My previous post on Star Trek and wonder caused a reader to ask what I thought of the thematic darkness of Deep Space Nine, one of the later Star Trek series. The show takes up war and crime in the Star Trek future to a greater extent than any other—its final seasons are tangled up in a war between the Federation and the totalitarian Dominion. But this show is no darker, I think, than the two darkest Star Trek movies—and all of them manage to preserve wonder. To understand how, it’s worth turning to the best English-language science-fiction self-help book out there, Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. He poses the following thought experiment:
Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look—it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions—good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide—be a bore?
Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
This is, in a sense, the situation of the final season of Deep Space Nine and the self-conscious Alamo analogy it constructs. It also helps to explain the end of The Wrath of Khan. Captain Kirk has been feeling his age—and, peering through reading glasses in the midst of a battle, has looked it. But in the movie’s closing moment, he declares, “I feel young.”
He doesn’t feel invigorated by his reunion with a former love or the son he never knew about, by his resumption of command or the thrill of battle. Only coming within seconds of losing all these things allows him to say that he feels young. A life that has become too mundane is threatened—and because of that threat, Kirk, for a moment, is allowed to perceive the sublime.
Maybe Star Trek and other cultural markers weren’t optimistic despite Vietnam, the threat of nuclear warfare, or Carter-era “malaise,” but were hopeful precisely because of them. It’s a wonderful thing to live in an era without existential threats to national survival—but, as Walker Percy knew, it’s very difficult to see the Acropolis when the only thing that threatens it is air pollution. With their darker, more dangerous plots, our contemporary re-boots of famous franchises put us in a position to wonder at what, threatened, we can suddenly notice. The Batman of The Dark Knight is certainly in a position to do this. But while he’s by no means bored, it isn’t at all clear he can see the Acropolis. There’s only the shadow of an object there, just as dark as anything around it.
March 7th, 2013 | 5:01 pm
Although I’m far from a Christopher Nolan fanboy, a humanity uncommon to action-films and attempts at contemporary popular-myth emerges in the Dark Knight Rises. While the trilogy’s finale doesn’t quite expunge the idealism and fideism–the split between hope and realism–of the previous films, the hunger of something better rises.
We see a subtle example of an awakened humanity fairly early in the film, just as the storm is brewing amidst the darkness and shadows. When Bane brutally beats Batman, we see Catwoman–underneath a fragile woman rather than the outward femme fatale she projects herself–begin to tear and cry. This subtle, yet surprisingly touching, display of humanity is unusual in action-films. The audience clearly isn’t meant to take sadistic pleasure in the beating, but to recognize Bane–driven by a disordered and vengeful sense of justice–as humanity gone wrong, turned into a monstrosity.
Even earlier, we see the need for realism rather than fideism emerge when Alfred affirms, risking of his friendship with Bruce, the need to “stop trying to outsmarting the truth and let the truth have its day.”
At the end of the film, it becomes clearer–though never stated–that Bruce devoted himself to incarnate human lives, however wicked and selfish, not an ideal. Innocent may be a strong word to use around Gotham, as the vengeful Talia al Ghul says, but humanity is never a lost cause.
Bruce Wayne attempts to defeat evil via jujitsu—disguising himself in the shadows in order to defeat the shadows of evil. Yet, as we see in the sewer-fight scene with Bane, shadows belong to evil; evil disguises, the good is transparent. There is a hunger for something better in TDKR but ultimately hope is reduced to escape and anonymity rather than transparency. (The transparency of the Cross is more awesome than any clean-slate).
March 8th, 2013 | 8:37 am
I agree the series was the best Batman ever but it had its flaws. The idea that the League of Shadows had to punish Gotham for being ‘corrupt’ never made much sense. But Liam Neison’s accent may let us overlook the odd mission of a group whose mission is to punish crime among Chinese farmers and Gotham but nowhere inbetween. Bane’s decision to embrace that mission was never really explained, esp. since Liam so mistreated the man who saved his daughter.
The real capstone was the 2nd movie with the Joker which I read as a take off on the Book of Job. His motive was to make things so bad that he would force people to ‘reveal themselves’ and make them do things they would swear they would never do in ‘normal life’ at the end even forcing Batman to embrace a lie rather than the truth.
March 8th, 2013 | 2:52 pm
Not to engage in a lengthy discussion about the trilogy’s plot, but in Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul explains that–in the story of course–the League of Shadows was behind the “cleansing” of every civilization that became corrupt beyond saving. Gotham–the metropolis of the world in the story–was the next target. The execution of the thief farmer was a test for Bruce Wayne’s initiation–his compassion, his humanity, differentiated his thirst for justice from their vengeance driven idealism.
Ra’s excommunicated Bane because his deformed face and his very horrid existence was a reminder of the hell he sent his wife to. Bane embraced Ra’s mission because it was the will of the one person he cared for–Talia, a daughter almost to him. Talia never forgave her father for excommunicating her protector, Bane, until Bruce allowed her father Ra’s to die. Although her father’s expulsion of Bane pained Talia for years, she agreed with her father’s vengeful plan. Bane and Talia believed the world irredeemably unjust and, similar to the way that Ra’s took his guilt and anger out on Bane, they sought to extract vengeance for all their sufferings on Bruce, a man who dare show compassion for a city where “innocent” is a strong word to use.
March 8th, 2013 | 6:44 pm
I suppose strictly speaking its coherent. Just not very convincing. Gotham seems like an exceptionally bad place in the first movie but not the 2nd two. Why is it deemed so worthy of punishment when it’s not so different from every other city in the developed world?
Let’s not ask how people who live in Tibetan mountains (or is next to a giant hole in a Middle Eastern desert?) manage to not only zip into Gotham but climb to the top of its social establishment?
March 9th, 2013 | 4:15 pm
Gotham seems less bad in the second film because Batman drove Gotham’s organized-crime off the streets and into hiding. Yet, Batman’s theatrics cause the Joker’s appearance and its accompanying escalation in destruction–things get visibly dangerous in Gotham once the dynamiter appears. In the third film, Gotham is peaceful on the surface due to the no-parole Dent-act, yet evil is rising—and eventually resurfaces from–beneath where Bruce and Gordon buried their lie. Likewise, Gotham chose, amidst their flimsy illusory peace, to bury neglected social-problems out-of-sight and out-of-mind–namely, the increase in troubled at-risk and orphaned youth. The orphaned youths go down to the sewers when they age-out of the orphanage because there isn’t any work for them up in the city.
In the story, Gotham is the metropolis of the world–a center of trade, commerce, innovation and culture–corrupted into a city run by greedy elites, self-interested bureaucrats, and crooked law-enforcement and inhabited by selfish citizens. Gotham epitomizes a beacon of development and progress gone wrong–power wasted on greed, indulgence and injustice. As for the pit, Christopher Nolan’s Batman-trilogy is a popularized contemporary quasi-myth and the pit-prison holds obvious metaphoric significance of the common mythic themes death and re-birth. As for the Talia‘s “zipping into Gotham” and climbing the city’s social-ladder, this is a pretty silly objection and thus I will answer in a half-silly manner. The al-Ghuls are presumably powerful and wealthy and Talia actually mentions her PLANE (which gives a hint about the prologue). Furthermore, Talia is presumably intelligent and worldly (so she ought to know how to get to Gotham). Thus, with resources, intelligence, wit, charm, beauty, enchantment–she is Marion Cotillard after all–Talia could easily make it in Gotham.
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