Ubiquitous
2012-08-17 09:05:00 UTC
Why have some conservatives fallen for this formulaic film?
When I last reviewed one, I wrote that a film critic reviewing a James
Bond movie inevitably feels like a food critic reviewing a McDonald's
Restaurant. In both cases there is really nothing to review, as the
effort expended by the authors has not been to produce something new
that, in their judgment, will please us but merely something that is as
close as possible to what we already know pleases us. Thank you for not
surprising! Even if it doesn't please, the point is the same: to follow a
formula in order to reproduce an experience that the same formula has
produced in the past, whether we like the result or not, since the
audience that likes it is a large and loyal one that keeps coming back
for more of the same whatever those who don't like it may do. And from
the point of view of the franchisees, one of the advantages of ownership
is that it short-circuits the critical process by reducing it to
irrelevance. Every review will amount to this: for those who like this
sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like. Everybody
already knows that anyway.
I think much the same is true of superhero movies. As someone who has
been criticizing them for years after a long period of regarding them as
a harmless indulgence and irony practice for the largely irony-free
American film industry, I have now arrived at the point where the
criticism seems as automatic as the movie formulae themselves. For one
thing: no more irony. Criticism, I find, is dumbfounded by those who take
such stuff seriously -- as, hitherto, only children have been able to do.
You have only my word to go on that each time I force myself to go to
another one of these dire productions -- and I don't go to many anymore
-- I really do try to find something to like about it, something that can
be taken seriously. But each time I find that the fantastical element,
which is of the very essence of the superhero genre, so overwhelms
anything that might in its absence have been a good idea that my
optimistic impulses are crushed. The need to stick to the formula makes
anything new or interesting extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This loss -- and I do feel it as a loss -- is the more to be regretted
because it puts me at odds with the legion of younger critics who have
grown up with these movies and seem to like them all the better for not
treating their camp heroes as jokes anymore. What more natural than that
they should think my not liking them merely a result of being old and out
of touch, stuck in an era when, admittedly, almost nothing was taken
seriously? Perhaps they are right. But even if they are, it doesn't make
it possible for me to regard the third and final movie in Christopher
Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, as having anything more
truthful or interesting to say than its two predecessors did. This must
be all the more galling to my colleagues who do, at least the
conservative ones, because there is something of a consensus that Mr.
Nolan has a conservative message for them, which they regard as reason
enough for them to like it.
John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard, for example, is at pains to
distinguish this movie and its predecessor from the run of superhero
movies, saying not only that "most of these movies are lousy" but that
this is a fact about which "even diehard fans agree." That is not my
impression, but let's say he's right. Where, it seems to me, he cannot be
right is when he claims that it is precisely by eschewing irony about
super-heroism that The Dark Knight Rises triumphs. It "represents the
true maturation of the superhero movie," he writes in defiance of what
seems to me the undeniable fact that it is of the very essence of the
superhero movie, like the comic books on which it is based, to be
immature by favoring fantasy over reality. Mr. Podhoretz handsomely
admits that all superheroes represent an "empowerment fantasy" for "young
kids and teenagers who feel so powerless in their own lives," but they
are more than that. They also depend for their success on what we might
call a disempowerment fantasy about the rest of the world.
In other words, for Batman and his adversaries to be super, everybody
else has to be negative super, or sub-ordinary. This is the key point
about the formula to which Mr. Nolan is confined, like Batman (Christian
Bale) himself, in his giant open garbage can of a dungeon but without
even the Caped Crusader's plainly fantastical prospects of escape. For
the immature not only seek the imaginative means to feel implausibly
strong themselves, they also seek confirmation of their belief in the
implausible weakness or wickedness of pretty much everybody else. Mr.
Nolan's Batman movies spend far more time and energy on promoting this
vision of the world than they do on the superpowers of Batman and his
Bat-machines which stand out against it. The masses in Mr. Nolan's
account are corrupt and cowardly: good when untroubled by evil-doers but
quickly yielding to the bad (or simply seeking to escape it) when
evil-doers gain power, as they periodically do. Batman's appeal is based
not just on the uniqueness of his strength and ingenuity and fighting
prowess but on his moral solitariness. Unselfish and courageous, he's
really the only one in his world who is. His example may inspire Catwoman
(Anne Hathaway) and a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who turns out -- spoiler
alert! -- to be auditioning for the part of Robin, but as Commissioner
Gordon (Gary Oldman) points out, there's no one but he who can save
Gotham.
