Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
What parts of Daniel's Life parallels that of Jesus?
Daniel has any number of elements that are similar to the life of Christ. The first third of the film, after he is asked to rewrite the passion play, he collects disciples. As his relationship with the disciples deepens, his life explicitly begins to parallel the Christ story. He finds an actress who is sleeping with her director, seeking worldly fame as opposed to following her spiritual gifts, this Magdalene figure becomes the lead of three women who eventually witness his death in a hospital and symbolic resurrection, in the corporeal sense of working as an organ donor and the symbolic sense of the dissemination of his writing
But I am getting ahead of myself. The passion play that Daniel recasts as an example of social and political dissent becomes popular as a work itself. In this popularity, men of power come to him, offer him favours. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with these people, with treating the passion of the Christ as another art performance that one does on a Saturday night. The Magdalene figure becomes Daniel's lover, she agrees to do a beer ad. At the audition, she is asked to take her clothes off. Daniel overturns what turns out to be 23 000 dollars in film equipment.
His friends hire a lawyer, who tries to convince Daniel to use his new found success and fame for good. He is Pharisaical, suggesting that selling out one's art becomes an act of heresy. That Daniel refutes him, is the beginning of the end. The passion play, filled with a female Christ, archaeological discussions of the real and the fake, and an ambiguous resurrection is a scandalous desire to return to a purified Christianity, infused with a love for the other, for art, for justice, and for the desire not for churches, but a populist redemption.
The dioceses shuts down the production. Daniel and his actors discuss next moves on the summit of Mount Trembly, like when Christ brought his apostles to Mount Olive, and shows them that he is fully divine and human. Agreeing to go on with the play, in the dark, security corners him, like the soldiers at Gethsemane. He collapses, is turned away from two hospitals, and travels through the city, before dying in a Metro station. After death, he is shot from above on a cruciform bed, and there are scenes of his eyes given to a blind woman, and his heart given to a previously dead man, alluding to his making the blind see, and the Lazarus myth. These scenes are interspersed with three women, including the Magdalene figure bringing the passion play into the world, like Quebecois Phoebes.
What Critique does this film offer about the origin of religious movements.
The new religious movement that is building here, is built from the work of Daniel and his rewriting of the passion play. That the prophecy is both written about and preformed, and that it textually resurrects a play that is so threadbare that it becomes a mockery gives a good general sense of how Arycand feels about the origin of religious movements. That Daniel is asked to make trendy this eternal story, and dies a martyr to his art, when the rewrite is proven too radical cements the central message of the film. This message has a triune formula. First, all new religious movements begin not ex nihlo from other texts. Just as Daniel's disciples and words grow from the catholic culture of old Quebec, so did Christianity grow from Judaism, Secondly, this growth from old movements, must have a logophillic component. Dennis is given a copy of the old script, he finds his disciples reading from a wide variety of scripts, dubbing English pornography or science documentaries to French for example; when he sets to rewrite the Passion play, he goes to the library so often that the librarian assumes that he is an evangelical and attempts to have a discussion of conversion for him. Later, there are rehearsals, in apartments filled with books, and when we finally see the production it is an intertextual exercise, using erotic, scientific, religious, and social texts. Third, that the old movement, and the logophillic tendencies, must have a social component, that constitutes a willingness to change. The actors not only turn down paying gigs to work for free, they rewrite the text with Daniel, argue with him about meaning, live together, and raise a child as well. They eat, drink, and by implication make love as a communal force. Arycands critique of the origin of religion, is that it fails to fulfil this narrative. That those radicals ignore tradition, that those who do not ignore tradition are afraid of text (written words on the page, the old fashioned meaning of the word, not the post modern equivalent where text is something that incorporates meaning) and lastly, that those who do not ignore tradition, and engage with the written words on the page, sully their art (and he assumes that art is a new kind of religion) by doing side work that pays the bills.
The passion play as a dramatic staging of Jesus life, trial and death is preformed in many Chrsitian denomoations...during Lent....How do you think it functions as a ritual for the characters in The Jesus of Montreal?
Remembering that a Christ figure is not Christ, and that Arycand is using the play within the play, to construct a narrative of resistance against much of the Anglophone relationship with Quebec, so that there are several layers in the rituals described here, simulacrum of images that have already been heavily formalised, and even the critiques of these forms have existed since the gnostic thinkers. That said, Lynd's quotation of Catherine Bell's Six Forms of Ritual can be useful here. Bell elcuidates 6 forms of ritual: Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule Governance, Sacral Symbolism, and Performance. 1Arycand uses each of these six forms to talk about what it means to be a catholic in Quebec.
He uses the idea of a passion play, of course, and his passion play features many of the forms that have not been changed since the mystery plays in the medieval era. There are 12 stations of the cross, pilgrims travel to each one, and the words/visual images do not change much at all. But he is also aware of how these forms are resistant to change. When the priest and the arch diocese refuse for the play to go on, there is a small and very tight burlesque, playing the passion as Kabuki, New York Method, Romance and traditionally Quebecois. Arycand then is aware of the filmic choices he is making, and how those filmic choices both reinforce a traditionally Catholic relationship to form (for example the lighting, camera movement and close ups in the last performance), update it (the cruciform ed hospital bed), and de-construct it (how the descent from the cross happens with a crane shot that mostly ignores the dead prophet)
The last scene in the Metro station, with the sweeping crane shot, and the elevators taking up most of the mise-en-scene, and that it can still be identified as a desecnsion, suggests that Arycand knows the traditions of Catholicism. But it is not only formal calls. Lync defines traditionalism as a sense that “we have always done it this way, even if we haven't”2 Though the passion play is only 45 years old, any change to it becomes a radical act of violence not only against the church but by Christ Himself. (same way really, that when Mireille is asked to dance and disrobe for the audition, and she is reluctant too, she is told that she is being difficult, that there is no other way of casting for beer ads.
This leads to a discussion of invariance. That things will never change, that any attempts to change the liturgy, to change how actors work, to change how plays are written or how christ is delivered to an audience that dismisses this work will be problematic. This invariance can be understood best when the priest who is sleeping with one of the actors refuses to break the rules about can be performed in the church. The passion play exists in the form that it was convienced in, as a way of bringing pilgrims and not critics to the shrine, and this must not change.
Dennis dies when the mob who comes to see the play overwhelms him. He does not die on the cross, but is brought to catholic hospitals, who refuse to help him and refuse to acknowledge how unwell he is. Though the psychiatrist claims that he is more rational then the judge who is to sentence him, he refuses to live in a world that does not respect his life as an artist or a french candian. It is ironic then that he is brought to a Jewish hospital at the end, an orginzation outside of the required rule governance found in both the social and religious milieu of mid 1980s Montreal.
