to the real people he can control then either Batman (who is unable to do anything but fulfil his ideological goals) and Joker (who has no central guiding principal except for spectacled violence.)
To be only random, to only be a vigilante, is to live such a singular purpose that denies the bifurcated existence that Two Face has decided to pursue. This bifurcation places him as the middle position though, the belief in fate is a belief in options. The Batman and the Joker have no such belief in options, in choice, no matter how many speeches that they both make about the ethical possiblities contained there in. Dent is the only one in the film then who has a choice, he makes the choice to flip a coin, and he makes the choice to flip that coin, every time he flips the coin he also makes the choice to follow it, or to flip it again. If he does this is up for debate, but these choices, even in their binary state are more then either the main hero or villian allow themselves.
In what ways does Batman: The Dark Knight cause us to be critical of our own (North American) culture?
I have my doubts that a film that cost 185 million dollars, was financed by the largest media conglomerate in the world, and made more then a billion2 could be truly critical of anything, in our or anyone else's culture. The pieces of the film that seem critical, including the Joker's You Complete Me speech, his burning a pile of money, Lucius Foxes nervousness about surveillance, among others can be explained away and at the end of the film, you have a tale of American exceptionalism embodied in a billionaire playboy who plays armed vigilante in the evenings., a figure that was so comfortable to the right wing in the united states that the Wall Street Journal used it as a defence of Bush's War in Iraq. 3
The You Complete Me speech is seductive, it has the radical allure of anarchic violence that seems reasonable, that makes you want to follow him. Think of it as the psychotic remake of Valerie Solenras writing the SCUM manifesto, some good points, some unhinged theatre, and enough charisma for you to be a child following the Pied Piper. But, the Joker is not a sympathetic character, his behaviour and his desires cannot be followed. Not in any moral, or social sense, but in that he is a singular creature working independently for the destruction of the human race. His monologue in the interrogation scene is not critical of the general culture, because it's intentions are outside any real rubrics of change, however utopian.
His burning the money to the ground is a similar situation. The Joker is not making a Burn, Baby, Burn outsider gesture against the luridness of late capitalism, he is a crazy person being crazy, suggesting the contempt he has for the world. As an audience we are more sympathetic to the aspirational life style porn of Bruce Wayne's expensive dinners, chicly minimal batcave, his mansions and penthouses, then we are of anything that the Joker can offer.
Speaking of Batman, he is a vigilante, and the official policy is to arrest him on site, but they call on him daily, and expect him to be there. This look one way, and do another is American foreign policy, a metonymy of Gautonomo Bay and the extraordinary rendition program where government officials tell us that America does not torture, that it has laws against torture, but that these people are so evil and so unable to be controlled that the only way to get information is to engage in what is called enhanced interrogation techniques. Batman with his physicality, his weaponry, and his lack of jurisdiction is a one man apology for the politics of American foreign policy in he first decade of the 21st century. That some of that weaponry comes from the CIA and that he feels no compunction about spying on every citizen of Gotham, and that even Fox is willing to do this, just one time, like the supposedly temporary allowances of the patriot act, hint heavily that Nolan was aware of what he was doing, that there was nothing accidental about these parallels.
In this capacity Batman is an American project. The people who are not fully assimilated Americans from the villains that Joker meets with, to the Hong Kong Bankers are ethnic or social others. With one important exceptions. Alfred the Butler, who convinces Batman after his small moral breakdown, that he is the only one who can save the entire city, that his business is one of saving lives. In this way, he becomes the supporter for an untenable policy. In fact, there are few people of colour in this film, few women who work as anything but a love interest. No queer voices, no voices of people who make under 6 figures, it is a movie that continues the idea that American idealism is a gift for the upper classes, and especially the white upper classes.
To make a movie that truly challenges the status qou is impossible when the ruling elite is funding it, and it expects that funding to result in some serious return on capital, even the joker masks, t-shirts, and other accessories are a cynical marketing ploy, encouraging especially adolescent males to capitalize on this sort of spectacle.
Do you find the two ferries scene realisitc:
The film is about what it means to make a choice, and whether making choices are even possible. The Joker has created a series of set pieces, that are increasingly spectacular. The two ferries scenes are not to be judged by the standard of verisimilitude in another kind of film, they are not intended to be be hyper realistic, it is intended to be over the top, to eschew realism for awesome special effects. To have a large scale prisoners dilemma, is in the rubric, theme and structure of the film. The dialouge, and the choices that the prisoners make, that they chose not to blow anything or anyone up, allows for Batman to argue for the essential goodness of every day citizens, which is important later on, because it gives him a moral ground to debate the Joker about the essential nature of humanity, which gives the audience an out, allowing them to enjoy the movie and still think of the psychotic Batman as someone who still protects everyone he can, while portraying the Joker once again, as someone who refuses the basic contract of what makes us human.