Conservatives used not to believe people were in need of that kind of
saving. Conservatives, at least of the American variety, used to have
faith in the people to save themselves. Their heroes were not of the
Super- variety but regular guys like Gary Cooper's Sergeant York or John
Wayne's Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima, guys whose rising to
the occasion inspired others to do likewise but who didn't give
themselves airs -- let alone run around in a mask and a rubber suit and
the coolest vehicles in town. Mr. Podhoretz's Weekly Standard colleague
Jonathan V. Last is of one mind with him in claiming that "Batman is
different" from the other superheroes in having a genuine claim to be
treated philosophically.
He is not an avatar for a particular political argument or idea. Batman
is about the liberal order itself -- specifically about the durability of
classical liberalism in the face of modernity. From the beginning, Batman
concerned himself with justice. Whereas Superman spent the 1930s and '40s
fighting for the common man against powerful interests -- corrupt
industrialists, scheming munitions manufacturers, dirty bankers -- Batman
fought mobsters. If you look at the original Batman comics, he's forever
chasing gangsters and colorful criminals, such as the Joker. Sometimes
he'd arrest the evildoers; sometimes, if they were particularly
repugnant, he'd kill them. In later years he evolved and swore never to
take a life.
One might agree with his contention that the movies -- for he, too,
celebrates both this one and the previous one in the series -- promote a
conservative vision of the contemporary world if they presented anything
even remotely similar to the contemporary world. They don't. Like the
classical heroic literature of which they are a parody, they depend
utterly on creating a special (super-) heroic world of their own, remote
from everyday experience, wherein such amazing deeds as they present for
our inspection may be believed actually to have happened.
Comic books and their superheroes are also like heroic literature in
this, that they imagine their greatest figures as lonely men, standing
far above the run of mankind to which their powers make them superior.
For the Greek heroes Achilles or Odysseus, this was enough. The
proto-Roman Trojan Aeneas introduced the idea of a moral superiority to
match the physical, though this superiority was based on what Virgil
calls "piety" and not what we think of as moral or ethical behavior. The
lone heroes of today are also seen as saviors of the good, but where they
differ is in the comics' penchant for building up their heroes by tearing
down those around them. As the only unsullied hero in a world of
evil-doing, cowardice and corruption, Batman naturally shares the
adolescent penchant for brooding. He broods not only over the death of
his parents, which turns him into Batman in the first place, but also
over his inability to escape being Batman and thus someone alone and
untouchable in a world of his manifest inferiors.
In The Dark Knight his brooding in the prison of himself took the form of
a pseudo moral quandary in which he could not but see himself as equaled
only by the supercriminal he opposes, so that the duel between them
became a mere spectator sport for the rest of the world -- or that part
of it which managed to escape being among the Joker's victims. Like
Batman's priggish and nonsensical refusal to use firearms (apart from
those mounted on his mega-cool Bat-vehicles), this clash of the titans
was meant to appeal to those who are still capable of thinking they might
be too good to live in this naughty world with all its shameful
hypocrisies. That's the same way the teenager looks with scorn on the
adult world: because he is afraid of having to join it. In The Dark
Knight Rises, Batman broods over his inability to fit in romantically, as
well as his being misunderstood by the world as a bad guy himself. The
adult way out of both these emotional dead-ends is to say: Get over
yourself! Get real! We know that that is not how the world is, not even
for the super-est of superheroes. But reality is not an option for the
irony-free superhero movie.
The conservative virtues that some say are celebrated by these films are
not, whatever else they may be, solitary ones, any more than they can
include the idea of "a one-man department of justice," to cite the title
of Mr. Last's piece. They depend for their coherence on a belief not just
in virtuous individuals but a virtuous people. That's also why it is a
mistake to claim, as Jonathan Last does, that "the Joker is the kind of
foreign, illiberal threat that al Qaeda presented to the West." No he's
not. Al Qaeda doesn't want to "watch the world burn" as the Joker is said
to do. For all the horrible deeds Islamicist extremists commit, they have
a positive, rational aim in view in the worldwide triumph of Islam which,
however repugnant it may be to us, is not merely nihilistic, like that of
the Batman villains, and nor does it even remotely threaten a total
breakdown of civil order and decency, as it does in The Dark Knight
Rises. The idea that Occupy Wall Street might do so is as much a fantasy
as anything in the picture. The paranoia that sees such threats in the
real world is more associated with the left than with the conservatism
that well-intentioned apologists are trying to attribute to Christopher
Nolan.
