>>362285The most life-affirming movie so far this year is one most critics ignored, Andre Techine's Unforgivable. Techine's film contains one of the most violent scenes in any contemporary work of serious art. It rates detailing in light of The Dark Knight Rises' widening aesthetic and political confusion.
When an emotionally disturbed youth reacts to a cruising gay man by angrily pushing him the into a Venetian canal, the would-be suitor gets even by killing the youth's pet. The latter sequence jolts audiences every time I've seen Unforgivable; Techine ensures that we feel the shock of violence and goes further to convey the troubled youth's pain, the gay man's pain and the terrible, conflicting motivations of each. The political resonance of that hideous act electrifies current attitudes toward violence and makes them problematic; it challenges our loyalties-especially toward the sanctity of identity politics. Techine's probing look at a modern family's unconventional histories and interconnections flirts with antisocial behavior but, despite a photogenic cast, never glamorizes transgressions. This is adult art, not pop trivia derived from comic books, which means its complexity derives from life-awareness. Nothing in Nolan's Batman movies is as complex, nor ultimately as illuminating about the nature of human behavior and society's complicatedness. Nolan simply wants violence to be fun-and to be rich.
Consider the praise describing Nolan's "postmodern, Sept. 11 epic of ambivalent good vs. multidimensional evil." This is a recrudescence of Reagan-era knee-jerk rebellion; retreating to juvenile pop culture as a safe, if overblown, expression of political dissent. And the same critic's assessment "Batman has always been a head case," recalls the facile countercultural psychoanalytic preferences-secularized attitudes, divorced from moral precepts-that now dominate mainstream film culture through negative emphasis on dystopian storylines and apocalyptic scenarios. Nolan's Batman films epitomize this pessimism.
It is obtuse to excuse such nihilism as expressing a legitimate social vision, especially when Nolan uses the Batman legend to exploit 9/11 and entertain the destruction of society through hyperbolic acts of terrorism and assassination. Despite media puffery, Nolan is dealing with political ideas he doesn't understand (as in a ridiculous evocation of the French Revolution via Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities). His repetitious, though extravagant, action scenes reveal an undeveloped sense of good and evil as proved by the confused motives of his hero and the obscured motives of his villains, the murky League of Shadows, The Joker, Two-Face Harvey Dent, Catwoman, Bane.
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However you look at the July 20 tragedy-and I didn't want to have another go at The Dark Knight Rises but this occurrence makes it necessary-it doesn't take a forensic scientist to see how Holmes ("The Joker") laid out the problem that the mainstream media desperately evades. (Remember how Jack Nicholson and Tim Burton's 1989 film defaced the very idea of "Art"?) Holmes did it on Nolan's own decadent terms.
But praise for The Dark Knight Rises shows that we have lost a proper sense of tragedy (it's muffled in Nolan's deadly "ambivalent" heroism and fantastic villainy), which is to say we've lost the humane scale of measuring popular art. Another prominent reviewer praised Nolan's work as "a visually stunning series of ruthless set pieces that made almost zero sense as a narrative…A jolly sadism was the dominant effect." This is exactly the kind of prevarication that let loose the anarchy of midnight marauder screenings where unwise parents took children to see mindless, violent spectacle.
Credit that critic for admitting "I was in a foul mood when [2008's The Dark Knight] was over." But he seems to have lost the confidence to trust his aesthetic instincts. Instead, he went deferential: "When I talked to some very smart young friends about it, the absence of logic and perverse cruelty was exactly what they thought was cool. For them, the dissociation from emotion freed an aesthetic response to extreme acts, to beauty. But even aesthetic ecstasy should run into a wall at some point."
However, "aesthetic ecstasy" contradicts "a foul mood." Where's the beauty when narrative coherence is missing? Those "very smart young friends" could only have been other deluded film critics. Rightly noting that "The sophisticated response to movie violence that has dominated the discussion for years should now seem inadequate and evasive," that reviewer is not talking true sophistication, just sophistry. Morally bankrupt and in willing collusion with the film industry.
To inflate pop culture with meanings it doesn't earn jeopardizes a critic's purpose. The challenge-and argument-are as old as movies itself. The use of violence as Pop Art makes the discussion vexing. (And I intend this to be a discussion; not an "attack" on other critics but an attempt to encourage discourse.) Nolan's use of the Batman fantasy doesn't represent the complex fears of modern, post-9/11 culture; sadly, he reduces those fears to mere entertainment.
But critics cannot have it both ways.
Nolan's uncertainty about heroism and evil does not serve our urgent need for clarity. Instead, it dissolves our concerns into miasma-the dismal circumstances by which Colorado citizens sought pleasure in chaos.
Our infatuation with dystopic behavior in movies has come home to roost. It is hypocritical to pretend that after years of celebrating sociopathy (as in Oscar tributes to such ugly characterizations as Charlize Theron in Monster, Denzel Washington in Training Day, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Monique in Precious, Ledger in The Dark Knight) that we don't recognize James Holmes' madness. The widely broadcast photos of him sitting in court with his orange-dyed hair, wearing a petulant, unreachable scowl, in fact bears striking resemblance to hiphop's favorite badboy, Eminem in one of his patented hoodlum-prophet guises.
Desensitized audiences and critics have lost the ability to argue on behalf of edifying or socially redeeming art. Nolan traffics in foul ambiguity and nihilism. Selling "darkness" to teenagers and adults will almost certainly have repercussions and it's simply thoughtless and dishonest to deny this-whether in bad midnight movie-going choices or psychopathological which, unfortunately came together in Aurora, causing pundits to scramble for the lamest excuses. Make no mistake, promoting gun control is just a lazy, blameless reflex. (Afraid of artistic censorship, pundits petition for public censorship.)