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When I was in San Francisco a few months ago attending the PCA/ACA Conference, I sat on a panel with a colleague who was presenting a paper discussing Batman and the levels of Kohlberg’s moral reasoning. Though an interesting premise, the audience (and I) felt that his topic was too broad: rather than using Batman as a character with a seventy year history and multiple incarnations, he should have restricted his analysis to only one of those incarnations. The overwhelming recommendation? Frank Miller’s Batman.
Then a couple of weeks ago during a friendly debate with my friend Steve Mollmann about Superman: Birthright, I invoked Miller’s Batman as an example of a complex depiction of a superhero that intrigued me more than Superman. Yet these references to Miller made me realize that I remembered little of The Dark Knight Returns, and perhaps remedying that situation should be a priority before I go shoot my mouth off about it and look like an ass.
I was surprised to see how much the novel is a work of its time. With the decrepit city and the Cold War paranoia, I didn’t need to see the Reagan look-alike president to know where this all was coming from. Yet what made this work for me wasn’t the gritty depiction of Batman in a Gotham gone wild, but the political and cultural aspects of the world that Miller has constructed here.
Half the book demonstrates the view of the action through the local media, something right out of Neil Postman’s criticism of television in the early 1980s. The pages are divided into many small panels that evoke the television screen, and forcing you to be an observer as you would if you were a citizen in this world allows the reader to analyze the morality at work in a different light than one traditionally would.
Another interesting idea is the fact that Bruce is presented as all too human, feeling the pain of old age and beatings, juxtaposed to Clark who looks just like he did fifteen years before. See, there is literally only one Superman. Yet what’s to stop any citizen in Gotham from becoming the Batman? Obviously they might not have the access to the billionaire’s gadgets, but essentially Batman is a vigilante, something that any of us could become should we really want to. Batman can clean up the streets I guess, but crime is too systemic problem for one man to solve, and therefore Miller has Bruce train the Mutant Gang remnants at the end to work together fighting crime.
The appearance of Reagan is all the more relevant now that we have Republicans and Democrats alike stepping over their mothers to be the second coming of. But Reagan was one of the worst presidents ever, and his depiction here will tell you why. He is always presented with an American flag and spouts of lame rhetoric about defending the cause of freedom. He manipulates a sentient man to do his bidding, and that manipulation leads directly to a nuclear exchange.
Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns has been canonized in the comic field, so you kind of need to read it for any sort of credibility. I didn’t love it this time, but I did find a lot of points to ponder, not all of which I have mentioned here. One thing I would like any readers to respond to is this: does the graphic novel’s depiction of Batman leave you supporting his methods, the idea being that he does it for the greater good? If so, how does this square with your notion of vigilante justice in our world?
When we criticize the government, I think it is imperative to remember what it does: collect and spend money. So when I read stories like this, I think, ‘These are my tax dollars at work?’
At a high school in Oceanside, California, police officers entered high school classrooms on a Monday morning and informed students that several of their classmates had been killed instantly in wrecks caused by drun
k drivers. Understandably, the teenagers wept. Some became hysterical. Why is this a story? It was a hoax. Everyone was fine; the story was concocted as a way to drive home the perils of drunken driving to impressionable teenagers.
What the hell were these people thinking? When I was in high school, two girls that were in my chemistry class were killed in a drunk driving accident. I wasn’t friendly with them, though I knew their names, yet the news shook me. Friends of the girls were bereft. It is rare that I have seen such shock and pain as I did that afternoon in class.
I don’t think we really have a sense of life and death when we are teenagers: though we intellectually know we won’t live forever, the reality hasn’t hit us emotionally. But when one of your peers is killed, it wakes you up in a hurry. Extra counselors came into our school when a death occurred to help students deal with their grief. I even remember some students going home early because the grief was too much for them. Classes ground to a halt for at least a solid day.
Perpetrating such a hoax is an unconscionable act, despite the rationalization given by authorities. Teenage drunken driving is a problem, but inflicting emotional duress in such a callous manner in the name of scaring students straight is so egregious that I find it difficult to imagine how this was green lit.