There are all kinds of ways in which Americans of today may be supposed
not to measure up to the sturdy republican virtues of their forefathers,
but it's ridiculous to find any resemblance at all to the mere mob they
have become in Mr. Nolan's eyes. That image is simply the complement of
the lonely Batman-hero. His moral isolation is what is being celebrated,
and it depends on the immorality or amorality of those around him, both
of which things are adolescent fantasies and nothing to do with
real-world politics or those who engage in them. But the media have been
promoting this dream of their own purity in the midst of a corrupt and
vicious political world since Watergate, and the movies have gone along
with it, pari passu, ever since, cranking out fantasies to that effect
both acknowledged, like the Dark Knight ones, and unacknowledged, like
All the President's Men (1976) -- a movie whose central idea of massive
corruption at the heart of power opposed only by one or two lonely
outsiders is still going strong in, say, the latest Bourne picture, which
is nothing but yet more superhero fare thinly disguised.
For those who like such things, as I have foretold you, The Dark Knight
Rises is the sort of thing they will like. But then you knew that anyway.
I very much regret being Batman-lonely myself in feeling obliged to
correct their taste -- so much so, indeed, that I am more than half
doubtful that I should even attempt to do so. I am certainly under no
illusions that I can peel off any of the movie's millions of fans, let
alone a significant number of them. When criticism has become irrelevant,
perhaps it is time for the critic to shut up. If I have not yet done so,
it is only because I think there is some value in reminding people that
the culture once offered up something better and more wholesome to the
popular appetite for excitement and moral models -- and that, if we ever
weary of that which we have got instead, it might do so again.
:About the Author
:James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar
:at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor:
:A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture,
:both published by Encounter Books.
--
"Re-electing Obama is like backing The Titanic up and hitting the iceberg
a second time."
When I last reviewed one, I wrote that a film critic reviewing a James
Bond movie inevitably feels like a food critic reviewing a McDonald's
Restaurant. In both cases there is really nothing to review, as the
effort expended by the authors has not been to produce something new
that, in their judgment, will please us but merely something that is as
close as possible to what we already know pleases us. Thank you for not
surprising! Even if it doesn't please, the point is the same: to follow a
formula in order to reproduce an experience that the same formula has
produced in the past, whether we like the result or not, since the
audience that likes it is a large and loyal one that keeps coming back
for more of the same whatever those who don't like it may do. And from
the point of view of the franchisees, one of the advantages of ownership
is that it short-circuits the critical process by reducing it to
irrelevance. Every review will amount to this: for those who like this
sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like. Everybody
already knows that anyway.
I think much the same is true of superhero movies. As someone who has
been criticizing them for years after a long period of regarding them as
a harmless indulgence and irony practice for the largely irony-free
American film industry, I have now arrived at the point where the
criticism seems as automatic as the movie formulae themselves. For one
thing: no more irony. Criticism, I find, is dumbfounded by those who take
such stuff seriously -- as, hitherto, only children have been able to do.
You have only my word to go on that each time I force myself to go to
another one of these dire productions -- and I don't go to many anymore
-- I really do try to find something to like about it, something that can
be taken seriously. But each time I find that the fantastical element,
which is of the very essence of the superhero genre, so overwhelms
anything that might in its absence have been a good idea that my
optimistic impulses are crushed. The need to stick to the formula makes
anything new or interesting extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This loss -- and I do feel it as a loss -- is the more to be regretted
because it puts me at odds with the legion of younger critics who have
grown up with these movies and seem to like them all the better for not
treating their camp heroes as jokes anymore. What more natural than that
they should think my not liking them merely a result of being old and out
of touch, stuck in an era when, admittedly, almost nothing was taken
seriously? Perhaps they are right. But even if they are, it doesn't make
it possible for me to regard the third and final movie in Christopher
Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, as having anything more
truthful or interesting to say than its two predecessors did. This must
be all the more galling to my colleagues who do, at least the
conservative ones, because there is something of a consensus that Mr.