This religious significance, this using ritual to move to larger truths can be found in the idea of sacral significance. In this way, though it is a gloss on Mark, Jesus of Montreal becomes a post secualr reworking of John 1:1, the sacral significance occurs in the ritual magic that turns words into the flesh of God. In this way Daniel becomes closer and closer to incorporate the flesh of Christ, as he gets closer and closer to the words. The word was made flesh, and by mirrored extension, those who make words make flesh, both symbolically in the sense of other characters embody the word of God.
Though this embodiment is profoundly sacral, that it ties all of the rituals together in a text that is about the metacontextual nature of performance, that it makes the mass, the psychiatric office, pornography, educational television, advertisements, and the passion play as parts of the same spectrum, makes the viewer consider what it means to be a passive viewer, to not perform the linguistic mysteries that both an inbound sense of art, and a religious sense of obligation require of them.
Compare Daniel's crucifxion in the passion play to that of Jesus-movies you may have seen...
Passolini and Arycand have much in common, both outsiders in a traditionally catholic culture, both nervous about American imperialism, both infatuated with the aesthetic history of American Christianity, both attempting to politically engage with a society who is attempting to extract itself from a monoculture, both have read the scriptures, and both are politically far left. So the two should be similar. Except that Passolini understood that the Christian story was about Christ, and attempted to purify it, not bring any of his own socio-cultural baggage into the mix. He hired a queer christ, and his own mother as the Madonna, of course, but that is outside the text, an extra bit when you have spent enough time with the rest of it.
When Passolini attempted to renew the gospel then, or update it, he did not feel the need to add meta-layers and so he did not choose the gospel that was the closest to his social concerns, and he did not film it at the Cine Citta, he went to the south of Italy, lived with his actors and created something that was infused with the spirit of Italian neo-realism, but was uniquely his.
There are things that similar though. Arycand loves Montreal profoundly, loves the people and loves the city in a way that no one else has. This love is difficult, honest, and earnest. The genius of this film and his films in general is that he can make cliché scenes of sentiment seem refreshed. The bohemian actors having dinner together becomes a tender and generous reworking of the last supper, for example. Pasolini loves Italy deeply, loves the city and loves the men, in a way that no one else has. The genius of his films is that he adapts the cultures of European classics with a po-faced earnestness, a believability and emotional rawness that is often not gentle or tender.
That Arycand felt the need to rework the gospel story in order to create a complicated narrative of ethnic ennui suggests that he might not be as trustful of his source material, or at least that he is attrempting to secularise the story. Pasolini though a marxist, believed in the Catholic church. There stories were his stories, this identity is not something you see in the detachment of Arycand's work. Or to put it another way, Arycand is capable of great emotional outpourings, of operatic excess, but these moments hold back to the final scenes, they work as catharsis and completion.
Pasolini's emotions are small, and the work is so unritualistic, and unformalised, that the there is no catharsis, no endings, nothing even close to the Lazarus motif or the blind woman seeing. Arcyand's work is squalid, close to the ground, domestic, and outward seeking. They are shooting from the same playbook, but their traditions, reading, and narrative sense make them create explicitly different works about implicitly similar subjects.
What do you think the role of the priest is in this film?
The priest is a sly and ironic critique He attempts to modernize the passion play, and discusses Daniel's changes as questions of fashions. He is sleeping with one of the actresses, quotes Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus as part of a sermon, would quit the priesthood but is too comfortable with the material comforts (literally the nun's making him breakfast), and later refuses to take moral responsibility for the arch-diocese banning the rewritten play.
This kind of priest has been a staple of French farce since Moliere: arch and decadent, urbane, sexualised, and basically amoral. When he is found in the apartment by Daniel, his lover says “I don't want this to become a bedroom farce” and it is not, because he makes no effort to hide his corruption. In a scene slightly afterwards, he makes excuses for not doing the intellectual work required for his role as university lecturer because his bishop has prevented anyone to have new and non prescribed ideas.
In this sense, with his status as part of the old guard, as engorged and happy as anything, he is a symbolic stand-in for the Church, who always assumes it will have power, who maintains the status qou, and who refuses to notice that change is not only inevitable but happening in front of him. He does not acknowledge the prophetic potential of Daniel, like the Church did not recognize what was new in Quebec society.
How approprite do you think Hamlet's soliloquy is in the film? What does it reveal about the actors understanding of religion?
Hamlet's soliloquy does three things. It secularises the search for eternal truth, which allows for a smoother transition between the religion for religions sake and art as a new kind of faith. It also talks about the nature of person-hood, what makes someone human, which is something that Daniels modified Passion Play mentions directly. Also, because both the priest, some of the actors, and Daniel speak it, it becomes a voice of ambiguity.
If the text can be used by a true believer, a doubting Thomas, and a Pharisees, it confirms the construction of Christ's humanity, and becomes not only a comment on the gnostic idea of a non-divine Christ, but integrative, allowing for another kind of secular set of agreements on how to be human. (Though I am not sure why the used Hamlet and not Racine?)
Jesus of Toronto :
There is nothing unified and iconographic in Toronto's history. The old guard Anglicans and Presbyterian that helped found the city and had most of its hard power for the 19th century were built alongside first nations, Irish Catholics, free thinkers, and non conformists. They sought comfort, but did not have the power of the Catholic church that Montreal did. All of that said, Arycand's work is very much about the 1960s, and being from Montreal, and sorting out what to do with a language, a structure of life, a society and a culture that was distinctly separate from especially Toronto.
There could be a similar sense of isolation in Vancouver, with it's geographical distance and the political problems of for example the Sikhs or the Dukaboors, and coming from Alberta, I know there is a sense of isolation in the prairies, where we give to the east, and do not get nearly as much in return, and the economic solitude of Atlantic Canada is well documented, and Toronto is far from perfect, but it sort of lacks the two things that the film suggests Montreal has: that isolation and a fear of scandal.
If I was to make such a movie, then maybe it could go the other way, sort of make it like Don McKellor's Last Night (which might just be the Jesus of Toronto), where the apocalypse happens to a wide variety of people, and those people walk the city, or have family dinner, or party a bit, or do nothing. That diffusiveness, and diveristy, the quietness, and the communal lack of solitary isolation is essentially a Toronto story, and one that I think works as an interesting companion piece to this work.
So, it would be important to examine the polyglot nature of the city, how it speaks 100+ languages, and has dozens of ethnic groups. My plot would not follow any strict narrative, or connecitons to anything idelogical, but be a set of small and discreet encounters, sometimes with noise, sometimes with silence, that combine the fractured, amorphous nature of the city into a set of impressionistic emotions, but not into one allegory that can only be read by a monoculture. I would set it all over the place, at the Hindu temple in Brampton, the new masjid in the Danforth, at the Cathedral of ST James, and at Moonbeam coffee house in Kensington, around a dining room in Rosedale, and at a loft in Liberty Village, I would have a scene at a pub, and among the dead animals at the ROM, and someone getting a lapdance at the Zanzibar, nothing transcendent, because there is no transcendence here. There are 8 million people, in one of the most decentralised cities, in one of the most decentralised regions, in one of the most decentralised countries trying to figure out what they have in common, which is very little.