Were I a parent and/or taxpayer in Oceanside, California, I would be even more outraged than I am now. This is how you are going to spend our tax dollars? Damaging someone emotionally to the point that they need counseling, counseling that I will likely have to pay for with even more of my tax dollars.
What the hell were they thinking?
When I was a junior in high school, the first stirrings of the 1996 presidential election began. For some reason, I was sent an offer to receive a year of Newsweek for only ten bucks, and my dad got it for me. I read all the articles on politics each week, and as the campaign moved forward into the primaries, I got hooked. I began to get up early on Sundays to watch Face the Nation and Meet the Press just so I could keep up with everything, even more amazing that my family had finally gotten off my case about sleeping through church. It thrilled me that there was television that not only challenged me, but didn’t spell everything out either. The assumption was that you would have a certain le
vel of knowledge if you were viewing, and it forced me to learn and catch up. Bob Schieffer and Tim Russert challenged me.
There is supposed to be a line separating news and entertainment, not to mention journalism and politics. And for the most part this works in print, but I’m not altogether sure that it’s even practical on television. When Russert appeared on the screen, he not only was someone highly connected within the world of Washington politics; he also was a character who people really liked and welcomed into their homes. He came across as a good guy, but also an authority. He would grill those who were in the upper echelons of power, yet not disrespect them by undermining or attacking them. He was assertive and unrelenting, but when he wished the hapless Bills good luck at the end of a broadcast, you felt like he was the kind of person you’d want to have a beer with.
This was even more obvious n his MSNBC interview show. He demonstrated real delight when he was talking with a person he found interesting about a subject he was interested in (usually history or politics, or political history). Despite the fact that he was an aide for a Democratic senator, he did a good job of taking the opposite side of an issue when questioning people.
The last time I watched Meet the Press was at the end of last year, when Russert grilled Mitt Romney for an hour. I thought Romney did pretty well against the onslaught, but it reminded me why I liked Russert so much: he pressed hard and asked incredibly tough questions. But his show was about the questions and answers, not the personalities of the host and commentators. In a television world being overrun with style over substance, Russet always thrived on presenting a lot of substance with style. It was the best of both worlds.
I’m not one to get upset about famous people I’ve never met passing away, and that’s not the case here. But there is a soft spot in my heart for a man that helped foster my interest in politics, an interest that has led to a deeper understanding of the world we live in. Though I no longer watch television, I still feel like I’ll be missing something this election season.
Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River is a movie that you have all figured out by the end of the first act. But the film is done so well that you don’t care, and you end up feeling that you’ve seen a great movie. Eastwood’s direction is reserved and refuses to call attention to itself, allowing the marvelous acting of the primary five actors to move to the forefront.
The plot is simple. As children, Sean, Jimmy, and Dave are playing hockey in the street and writing t
heir names in wet cement when Dave is abducted by two child molesters and only manages to escape four days later. Flash forward to the present, where the boys are now in their late 30s, and Jimmy’s nineteen-year-old daughter is murdered, an event that causes the three old friends who have sense become estranged to cross paths again. On the night of the murder, Dave arrives home covered in blood and presents a conflicting explanation to his wife, causing us to question whether he committed the murder. And Sean is a cop assigned to the case.
Everyone in the movie seems to be harboring some sort of dark secret. Dave (Tim Robbins) has emerged from his captivity a changed man. Jimmy (Sean Penn) is an ex-con who’s gone straight, yet a sense of malice hangs over everything that we know about him. And Sean (Kevin Bacon) has a wife who has left him, and who frequently calls but won’t say a word.
As with most murder mysteries, it isn’t too hard to figure out where the narrative is going. It’s too obvious to assume Dave is the killer because he is covered in blood, so the rest of the film is one of dramatic irony: though we aren’t exactly sure what happened, we are absolutely sure of what didn’t.