In this sense, it also states explicitly what has been implied from the beginning, that it takes someone outside the usual status to do what is nessecary. Ordinary people are unwilling or perhaps unable, even people who have killed before, to “get their hands dirty” to make the difficult choices, and they require strong leaders to make those choices for them. The Joker then mocks both Batman and the prisoners/good citizens as weak and unable to control their lives. The scene then, in it's obsessions with power, control, desire for a strong leader, and the critical attention to preventing chaos by any means necessary is both textually and subtextually realistic to the structure of the film, and Nolan's outstanding goals.
What does the Joker mean when he tells Batman you complete me?
The Batman commits violence in the dark, at night, in costume and a mask. The Joker commits violence in the dark, at all hours, in costume and a mask. Batman only commits violence against those who he thinks deserve it. The Joker commits violence against everyone. The Batman's essential goal is to perserve order. The Joker's essential goal is to destroy order. They work in conjunction, one without ideology and one with ideolgy. Without Batman, Joker would have no reason to live, and without the Joker (and the other, more florid villians) Batman would have no reason to live. Their existence depends on each other. They are the yin/yang of Gotham. If the Joker stops, then Batman loses his reason for living.
There are also issues of Normality. Batman, and not Wayne is closeted, he attempts to be normal on his days off, his role as a costumed superhero only happens in the off hours. His ordianriness and his power allow him to cosset the strangeness of the Joker. Joker does not remove the mask, does not live in the corridors of power, and refuses the obsession with normality, with fitting in that Wayne holds onto as an example of his superiority to the other scum. In that scene, Batman says that the Joker is “garbarge that kills for money” but the Joker kills for reasons that are his own, just as Batman began the quest for justice for reasons that are personal and are slightly cryptic.
In this sense, that not only is the Joker saying you and I have the costuming, the masking, the personal quest that cannot be contained, that are broken forever and no matter how much justice seeking or chaos making that we do, we will forever keep doing it, if Batman loses that thin veneer of civiliazation, if he loses the excuse for going out and killing people, even if he stops feeling bad about it, then he will be the Joker. The Joker is a complete Batman in the sense that he is the logical extension of Batman's obsessive quest, or at least he is Batman with out any of Bruce Wayne's morals, status, position in society, power, or self control.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
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| From Untitled Album |
elizabeth james snake cuff, pretty as fuck.
great article about how it is a lack of works, rather then a general recession that is making the sothebys and christies auctions problematic, and how it is less problematic from a finical standpoint then most people think.
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| From Untitled Album |
Eakins, Two Men Wrestling, 188?
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis together, fan video but really well edited. (makes where the truth lies make a little more sense)
bad british architechture the blog.
the world famous neferiti bust might be a fraud (which makes sense, because the work is a little too looking for examples of our own aesthetic super deco then other egyption work of that peroid.)
ctv uses my photo, as does wikipedia and the gaurdian (lost the link)
pamela coleman's 100th anniversary edition, makes much clearer the ambiguities found in the rider waite.
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| From Untitled Album |
Tilda in LA
pelosi knew about and okayed tortue.
Ray Blanchard's position on paraphillias, is chilling esp. since he is part of the paraphillia working group at the DSM rewrite this year, he seems to want to include all of those kinky and fun things that have been dropped in the last decade or so, and also wants to expand the body and gender dysmorphia sections.
keyboard cat is keyboardy.
ohio barns presents artistic tanks.
Sister Dottie Dixon might be the gentle and loving correction that hte LDS church needs as the mother of a gay son.
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| From Untitled Album |
John Waters, Pilgrim, from his show at the Gagosian, 2009
the pope apologises for residental school abuse.
rejneit xrays v ideo game systems.
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| From Untitled Album |
Franz Franzetta calendar art
these photos of Tarintino and his new muse Diane Krueger might be kinkiest thing ever found in the ny times.
the internet archives scores some real nice academic, often raw, humanities footage from the university of penn.
when a fourth grader has better moral sense t hen you, it might be a good time to sit in the corner and think about what you have done (condi)
Evangelical Christians in Afghanistan treat the war as a holy quest.
jeffery rosen starts the right wing campaign against the capable jurist Sotomayor for the supreme court. Depressing.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Thursday, May 07, 2009
outline for first 500 word paper:
- Language constructs meaning (use the femminist idea of the ova absorbing the sperm, as opposed to the competing race of sperm to conquer the ova as an example)
- As expected Darwin was a 19th century man, enlightened about the possibility of a kind of liberation, but also suspicious of women's progress. Often his language was constructed in the absence of women. (use eks idea of homo-sociality) (also quote louise michelle newman's discussion of darwin as a father to daughters)
- The 19th century struggle for and against a variety of liberations was pragmatically political, and those who were engaged in it used the language of sexual selection for and against their own and other people's liberation (including the tensions b/w the exterior presentaiton of ST race and gender, Havelock Ellis' seeking of normalcy, but advocating for an extension of that desire, and the later eugenic discourses of suffergettes like Stanton (who seemed to throw WOC under the bus); and Emily Murphy (who believed the Eugenic movements arguements)
- These arguements were disemmiated by populist material culture, expanding them for previously unseen needs.