Daniel has any number of elements that are similar to the life of Christ. The first third of the film, after he is asked to rewrite the passion play, he collects disciples. As his relationship with the disciples deepens, his life explicitly begins to parallel the Christ story. He finds an actress who is sleeping with her director, seeking worldly fame as opposed to following her spiritual gifts, this Magdalene figure becomes the lead of three women who eventually witness his death in a hospital and symbolic resurrection, in the corporeal sense of working as an organ donor and the symbolic sense of the dissemination of his writing
But I am getting ahead of myself. The passion play that Daniel recasts as an example of social and political dissent becomes popular as a work itself. In this popularity, men of power come to him, offer him favours. He grows increasingly uncomfortable with these people, with treating the passion of the Christ as another art performance that one does on a Saturday night. The Magdalene figure becomes Daniel's lover, she agrees to do a beer ad. At the audition, she is asked to take her clothes off. Daniel overturns what turns out to be 23 000 dollars in film equipment.
His friends hire a lawyer, who tries to convince Daniel to use his new found success and fame for good. He is Pharisaical, suggesting that selling out one's art becomes an act of heresy. That Daniel refutes him, is the beginning of the end. The passion play, filled with a female Christ, archaeological discussions of the real and the fake, and an ambiguous resurrection is a scandalous desire to return to a purified Christianity, infused with a love for the other, for art, for justice, and for the desire not for churches, but a populist redemption.
The dioceses shuts down the production. Daniel and his actors discuss next moves on the summit of Mount Trembly, like when Christ brought his apostles to Mount Olive, and shows them that he is fully divine and human. Agreeing to go on with the play, in the dark, security corners him, like the soldiers at Gethsemane. He collapses, is turned away from two hospitals, and travels through the city, before dying in a Metro station. After death, he is shot from above on a cruciform bed, and there are scenes of his eyes given to a blind woman, and his heart given to a previously dead man, alluding to his making the blind see, and the Lazarus myth. These scenes are interspersed with three women, including the Magdalene figure bringing the passion play into the world, like Quebecois Phoebes.
What Critique does this film offer about the origin of religious movements.
The new religious movement that is building here, is built from the work of Daniel and his rewriting of the passion play. That the prophecy is both written about and preformed, and that it textually resurrects a play that is so threadbare that it becomes a mockery gives a good general sense of how Arycand feels about the origin of religious movements. That Daniel is asked to make trendy this eternal story, and dies a martyr to his art, when the rewrite is proven too radical cements the central message of the film. This message has a triune formula. First, all new religious movements begin not ex nihlo from other texts. Just as Daniel's disciples and words grow from the catholic culture of old Quebec, so did Christianity grow from Judaism, Secondly, this growth from old movements, must have a logophillic component. Dennis is given a copy of the old script, he finds his disciples reading from a wide variety of scripts, dubbing English pornography or science documentaries to French for example; when he sets to rewrite the Passion play, he goes to the library so often that the librarian assumes that he is an evangelical and attempts to have a discussion of conversion for him. Later, there are rehearsals, in apartments filled with books, and when we finally see the production it is an intertextual exercise, using erotic, scientific, religious, and social texts. Third, that the old movement, and the logophillic tendencies, must have a social component, that constitutes a willingness to change. The actors not only turn down paying gigs to work for free, they rewrite the text with Daniel, argue with him about meaning, live together, and raise a child as well. They eat, drink, and by implication make love as a communal force. Arycands critique of the origin of religion, is that it fails to fulfil this narrative. That those radicals ignore tradition, that those who do not ignore tradition are afraid of text (written words on the page, the old fashioned meaning of the word, not the post modern equivalent where text is something that incorporates meaning) and lastly, that those who do not ignore tradition, and engage with the written words on the page, sully their art (and he assumes that art is a new kind of religion) by doing side work that pays the bills.
The passion play as a dramatic staging of Jesus life, trial and death is preformed in many Chrsitian denomoations...during Lent....How do you think it functions as a ritual for the characters in The Jesus of Montreal?
Remembering that a Christ figure is not Christ, and that Arycand is using the play within the play, to construct a narrative of resistance against much of the Anglophone relationship with Quebec, so that there are several layers in the rituals described here, simulacrum of images that have already been heavily formalised, and even the critiques of these forms have existed since the gnostic thinkers. That said, Lynd's quotation of Catherine Bell's Six Forms of Ritual can be useful here. Bell elcuidates 6 forms of ritual: Formalism, Traditionalism, Invariance, Rule Governance, Sacral Symbolism, and Performance. 1Arycand uses each of these six forms to talk about what it means to be a catholic in Quebec.
He uses the idea of a passion play, of course, and his passion play features many of the forms that have not been changed since the mystery plays in the medieval era. There are 12 stations of the cross, pilgrims travel to each one, and the words/visual images do not change much at all. But he is also aware of how these forms are resistant to change. When the priest and the arch diocese refuse for the play to go on, there is a small and very tight burlesque, playing the passion as Kabuki, New York Method, Romance and traditionally Quebecois. Arycand then is aware of the filmic choices he is making, and how those filmic choices both reinforce a traditionally Catholic relationship to form (for example the lighting, camera movement and close ups in the last performance), update it (the cruciform ed hospital bed), and de-construct it (how the descent from the cross happens with a crane shot that mostly ignores the dead prophet)
The last scene in the Metro station, with the sweeping crane shot, and the elevators taking up most of the mise-en-scene, and that it can still be identified as a desecnsion, suggests that Arycand knows the traditions of Catholicism. But it is not only formal calls. Lync defines traditionalism as a sense that “we have always done it this way, even if we haven't”2 Though the passion play is only 45 years old, any change to it becomes a radical act of violence not only against the church but by Christ Himself. (same way really, that when Mireille is asked to dance and disrobe for the audition, and she is reluctant too, she is told that she is being difficult, that there is no other way of casting for beer ads.
This leads to a discussion of invariance. That things will never change, that any attempts to change the liturgy, to change how actors work, to change how plays are written or how christ is delivered to an audience that dismisses this work will be problematic. This invariance can be understood best when the priest who is sleeping with one of the actors refuses to break the rules about can be performed in the church. The passion play exists in the form that it was convienced in, as a way of bringing pilgrims and not critics to the shrine, and this must not change.
Dennis dies when the mob who comes to see the play overwhelms him. He does not die on the cross, but is brought to catholic hospitals, who refuse to help him and refuse to acknowledge how unwell he is. Though the psychiatrist claims that he is more rational then the judge who is to sentence him, he refuses to live in a world that does not respect his life as an artist or a french candian. It is ironic then that he is brought to a Jewish hospital at the end, an orginzation outside of the required rule governance found in both the social and religious milieu of mid 1980s Montreal.