Nolan has a conservative message for them, which they regard as reason
enough for them to like it.
John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard, for example, is at pains to
distinguish this movie and its predecessor from the run of superhero
movies, saying not only that "most of these movies are lousy" but that
this is a fact about which "even diehard fans agree." That is not my
impression, but let's say he's right. Where, it seems to me, he cannot be
right is when he claims that it is precisely by eschewing irony about
super-heroism that The Dark Knight Rises triumphs. It "represents the
true maturation of the superhero movie," he writes in defiance of what
seems to me the undeniable fact that it is of the very essence of the
superhero movie, like the comic books on which it is based, to be
immature by favoring fantasy over reality. Mr. Podhoretz handsomely
admits that all superheroes represent an "empowerment fantasy" for "young
kids and teenagers who feel so powerless in their own lives," but they
are more than that. They also depend for their success on what we might
call a disempowerment fantasy about the rest of the world.
In other words, for Batman and his adversaries to be super, everybody
else has to be negative super, or sub-ordinary. This is the key point
about the formula to which Mr. Nolan is confined, like Batman (Christian
Bale) himself, in his giant open garbage can of a dungeon but without
even the Caped Crusader's plainly fantastical prospects of escape. For
the immature not only seek the imaginative means to feel implausibly
strong themselves, they also seek confirmation of their belief in the
implausible weakness or wickedness of pretty much everybody else. Mr.
Nolan's Batman movies spend far more time and energy on promoting this
vision of the world than they do on the superpowers of Batman and his
Bat-machines which stand out against it. The masses in Mr. Nolan's
account are corrupt and cowardly: good when untroubled by evil-doers but
quickly yielding to the bad (or simply seeking to escape it) when
evil-doers gain power, as they periodically do. Batman's appeal is based
not just on the uniqueness of his strength and ingenuity and fighting
prowess but on his moral solitariness. Unselfish and courageous, he's
really the only one in his world who is. His example may inspire Catwoman
(Anne Hathaway) and a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who turns out -- spoiler
alert! -- to be auditioning for the part of Robin, but as Commissioner
Gordon (Gary Oldman) points out, there's no one but he who can save
Gotham.
Conservatives used not to believe people were in need of that kind of
saving. Conservatives, at least of the American variety, used to have
faith in the people to save themselves. Their heroes were not of the
Super- variety but regular guys like Gary Cooper's Sergeant York or John
Wayne's Sergeant Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima, guys whose rising to
the occasion inspired others to do likewise but who didn't give
themselves airs -- let alone run around in a mask and a rubber suit and
the coolest vehicles in town. Mr. Podhoretz's Weekly Standard colleague
Jonathan V. Last is of one mind with him in claiming that "Batman is
different" from the other superheroes in having a genuine claim to be
treated philosophically.
He is not an avatar for a particular political argument or idea. Batman
is about the liberal order itself -- specifically about the durability of
classical liberalism in the face of modernity. From the beginning, Batman
concerned himself with justice. Whereas Superman spent the 1930s and '40s
fighting for the common man against powerful interests -- corrupt
industrialists, scheming munitions manufacturers, dirty bankers -- Batman
fought mobsters. If you look at the original Batman comics, he's forever
chasing gangsters and colorful criminals, such as the Joker. Sometimes
he'd arrest the evildoers; sometimes, if they were particularly
repugnant, he'd kill them. In later years he evolved and swore never to
take a life.
One might agree with his contention that the movies -- for he, too,
celebrates both this one and the previous one in the series -- promote a
conservative vision of the contemporary world if they presented anything
even remotely similar to the contemporary world. They don't. Like the
classical heroic literature of which they are a parody, they depend
utterly on creating a special (super-) heroic world of their own, remote
from everyday experience, wherein such amazing deeds as they present for
our inspection may be believed actually to have happened.
Comic books and their superheroes are also like heroic literature in
this, that they imagine their greatest figures as lonely men, standing
far above the run of mankind to which their powers make them superior.
