The Dark Knight: A Review

By John David Ebert 

Nowadays, after the events of 9/11, the Oklahoma city bombing, the Unabomber and even the AUM Shunryuku nerve gas attack on Tokyo subways in the mid 1990s, we take our villains seriously, because we are well aware that there are a number of disquieted souls out there who wish to destroy Western capitalist society. The creators of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, likewise, take their villains very seriously, and seem also to be aware that animosity toward our megalopolises and the consumer mentality which they support is alive and well.

This is perhaps why Christopher Nolan’s new Batman film works so well, for it tells in counterpoint the stories of two of Batman’s most famous villains, the Joker and Two Face, and does so with such well written and exquisite detail that the viewer is completely fascinated by their destructive energies from start to finish. This is a feat that Tim Burton was never able to pull off, for his villains remained mere caricatures of old worn out icons from the campy Batman television show of the 1960s. Nolan’s villains are more frightening precisely because we can sense the shadows of such real antagonists looming behind them as Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber. When, for example, the Joker blows up a hospital, Nolan frames the shot in such a way as to deliberately evoke the Oklahoma City bombing.

Make no mistake about it: Western society is under threat, both from within as well as without. For exactly as Arnold Toynbee predicted, it has generated a barbarian external proletariat in the form of Islamist terrorists who, I suspect, will be around for a long, long time to come, and an internal proletariat — that is to say, a disaffected portion of a society who are in a particular society, but not of it– in the form of such paranoids as the Freemen of Texas or the Branch Davidians. (And yes, there will be more where those came from).

The Dark Knight is slightly misnamed, however, for unlike its predecessor, Batman Begins, it is not a portrait study of Batman himself, but of his two greatest antagonists — who upstage him somewhat in this film — the Joker and Two Face. The latter is a character who sees every situation that comes to him in binary terms, like a computer. He cannot handle ambiguities, and the toss of a coin must determine the fate of everyone who crosses him. His face is an image of Life living on Death, for half of it is alive, while the other half is dead, an image that is found in the Maya - Aztec culture, in which pottery masks at sites like Tlatilco show faces split down the middle, with flesh on one side and a skull on the other. (Batman, too, is a character straight out of Mesoamerican mythology, for they also had a Batman God).

The Joker, on the other hand, is a more sinister, more complex character, although paradoxically, he is not nearly so three dimensional as Harvey Dent, a character whose sufferings and anguish the viewer can identify with. In the case of the Joker, there is nothing to identify with because we know nothing about him: he is more like a serial killer who kills for the fun and pleasure of it, and not because he has any motive for doing so. The Joker cannot be reasoned with and he personifies non-linear thinking: if the masked Batman takes himself far too seriously as a figure, the Joker is there to lighten things up, for he realizes that laughter constitutes the death of all systems and systematic thinking, of all forms of stark, sanctimonious piety that lie at the origin of religions and cults, including the religion of capitalism.

And the Joker is such a villain to Gotham precisely because Gotham — a metaphor for New York — is a rectilinear city laid out on a grid, with a grimly serious purpose for making a few people absurdly wealthy at the cost of generating an enormous, impoverished population of the disaffected. The Joker has no motive and he cannot be explained away by logic or rationality of any kind. He is simply the incarnation of Chaos, an archaic mythic figure like Loki in Scandinavian mythology, who has devoted himself to messing up every form of organization which is brought into being by the gods. Why? Because life is like that. Cities are built in grim earnest, and nature laughingly buries them under volcanic ash or swallows them whole in earthquakes which kill thousands. You don’t find that funny? Well the gods, apparently, do. And that is the Joker’s purpose vis a vis the cosmos which Batman has dedicated himself to defending.

In the film, furthermore, the Joker seems to be everywhere all at once. He is taken into custody and put in jail only to reveal that this was part of a larger plan in which he takes the city hostage and sends the authorities racing against the clock to fight the bombs he has planted at various points in the city. The Joker is an appropriate hero for electronic society with its non-linear systems of chaos and complexity theory, in which the small can explosively bifurcate into the large and send entire systems spiralling into chaos from a few small perturbations dealt to it at the right spot. The Joker is everything that is inimical to systems: non-linearity, asymmetry, perturbations, catastrophe. Indeed, the Joker is the “accident” that every form of technology brings into being along with it: the car crash, the shipwreck, the plane crash. Such systems cannot exist without their chaotic twins, anymore than you can find an ancient mythological system without its dark antagonist.

