Why I hate movie critics part 1 zillion and whatever. Luc Besson’s Anna (2019) was actually good. I believe Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 38%. Anyway, I had fun and it makes you feel. It also connects with Sophocles’ Antigone, which I will return to, in that it has a protagonist who is defiant. Matthew Arnold didn’t care for Antigone because the Victorians weren’t into defiance. They wanted compliance. I mean, strap yourself onto this dynamo. It will take us into unending progress, right? We don’t trust systems anymore. That’s part of our problem. It’s interesting how there’s a very strong paradox in our times: people so desperately needing to belong. They will even die in order to get in the group. The liberals won’t fool them with their vaccines. “You can’t take away my freedom!” They commit their lives to an anti-system that cannot work. Build a wall. Let the viruses in. Give everything to the super rich because we aren’t lazy and we won’t be the suckers who give handouts to the greedy moochers. Yep. We all love defiance, now.

If we aren’t all postmodernists now, we are still in the Postwar period. That was when there was the final shift away from the Victorians. It didn’t all die with Edward on the throne and Modernism in the air. It took a while for the tide to truly go out, for faith in progress to die off. The positivists were happy throughout the 50s. Hippies were always idealists. Maybe it was the Dadaists who got there first. We were all for progress but Auschwitz and the Bomb killed something. Not everything. Even into the ’70s and ’80s we were thinking that the Year 2000 would usher in a utopia with hotels on the Moon. Cooperation and resistance coexisted. And it wasn’t just that one group held with duty and the other went with desire. Michel Foucault with his clubby male soirees was in his own way conservative. He thought AIDS was an invented disease because, well, so many are invented diseases. What can be more conservative then a rejection of science and what new data can do to our view of the world? Maybe because language came so easily to him and mathematics with much greater difficulty, he shied away from areas where he didn’t excel. I don’t know but Foucault had a lifelong desire to strip away the façade and get to the stable truth beneath, while rejecting the importance of science, a realm of dizzying changes of theory and evidence. Science was created in the 18th century. Freedom is timeless. Looking at Foucault’s writings on “biopolitics” doesn’t make it much of stretch to say he wouldn’t be a fan of Dr. Fauci or the CDC. You can’t trust the government to quarantine the right people. They’ll just use the opportunity to eradicate the enemies of the state…

However this change came about from Matthew Arnold’s day, transgression became the highest value of the postmodernist age, to paraphrase the scholar David Coward. We have a warm place in our hearts for the outlaw. Even those with signs in the yards proclaiming that they Back the Badge have no problem rooting for the rulebreaker — not in a movie or TV show. Why not? We can defy logic too. These are unreasonable times.

You can’t be too careful what you wish for.

It has probably been a decade now since a guy unfriended and then blocked me. That’s not the interesting part. We weren’t what you would call close friends. We were barely acquainted. The interesting part has to do with who he is professionally, and what seems to have been the source of his animus. I believe he’s a law professor. I know he certainly got his law degree from an Ivy League school. We had had few interactions on Facebook up until the day he blocked me. Those interactions had always been positive. Then one day I started a thread about mortality. Try as I might, I can’t remember if this was before or after my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I have no idea what prompted this online discussion. Was it the death of a famous person? My grandfather’s passing? My mother-in-law’s? Was it a reflection on my mentor’s sudden and freak death by drowning in 1999? I don’t know.

            What I do remember is that I had said something about my own desire to live forever. Immortality – nice work if you can get it. This wish was expressed half as a joke. I also recall the substance of my acquaintance’s reaction: Grow up. I don’t remember the exact words but I think it in part did include the phrase, “That’s what being an adult is all about.” You aren’t really an adult until you rid yourself of your foolish desire to live forever – that was the general thrust.

            I may have responded to his comment. I’m not sure. I think I said that this was only a wish that I have. This is not a belief. I don’t have a plan on how to achieve everlasting life. I’m not trying to convert anyone. I don’t have a religious agenda.

            A few days or even weeks after that, I discovered that the man had blocked me subsequent to this exchange when someone on another person’s thread tagged him in a comment. I could see his name, but not any of his comments. I entered his name in the search field. Sure enough, he was gone.

