Ten days or so ago my wife and I viewed an unfortunate film, one where the second scene displayed an inchoate Richard Burton placed upon an Alpine slope and looking eternally lost in proximity to modern objects: a parachute and a field radio. My wife quickly noted, "My god, how drunk is he?"
Indeed this essay was to be about Richard Burton, both his hair and his unholy glaze which cement his performance in Where Eagles Dare. Instead, I must shift emphasis upon Joanthan Lethem's essay Art of Darkness which was featured in last Sunday's NYT Op-Ed section. The essay grapples with the notion that the film The Dark Knight was symbolic of the nation's need for president Bush to protect us from darkened others, and in the case of the sub-prime market, from ourselves as well. Filtering my reading of the essay through the morning's memory of Eagle Eye, another cineplex warning concerning geopolitics and paranoia, I admit to being impressed by Lethem's characterization of Dark Knight as "a morbid incoherence...chaotic form its ultimate content."
Elsewhere Lethem notes, "The Joker's paradox, of course, is the same as that of 9/11 and its long aftermath: audacious transgression ought to call out of us an equal and adamant passion for love of truth and freedom, yet the fear he inspires instead drives us deep into passivity and silence."
This passivity and silence were being plucked again last night in Oxford, MS. I remain at a loss as how the frayed appeal of blocky nationalism and a consumer culture under constant ravaging by ennui and economic famine has managed so uniformly the lemur's stroll into the sunset.
Perhaps my answer lies within another of Lethem's observations. "No wonder we crave an entertainment like "The Dark Knight" where every topic we're unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion."
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See, here it is, I don't think it is a "milkshake" - rather it is a handshake. As Lethem points out, it makes no matter whether it be indifference or not, there is complicity in the whole affair given at least the look of the system - chads in 2000 and broken machines in 2004 notwithstanding. Perhaps I am too optimistic (ha, that's not something most would consider of me) but we are not the Joker we are Harvey Dent. We are the generally educated mass, comfortable and powerful, and willing to allow for the emergence of an executor (to be kind) in extraordinary times. The issue might well have become that the extraordinary times have now comes so quickly, with such a manic pace that even failure to meet the issue, even on a grand scale, is not enough to secure from us the need to begin anew. That is too risky.
When it comes to evaluating this film (or any number of others) in this regard I am pressed to wonder if it only be a matter of the broader social context - the time of its making. Has not the concern of the vigilante on film been with us as long as their has been an industry of/in celluloid? Does it matter if it is Griffith's "Birth" or "Who Shot Liberty Valence" or this latest venture? I can recognize that this one is different, more multi-valenced and domestic and confused digression on the field of America than the brighter, shinier "Iron Man" of earlier in the season but it is still that. Ledger's stunning turn aside, there is no doubt that his Joker was chaos, without name or history (although let us not forget the good manservant Alfred's retelling of his colonial story and that there are just some people who, well you know), simply chaos - but "the Batman" (as so many of the "regulars" in the film seemed to insist on calling him in a strange and formal distancing tactic), as protector of Gotham, left us asking not for his help but whether we aren't better off without him - the sin-eater ending not withstanding. There was a hopeful scene and though it played a penultimate role in the film it has been largely ignored or, at best, derided. I care little for the wormly way in which the "average joe on the street" on the ferry proved unable to push the button to explode and sink the prison barge - it was rather the striking ex-wrestler on that barge who took the detonator from the chief and threw it out the window after leaving him with the idea that he would end the drama by sinking the ferry. It is a nearly impotent notion and certainly the (only) "feel good" moment of the movie but as predictable as it was, it scratched away at the idea that there was humanity still left to be tapped. Would this be any more or less credible a reading of the text? In the whole mix of things, I have to say I was struck by the visceral accuracy of Lehman's notion that electing McCain might well be, in fact, "moral cover" for our own decided failures - that, friend, is something to chew over.
-fp
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