About that Batman movie
-
- July
- 24
For the past few days, I’ve gone back and forth about whether to say something about the Batman movie.
Everyone is probably sick of hearing about it. It is another comic book film, after all, a popcorn movie.
And do the movie’s themes, while provocative, really have a spiritual dimension?
But I came across a terrific commentary on the First Things website by Thomas Hibbs, distinguished professor of ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University. He focuses, like most writers, on Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, which is truly scary, in both obvious and existential ways.
Hibbs writes:
Beyond good and evil, The Joker is off the human scale. In preparation for the role, Ledger studied the voices of ventriloquist dummies aiming for a chilling effect in which the voice itself sounds “disembodied.†Ledger and Nolan looked at Francis Bacon paintings to try to capture the look of “human decay and corruption.†As in William Peter Blatty’s definitive depiction of demonic evil in The Exorcist, so too here—the demon’s target is us, to make us believe that we are “bestial, ugly, and not worthy of redemption.â€
Not worthy of redemption. Hmmm.
He goes on:
The Joker espouses a nihilist philosophy concerning the arbitrariness of the code of morality in civilized society; it is but a thin veneer, a construct intended for our consolation. If you tear away at the surface, “civilized people will eat each other.†As The Joker puts it, “madness is like gravity; all it takes is a little push.†In a wonderfully comic take on a Nietzschean sentiment, he sums up his beliefs: “Whatever does not kill you makes you stranger.†His character also illustrates the parasitic status of evil and nihilism. A thoroughgoing nihilist could not muster the energy to destroy or create. As The Joker puts it at one point, he’s like the dog chasing a car; he has no idea what he would do if he caught it.
When I was watching the movie, the Joker’s riotous but somehow coherent soliloquies on chaos and the “arbitrariness of the code of morality” struck me as frighteningly real. I could imagine some of history’s most ruthless characters feeding off similar rationales.
I’ve never been a Batman guy. To me, the story always came down to: “His parents got murdered. He’s real angry. End of story.”
But I thought The Dark Knight was powerful in a deeply disturbing way, too good (and scary) for a comic book movie.
Hibbs writes that the movie owes a great debt to “classic film noir.” He explains what he means beautifully:
Modernity is about human beings exercising control over nature and thus taking control of their destinies; in our modern technological project, knowledge and power are one. The postmodern turn in noir is about the loss of control, the absence of intelligibility, and the threat of powerlessness. But the quest has something pre-modern about it—a sense of human limitations, of the dependence of human beings on one another and on events not in their control. In this world, the outcome of the quest is tenuous and uncertain.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 9:54 am by Gary Stern.
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The world of religion, we don't have to tell you, is vast. The purpose of this blog is for Stern to note, flag and comment on some of the more interesting religious developments on the scene – weighty and quirky, somber and laughable, far away and just down the road. He won't interpret Scripture, take sides in conflicts or judge anyone. But he will take advantage of the journalist's license to observe.
