The Politics of the Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is, in many ways, the ideal movie to blog about. Its complex, so complex that I'm sure I missed a few things. After seeing it a second time, I still wasn't sure whether The Joker, when he was informing Batman of the Harvey Dent/Rachael Dawes hostage situation, told Batman who was at which address. My friend and I had conflicting memories about this, and I heard a reporter from Slate say that Batman had intended to save Harvey when I'm 90% sure he said he was going to save Rachael (though who can tell w/ that ridiculously gruff voice!). You can pause and review a DVD, but not theater flick, so we're left with the collective memory of the blogosphere to get everything straight.

But more than facts, its the meaning of The Dark Knight that needs unpacking and debating, specifically the political meaning. I'm reminded of why outlandish fiction (particularly sci-fi and comic books movies which, in some ways, have taken over sci-fi's domain in the past 5 years) can work so much better as a way of talking through issues of the day than more literal historical fiction like that rash of Iraq war movies from the last year. Even a movie I adore, The Lives of Others, is ill-suited to really dig into the philosophical and moral issues around surveillance in an impartial way. We know who to side with - those fighting the Stasi. Similarly, we know to side against the US administration and with the hapless, brave soldiers in most movies about 'nam or Iraq.

It would be very easy to read The Dark Knight as an allegory for post 9/11 America, though we don't have to read it that way. In fact, I think its a great way to think about a hypothetical world with hypothetical heroes and villains that our world might come to resemble in the future, in which case we should think about how we would act in those situations.

Being a Role Model: Batman wanted to be a symbol of good actions, so that if he died, there would be others who would take his place to step up and do the right thing. Trouble is a lot of those people bastardize that good symbol and put their own spin on it. To them, its OK for Batman to carry a gun, and b/c they're not mega-millionaires with military R&D people working for them, they don't have much choice but to carry guns and wear hockey pads. Then there's the matter of inspiring madmen like the Joker/terrorists, but its tough to say that Batman's hubris and his clones created The Joker, just as it would be tough to say that any given culture or Cowboy president created terrorists, though its to their advantage to make you think that.

Surveillance: In real world "prisoner's dilemma" situations, the best course of action is to try as hard as you can to find a third option. Its Batman's use of illicit surveillance that resolves the prisoner's dilemma on the two ferries. Thanks to the cell phones as cameras, he's able to track down the Joker before he throws the switch and kills the people on the two ferries who, in a strictly Utilitarian sense, made the wrong decision not to kill each other. There are two significant things about that cell-phone scene in the Bat lab: Lucius Fox objects to the surveillance on moral grounds, and even though he capitulates, the fact that he objected makes it more thought provoking than if the scene were just passed off as cool gadgetry (Bond, anyone?). And before we jump to making the obligatory Orwellian metaphor, its worth noting that the civilians do not know they're being spied upon. When people know they're being spied on by their leaders, it can have a chilling effect on their behavior. But if they don't know, well then, is there any harm? This leads us to the next moral dilemma.

Lying to the Public: Bruce has trouble with this one at first, wanting to come out and tell the world he's been living a lie, coming clean and telling them that he's Batman. He wants crime to be fought by a public figure - Harvey Dent (Obama to Bruce's Bush? Just a thought). Alfred insists that there needs to be someone who does the dirty work, who makes decisions that he knows are unpopular and probably illegal. The solution? Do those deeds but invent a persona that is distanced from you that can take the public's disapproval. At first, its just Bruce's reputation that needs to be kept clean. In the end, of course, its Harvey's. But all of this assumes that the public simply can't handle the fact that a good person - Harvey Dent - did some really bad things. Knowing this would make them lose all faith in themselves. Is this true? What if we found evidence that MLK shot a bunch of people in an insane revenge seeking fit? Interesting question, but I really find it shocking that any movie would say that the answer is that the public can't handle the truth. What are we, children?

Killing people: I would argue that b/c Batman cannot kill anyone, even his arch nemesis, he has to commit other sins against the freedom of the people he protects. Sometimes, martyrs for non-violence don't get assassinated. Sometimes they live long enough to have to make some unpopular decisions, to see themselves become villains.

So what does the movie really say about any of these? I think it leaves a lot of questions open to debate. If the movie has a moral voice, it is not that of Bruce Wayne but that of Alfred. Bruce eventually comes around to Alfred's "things have to get worse before they get better" philosophy, which is oddly similar to Ra's Al Ghul's, the villain from Batman Begins. Something about the way in which Alfred and his message is presented makes it seem authoritative in a way that Bruce isn't. Bruce, like the audience, is trying to work through difficult real-world moral dilemmas, whereas Alfred seems to have it all figured out from his years of experience.