And so, consistent with the film’s twinning metaphors, its two antagonists, the Joker and Two Face, both embody cosmic forces: polarity (night / day; sun / moon; life / death); and ambiguity, the forces that disrupt and intermix those polarities (eclipses; hermaphrodites; death’s laughter at life’s paltry clinging to existence in a cosmos that is endlessly, inexhaustibly creative).

In this film, Batman begins to find that the cosmos of the city of Gotham which he has sworn to protect from “criminals” is getting away from him, for these cosmic forces embodied in these new antagonists are too mighty, too gigantic to be stamped out with a mere karate chop to the throat. These villains are features of permanent, unchangeable cosmic forces, forces which are too large for a man with a schizoid ego who believes himself to be the incarnation of a Mayan bat god to simply stamp out. In this film, unlike the first one, Gotham is getting away from Batman. It is no longer under his control, and he is beginning to realize that his job is much more difficult than he had suspected it to be, for he had set out swearing to rid the city of “criminals,” that is, law breakers.

But the irony of the film is that the Joker and Two Face are not criminals, they are cosmic forces that can no more be removed from existence than can death, aging or disease. In the future, Batman is going to have to shift gears and begin to realize that mastering karate is not enough: a new religion is going to have to come into being from within him, an inner awareness equivalent to the realizations of the prophets of the Axial Age (i.e. Buddha, Christ, Lao Tzu) that death and suffering cannot be fought with martial force, but only accepted and integrated into one’s own cosmos.

Either that, or he will go insane.      

Reviewing an archetypal movie, by John Lobell

Myths are a repository of the structures and mores of a culture, a suprapsychology, a system of principles describing the nature and workings of being, the universe, society, and individual development. Movies have become a dominant artistic form in our culture, and are therefore a major vehicle for the presentation of our myths.

The prime myth of Wanted, as of many action movies, is Percival, the story of one of the knights of King Arthur’s Roundtable. A sub myth is the search for the father. While the search for the father is found in the myths of many cultures, the themes of the Arthurian Romances are unique to the European culture which began around 1,100 with these tales and with the laying down of the Western temple form, the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.

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The Incredible Hulk: A Review

By John David Ebert

In a way, Marvel’s new Hulk movie is not so much a sequel to Ang Lee’s earlier (and much better) film about one of their most famous comicbook characters as it is a remake of the first movie, for it tells exactly the same story, and does so with little imagination or attempt at varying the theme. In the new movie, as in the Ang Lee film, the Hulk spends most of the narrative fighting the American military, and then ends up at the climax fighting another bizarre supervillain created as a misbegotten child of a science experiment gone awry. The storyline, then, is formulaic and so one wonders what the motives of the film’s makers could have been in constructing a new movie with different cast members but with exactly the same premiss. The lack of imagination demonstrated here by the filmmakers reminds one of the old Hulk television shows, for television, especially of the 1970s variety, was once virtually synonymous with the phrase ‘lack of imagination.’ Today’s television, however, with shows like HBO’s Deadwood and Rome or Showtime’s Weeds has gone way beyond this old stereotype toward the creation of some really interesting and inventive narratives. Marvel’s new movie, unfortunately, belongs in the dustbin with the old television shows of the 1970s.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls: A Review

By John David Ebert

The original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, had concerned the descent of a solar hero — hence, his antipathy to snakes, for snakes are usually lunar — into the underworld of Egyptian civilization in order to retrieve from the sunken depths of our perceptual field the Ark of the Covenant, the central fetish around which the Hebraic tradition had revolved. The significance of the retrieval was precisely that it was a religious object that had to be restored and brought into the field of focus of our modern, secular society, since the religious object becomes pars pro toto for the religious experience as a whole. It is precisely a sense of communion with the divine which we moderns have lost, and it was the goal of the first film to retrieve this lost experience as a way of bringing it to our attention and making the point that contact with a spirit world is indeed what we have lost in the building of modernity.