            This man’s reaction isn’t theoretically surprising. I’ve encountered a lot of people who are what you might call militant atheists. Some of my friends even call them atheist fundamentalists. They have this simmering rage toward religion. Like Richard Dawkins, they are on a mission to push humanity past all foolish desires, to wake us all from our dogmatic slumber. What our species needs is to live by reason alone.

            Now, I don’t know about other writers, but I feel it’s my job to put into words as much as I possibly can about human experience. Can everything be expressed? Of course not. Sometimes it won’t be the naming but the attempt to name that is important. This strange interaction I had with the Law Guy suggests something to me: some of us wish we could surgically remove irrationality from our brains. AT some point, this school of thought goes, human beings will beyond the need for religion or fantasy. This strikes me as very Puritanical. I am aware that many people see Puritanism as excessively focused on sex. I tend to use the term more metaphorically. I know people will say that Puritans didn’t or don’t like sex. Such people have never met Baptists. Puritans love sex. They are often obsessed with it. They don’t want YOU to enjoy sex. But purity tests are common to many systems. Stalinism demanded it. Democrats are plagued with in-fighting due to it. Show me a club or a sect and I’ll find the purists. For them everything is simple. Everything is black and white. Everything is categorical. Have you yourself fallen into this trap? I know I have. More frequently than I would care to admit.

            What role can purity play for the fiction-writer? I think s/he needs to confront it at every turn. Whenever there is some Stoic telling us that self-abnegation is the better part of valor, we need to make that a focus of the drama. Someone telling us “Thou shalt not feel x” should be the cynosure of our art. In the case of Law Guy’s rationalism, it doesn’t matter if you agree with him or me, the writer will have to agree that the Big Fight should be all about this desire and the rule that would stamp it out.

            Let’s assume that we all see the intrinsic drama in someone being told they MUST not dream of immortality. Let’s assume that we all agree that death is the last enemy. Let’s assume we see the point of Achilles in the Underworld saying, “I’d rather serve as another man’s servant, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.” Let’s assume we don’t scoff at the Egyptian kings’ mania for immortality. We’ll set aside Plato and Dante and William Wordsworth’s intimations, of Dostoevsky’s cris de coeur. We’ll shelf whatever Dorian Gray is. We’ll discard T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Why do this? In order to ask this: Can we live without a wish to be spared dying? To have our friends be spared as well? Is it even possible? Or will it always be in there? What is the point of all technology if not to finally have power over death? But maybe that should not be the point of all technology. Maybe we should reject that goal on moral grounds. Can we? Are we capable of doing that? Go ahead, try not to desire too much.

            I will even attempt to build some sort of framework for how we might effect this denial. We could become, to borrow from Keats, almost half in love with death. How might that affect policy? Would we care so much about kids in cages at our borders if we were truly half in love with death. Or how do we feel about deaths that arose because of the use (or abuse?) of opioids? Were not those people simply eased into the inevitable? Would being half in love with death mean that responded differently to the covid epidemic?             Well, the rationalist says, we don’t have to go too far in any one direction. Really? We don’t? It is humanly possible to ensure that not just America, but that the whole planet doesn’t go too far in any one direction? No. Not now. But it will be. One day. When the human being is no longer in its irrational infancy.
            I don’t think we’ll ever live that long.
            All of that is really not my theme for today, it’s not the real reason that I write this. I write this as a note to myself that not only do I still see this argument as the one I am most interested in having as a writer of fiction, but that I have discovered a means of dramatizing this argument.
            I have found a character into whose mouth I will put certain words. I’ve found a situation that is perfect for this discussion. It has taken many years longer than I had expected, but I’ve finally found a means of expressing the very deepest human yearning I know of. And I’m damn glad I did.

            It seems to me that the theme of books like Foucault’s Pendulum is be careful what you wish for. Don’t get carried away by your dreams and fantasies. The imagination is dangerous ground. As Milton said of Adam and Eve in the Garden, “O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more.” But can the genie be put back in the bottle? Can human beings really suppress their wildest desires? Can the rational mind hold the passions in check forever?  

