Film - Think

There is a great quote from Marinetti at the end of Walter Benjamin’s essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility":

"For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!"

This is a handy description of the new cinema that has developed around comic book films, arguably culminating in the celebration of Nolan's two Batman installments as art films rather than typical Hollywood cinema. I couldn't help but think of the serene images of Batman soaring across Hong Kong or brooding across Gotham’s heights in terms of Marinetti's "metal-man." Throughout the essay, Benjamin describes the way in which fascism had hijacked the ritualistic functions of art in society for the purpose of social control (n.b. this is a massive oversimplification, don’t trust it). Batman as a "metal-man" created by violent conflict has a similar relationship to the social problems of Gotham City, standing outside the common rituals of court and jurisprudence. I am not sure how far to go with so many reviews reading Batman’s crime-fighting and privacy invading tactics as a sort of fascist critique of current American policy, but it does seem that Batman leaves himself open to interesting criticism.

There is an incoherency at the center of the film that develops between the Batman and Harvey Dent responses to the Joker. The story sets up Harvey Dent as the white knight, using normative social structures to save the people of Gotham as opposed to Batman’s use of torture, privacy invasion, and large amounts of collateral damage. But the actual production of the film, monopolizing on the "beauty" of Batman and his technology, maintains his heroic status regardless. There are competing concepts of heroism at play in the film, Dent’s moralism and Batman's sheer technological and aesthetic prowess. To be sure, Batman’s entire mythos is built on combating the sort of passive victimization that happens when people don’t have the power to enact justice (born in having to watch his parents' senseless murder). But the form in which his response takes place is the futurism that Benjamin despises. This incoherency leaks into other parts of the film as well - notice how quickly Lucius Fox capitulates to the "privacy invasion" issue. His decision has similarities to the ease with which shows like 24 pander to the fashion of fear-mongering that is now part of our daily routine (...it is okay if I break just this one guy's arm because I really need the phone number of that terrorist). The Dark Knight tries to be critical of this sort of "fascism" by making Fox hesitant to let Bruce Wayne use this incredible computer echo thing, but then spends a great deal of narrative capital on the cool special effects the entire scenario was intended to bracket anyway. In which do we participate more fully, the implicit criticism or well-executed action sequence?

The first installment wasn't this convoluted, so perhaps in a third film there will be some resolution to some of these niggling issues of violence and aesthetic. Maybe Batman will come to terms with his hero/anarchist dialectic, or simply resign himself to it like William Munny in Unforgiven. I am willing to follow the story arc on this one and see where it goes. I never bought the Joker's continual diatribe (he is about as profound as The Matrix), but from a narrative standpoint, the Joker really is the source of the incoherency of Batman and Dent - perhaps he unwittingly serves his destabilizing purpose after all?