- To simplify then Darwin as a member of his time, of his own prejudices, but also of his own searching ambiguity, had his intricate arguements extended against what he might not have believed.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Prospectus:
I grew up in Alberta. I grew up LDS in Alberta. I grew up queer in Alberta. My grandparents, and some of my great grandparents were from Alberta. I listened to country music on the rodeo, went to school with ranchers and cowboys, had tickets to the rodeo, went to school for grades 7 and 8 at a school that hiked and canoed and swam through Alberta and Saskatchewan. I have took photos of pick up trucks, made love to working men and was never a working man myself. I live in Toronto now, escaped from Alberta, and it's various complicated and wily charms.
Alberta, like most of the west, has no real narrative cohesion. It has myths that people riff on, talking points that are mentioned every so often, a solid set of values that moves when the spirit is required, a unique set of holy texts, and an innate suspicion of one way of thinking. Even in the cities, there is more land then people, and the sprawl connects psycho-geographically the unruly land to the unruly body
In the last 26 years, there has been a renewed history about work made in the west, about what it means to be western. Much of this work has been done by false populists, people living outside of the geographical area, or people who are contemptuous about the landscape and it's citizens. For the last decade, I have tried to figure out what it means to be from Alberta, from Western Canada, from the prairies. What I want the book to be is a way of creating a cohesive narrative by breaching the inside/outside divide. These essays, reviews, commentaries, interviews, conference papers, proposals, and general ephemera are collected into four loose sections, each broaching one of the central questions of this new west: Music, Landscape, Sex, and God.
These texts are an open range. They cover Gary Winogrand's photos, and going to the Rodeo, the Lutheran singer songwriter Jonathan Rundman, and what exactly is happening under Kenny Chesney's hat, the Atlantic recordings of Willie Nelson, discussions of America's agricultural queens, and a list of the 50 best liberal country songs, and secrets of boys boarding schools, Mormon housewives, what exactly happened in those Brokeback tents, some reviews of current country music, among other topics.
It will be personal, eccentric, difficult, and plain spoken, like the land I grew up in, and the land I had to leave.
Table of Contents:
Landscape:
Essays:
On the Survival of Agricultural Beauty Queens (
Red State Reader)
(3000 Words)
Originally written for Bitch Magazine, and picked up by Jesse May Shank's Red State Reader, a piece of original reportage, with interviews and commentary about American Agricultural Beauty Queens, from Maine to California, and from Minnesota to Texas, including a brief dicursion into the differences between rodeo queens and barrel races.
35 Thoughts on Grand Prairie Alberta
(Unpublished)
(2500 Words)
First person, deconstructed ramble through Northern Alberta cow country, written after spending two weeks with my friend John's farm.
Why I Love Rodeo
(1250 words)
(Unpublished)
Written for an urban Toronto audience, it was a personal defence of the spectacle and aesthetics of rodeo, especially the differences between the Working Hands and the National Final Rodeos, held every year in Edmonton.
Occasional pieces:
Assorted Reviews and Gallery Proposals for Edmonton Artists:
Branding, Language and the Works of Blair Brennan (150 words)
Dean Dreaver and Masculine Violence (75 words)
Not Another Landscape Proposal (4 Young Edmonton Photographers (200 words)
Review of Orest Semlish (70s era Edmonton Photographer (200 words)
Review of Gary Winogrand's Texas Stock Show photographs, comparing them to Livestock catalogs (Freaky Trigger) (150 words)
Sex:
Review of Willie Nelson's Cowboy's are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other
(Unpublished)
(1000 Words)
Originally written for No Depression, enjoyed by the editor, but contained langauge that was too raw for the audience, about why sodomy occurs among cowboys, and about Mr Nelson's prophetic stance in favour of love.
Oh, My God I Fucked Kenny
(2008 PCA/AA Conference Presentation)
(6000 words)
Discussion of how Chesney evades the dichotomous language that we use to discuss sexuality (Top/Bottom, Straight/Gay, Femme/Butch, etc.) and introduces a new complexity to traditionally conservative desires.