Tim Robbins has the most wrenching role. One feels sorry for him since he has never been the same since his abuse, but there is a violent side to him that frightens you. Marcia Gay Harden (Dave’s wife Celeste) and Laura Linney (Jimmy’s wife Annabeth) both give stellar performances and the relationship between husbands and wives is a powerful component of the story. Celeste is quick to doubt Dave’s story involving the blood and ultimately she betrays him, while Annabeth is quick to exonerate Jimmy’s misdeeds, a role that is akin to Lady Macbeth.
A wrenching film, Mystic River’s actors well deserved their Academy Awards. And despite the somewhat conventional murder mystery narrative, the depth of the characters and the fantastic performances make this a film worthy of your time.
Craig Thompson produces a powerful coming of age story in Blankets, and a lengthy one too: it weighs in at almost 600 pages. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household in rural Wisconsin, the semi-autobiographical character named Craig must share a bed with his little brother. He grows up in a cultural environment that I know all too well. There are signs on the road that proclaim ‘Jesus is the only fire insurance,’ and the boys are force
d to attend a church in which even questioning things in good faith is strongly discouraged and dismissed.
At a winter church camp, Craig just doesn’t see how so many people can actually all be on the same page in regards to their worshipping of Jesus, much less be able to jointly carry out any kind of cohesive policy in the world. But at this camp he meets a somewhat kindred spirit named Raina, and most of the remainder of the novel follows their relationship.
Thompson exploits the graphic form quite well. The snowy landscapes provide a sense of otherworldliness, and all adult authority figures are presented as giants, towering over the young boys and filing them with fear and intimidation. Though he is questioning his faith to some degree, Craig is fairly devout and Thompson presents a war between his desires and the Bible graphically. As he is told about Hell for the first time, the young Craig’s imagination shows people in agony in a style that is much more traditionally gothic than the typical style of the primary narrative. And upon learning that the book of Ecclesiastes had been revised and added to many years after it original composition, the artist presents the more hopeful additions with cartoonish pigs, contrasting the presentation of the darker statements, which reflect a surrealist type of horror.
Though the love story between Raina and Craig worked quite well and was very believable to me, I was more affected by Craig’s stifling religious environment because it reminded me of my own as a boy. When questioning his pastor about the changes made to Ecclesiastes, the minister dismisses him by saying that even if some additions were made as the translations took place across the centuries, one shouldn’t let that fact dissuade them from God’s holy word.
When I first started college, I went to religious school where all students were required to take a survey class in both Old and New Testament. In those classes, I learned much more than I had in years of going to church, and now religious history and theology is a prominent interest for me. So many of the implications behind the history were fascinating and caused me to look at familiar stories in a new way. Learning how the Samaritans were viewed in the time of Jesus gives the parable a deeper meaning. Yet none of this was ever discussed in the church we attended. And in having conversations with my mother and grandmother, both who had been attending churches for decades, I realized that they had no idea about any of this stuff. This was the basis of all their beliefs and yet they were so immersed within the culture of unquestioning orthodoxy that even simple matters, like the Pentateuch being attributed to Moses making no sense as he dies in the middle of it, were heresy to them.
In the last chapter of the book, Craig as a young adult returns home and has a conversation about leaving Christianity behind with his brother. He adds that he doesn’t feel he can ever tell their parents because they would think of nothing else but saving his immortal soul. And this is precisely how I feel as well. After years of hearing that the answer to my questions was God, but then being forbidden from asking questions in God’s church has left me feeling like Craig: apart from my family, yet overwhelmingly confident that I am on the right side.
As one would expect, there is a blanket motif throughout Blankets, and towards the end of the novel Craig notes as he walks through snow how ‘satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface.’ Thomson would be happy to know that no only were his marks satisfying to make, but they were very satisfying to read as well.
From the opening three and a half minute continuous shot of Touch of Evil, following a bomb in the trunk of a car, the viewer is wowed by Orson Welles’s directorial ability. He has conversations move from hallways into 
elevators and then out onto another floor without ever breaking the shot. One of the last film noirs, these cinematography choices help frame the characters and set the moods in ways that compliment the narrative. While the film is no Citizen Kane, it is a masterful effort.