This religious significance, this using ritual to move to larger truths can be found in the idea of sacral significance. In this way, though it is a gloss on Mark, Jesus of Montreal becomes a post secualr reworking of John 1:1, the sacral significance occurs in the ritual magic that turns words into the flesh of God. In this way Daniel becomes closer and closer to incorporate the flesh of Christ, as he gets closer and closer to the words. The word was made flesh, and by mirrored extension, those who make words make flesh, both symbolically in the sense of other characters embody the word of God.
Though this embodiment is profoundly sacral, that it ties all of the rituals together in a text that is about the metacontextual nature of performance, that it makes the mass, the psychiatric office, pornography, educational television, advertisements, and the passion play as parts of the same spectrum, makes the viewer consider what it means to be a passive viewer, to not perform the linguistic mysteries that both an inbound sense of art, and a religious sense of obligation require of them.
Compare Daniel's crucifxion in the passion play to that of Jesus-movies you may have seen...
Passolini and Arycand have much in common, both outsiders in a traditionally catholic culture, both nervous about American imperialism, both infatuated with the aesthetic history of American Christianity, both attempting to politically engage with a society who is attempting to extract itself from a monoculture, both have read the scriptures, and both are politically far left. So the two should be similar. Except that Passolini understood that the Christian story was about Christ, and attempted to purify it, not bring any of his own socio-cultural baggage into the mix. He hired a queer christ, and his own mother as the Madonna, of course, but that is outside the text, an extra bit when you have spent enough time with the rest of it.
When Passolini attempted to renew the gospel then, or update it, he did not feel the need to add meta-layers and so he did not choose the gospel that was the closest to his social concerns, and he did not film it at the Cine Citta, he went to the south of Italy, lived with his actors and created something that was infused with the spirit of Italian neo-realism, but was uniquely his.
There are things that similar though. Arycand loves Montreal profoundly, loves the people and loves the city in a way that no one else has. This love is difficult, honest, and earnest. The genius of this film and his films in general is that he can make cliché scenes of sentiment seem refreshed. The bohemian actors having dinner together becomes a tender and generous reworking of the last supper, for example. Pasolini loves Italy deeply, loves the city and loves the men, in a way that no one else has. The genius of his films is that he adapts the cultures of European classics with a po-faced earnestness, a believability and emotional rawness that is often not gentle or tender.
That Arycand felt the need to rework the gospel story in order to create a complicated narrative of ethnic ennui suggests that he might not be as trustful of his source material, or at least that he is attrempting to secularise the story. Pasolini though a marxist, believed in the Catholic church. There stories were his stories, this identity is not something you see in the detachment of Arycand's work. Or to put it another way, Arycand is capable of great emotional outpourings, of operatic excess, but these moments hold back to the final scenes, they work as catharsis and completion.
Pasolini's emotions are small, and the work is so unritualistic, and unformalised, that the there is no catharsis, no endings, nothing even close to the Lazarus motif or the blind woman seeing. Arcyand's work is squalid, close to the ground, domestic, and outward seeking. They are shooting from the same playbook, but their traditions, reading, and narrative sense make them create explicitly different works about implicitly similar subjects.
What do you think the role of the priest is in this film?
The priest is a sly and ironic critique He attempts to modernize the passion play, and discusses Daniel's changes as questions of fashions. He is sleeping with one of the actresses, quotes Camus' the Myth of Sisyphus as part of a sermon, would quit the priesthood but is too comfortable with the material comforts (literally the nun's making him breakfast), and later refuses to take moral responsibility for the arch-diocese banning the rewritten play.
This kind of priest has been a staple of French farce since Moliere: arch and decadent, urbane, sexualised, and basically amoral. When he is found in the apartment by Daniel, his lover says “I don't want this to become a bedroom farce” and it is not, because he makes no effort to hide his corruption. In a scene slightly afterwards, he makes excuses for not doing the intellectual work required for his role as university lecturer because his bishop has prevented anyone to have new and non prescribed ideas.
In this sense, with his status as part of the old guard, as engorged and happy as anything, he is a symbolic stand-in for the Church, who always assumes it will have power, who maintains the status qou, and who refuses to notice that change is not only inevitable but happening in front of him. He does not acknowledge the prophetic potential of Daniel, like the Church did not recognize what was new in Quebec society.
How approprite do you think Hamlet's soliloquy is in the film? What does it reveal about the actors understanding of religion?
Hamlet's soliloquy does three things. It secularises the search for eternal truth, which allows for a smoother transition between the religion for religions sake and art as a new kind of faith. It also talks about the nature of person-hood, what makes someone human, which is something that Daniels modified Passion Play mentions directly. Also, because both the priest, some of the actors, and Daniel speak it, it becomes a voice of ambiguity.
If the text can be used by a true believer, a doubting Thomas, and a Pharisees, it confirms the construction of Christ's humanity, and becomes not only a comment on the gnostic idea of a non-divine Christ, but integrative, allowing for another kind of secular set of agreements on how to be human. (Though I am not sure why the used Hamlet and not Racine?)
Jesus of Toronto :
There is nothing unified and iconographic in Toronto's history. The old guard Anglicans and Presbyterian that helped found the city and had most of its hard power for the 19th century were built alongside first nations, Irish Catholics, free thinkers, and non conformists. They sought comfort, but did not have the power of the Catholic church that Montreal did. All of that said, Arycand's work is very much about the 1960s, and being from Montreal, and sorting out what to do with a language, a structure of life, a society and a culture that was distinctly separate from especially Toronto.
There could be a similar sense of isolation in Vancouver, with it's geographical distance and the political problems of for example the Sikhs or the Dukaboors, and coming from Alberta, I know there is a sense of isolation in the prairies, where we give to the east, and do not get nearly as much in return, and the economic solitude of Atlantic Canada is well documented, and Toronto is far from perfect, but it sort of lacks the two things that the film suggests Montreal has: that isolation and a fear of scandal.
If I was to make such a movie, then maybe it could go the other way, sort of make it like Don McKellor's Last Night (which might just be the Jesus of Toronto), where the apocalypse happens to a wide variety of people, and those people walk the city, or have family dinner, or party a bit, or do nothing. That diffusiveness, and diveristy, the quietness, and the communal lack of solitary isolation is essentially a Toronto story, and one that I think works as an interesting companion piece to this work.
So, it would be important to examine the polyglot nature of the city, how it speaks 100+ languages, and has dozens of ethnic groups. My plot would not follow any strict narrative, or connecitons to anything idelogical, but be a set of small and discreet encounters, sometimes with noise, sometimes with silence, that combine the fractured, amorphous nature of the city into a set of impressionistic emotions, but not into one allegory that can only be read by a monoculture. I would set it all over the place, at the Hindu temple in Brampton, the new masjid in the Danforth, at the Cathedral of ST James, and at Moonbeam coffee house in Kensington, around a dining room in Rosedale, and at a loft in Liberty Village, I would have a scene at a pub, and among the dead animals at the ROM, and someone getting a lapdance at the Zanzibar, nothing transcendent, because there is no transcendence here. There are 8 million people, in one of the most decentralised cities, in one of the most decentralised regions, in one of the most decentralised countries trying to figure out what they have in common, which is very little.
