Filed under: academia, cinema | Tags: Adorno, Batman, Culture Industry, Dark Knight, Gotham, Hollywood, Horkheimer
Batman is nearly 70 years old. He has been many things during that lifetime, and may yet be many more. He is post-modern popular culture’s very own folk tale, an allegorical myth traded with endless stylistic variations, endless rewritings, endless parallel existences. Yet in its recourse to spectacularity over subtlety, The Dark Knight is a disappointing film: propagating the Hollywood myth in lieu of the Batman myth.
Their ideology is business. In this they are right to the extent that the power of the culture industry lies in its unity with fabricated need and not in simple antithesis to it – or even in the antithesis between omnipotence and powerlessness. Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism.
The Batman franchise is full of auteuristic promise and possibility. The Dark Knight, however, is a Hollywood Blockbuster in style and content. This film is wrought with the tropes and tricks of a big-budget, modern action film, made for the IMAX cinema and the battering of the senses. The film proceeds as a series of explosions, gunshots and shattering glass, through a storyline that simply detangles a pretangled plot, predictably unpredictable. The writers, one imagines, began at the end – for whatever may happen during the film, the final shot of Batman returning to the shadows is foreseen by all – and from this point they work backwards, adding twists as they please, complication for complication’s sake, assuring the director’s control as the viewer has no space to ruminate on how that final scene may be reached. The viewer of this film is encouraged to sit back and switch off. The relation of this film to Batman Begins – a much more promising and imaginative film – is of increased spectacularisation, recourse to the safe and expected.
The standardised forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance.
What is perhaps the most repugnant element of The Dark Knight, though, is that it insists on walking the viewer through a forced and false self-examination on behalf of the American neoconservative imagination. The film’s perspective, mirrored in Bruce Wayne’s conflicted identity, is of a superpower safe in its position of power, but questioning why its security has been rocked and how can it go about living with its guilt and dirty hands. Batman has always, essentially, been about America, but has focussed inwards, on improving America from within and confronting its inner demons. This film is concerned with America in relation to an increasingly globalised, post-9/11 world, where the enemies are not homegrown but other: from the downright racist selection of human villains (Italian-American mobsters, nouveau-riche Black gangstas, feral Latin-Americans); to the superhuman Joker who, incomprehensible within the diegesis, is not motivated by money but an irrational desire for pure chaos. The Joker is not presented as a product of Gotham City as Jack Nicholson’s Joker was – a crime boss scarred by falling into a vat of toxic waste – instead, he is an outright maniac, whose psychology is continuously explained to the viewer with the unnecessary analogy of a dog let off a leash.
The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it.
Tim Burton’s 1989 revamp, Batman, still stands as the pinnacle of the retelling of the Batman myth. That film pulled Batman from a campy, uncomplicated superhero role, to the more sinister and troubled vigilante that we are perhaps more familiar with today. Of course, it would be regressive to simply repeat that version, and it would also be impossible to ignore changes in cinema from the last 20 years. The influence of capital has always been apparant, especially within the Batman films. What is needed, though, is a balance of populist appeal (should such a thing even exist – and if it does, it is not necessarily lots of explosions and gunshots) and gently subversive creativity. It is this balance that gives the Batman franchise such a wide-ranging appeal in the first place, from fantasy enthusiasts to cinemagoers who recognise only big names and big themes.
Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beating so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.
The main limitation of The Dark Knight is its violence, and has been released with a bizarre 12A classification. This means that children under 12 can only see this film with their parents’ permission, but does it also mean that the parents need to watch the film themselves before revisiting and taking their children? I doubt it. Children will see this film, and will be – or at least, should be – shocked: violence, like many modern mainstream action films, is thrown in without consequence or consideration. When I saw this film, people laughed at the violence, or at least at the shock and immediacy of the violence. Violence as cinematic effect, real events as cinema. Bread and circuses, lowest common denominatorsl: everything bigger, more shocking, purportedly more real but actually drifting ever further from honesty and integrity. Again, violence has always been central to the Batman story, but it is better used as climactic moment rather than a desensitizing continuous shower of pain and ugliness.
Works of art are ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. It reduces love to romance.
Alongside the throwaway violence, this film pays lip-service to a bogus political morality. The good guy bending the rules to get results, the association between good and evil, the destruction of binary divisions, the complicated nature of doing good: tired and lazy tropes, referenced but not explored. The psychology is explained at every moment, everything ties together, a conclusion is reached. All lies, neither escapism nor honesty.
Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is indeed escape, but not, as it claims, escape from bad reality but from the last thought of resisting that reality.
The film’s premise – the existence of Batman in a modern world, in our world, or at least an idealised American mega-city – is itself problematic. Without the fantasy parallel world of Gotham City, Batman is tied to all the banalities of modern global interaction: he fights accountants, he perches atop shiny skyscrapers instead of looming gothic towers, the economic threat of China to America is as much a villain as some lunatic in a costume. The words ‘anarchy’ and ‘terrorist’ are dropped in to heighten the American fear. This film does not explore the imaginative possibilities of a parallel world, but tramples imagination under the fears and fissures of American hegemony.
The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth.
A fan of action films will probably really enjoy The Dark Knight. Personally, I feel as though I have been fooled into watching a generic Hollywood Blockbuster trading off the name of something interesting and progressive. Perhaps i should have expected nothing less of a franchise that, honestly, has long been lost to Hollywood. The shadows and blackness of Gotham are now the grey sludge of Hollywood.
All quotes from “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
Filed under: music | Tags: finally punk, kill rock stars, mika miko, new bloods
Revolution Girl-Style… Again!
As a brief musical interlude, I thought I’d present some music I’ve been listening to recently. Its nothing terribly new – you can hear The Slits, The Raincoats, Kleenex/Liliput, B52s, Bikini Kill and so on all the way through – but a resurgence of sloppy, dischordant and thoroughly DIY post-punk is always welcome here.