Still, I'm not convinced that if we are to call Alfred's version of reality a bit...right wing that we must dislike or dismiss the movie if we do not share those values. It reminds me of one of the most praised films of all time - The Searchers. From what I understand, critics love that movie b/c the morality it apparently presents in the end (lunatic racist hyper-macho psychopath hero decides to reform for no reason at the last minute) shows how ridiculous traditional Hollywood Western morality (and, by association, the morality of 1950's America) really is. You could read the end of The Dark Knight the same way. Its holding up a mirror to our political culture. We're scared of people we think just want to watch the world burn (maybe you think its terrorists, maybe you think its Cheney/Bush/corporations). We want a knight in shining armor, but sooner or later, that knight has to do some things that aren't going to look so good to others. In order to maintain power in this democratic culture that values popularity above all else, the knight has to hide his or her dirty work and maintain a nice face for children and the ignorant masses. At least that's my reading. What's yours?

Superhero Movies - More Diverse Than You Think

At the risk of using a classic snowclone, Superhero (or comic book) movies are the new Westerns. What I mean is that the genre is both popular and diverse enough to be regarded as a venue for working through our collective philosophical and psychological issues.

Other genres (horror, melodrama, comedy) also hold up a mirror to our collective psyches, but not in the way that the Big movies do. The lesser genres show us what we want - morally, aesthetically, emotionally - but only part of what some of us want. The dominant genre of the time, be it Westerns, gangster movies, or superhero flicks, reflects most of what most of us want. I would consider comparing gangster movies and TV shows to Westerns, if you were to say that Westerns were more of a way of defining masculinity. But I think Westerns, in their time, were bigger than gangster films/shows like The Sopranos, Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface are today.

No one would doubt that superhero tales are quite popular, more popular in the last 5 years than ever before and more popular than any other type of film with the possible exception of talking-animal-CGI films. If you were keen on making an older comparison, you could liken them to myths or fairy tails, other dominant genres of their times. But what about my claim that the genre is diverse?

Enter The Dark Knight, in some sense a synthesis of the superhero movie and the gangster flick. And yes, I know Batman isn't technically a superhero because he doesn't have superpowers. But genres and classification aren't defined that way. They're defined by the language we use to refer to the texts, by marketers, vendors, critics, and fans. And I'm willing to assume that most of them would classify this as a superhero blockbuster film. While watching it, I couldn't help but compare it to another superhero blockbuster - Iron Man. These films came out in the same year, they're of the same genre, I'm willing to wager they make roughly the same money (they're as popular as one another), and, significantly, they have almost the same amount of critical acclaim (79 for Iron Man on metacritic, to Dark Knight's 82).

If we were going to plop down $15 to see the Dark Knight on the Imax, maybe we'd like to have a good idea of what we're in for. Ads are of no service here, as they remain startlingly homogeneous. They have to. Ads have to appeal to the largest group possible, even if they have to misrepresent their product, which they frequently do. Ads for Iron Man, Hancock, and Dark Knight look pretty similar to one another - lots of action, some ironic wit, good-looking wounded-yet-rough men, sexy women. To take Dark Knight as an example, its interesting to note that almost all of the clips in the many previews come from the first 2/3 of the movie (which, in my opinion, are the least interesting part of the movie, certainly not as morally complex as the last third). So ads are not a good indicator of content.

What about critics? Shouldn't critics be the corrective to misleading advertising? Well, it depends on how much you bother to read. If you're just looking for general thumbs-up-thumbs-down assessment, as most people are, then the critics are of no use. Yes, all of the critics like both movies, but I have a tough time believing that the public will like both movies equally. One is pretty frothy and fun, the other is pitch black and quite complex. If you dig a little deeper and read the reviews, you can see that most critics recognize these differences. Its important to say that I do not think critics should've praised Iron Man, damned Dark Knight, or vice-versa. But to fail to acknowledge the stark differences between these movies, as thumbs-up-thumbs-down reviewing does, seems to indicate that there's something wrong with that kind of popular film criticism.

Let's go over some of the differences:

Humor: the humor in Iron Man relies primarily on understatement - the hero reacts to a huge explosion with raised eyebrows. There are plenty of catchphrases and instances of Tony Stark reacting in more laid-back fashion than the situation dictates. In the Dark Knight, the humor is more dry and British, quicker and, depending on your taste for these things, either clever or too clever. There's more gallows humor as one would expect with the Joker (here's hoping that Heath Ledger's death doesn't totally overwhelm critical appraisal of this film).