She's In Love with the Boy
(2009 PCA/AA Conference Presentation)
3000 words
A discussion of abortion and country music, formally analysing two songs that come in favour of a woman's choice (Kinky Friedman's Rapid City South Dakota and Tim McGraw's Red Rag Top) with two who work against it (Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, Heidi Newfield Knocked Up)
Straighten you out: A personally Queer History of Saint John's School of Alberta
2000 Words
Originally an impact statement about the school when it closed in 2009, and which I attended for grade 7 and 8, it becomes an oblique history of Conservative political power in Alberta, and the accidental sadism of men together.
Occasional pieces
Various comments on Toby Keith's Big Bad Daddy, Josh Turner's voice, Joe Nichol's Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off, and Trace Adkin's Honky Tonk Badonkadonk for the annual Pazz and Jop/Nashville Scene polls. (300 words)
On the erotic loneliness of I Never Liked Planes by Robbie Fulks (Poptimist) (150 words)
a gendered analysis of Reba McEntire and Bobbi Gentry's Fancy (Freaky Trigger)(150 words)
Edmonton Erotica Proposal (11 Edmonton Artists (200 Words)
Production Notes for Exposure (Edmonton's First Annual Queer Arts Festival) (150 words)
God:
Essays:
An Interview with Lutheran Singer/Songwriter Jonathan Rundman ]
(3000 words)
(Killing the Buddha)
A long interview about the personal and social history of Lutherans in Minnesota, indie music, populist desire, and ministry.
William Kurelek: Prarie Visionary
(2500 words)
Originally for Raw Visions magazine, an introductory essay about the aesthetic and personal history of this famous Prairie populist, his apocalyptic Catholicism, his ethnic history, and his mental illness.
14 Thoughts on Queer Catholic Bodies (1000 words)
(Queer and Catholic
(Routledge)
Published by Routledge as part of the book Queer and Catholic, a personal history about growing up LDS, converting to Catholicism, and what that meant in a local context.
Picnic, Pro Life, and Pilgrimage
(Diary)
(1000 words)
First person, semi-gonzo piece about going to an annual pro family mass and rally at the first nations pilgrimage site of Lac St Anne, with a catholic theologian, his wife, and his child. It is intended to put a human face on, and complicate the argument in favour and against abortion, without taking a side.
Brokeback, Wisconsin, Alberta, and Sacred Loneliness
(unpublished)
(1000 Words)
This piece uses LDS theologian Todd Compton's discussion of Sacred Loneliness, to discuss how sexuality created in isolation for comfort can develop aspects of grace and mercy, especially sexuality that is considered outside traditional morality.
Occasional pieces:
Dolly Parton's Stairway to Heaven, Brad Paisley's When I Get To Heaven, Chely Wright's The River, No Depression in Heaven, Iris Dement's God Might Forgive You (But I Don't) for Freaky Trigger, ILX, Pazz and Jop, plus Nashville Scene. (1500 words)
Discussions of the LDS temple in Cardston, the aesthetic plainness of LDS Chapels, the work of Millerite prophetess Henrietta Black and the social politics of LDS church dances. (Sally Mckay)
Music
Album Reviews (5000 words):
Brad Paisley Play (Left Hip)
Brad Paisley Time Well Wasted (Stylus)
Kenny Chesney Road and the Radio (Stylus)
Tim McGraw Let It Go (Left Hip)
Jeremey Fisher Let It Shine (Stylus)
Lee Ann Womack—There Is More Where That Came From (Stylus)
Criticism:
On The Aesthetics of Dead Babies
(Poptimist)
500 Words
Comparing John Michael Cameron's Alyssa Lies, to Victorian Melodrama, as an example of the visual and narrative potential of infant death.
Country Music Tells The Red States What to Feel
(Stylus)
1250 Words:
A discussion of moral ambiguity and sex with women other then wives, in songs by Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney.
Book Proposal for 33 1/3rds Book on Red Headed Stranger
(1250)
This works as a mini essay about how the aesthetics of Nelson's Atlantic recordings worked in a specific, singer songwriter 70s context and made him as a performer, adding to his legend and his longevity.
50 Liberal Country Songs
(Red State Reader)
2500 words.
A response to a New Republic list of 50 conservative Rock and Roll songs, this was a fun attempt at upsetting conventional wisdom about the history of country music.
Things Griel Marcus Got Wrong About I Wish I Was A Mole In the Ground
(Poptimist)
400 Words.
This song has been incredibly important to me, as has Marcus's history of punk Lipstick traces. This piece talks about the musicological and historical importance of this song, and Marcus's analysis of it, and then veers into the personal.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Friday, May 01, 2009
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