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The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the
all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the
animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many
angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves
feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture
reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it
all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused
audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
The rich symbolism in this
spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few
notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We
like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken.
The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more
exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no
consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only
of torturers and their mug victims.
Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic
vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing
completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a.
zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly
accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three
football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal
computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the
city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of
techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating
things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of
the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid
glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid
exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"
At the center of all this is the
character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and
reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath
Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic
deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on
screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played
him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially
wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's
greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award
for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)
The Joker is not so much as person
as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no
fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an
evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so
he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things
up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to
do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at
face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now
threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of
our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening
capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their
motivations to us.
By the way, forget about God here or
anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All
that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far).
And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible
idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of
"the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused
about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy --
instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness
has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be
understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies,
meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can
bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for
thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the
menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to
imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City --
literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the
movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve
whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."
A few other striking elements of
this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the
story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses
every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail
him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile
hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human
carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously
aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face
of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world
is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what
an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which
investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and
explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless
city.
Finally there is the derivation of
all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since
we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American
landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're
so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're to far gone -- and
even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest
of the world. It is
already making a fortune out there.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and
strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at
war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion
subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more from James Howard
Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his
blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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