Romance subplot: While both protagonists are playboys, Tony Stark gets the girl in the end while Bruce Wayne is left to brood over a dead lover. Not exactly a minor difference in terms of tone.

Morality: Iron Man dabbles with moral complexity, casting a reformed arms dealer as hero (who ultimately ends up using weapons he designed to kill bad guys, much like the military does). The Dark Knight, on the other hand, had scene after scene in which characters were made to ask themselves (and the audience) tough moral questions: is it ever moral to kill large numbers of people? Is it okay to lie to the public in order to maintain order? Is it okay to survey the public without their knowing? Does using force against the enemy breed more insidious, amoral enemies? Can we delegate the killing that our situation demands to superheroes (read: soldiers) because we can't do what needs to be done? The film was practically an ethics class.

There's one scene that really brings home the dissimilarity. At the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark holds a press conference and announces that he is Iron Man. The scene is subversive, in that it goes against what we know about superheroes: they like to keep their true identity a secret. In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent calls a press conference and announces that he is Batman (when we know that he's not). Iron Man is content with a few double crosses here and there but doesn't want to confuse the audience with too many. The Dark Knight assumes the audience can maintain an understanding of character motivation even when there are many, many more double crosses.

If there's anything to learn from this, it is that looking at who wrote and directed the movie might be a better indicator than any as to what the film will be like, lending credence to the beleaguered auteur theory. I think that auteur theory is imperfect in that it fails to recognize the fact that creators could create something especially similar to other creators' works and dissimilar to their own previous work. This happens plenty, and the good critic can recognize it.

So, what are the recurring authorial themes? Right away, there's identity. In the first two scenes, the Nolans play with our expectations of who's who, just as they did with the twins in The Prestige, the hero/villain of Memento, and superhero-as-symbol-transcending -individual concept in Batman Begins. They take the idea of superhero's symbolic power being more important than their individual identity to a new level by making a mockery of the personal-history-as-destiny concept. The Joker tells a couple of different versions of how he got to be as fucked up as he is, and none of them is the truth. Each version suits his situation. This film deals far more with moral, political, social, and philosophical issues than psychological or personal ones. Another point of difference from some comic book heroes (Hulk) but not terribly different than others (Spiderman).

And for those of you who think web criticism doesn't matter, check out this article from Slate. Be advised that the article never claims that critics cause a movie to be popular. Only that they are able to anticipate the popularity of a movie better than non-experts and better than chance. Surely, some critics exert some effect on the popularity of a movie (probably the ones who have been especially good at predicting how much the public will like it). Anyway, if critics learn to write from the point of view of the experienced expert and not from the point of view of the cultural elitist, then they will be valued widely. As long as they assume that their job is to say what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is trash, instead of being able to distill the differences of films and be able to present those differences in a way that consumers can make decisions based on them, they'll be writing for just another niche.

Why Facebook? Why Not? The Social Networking Divide

One of my friends just joined Facebook and was greeted with tons of posts that basically said the same thing: "what took you so long?" The criticism isn't altogether serious, but its probably rooted in some truth: maybe those of us who are surrounded by heavy internet users find it more "normal" for someone to join a social networking site than to not join. Normal is just a numbers issue. If 80% of your peers are doing something and you're not, then you're abnormal in that respect. Obviously, being normal isn't necessarily good or bad, but its something that people tend to be aware of on some level.

In my quest to find out whether it was normal to join a social networking site if you were 31 and from my hometown in Massachusetts, I noticed this funny little trend. About 1/3 of my high school class listed themselves on Facebook as part of the class of 94. I thought I'd check to see how many people per class were on Facebook for other years, expecting the number to go up the closer you got to this year (on account of millenials' affinity for all things digital). Instead, I found that the number stayed right about at 1/3 for the past 15 years, then started to drop off in the early 90's to about 1/5. it stays there for about a decade, until the early 80's when it goes down to 1/10. Surprisingly, there are people who graduated from our little high school in the 60's on Facebook! (didn't even know our school was around back then).

I'd suspect that as you go back further in time, people would be less apt to join b/c Facebook is primarily a young person's network (unlike, say, reunion.com which probably advertises on email sites which older people are more apt to use). But then what accounts for the plateau at 1/3 around the mid-90's? Maybe every group separates into two halves: the technologically outgoing and the technologically shy (which don't necessarily correlate to real-world outgoing/shy groups). Both groups seem to regard the other with a kind of contempt.