1 8 Oral sex
2 1337 Elite
3 143 I love you
4 182 I hate you
5 459 I love you
6 1174 Nude club
7 420 Marijuana
8 ADR Address
9 ASL Age/Sex/Location
10 Banana Penis
11 CD9 or Code 9 Parents are around
12 DUM Do You Masturbate?
13 DUSL Do You Scream Loud?
14 FB F*** Buddy
15
16 FMLTWIA F*** Me Like The Whore I Am
17 FOL Fond of Leather
18 GNOC Get Naked On Cam
19 GYPO Get Your Pants Off
20 IAYM I Am Your Master
21 IF/IB In the Front or In the Back
22 IIT Is It Tight?
23 ILF/MD I Love Female/Male Dominance
24 IMEZRU I Am Easy, Are You?
25 IWSN I Want Sex Now
26 J/O Jerking Off
27 KFY or K4Y Kiss For You
28 Kitty Vagina
29 KPC Keeping Parents Clueless
30 MorF Male or Female
31 LMIRL Let's Meet In Real Life
32 MOOS Member Of The Opposite Sex
33 WYCM Will You Call Me?
34 MOS Mom Over Shoulder
35 MPFB My Personal F*** Buddy
36 NALOPKT Not A Lot Of People Know That
37 NIFOC Nude In Front Of The Computer
38 NMU Not Much, You?
39 P911 Parent Alert
40 PAL Parents Are Listening
41 PAW Parents Are Watching
42 PIR Parent In Room
43 POS Parent Over Shoulder or Piece Of Sh**
44 PRON Porn
45 Q2C Quick To Cum
46 RU/18 Are You Over 18?
47 RUH Are You Horny?
48 S2R Send To Receive
49 SorG Straight or Gay
50 TDTM Talk Dirty To Me
2 1337 Elite
3 143 I love you
4 182 I hate you
5 459 I love you
6 1174 Nude club
7 420 Marijuana
8 ADR Address
9 ASL Age/Sex/Location
10 Banana Penis
11 CD9 or Code 9 Parents are around
12 DUM Do You Masturbate?
13 DUSL Do You Scream Loud?
14 FB F*** Buddy
15
16 FMLTWIA F*** Me Like The Whore I Am
17 FOL Fond of Leather
18 GNOC Get Naked On Cam
19 GYPO Get Your Pants Off
20 IAYM I Am Your Master
21 IF/IB In the Front or In the Back
22 IIT Is It Tight?
23 ILF/MD I Love Female/Male Dominance
24 IMEZRU I Am Easy, Are You?
25 IWSN I Want Sex Now
26 J/O Jerking Off
27 KFY or K4Y Kiss For You
28 Kitty Vagina
29 KPC Keeping Parents Clueless
30 MorF Male or Female
31 LMIRL Let's Meet In Real Life
32 MOOS Member Of The Opposite Sex
33 WYCM Will You Call Me?
34 MOS Mom Over Shoulder
35 MPFB My Personal F*** Buddy
36 NALOPKT Not A Lot Of People Know That
37 NIFOC Nude In Front Of The Computer
38 NMU Not Much, You?
39 P911 Parent Alert
40 PAL Parents Are Listening
41 PAW Parents Are Watching
42 PIR Parent In Room
43 POS Parent Over Shoulder or Piece Of Sh**
44 PRON Porn
45 Q2C Quick To Cum
46 RU/18 Are You Over 18?
47 RUH Are You Horny?
48 S2R Send To Receive
49 SorG Straight or Gay
50 TDTM Talk Dirty To Me
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Me
major presbyterian, epsicoplian, and lutheran decesions of same sex marriage are expected this summer. while the church of scotland agrees to allow a gay man to become a priest, even move his bf into the manse.
New Robyn with Royskopp.
obama asks for the right for defandents to have lawyers in the room to be cut
Obama's picking of Sotomayer:
a) solid, centre left.
b) smart.
c) will work as a corrective to Robert's strange attitudes vis a vis race.
d) poltically genius in that it firms up a latin base, and makes republicans look like crazy racists when they oppose her.
she isn't who i wanted, but i never get what i want.
7 minutes of an 18 yr old taxidermist, the interesting bit is her use of ebay. She is really calm, really talented, and v. smart. Will go far.
hand drawn cartoons from wwii
Toronto School of Architects guide maps to modernism.
America Is F*cked.......(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.
America is Fucked, at least from a design standpoint. (Jesse Gibson is a passionite advocate for good, solid design)
photos and audio from segreated proms in the american south.
cutest photo of a baby anteater ever
a blog of high fashion and street fashion hijabs.
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| From Untitled Album |
Angelina Jolie at 16
interesting discussion of the effectiveness of thot supression
who let the police union buy a section ofa news paper that criticises them? (of course the cops told the san diego union tribune to quit writing stories critical of them.
finally the hyper realism of cali airbursh has its critical history, link goes to a news story with some pretty hot images.
heartland family ministries attempts to remake the I85 from Canada thru to Mexico, in the middle of the contient, a holiness corridor.
if i had time i would discuss how Robinson formally uses the tropes of local news to normalise the structure of something that is really outsiderish, or the rhetoric of violence that they use to express their faith, or such interesting neolgisms as prophetic intercessor,but you have heard that all before, so just make fun of them.
Let's hope Edna O'Brien is reading about the 500 irish women in secret affairs with priests. and the reports of irish schools is growing more abusive, and more corrupt, with the reports having no names, so no prosections.
Lick It Before You Stick It, Denise Le Salle.
the current president of the ANC cannot forget his old revotiuonary ties, or songs with chorsues about machine guns.
a taxonomy of highway overpasses
small in situ video of Alys Fabiola.
australian policy in the northern territory continues to be a disaster.
Holzer's Whitney curator Nicholas Spark seems difficult in this interview with Catherine Spaeth, but that might be because she asks really stupid quesitons.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
The Cover for Brooke Hogan's New Album
france rejects the idea of gender bimorphic disorder.
Charlie STross on video games.
this saltz discussion of the Met Musuem's Picture show has one of the most succint discussions of image creation:
"Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades—even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu."
woman elected in Kuwait
more discussion of what is allowed and what is forbidden, in FINA's attempts to control technology.
this concrete coffee table fills me with lust
this house fills me with more lust more fotos here
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Norman Foster's New Stadium in Shang hai looks like a vulva.
, here
Governor General Michaëlle Jean, on the first day of her trip to the Arctic, gutted a freshly slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart — and ate it.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Ryman (date and title unknown)
"First ... our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution. Regardless of our views as individuals on this question of policy, we recognize as judges and as a court our responsibility to confine our consideration to a determination of the constitutional validity and legal effect of the measure in question. It bears emphasis in this regard that our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values."