7/7/21 Timothy Ladd

I’m reading a minor novel by Jules Verne published in 1892. The theme seems to be somewhat similar to the themes of Umberto Eco in novels such as Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose, at least from my perspective, which sees Eco really nervous about the human capacity to believe what we imagine. Eco shares with postmodernists (though he claimed not to be a postmodernist) a fear of fiction, a fear of narrative wholeness that may derive from a skepticism of metanarrative. They seem to see in all narrative the seeds of self-deception and mass delusion. If that’s not your take on postmodernism, that’s fine. I don’t know of too many scholars who agree with me. Not that I’ve really looked. I got about as far as Wendy B Faris, Labyrinths of Language. She certainly sees postmodernism as revolutionary and a break from traditional narrative structure. There are many beginnings but resolutions are something postmodernists avoid. We can’t send complete stories out into the world. That will only lead to trouble. Probably in the form of dogma and religion.

Back to Jules Verne. It’s interesting in this novel that he attacks the superstitious stories and beliefs of the peasants. Foolish people believe foolish things. And without evidence! The narrator is no such fool. He’s modern and educated. There’s just one catch — the book has a good deal of anti-Semitism. Jews are taking over countries like Romania. They’re getting rich and buying up all of the valuable property. Some day soon Romania will be a land of Israelites!

Verne was intelligent enough to recognize that superstitions could cause unnecessary fears. But he wasn’t sharp enough to see that he himself was caught up in the superstitious assumptions needed to accept anti-Semitism. Many times what people take to be evidence-based facts are anything but. It’s my suspicion that no human will ever be free of foolish assumptions. It would be like trying to take all of the sand from the oceans. New sand is being brought in by erosion every day. We have no idea what we have accepted without solid evidence and what we have not. We need to constantly clean out the filtration system. Junk is always getting into the water.

            Recently, I rewatched the third Christopher Nolan Batman film. I really like Nolan’s take on the mythos. But controversy is something I don’t mind courting, so, for full disclosure, I will admit that I also think Ben Affleck makes a good Batman. I was never convinced by Michael Keaton’s turn as Bruce Wayne. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to like in the two Tim Burton Batman movies. For instance, I love everything about William Hootkins’s character, and all of his interactions with Jack Nicholson are superb. The scene when the Joker gets his famous smile is wonderfully macabre, creepy, and completely unsanitary. I love the Batmobile.

            There are also a number of things I don’t like. I suppose first is how half of Gotham looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss on crack. What’s with all that piping? It’s silly. Batman shouldn’t have silliness in it. There was enough of that in the old TV show (which had its own virtues). I imagine there are films Robert Wuhl should appear in. A Batman film is not one of them. I’m not crazy about Kim Basinger given not much more to do than look voluptuous. She’s a talented actress. This film makes it easy to forget that since it only focuses on her as an object of male sexual desire. I’m also not crazy about the music that Prince cranked out for the film. I’m unconvinced by its sincerity – in that it seems to have none.

            Perhaps the point in the film where I squirm the most is at Keaton’s line when he brandishes the fireplace poker: “You wanna get nuts? C’mon, let’s get nuts!” Everything about the scene is unnecessary, the acting is wrong, and what was even the point? Was it meant to suggest that Batman really was a bit off his rocker? If so, wouldn’t we expect him to act nuts instead of talking about being nuts? I don’t think Keaton liked the line. His heart doesn’t seem into it. It’s too stagey to be meant as Bruce Wayne’s genuine anger.
            Many dramas have a face-off between the protagonist and antagonist somewhat early in the work. But this confrontation between Wayne and the Joker is awkward and poorly handled. I suppose the audience is meant to heave a sigh of relief that the Joker didn’t recognize that Wayne is Batman. That, however, is not how the scene is set up. It is almost set up that way. Wayne tells the Joker, “I know who you are.” That could suggest the more dramatic opposite – that the Joker knows who Wayne really is. Yet there is no indication that Burton wanted to audience to conclude that, despite the fact that the Joker does refer to Wayne as his “prey.” Apparently, we are meant to see Batman’s resourcefulness in this scene. Vicky Vale discovers the tray that has stopped the Joker’s bullet. When Wayne supposedly got that under his coat is unclear. What I felt in the scene was that we weren’t seeing Batman in this scene. He was being played by Michael Keaton as Michael Keaton in so many other films. Films such as Night Shift, Johnny Dangerously, Gung Ho, Mr. Mom. All of the gestures and movements are recognizably Keaton’s own. He’s not inhabiting a character. He’s being himself on camera, which is out of sync with other scenes in which he’s clearly moving in a way that portrays Bruce Wayne, billionaire genius.

