Anti-Climacus

LINK: I disagree with Poulos's contention about the new Batman (which I haven't seen, for reasons I'm about to get to):

Actually, I haven't seen Nolan's Batman yet. But in talking with my maniacal friend and Lawler-beloved movie guru Peter Suderman, over a fat lunch of coconut shrimp and gin & grapefruit, we agreed that a film which tries to hold the audience to account for thrilling to evil is better than a film which soft-pedals the truth about wickedness -- even if that certain hypocrisy in offering a thrill later to be damned is unavoidable. We concluded that George Romero is perhaps best at this trick, which indeed isn't a trick when done well as much as it is a reckoning with what's bad in human nature, and an attempt to raise our souls through mortification, like Kafka. Dangerous business, but necessary.

Three thoughts, all related:

1. Some time ago, I watched the unedited version of Heathers (I usually just catch it if/when it's on TV), and was surprised to remember exactly how violent it is. In fact, what gets cut for broadcast TV is unnecessary to the plot, and added instead to appeal to its target demographic. The edited version plumbs the depths in a satisfactory manner--the viewer still sees J.D.'s craziness and the absurdist minimalism ('eskimo,' 'corn nuts')--I couldn't help finding it on the whole gratuitous.

2. No Country for Old Men, one of those movies everyone praised for its realism and philosophical seriousness, struck me as very similar. Within the first five minutes, someone gets violently strangled to death, and to the extent the movie works, it works by keeping perpetually before the viewer the fear that the violence will return, in all its random senselessness. Herein the art is supposed to lie--the violence moves progressively off-screen as the movie goes on. Instead violence comes off as the movie's fetish, whose presence is justified by an appeal to realism or weighty issues. But realism (as any good IR scholar can tell you) is a subjective determination; the film may lay bare something about the human condition, but its not something most of us will encounter in any form whatever, much less in the form its presented in the movie. As for philosophical seriousness, it was rather like The Matrix for me: in the desire to play up one tension within modern philosophy, it restricts where the debate may go. By making the perpetual mind-body question literal, The Matrix can reduce philosophy of mind and epistemology to a series of 'brain in a vat' questions; in the same way, the last coin-flipping Anton Chigur tries to do raises one philosophical question--are we free or aren't we--in the most passing of ways (passing, indeed, because every other character is a manifestation of pure will). And if the philosophical complexities, such as they are, get stripped away, one ends up with just a lot of violence, and an appeal to, if you like, a certain kind of sadism or schadenfreude on the part of the audience.

(question for future reflection, perhaps by me: is there any essential difference between No Country for Old Men, which I didn't like, and Le Samourai, which I did? Or The Bridge on the River Kwai, another film that takes up agency in the face of human cruelty and the absurd?)

3. The new Batman, being praised for its realism and seriousness, worries me for the same reason: it'll be a joyless and grim slog, whenever I do get around to seeing it. Unlike, say, Jacob Levy, I have no long-standing relationship to the comic-book movie as genre, and so no particular reason to want to see it. But I've been thinking of other genres I like--noir in particular--and whether I'm applying a double-standard because I am by nature unwilling to give credit to certain kinds of movies. The answer, I think, is no, but the reasons relate to time, and not to genre. A reasonably astute viewer knows the nature of the relationships in Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, though I am fairly certain they're never mentioned, just as a viewer knows the nature of the blackmail in The Big Sleep. Those things couldn't be directly addressed in those movies because they couldn't be addressed in any movie of the time. What was lost in realism had to be made up in art--the audience can't see Oedipus poke his eyes out, so they must be made to feel the tragedy in other ways. Here I have perhaps aligned myself with a very old style of criticism, but I feel comfortable with that.