From the Prop 8 decesion.
From the Prop 8 decesion.
Monday, May 25, 2009
me: explain hegel to me
5:30 PM ingreatcaves: seems like history could be system, that it could have plans for us, which we can anticipate!
me: well thats easy
how can we anticapte it
ingreatcaves: Yes, let's try that through the stamp of taxonomy, crossed with reductive abstractions/
5:31 PM there you go.
me: yr a genius
ingreatcaves: from there, you can make up YOUR OWN taxonomies and speculative structure.
5:32 PM History will be what you say it will be!
5:33 PM me: yr good at this
5:34 PM thank you
now to writing
5:30 PM ingreatcaves: seems like history could be system, that it could have plans for us, which we can anticipate!
me: well thats easy
how can we anticapte it
ingreatcaves: Yes, let's try that through the stamp of taxonomy, crossed with reductive abstractions/
5:31 PM there you go.
me: yr a genius
ingreatcaves: from there, you can make up YOUR OWN taxonomies and speculative structure.
5:32 PM History will be what you say it will be!
5:33 PM me: yr good at this
5:34 PM thank you
now to writing
Aliens and American Civil Religion.
If Bellah is right, and there is an American civil religion, where elements of the empire's civil institutions are constructed religiously, then the Military could be considered a priestly class, or was at least. Set apart, respected and beloved beyond others, they become a group of martyrs and pioneers, protecting civilians, preserving order, and maintaining the conflicted values that make America. They are convinced to become soldiers by the recruiters theistic language, once all male, schools like Annapolis and West Point became seminaries, presidents pray with them and for them, when they die they are sent home with Christian language, and buried under gravestones perpetually cared for, emblazoned with the graphic of faith. The setting apart of this class, with it's own language, is indicative of Bellah's argument: “What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” (From Biblical Religion and Civil Religion, first published by Daedalus, June 1967, found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306124338/http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).
He starts talking about Kennedy, who gave us Vietnam, and who died in the back of a Cadillac in Texas, was the origin of the last of the periods of Chaos where the American Civil Relgion fell apart. If the civil religions status is to preserve order, to clean and reconstruct chaos so that it becomes once again “the shining city on the hill” (cf Winthrop, Regan) then one has to re-establish the other. Bellah hints that this work would be done, and talks about how language was being manipulated already: “
Those nations that are for the moment “on our side” become “the free world.” A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes “the free people of South Vietnam and their government.” It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and “the last best hope of earth” to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are “free like us,” such arguments are convincing. " (ibid)
Remember, that this is the sequel to an original, that was made in 1979, 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and the second in 1986, a decade past. Still fresh wounds in the memory of the body politic, the obsession with making money in the 1980s became in the minds of certain conservatives the rewards of living after the horrors and sacrifices of that decade, and those wars. Like the Terminator films, Predator, Rambo, Commando, and the like, all done in the same few years, they become part of a well of ultra patriotic films with the military successfully destroying often grotesque or mechanical other.
In this film, the monsters are so viscous, so alien, that to commit genocide against them is necessary. The only person who ends up agreeing is the slimy corporate lawyer, who argues for the self-hood of the liberation “clearly important species right to arbitraryly exterminate them” He places this fairly reasonable argument, in the midst of several discussions of saving samples to experiment on them, and eventually tries to impregnate Ripley and the found feral child Newt, with the monsters eggs. His argument against the genocide of an entire planet is an artificial one, intended to get what he wants.
These aliens deserve to be killed, because they killed 157 colonists. The colonists, because they were human or at least humanoid, had more of a place to be on the planet then the natives. That they are willing to kill a child, and because Ripley becomes maternal, constructs these people are monsterious, amoral, fundamentally incapable of reason, when one of the marines asks “how could they cut the power, they are animals”, it becomes the kind of distancing language that America uses for most of its enterprises. The film complicates this language though, this construction of American civil religion and mythology. It criticises capitalism, at least obliquely. It rarely mentions God. It regularly places a child in danger. It allows a woman to destroy the enemy. It fully integrates by gender and race the American military. The robot is the hero. It becomes a more difficult movie then the action movies made at the same time and place.
The corporatism of Reiser's character is considered excessive, his constant mentioning of money over humanity, or property over humanity, makes him almost parodic of the excesses of Regan. When Ripley tells him “I don't know which species is worse, you don't see them fucking each over for a god damn percentage” places those who seek money over the loyalty of the brigade as monstrous, in fact so monstrous that they are worse then the enemies they are fighting.
That God damn is one of the few mentions of God, and it seems vestigial. All of the other signifiers of military experience, the naughty stories, the sexual harassment, the gung -ho attitude, the willingness to die, the camaraderie and even the language is there. The Space Marines have an authentic feel, similar to the real marines. But when they eat they do not say grace, and when they leave to go to the ship, they do not say a naval prayer. It is more common to use the Anglo Saxon language when encountering an enemy then it is to use theistic language. In this way, the rigours, rituals, and linguistic sites of the American military, the priestly class of the American civil religion has replaced the rigours, rituals and linguistic sites of more traditional religious texts.
When I saw Newt almost being killed by Reiser, when she was captured by the aliens after t hat, when she was thought to be killed several times, and when she finally was saved by Ripley thanks to Bishop , it seemed to be a corrective. Think of My Lai, with the American military killing children, or the carpet bombing of Laos or Cambodia, done at the tail end of a war that the Americans lost. The priestly class raped women and killed children. The sense of honour, of devotion to a larger cause was broken (this violation of the American Civil Religion might be why Bellah claimed it as one of the gaps in the central faith).
That the military died before they could do the final rescue, that the rescue was completed by civilians were indicative of this break in the usual structure of discourses around soldiers in the US. That a small girl was the one to be saved from the attack, and that she was saved by another woman, who was willing to be scared, to cry, to mother, and also proved to be able to fly, to operate heavy machinery, and to be adroit with barely any training, guns and flame throwers, that the last scene between Ripley who is trying to save Newt, and the queen who is trying to avenge the killing of her children, becoming a battle of matriarchy gives the viewers another way to think of heroics, outside the phallocentric auspices of both corporate control and military intervention.
That is not to say, that women and people of colour did not commit heroics in this film. Vasquez, a Hispanic woman, who is fully one of the marine corps dies in order to save Ripley, but she is not allowed the emotion of Ripley, and has the training that sublimates the self to the rituals and language of the American military establishment. That Ripley, and the Artifical American are the only two left, allows for a more pluralistic, wider idea of what this civil religion could consist of. So it is patriotic, it allows for the colonists to be good people, and it commits genocide against an other that is too alien, and therefore unsympathetic. It is a movie that maintains the idea of American empire, while problemtaizing some of its more recent excesses. In this way, it attempts towards another kind of progress, one that allows Americans there holy ideas of eminent domain and manifest destiny.