New Bloods – Doubles
Mika Miko – Business Cats
Finally Punk – Missile
Filed under: adverts | Tags: bad photoshop!, baudrillard, Murdoch, simulacra, The Sun
Filed under: May 68, space and everyday life | Tags: big character posters, Daziboa, Journals Murals
On May 25th 1966, members of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University exhibited a poster they had produced that criticised the University management of counter-revolutionary actions and impeding the workers’ movement. Although the practise of producing large-scale, hand-written posters – called Dazibao, or Big Character Posters – dates to imperial times, the role of this form of public expression and political engagement would receive increased attention as the Cultural Revolution progressed. The University authorities initially suppressed the Department of Philosophy’s poster, called “What are Sung Shih, Lu Ping and Pen Pei-yun up to in the Cultural Revolution?”, although on June 1st Mao himself would approve the poster, as the country’s “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster”. Mao encouraged the dissemination of this practise, and produced his own poster entitled “Bombard the Headquarters“. An article in the People’s Daily of June 20th further encouraged the production of big-character posters, emphasising that they “concentrate in a single day twenty years’ education of the masses” and are “magic mirrors to show up monsters of all kinds”.
In line with the Third Worldism and explicitly Maoist tendencies of many French students and intellectuals of the 1960s, the issuing of big-character posters was repeated during the events of May ‘68, with the poster workshops also producing large and text-heavy Journals Murals to criticise de Gaulle and support striking students and workers. However there is also a parallel in the aftermaths of these sudden surges of publicised polemic and often very personal denunciations. Jack Chen’s Inside the Cultural Revolution reports on how Chen happily produced many big-character posters, until he learnt that the local Communist Party secretary “had been engaged in a vast provocation… they had been egging people on to criticise ‘whether you have all the evidence or not’ while keeping dossiers on all the critics” (1976, p233). Likewise, Raymond Marcellin, appointed Minister of the Interior in France on May 31th 1968, was to assemble “the most complete collection possible of the some 20, 000 tracts, documents, journals, and texts of the ‘68 movement” in order to mobilise the “massive police identification, classification, and roundup of all known gauchists and other militants” (Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives 2004, p61) that followed the events in France.
Filed under: psychogeography, reviews, space and everyday life | Tags: art, Gelitin, Psycho Buildings, The Hayward
As entertainment for a Saturday afternoon, I really enjoyed this exhibition. It was busy, with lots of queuing and children crying and vying for attention, but I suspect that all this created an atmosphere much more suited to this type of event than hushed inspection and contemplation. The eleven installations that make up Psycho Buildings are to be experienced viscerally, even physically: infact, we could even go so far as to think of Psycho Buildings as an exhibition for children that adults happen to enjoy as well, like those animated films and fantasy novels that are deemed, I imagine, to have “crossover appeal”.
Most of this exhibition isn’t really things to look at and think about, but places to be (with, following the usual guidebook rhetoric, the ensuing revaluation of the environments we inhabit). Some of these places to be aren’t entirely unfamiliar, recreating spaces usually found at playgrounds and theme parks: Atelier Bow-Wow’s sheet-metal “Life Tunnel” and Ernesto Neto’s wooden-framed “Life Fog Frog…Fog Frog” could both be from a roadside service station’s kid’s area; whilst, a little more ambitious, Tomas Saraceno’s geodesic “Observatory, Air-Port-City” and Mike Nelson’s cinematic “To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999” could be part of an elaborate queuing area for a ride at Alton Towers. I don’t mean to criticise these installations by drawing these comparisons: all of these are fun places to explore and clamber around, and making us feel young and excited is probably the best way to get us to “re-examine our ideas about the relationship between ourselves – our bodies and minds – and our surroundings”.
The other main category of installation at Psycho Buildings is more concerned with the minutiae of dwelling-spaces, appealing more to curiosity and a fine eye. Do Ho Suh’s “Fallen Star 1/5” and Rachel Whiteread’s “Place” both use doll’s houses as the means to dislocate the visitor from an embedded position within a home or a street, and give us a similar sense to how a child must feel with their toys, a contrasting sense of god-like control and humbling reverence for the fragility and artificiality of the environments in which we live. This fragility is then emphasized in Los Carpinteros’ “Show Room“, which freezes a generic Ikea everyroom in the moment of an explosion, although my attention was drawn mainly to the intricacy of the sink’s plug chain rather than reflecting on the startling overall effect and the potential reality of this scene somewhere else in the world.
The most fun – err, I mean intellectually stimulating – part of Psycho Buildings, really, was Gelitin’s “Normally, Preceeding and Unrestricted with without title“, which fills one of The Hayward’s rooftop terraces with water to create a small boating lake. This (judged in part by the length of its queue) seems to achieve most effectively what this exhibition offers, namely a novel but gentle surrealisation of an otherwise innocuous space. Rowing around in a small circle along the skyline of the Southbank may not tell you anything about where and how you live, but certainly suggests that the built environment is not as concrete and fixed as we may assume it to be. The Hayward makes a great pond.
And to pull all this towards more recent debates, these installations – especially the Gelitin boating lake – come as something of a defence of modernist architecture, even a demonstration that Brutalism isn’t such a monolithic vortex of everyday interaction and humane living space after all (see: Robin Hood Gardens’ revamp or knock-it-down-and-start-again debate). On the whole, this exhibition pulls together and makes associations between different, otherwise opposing, environments (serene boating lake and harsh concrete; everyday banality and rupturing explosion; highbrow exhibition space and lowbrow horror film set), the message of which would be that existing space can be reused and reworked in favour of moving prematurely onto something new. A change is as good as a restart.