For the Greek heroes Achilles or Odysseus, this was enough. The
proto-Roman Trojan Aeneas introduced the idea of a moral superiority to
match the physical, though this superiority was based on what Virgil
calls "piety" and not what we think of as moral or ethical behavior. The
lone heroes of today are also seen as saviors of the good, but where they
differ is in the comics' penchant for building up their heroes by tearing
down those around them. As the only unsullied hero in a world of
evil-doing, cowardice and corruption, Batman naturally shares the
adolescent penchant for brooding. He broods not only over the death of
his parents, which turns him into Batman in the first place, but also
over his inability to escape being Batman and thus someone alone and
untouchable in a world of his manifest inferiors.
In The Dark Knight his brooding in the prison of himself took the form of
a pseudo moral quandary in which he could not but see himself as equaled
only by the supercriminal he opposes, so that the duel between them
became a mere spectator sport for the rest of the world -- or that part
of it which managed to escape being among the Joker's victims. Like
Batman's priggish and nonsensical refusal to use firearms (apart from
those mounted on his mega-cool Bat-vehicles), this clash of the titans
was meant to appeal to those who are still capable of thinking they might
be too good to live in this naughty world with all its shameful
hypocrisies. That's the same way the teenager looks with scorn on the
adult world: because he is afraid of having to join it. In The Dark
Knight Rises, Batman broods over his inability to fit in romantically, as
well as his being misunderstood by the world as a bad guy himself. The
adult way out of both these emotional dead-ends is to say: Get over
yourself! Get real! We know that that is not how the world is, not even
for the super-est of superheroes. But reality is not an option for the
irony-free superhero movie.
The conservative virtues that some say are celebrated by these films are
not, whatever else they may be, solitary ones, any more than they can
include the idea of "a one-man department of justice," to cite the title
of Mr. Last's piece. They depend for their coherence on a belief not just
in virtuous individuals but a virtuous people. That's also why it is a
mistake to claim, as Jonathan Last does, that "the Joker is the kind of
foreign, illiberal threat that al Qaeda presented to the West." No he's
not. Al Qaeda doesn't want to "watch the world burn" as the Joker is said
to do. For all the horrible deeds Islamicist extremists commit, they have
a positive, rational aim in view in the worldwide triumph of Islam which,
however repugnant it may be to us, is not merely nihilistic, like that of
the Batman villains, and nor does it even remotely threaten a total
breakdown of civil order and decency, as it does in The Dark Knight
Rises. The idea that Occupy Wall Street might do so is as much a fantasy
as anything in the picture. The paranoia that sees such threats in the
real world is more associated with the left than with the conservatism
that well-intentioned apologists are trying to attribute to Christopher
Nolan.
There are all kinds of ways in which Americans of today may be supposed
not to measure up to the sturdy republican virtues of their forefathers,
but it's ridiculous to find any resemblance at all to the mere mob they
have become in Mr. Nolan's eyes. That image is simply the complement of
the lonely Batman-hero. His moral isolation is what is being celebrated,
and it depends on the immorality or amorality of those around him, both
of which things are adolescent fantasies and nothing to do with
real-world politics or those who engage in them. But the media have been
promoting this dream of their own purity in the midst of a corrupt and
vicious political world since Watergate, and the movies have gone along
with it, pari passu, ever since, cranking out fantasies to that effect
both acknowledged, like the Dark Knight ones, and unacknowledged, like
All the President's Men (1976) -- a movie whose central idea of massive
corruption at the heart of power opposed only by one or two lonely
outsiders is still going strong in, say, the latest Bourne picture, which
is nothing but yet more superhero fare thinly disguised.
For those who like such things, as I have foretold you, The Dark Knight
Rises is the sort of thing they will like. But then you knew that anyway.
I very much regret being Batman-lonely myself in feeling obliged to
correct their taste -- so much so, indeed, that I am more than half
doubtful that I should even attempt to do so. I am certainly under no
illusions that I can peel off any of the movie's millions of fans, let
alone a significant number of them. When criticism has become irrelevant,
perhaps it is time for the critic to shut up. If I have not yet done so,
it is only because I think there is some value in reminding people that
the culture once offered up something better and more wholesome to the
popular appetite for excitement and moral models -- and that, if we ever
weary of that which we have got instead, it might do so again.
:About the Author
:James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar
:at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor:
:A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture,
:both published by Encounter Books.
--
"Re-electing Obama is like backing The Titanic up and hitting the iceberg
a second time."