If Bellah is right, and there is an American civil religion, where elements of the empire's civil institutions are constructed religiously, then the Military could be considered a priestly class, or was at least. Set apart, respected and beloved beyond others, they become a group of martyrs and pioneers, protecting civilians, preserving order, and maintaining the conflicted values that make America. They are convinced to become soldiers by the recruiters theistic language, once all male, schools like Annapolis and West Point became seminaries, presidents pray with them and for them, when they die they are sent home with Christian language, and buried under gravestones perpetually cared for, emblazoned with the graphic of faith. The setting apart of this class, with it's own language, is indicative of Bellah's argument: “What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” (From Biblical Religion and Civil Religion, first published by Daedalus, June 1967, found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306124338/http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).
He starts talking about Kennedy, who gave us Vietnam, and who died in the back of a Cadillac in Texas, was the origin of the last of the periods of Chaos where the American Civil Relgion fell apart. If the civil religions status is to preserve order, to clean and reconstruct chaos so that it becomes once again “the shining city on the hill” (cf Winthrop, Regan) then one has to re-establish the other. Bellah hints that this work would be done, and talks about how language was being manipulated already: “
Those nations that are for the moment “on our side” become “the free world.” A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes “the free people of South Vietnam and their government.” It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and “the last best hope of earth” to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are “free like us,” such arguments are convincing. " (ibid)
Remember, that this is the sequel to an original, that was made in 1979, 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and the second in 1986, a decade past. Still fresh wounds in the memory of the body politic, the obsession with making money in the 1980s became in the minds of certain conservatives the rewards of living after the horrors and sacrifices of that decade, and those wars. Like the Terminator films, Predator, Rambo, Commando, and the like, all done in the same few years, they become part of a well of ultra patriotic films with the military successfully destroying often grotesque or mechanical other.
In this film, the monsters are so viscous, so alien, that to commit genocide against them is necessary. The only person who ends up agreeing is the slimy corporate lawyer, who argues for the self-hood of the liberation “clearly important species right to arbitraryly exterminate them” He places this fairly reasonable argument, in the midst of several discussions of saving samples to experiment on them, and eventually tries to impregnate Ripley and the found feral child Newt, with the monsters eggs. His argument against the genocide of an entire planet is an artificial one, intended to get what he wants.
These aliens deserve to be killed, because they killed 157 colonists. The colonists, because they were human or at least humanoid, had more of a place to be on the planet then the natives. That they are willing to kill a child, and because Ripley becomes maternal, constructs these people are monsterious, amoral, fundamentally incapable of reason, when one of the marines asks “how could they cut the power, they are animals”, it becomes the kind of distancing language that America uses for most of its enterprises. The film complicates this language though, this construction of American civil religion and mythology. It criticises capitalism, at least obliquely. It rarely mentions God. It regularly places a child in danger. It allows a woman to destroy the enemy. It fully integrates by gender and race the American military. The robot is the hero. It becomes a more difficult movie then the action movies made at the same time and place.
The corporatism of Reiser's character is considered excessive, his constant mentioning of money over humanity, or property over humanity, makes him almost parodic of the excesses of Regan. When Ripley tells him “I don't know which species is worse, you don't see them fucking each over for a god damn percentage” places those who seek money over the loyalty of the brigade as monstrous, in fact so monstrous that they are worse then the enemies they are fighting.
That God damn is one of the few mentions of God, and it seems vestigial. All of the other signifiers of military experience, the naughty stories, the sexual harassment, the gung -ho attitude, the willingness to die, the camaraderie and even the language is there. The Space Marines have an authentic feel, similar to the real marines. But when they eat they do not say grace, and when they leave to go to the ship, they do not say a naval prayer. It is more common to use the Anglo Saxon language when encountering an enemy then it is to use theistic language. In this way, the rigours, rituals, and linguistic sites of the American military, the priestly class of the American civil religion has replaced the rigours, rituals and linguistic sites of more traditional religious texts.
When I saw Newt almost being killed by Reiser, when she was captured by the aliens after t hat, when she was thought to be killed several times, and when she finally was saved by Ripley thanks to Bishop , it seemed to be a corrective. Think of My Lai, with the American military killing children, or the carpet bombing of Laos or Cambodia, done at the tail end of a war that the Americans lost. The priestly class raped women and killed children. The sense of honour, of devotion to a larger cause was broken (this violation of the American Civil Religion might be why Bellah claimed it as one of the gaps in the central faith).
That the military died before they could do the final rescue, that the rescue was completed by civilians were indicative of this break in the usual structure of discourses around soldiers in the US. That a small girl was the one to be saved from the attack, and that she was saved by another woman, who was willing to be scared, to cry, to mother, and also proved to be able to fly, to operate heavy machinery, and to be adroit with barely any training, guns and flame throwers, that the last scene between Ripley who is trying to save Newt, and the queen who is trying to avenge the killing of her children, becoming a battle of matriarchy gives the viewers another way to think of heroics, outside the phallocentric auspices of both corporate control and military intervention.
That is not to say, that women and people of colour did not commit heroics in this film. Vasquez, a Hispanic woman, who is fully one of the marine corps dies in order to save Ripley, but she is not allowed the emotion of Ripley, and has the training that sublimates the self to the rituals and language of the American military establishment. That Ripley, and the Artifical American are the only two left, allows for a more pluralistic, wider idea of what this civil religion could consist of. So it is patriotic, it allows for the colonists to be good people, and it commits genocide against an other that is too alien, and therefore unsympathetic. It is a movie that maintains the idea of American empire, while problemtaizing some of its more recent excesses. In this way, it attempts towards another kind of progress, one that allows Americans there holy ideas of eminent domain and manifest destiny.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Frak Facebook:
I don't want to frak (or it's less euphemistic cousin, fuck) facebook. I want to make sweet love to it. I want to love it as much as i love blogger, flickr, tumblr, and wordpress. This new digital culture that I have been born into, with 24-7 sateillete, mobile phones, the internet, digital cameras that are basically disposable, cheap and copius memory, and the like, means that one drowns constantly in information. What becomes valuable is not the creation of new media. Everyone creates new media, everyone is prolific, in this post-Warholian fracturalised image bank culture, where every one is a geek and most perversions are satitated, what is required is a curator.
But even that status, has become democratized. What facebook does, and what social media does by extension, is treat everyone who uses it as a curator, with their own rubrick and their own standards. Sometimes you share those standards, and sometimes you do not care, but what facebook does is cut out the professional. Your friends tell you what looks cool, what makes them think, what angers them, what visually excites them, and who turns them on. They send you links from old soul bands in the 70s that might have had one minor regional hit, or a video of a kitten falling off a table, and you watch or listen and sometimes if it is just cool enough, you share it as well.
It seems ironic that for someone who has worked as a curtaor and artist semi-professionally to advocate this world turned upside down radicialism. Print journalists the world over, are having a conniption about the rise of free writing on the web for example, but two things:
a) someone needs to curate the curators, just like someone needs to watch the watchers. This new digital culture needs to have people who are good at pattern recognition so they can point out where the waves are heading.
b) there is something interesting in meta-curatoring, creating collections of work that have already been curated, and placing them into different contexts.