So there's roughly 2/3 that either doesn't want to be on Facebook or, like me, forgot to mark themselves as alumni. Is it people who are so "well off," socially, romantically, and professionally, that they don't feel the need to join this particular network? Conversely, they might be such big losers that they wouldn't show up at the online equivalent of a class reunion. Maybe they're just not into social technology.

It made me wonder: what are the motivations for joining Facebook? There's people who use it to network, usually related to dating or their occupation. There's "staying in touch with friends," though I'm dubious of this reason; email works just fine for that. There's some sort of nebulous desire to be with familiar people, some desire for company. There's the reunion factor, which I think is rooted in people's desire to compare themselves to one another, using the internet as a means of social surveillance, as a way of determining how normal they are, be it whether they're married, how well they've aged, what job they have, where they went to school, etc. Its not something we like to admit, so I don't think you'd find it in self-reported motivation surveys. But still, it might be driving people to use the sites (you could find out by tracking how much people scan the news feeds and how much they actually message one another).

I've been doing some work here in Washington on closing the digital divide. In terms of the degree in which it socializes people and helps them learn about the world, the internet is more like public school and less like television. I know a fair amount of people who don't watch TV, and I don't think of them as fundamentally different than me or anyone else I know. But people who don't use the internet? Though there are some socio-economic, ethnic, and age gaps, plenty of poor people are on the internet, plenty of old people are on the internet, plenty of rural people, urban people, all genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities are on the internet. So internet culture isn't white, wealthy, or hetero (not to the degree that TV and film culture is), and in the future it might not even be especially young. After the years and years I've spent immersed in online culture, I'm starting to think of non-users the way that I think about people who didn't go to school. 80% of the US is part of something that they're not part of.

Social network adoption numbers aren't even close to 80%, and I'd guess they are and will continue to be much more popular among younger people who are shaping their public identities. But adoption rates have gone up steadily in the past few years. What if the 1/3 plateau is temporary? No doubt if you were to take MySpace into account, it would be closer to a half, maybe more (also keeping in mind that some high schools might be more apt to adopt Facebook than MySpace). At any point will there be genuine social pressure to join a network? If you say that you're not on any of these networks, will people assume that you're paranoid about technology or have something to hide?

I'd say yes, keeping in mind that there's a significant difference between people who have minimal online presences (people who've used Facebook once in the last year) and those who have no online presence. Light users may not be interested in finding others, but they've put themselves out there so that others, if properly motivated, could find them. There will always be people who hate this or that social networking site, but to hate them all will be like hating every person on the planet. Even most misanthropes have a friend or two.

Absolute Privacy

In the increasingly strident and polarized popular discourse surrounding privacy, people tend to break down into two categories.

Absolutists: the right to privacy, like freedom and justice, is an inalienable right and an abstract concept that does not have to be defined in any specific way relating to the real world. What I choose to watch on TV or YouTube is just as private as my social security number or 24-hour surveillance footage of me or what kind of cereal I choose to buy. Any monitoring of these activities or collection of data pertaining to them constitutes a violation of my Constitutional rights. These rights may as well have been handed down by God; that is to say the morality, logic, and appropriateness of their application to any given situation cannot be questioned. In fact, their strength derives from their universality, from the fact that they are appropriate to all possible situations (and, I would argue, from their vagueness).

Situationalists: The value of privacy in a given context depends on what can be gained by the individual or the society when it is sacrificed.

Imagine two worlds: one in which no one has any weapon larger than a slingshot and another in which everyone has an atomic bomb. In order to use any weapon in either world, people must go through various preparatory acts which include talking on the phone, emailing others, and doing other things in the privacy of their own homes. An absolutist would say that we should not monitor phonecalls, emails, or other private activities. We should work to make sure people don't use the bombs, and we should try to dismantle the bombs. But if we can't do those things, then it is worth running the risk of having a few angry people use the bombs and thereby destroy the world just so long as privacy is preserved. A situationalist would also advocate weapons control and anger management, but once those options have been exhausted, then they would say that the slingshot world requires one level of privacy (no wiretaps, etc) while the atomic bomb world requires another (24-hour surveillance).

We do not live in either of these worlds, but we've been moving steadily from the slingshot world to the atomic bomb world. Its increasingly easy for a small group of angry people to kill a lot of people. This has less to do with Bush or Bin Laden, Islam or Christianity, China or Palestine, and more to do with technology and our interconnectedness (side question: has our interconnection via the internet made us less vulnerable, as it was originally intended to do, or more vulnerable to attack?).