Charlton Heston plays Mike Vargas, a Mexican anti-narcotics officer who on his honeymoon bride Janet Leigh witnesses the explosion of the aforementioned car. The bomb originated in Mexico, but the explosion takes place in the US making jurisdictional issues bring Vargas into the world of Sheriff Hank Quinlan, a huge Orson Welles. I felt the plot was fairly straight forward, though of course some of the choices made for dramatic effect made no real world sense. But seeing Quinlan deviate from the investigation to pursue his own ends, ultimately framing Vargas and his wife for murder because he resents the intrusion to his case and he is a racist, enraptured me. Welles is brilliant in this role, and though I had a hard time accepting Heston as a Mexican, he was sufficient in his as well.
Quinlan has a legendary ‘intuition’: he has a hunch about what happens, and he always seems to be right. Though we quickly learn that these hunches are helped by the planting of evidence, we can’t judge the sheriff too quickly. There is reason to think that perhaps his hunches are right after all, and that he is helping justice along rather than playing by the rules. Mexican officer Vargas is a by-the-book man though, and once he realizes Quinlan’s MO, the two are pitted against each other.
How progressive was the storyline for 1959? Quinlan embodies the typical Mexican police stereotype: shady, alcoholic, and corrupt. Meanwhile, Mexican Vargas is the hero of the film who is upstanding and crusades for justice and fairness, as the typical American officer is usually portrayed. This inversion is powerful on its own, but even more so when one considers the environment in which the film was released. (One might also suspect that the box office failure it endured may have been tied to this in some way.)
The narrative is more complex that good v. evil, enriching a visually stunning film to greatness. It would be hard to say Welles is an underappreciated genius, but for someone to say he never did anything worthwhile after Kane at 26 years is way off the mark. One could watch this film merely to see the directorial prowess, ignoring the acting and the narrative, because Touch of Evil is about what the cinema can do as much as it is about Quinlan v. Vargas. An excellent movie worthy of your attention.
By identifying ten steps in The End of America that all dictators and would-be dictators take in order to close down an open society, Naomi Wolf is able to argue convincingly that all ten of these steps are underway in the United States today. She argues convincingly that citizens need to rise up and challenge the powers that be to insure that our country as we know it isn’t lost to us.
Is easily digestible chapters, Wolf compares the current political climate in the US with the conditi
ons in other free states before or as they turned totalitarian. Most often the analogy is drawn with Hitler and the National Socialist Party and Mussolini’s Italy. This resonates especially in chapters on the development of a paramilitary force answerable only to the ruler and restriction of the free press. What struck this reader was how easily the current climate towards the press has shifted to intimidation factors that make outright control unnecessary.
But her presentation is not without its flaws. Wolf never adequately demonstrates that these ten steps are used by all dictators as they attempt to achieve power. Her examples are selected so as to be relevant to her arguments about the US, and while the book is meant to be a short cri de coeur, I believe a firmer grounding in history might have served her better. At times Wolf also fails to show a causal link making her examples relevant. For example, in a chapter arguing the point of surveillance of citizens, she drops in that Condoleeza Rice is ‘an expert on a least one surveillance society, which she analyzed in a book she coauthored, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed.’ The fact that a political science professor seeking tenure published such a book should surprise no one, and Wolf fails to make this one sentence relevant to the rest of the passage. Though almost all statements are sourced, more than one slipped through without providing a reference.
The brevity of the piece often makes one wish that she had gone into more detail, even if only to mention texts for further reading. One of Foucault’s most recognizable societal criticisms involved the Panopticon, a prison in which one guard could monitor hundreds of prisoners and maintain order because none would ever know when he or she was being watched. Yet Wolf never mentions this in her arguments on the surveillance of citizens. Perhaps such a connection is unnecessary, but Discipline and Punish is the type of text that would support her argument, giving her a solid appeal to authority.
Despite these criticisms, The End of America should serve as a jarring call to arms for people who believe that it can’t happen here. The parallels are eerie and prescient. And while America is unlikely to be subject to a violent closing down of our open society; we are vulnerable erosions in democracy that will look very American on the surface yet leave us less free.