In the last few years, I have curated and made art about image bank culture. I have taken my random picture file and sorted it by colour, to be shown in a digital picture frame; i have made a poster 24 feet long called Movie Stars I Would Like to Fuck, featuring stills from films, have had someone paint panels corresponding to the offically allowed religious symbols on American Miltary graveyards, had someone else shoot reproductions of John's targets at the Wild West shooting range in West Edmonton Mall, and created small editions of photos with such titles as 100 Pick Up Trucks In or Around Fort Saskatchewan Alberta, 5 Fake Flavin's and one Real, or 7 Sexy Lutherans. I have attempted to make a gingerbread house on stage at Buddies while Faith Hill sung "Like I Never Loved at All", and taught hipsters at the Gladstone how to make thanksgiving or valentine craft. In the last year I have taken 2535 photos and shot 2 hours of video, on a pocket sized point and shoot. I took Ed Ruscha at his word and had 100 artists draw a 1950 Ford from Memory. My work, with its high camp and low culture, or high culture and low camp, cannot exist without the social media, the image bank, the insider reference.
The thing is, much of my understanding does not feature video work. For someone who lives by Youtube, it is shameful how much video work has passed me by. I want to be part of the curatorial incubator, because digital culture, in the words of LCD Soundsystem, "a world where I would happily drown", and it is absurd that I know so little of it in traditional video art capbalities. I have the writing, the curatorial, and the art making experience, so I wish to expand my practice into this medium.
I don't want to frak (or it's less euphemistic cousin, fuck) facebook. I want to make sweet love to it. I want to love it as much as i love blogger, flickr, tumblr, and wordpress. This new digital culture that I have been born into, with 24-7 sateillete, mobile phones, the internet, digital cameras that are basically disposable, cheap and copius memory, and the like, means that one drowns constantly in information. What becomes valuable is not the creation of new media. Everyone creates new media, everyone is prolific, in this post-Warholian fracturalised image bank culture, where every one is a geek and most perversions are satitated, what is required is a curator.
But even that status, has become democratized. What facebook does, and what social media does by extension, is treat everyone who uses it as a curator, with their own rubrick and their own standards. Sometimes you share those standards, and sometimes you do not care, but what facebook does is cut out the professional. Your friends tell you what looks cool, what makes them think, what angers them, what visually excites them, and who turns them on. They send you links from old soul bands in the 70s that might have had one minor regional hit, or a video of a kitten falling off a table, and you watch or listen and sometimes if it is just cool enough, you share it as well.
It seems ironic that for someone who has worked as a curtaor and artist semi-professionally to advocate this world turned upside down radicialism. Print journalists the world over, are having a conniption about the rise of free writing on the web for example, but two things:
a) someone needs to curate the curators, just like someone needs to watch the watchers. This new digital culture needs to have people who are good at pattern recognition so they can point out where the waves are heading.
b) there is something interesting in meta-curatoring, creating collections of work that have already been curated, and placing them into different contexts.
In the last few years, I have curated and made art about image bank culture. I have taken my random picture file and sorted it by colour, to be shown in a digital picture frame; i have made a poster 24 feet long called Movie Stars I Would Like to Fuck, featuring stills from films, have had someone paint panels corresponding to the offically allowed religious symbols on American Miltary graveyards, had someone else shoot reproductions of John's targets at the Wild West shooting range in West Edmonton Mall, and created small editions of photos with such titles as 100 Pick Up Trucks In or Around Fort Saskatchewan Alberta, 5 Fake Flavin's and one Real, or 7 Sexy Lutherans. I have attempted to make a gingerbread house on stage at Buddies while Faith Hill sung "Like I Never Loved at All", and taught hipsters at the Gladstone how to make thanksgiving or valentine craft. In the last year I have taken 2535 photos and shot 2 hours of video, on a pocket sized point and shoot. I took Ed Ruscha at his word and had 100 artists draw a 1950 Ford from Memory. My work, with its high camp and low culture, or high culture and low camp, cannot exist without the social media, the image bank, the insider reference.
The thing is, much of my understanding does not feature video work. For someone who lives by Youtube, it is shameful how much video work has passed me by. I want to be part of the curatorial incubator, because digital culture, in the words of LCD Soundsystem, "a world where I would happily drown", and it is absurd that I know so little of it in traditional video art capbalities. I have the writing, the curatorial, and the art making experience, so I wish to expand my practice into this medium.
Mary Henry was one of the best abstract painters in the united states, and had been for more then 4 decades. In her precise, modest, and intellectual way, she was as good as Noland, Riley, early Stella, Jack Bush or Ellsworth Kelly. You have never heard of her because:
a) she was a woman, and we still think of women as less good then men, but you have heard of Riley.
b) she was the wrong age, she was born in 1921, she made work just before the post painterly abstraction hit plus she was just a little bit too old to have the kind of revival that Elizabeth Murrary had before she died, or that Mary Heliman is having now. (it means something that Martin or Riley or Henry were left out of the WACK catalog, but Heliman was included)
c) plus she kept making work in seattle, outside of new york or los angeles (though she spent time in the 60s in california), and though noland,louis, and truitt all made work in DC, they had a major champion, and besides DC is a comfortable train ride to new york. (she could paint big though, After Scaleriti, in Tacoma is 20 feet long), Riley had the power of a movement, Martin had her spirtuality, Henry had none of hose things. it was small and unideological
e) she had no friends in the major critics (though she was taught by Nagy), no lovers in the major musuems, she was too pretty, too small, too decorative, and at the end too fucking good.
only real major peice of criticism of her for the stranger in seattle.
a) she was a woman, and we still think of women as less good then men, but you have heard of Riley.
b) she was the wrong age, she was born in 1921, she made work just before the post painterly abstraction hit plus she was just a little bit too old to have the kind of revival that Elizabeth Murrary had before she died, or that Mary Heliman is having now. (it means something that Martin or Riley or Henry were left out of the WACK catalog, but Heliman was included)
c) plus she kept making work in seattle, outside of new york or los angeles (though she spent time in the 60s in california), and though noland,louis, and truitt all made work in DC, they had a major champion, and besides DC is a comfortable train ride to new york. (she could paint big though, After Scaleriti, in Tacoma is 20 feet long), Riley had the power of a movement, Martin had her spirtuality, Henry had none of hose things. it was small and unideological
e) she had no friends in the major critics (though she was taught by Nagy), no lovers in the major musuems, she was too pretty, too small, too decorative, and at the end too fucking good.
only real major peice of criticism of her for the stranger in seattle.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
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.
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.
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
cite
text
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include holdings To:
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IN
Robarts
Stacks
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N7433.3 .P38 2004 v.1
IN
Robarts
Stacks
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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.
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