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Iron Man: A Review

By John David Ebert

In ancient mythology, blacksmith heroes are normally devious, crafty, morally ambiguous figures who cannot be trusted. Their creations are often faulty and sometimes redound fatally upon their users. Worse, they are often murderers. The name of Cain, for instance, who committed the world’s first murder in Biblical mythology, means “smith” and Tubal-cain later became the world’s first worker in bronze and metallurgy. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a man who was chased out of the city of Athens for murdering his cousin Talos, of whom Daedalus was jealous since Talos was said to have invented the first saw after being inspired by finding the jawbone of a snake. In Scandinavian myth, Volund the smith was imprisoned on an island and hamstrung by a king who wished to prevent him from escaping so that he could use Volund’s talents for the making of weapons, but the crafty smith murdered the king’s two young sons and transformed their skulls into bowls and their eyeballs into jewels which he sent to the king as “gifts” before inventing wings and flying away from his island prison. Ancient societies seem to have been well aware of the warping effects of technology on the human personality. Read the rest of this entry »

A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield

By William Irwin Thompson

As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary.  Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.” 

But another point is that our culture has been kept in arrested development by the media at the stage of the 13 year old–the age of the comic book for my generation–witness the recent acne outburst of comic book movies.  The 13 year old is not a child and is not yet an adult capable of dealing with threats.  So it imagines itself to be a superhero in the same way Piaget once noted that 13 year olds generate life histories of fame for themselves and already see their statues up in the park.  So the superhero is a preteen mythic unconscious projection. Read the rest of this entry »

Cloverfield as an Omen of Things to Come

By John David Ebert 

The new film by director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield, shows us an attack upon Manhattan by giant monsters out of a 1950s B movie. It is filmed in the fake documentary style pioneered by the Blair Witch Project and so the whole story is told from the point of view of the guy on the ground with the camera who has no idea what is going on, as would be the case, more or less, in real life. Also, as in real life, we never find out who or what these monsters are or where they came from or what they’re doing in the city, as the director rightly senses that in electronic society such things as plot and storyline are antiquated relics of our literate past. In the age of “secondary orality,” as Walter Ong has termed it, narrative structures can afford to be loose and haphazard since it is no longer the story “line” that counts but rather the all inclusive and immersive immediacy of the events themselves. The film’s cameraman point of view suggests that the events are taking place in “real time,” that mediatized nowness that has come to engulf us all in a shower of photons and which has eliminated the deferred time and space necessary for the processing of experience by the human mind. There is no time for such processing when everything happens at the speed of light, all at once. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tribal Cosmology of James Bond

By John David Ebert 

The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending U-2 spyplanes on reconnaissance missions over Moscow, to which the Russians would respond by imprisoning the entire planet within the orbit of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. Thus, in the world into which Fleming’s famous character was born, everyone was busy looking over everyone else’s shoulders. Indeed, Bond himself is essentially an extension of the human eyeball, cut loose from the body and sent roving across the planet to peer through walls and behind closed doors. If the Berlin Wall was Russia’s response to the Marshall Plan, then the West’s response to the Berlin Wall was James Bond, a man who specializes in boring through walls. Read the rest of this entry »

 Andy Warhol: Prophet of You Tube

By John David Ebert

1. 

Andy Warhol was the first great icon painter of electronic society. In contemplating his gallery of celebrity portraits, we are struck by the possibility that some Medieval icon painter, an Andre Rublev, say, had died and been reborn in the twentieth century as a poor kid from Pittsburgh with no memory of his former life, but with all his artistic skills still intact. Warhol was the first painter to subliminally intuit the emergence of a new religion of celebrity demigods, and he became not only its first icon painter, but also its first High Priest. His famous paintings from the early 1960s, the Elvises and the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors and the Jackie Kennedys, are one and all portraits of the newly emerging saints and demigods of the age of electronic stained glass. (It is no coincidence that he was raised in the Byzantine church and regularly attended mass on Sundays all his life, for his religious upbringing helped prepare him for his life’s task.)

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 The X-Files and the Breakdown of Our Cultural Immune System

By John David Ebert

1.

By now, Mulder and Scully have become almost as famous as their literary prototypes Holmes and Watson. Indeed, in many ways, they strongly resemble this earlier pair of detectives who stand at the threshold of the birth of the forensic genre. Watson, like Scully, was also trained as a medical doctor, and Holmes, like Mulder, was the man of genius for whom solutions to any given mystery would come in a flash of intuition like a revelation from the gods, leaving a bewildered Watson struggling to keep up. But unlike Watson, Scully normally offers an alternative explanation for the given mystery, one that, she typically boasts, is based upon a scientific and rational view of the world. In this respect, she resembles Holmes rather more than Watson, for Holmes was bent upon sterilizing the grimy streets of Victorian London of its human bacterial infections of irrationalism and emotionalism, whereas Mulder applies his intellect to the task of bringing demons and devils, rather than bacteria, into focus.

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