This steady move doesn't make the atomic bomb world an inevitability. We need arms control. We need to remember that two things made 9/11 as bad as it was: jet fuel and architecture. If jets were battery powered and people in buildings were more spread out, it would be harder to kill large numbers of people. We also need to figure out why people who launch attacks are so pissed off and try to do something to resolve those conflicts non-violently. Taking steps to reduce inequality, even if that means (god forbid) regulating a market or implementing a governmental program every now and then, would almost certainly help in this regard. Once we've done those things to the extent that we can, we need to decide whether we are absolutists or situationalists about the remaining risk and our privacy.

Resolutions: approximating the likelihood of and identifying the motivations for abuse of surveying power. Designing mechanisms to detect abuse and punishing abuse severely. Figuring out ways of assessing the risk of failing to survey the population properly and punishing the over-valuation or under-valuation of a threat severely. These are, of course, extremely difficult to even approximate. And yet, I would argue, this is what people in power are already doing, and this is what they must do. My hunch is that people who aren't in power (Joe Blow on the internet forum) tend to be absolutists because they do not have to face the negative consequences of being wrong. Those who are in power must face these consequences, and so they tend to be situationalists. If we were ever to have a more direct democracy and really give the power to the people, I'd wager that we'd make some pretty big mistakes b/c most people are not used to dealing with the consequences of very bad decisions made on a large scale. We'd learn, of course, but it would be pretty ugly.

The problems go beyond the rapid evolution of technology. I think that our culture (primarily on the left) is running into a conflict that we (primarily on the right) had when we tried to reconcile modernity with another document written in another era: the Bible. The way we think about the world - in particular language and the self - is not the way that we looked at it when the Constitution or the Bible were written. The shift happened gradually, as the population became more educated and interconnected, more industrialized. I'm not saying that the way we perceive our world and our selves is superior or inferior to the way we perceived them before; only that it is different, so different that words written in one paradigm, while still maintaining some semblance of meaning that applies to our lives today, need to be translated and updated.

This sounds really dangerous, I'll admit. This way lies moral relativism. But I'd argue that there is no other way to deal with our inner conflict between the modern reliance on technology, logic, and interdependence and our obsession with the roots of our democracy.

To sum up, we need to shift the debate away from whether there is potential for abuse of surveillance power (there is) to the likelihood of it being abused (how easy does the technology and socioeconomic structure make it to abuse that power) and the motivations for abuse. We also need to take a longer view with surveillance and let go of the idea that we ever lived in a world where determining our levels of privacy was completely up to us. We need to be vigilant for abuse of surveying power, aware of structures that concentrate this power, and we should question the legitimacy of outside threats. But we cannot keep getting freaked out about a few cameras, invoking Orwell every time a new technology hits the market. We need to realize that cultures and even species have been playing this game of hide and seek for awhile now. When a culture is surveyed, its mode of expression changes. A more intricate slang language develops. A subtle sense of irony develops, one that is indiscernible to outsiders. Pranksters demonstrate how sophisticated photoshop and video editing technology is so that courts will no longer be able to use video surveillance as proof that an event occurred. Like any power struggle, it does not end. Both sides evolve more sophisticated ways of outsmarting the other side. Better eyes lead to better camouflage, ad infinitum.

YouTube: Public or Private?

One of the most interesting things about the case of Viacom ordering YouTube to hand over its information on users is that the act of watching videos is being referred to as a private act. Is it as private as our social security and credit card numbers? Half as private? Twice as private? Where did the idea of what you watch being private come from? Here's one answer to that last question:

"'(the right to watch videos in private) is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, 'Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee."

One might have guessed that Bork's rental history was similar to that of Clarence Thomas. Actually, Bork, who's nomination was rejected, had fairly tame tastes while Thomas, who serves on the court today, claimed to have watched some less mainstream fare.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the act of watching a video on YouTube is similar enough to the act of watching a video cassette to qualify that act for protection under the video privacy protection act. I would argue that YouTube is not very similar to watching videos in the privacy of your own home. There are so many things about the site that make it feel public - the comments, the favorite lists open to the public, the usernames. It is precisely those attributes that set YouTube apart form existing online video sites and led to its massive success. YouTube became what it is today b/c it is not as private as watching TV. It is communal and public.

Watching a video on YouTube is NOT (and never was) a simple private act. Opsahl makes the classic mistake of thinking that just because YouTube has video, like VCR tapes, it is used in the same way and has the same relationship to publicness/privateness as its visual predecessors. He is not alone in the error of attribution. Viewers, lawyers, privacy advocates, and even users may mistake watching YouTube for a private act, but be assured, it is not.