            This all happens at 1 hour, 24 minutes, give or take. Out of a film that runs just over two hours. It ought to be a confrontation between the principals. As such it feels like a misfire.

            A far more satisfying confrontation in the movie is when Batman rescues Vale. This scene ends with the lovely line, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

            I won’t even comment on the parade scene when the Joker gratuitously shoots Bob and then brings down the Batjet.

            Let’s skip to the finale, since that’s what I began this with. The Joker and Batman finally are going to fight. We’ve been waiting all night for this contest. It’s a fight to the death. And it can’t be too easily won for our hero. I think all of the actual combat is great. It doesn’t go on too long. It’s fun. Sometimes it’s even funny – which is fitting since we’re fighting a middle-aged clown who is, after all, quite insane.

            My real issue is that the Joker dies. And it’s how he dies. It happens at a distance. The combat is not face-to-face, where I think the Big Finish needs to be. When the villain gets his, the hero should be looking in his eye. The knife should go in with some crunching of bones. I’m not sure how many blockbusters end this way. If any. Excalibur more than doubled its budget, but isn’t considered a blockbuster. The final fight there is perfect. It reflects exactly what I mean. I’m not sure how many final showdowns end in an up-close and personal way. Dirty Harry had opponents who could see each other. The Outlaw Josey Wales has a good ending. The bastard finally meets his end with a saber to the midsection.

            When Vincent Regan’s character meets his fate, he’s off camera. Guy Pierce’s character Snow has left him on the satellite prison, which then explodes. That pretty much stands for all I think shouldn’t happen in the Big Finish. Can we say “damp squib”?

            Thanos has not one but two deaths in Endgame. The final death fairly satisfying, though the vicious bastard should have screamed in pain. Really, he should have gone out like Rumpelstiltskin.

            The finale should be slightly drawn out and emotional. What I don’t understand is when directors bunt when they could have gone for a homer. (And I don’t even like baseball!) But let’s face it, when Bane dies it happens in a flash, he is dead instantly, never saw it coming, never suffered. This feels very unsatisfactory on moral grounds. The bad should be made to pay for their sins. Burton seemed to want to have it both ways with his Joker’s death. It happens far from us. Then there is the laughing toy, which seems to suggest that there is still life in our flamboyant and irrepressible villain. But, no, the Joker is dead. This is his inaugural confrontation with Batman, his first real caper, and he’s been foiled forever.

            In terms of preceding Batman lore and mythology, this is very upsetting to the audience. We know the Joker isn’t dead. Batman is always dueling the Joker. It’s their destiny to be forever locked in combat. They are a kind of imperfect Yin and Yang. It’s also more than just disappointing that the Joker dies at a great distance from Batman. If he ever should meet his fate, it needs to be face to face. Beowulf had one hand burnt to a cinder and he finishes the dragon with a knife that slices down its belly. That’s personal.

            Probably my favorite final battle is between Aeneas and Turnus. Aeneas stands over the defeated Turnus, who begs for his life out of respect to his father. This is replaying the Iliad. And we expect the Roman, with all his self-control, to act with magnanimity, clemency. Not only would this be the avowed values of the Romans, it was actually how the Greeks liked to think of themselves – rational and in control. The Spartans were disciplined and silent. They weren’t berserkers. It’s almost overdetermined from everything in the Aeneid that Aeneas will spare Turnus. It goes against all that has come before. But Vergil prepares us for the shock with some hints. Aeneas stood (stetit) acer in armis. Acer has a lot of gradations. There’s positive and negative. We aren’t really sure how we must take it until we get to the next line: volvens oculos. Eyes rolling – a sure sign of someone caught in a frenzy. That means we have to take acer to mean something very violent, furious. But Vergil teases us because the line ends the way it should when you are talking about a good Roman: dextramque repressit. His sword hand may be itching and twitching, but he is repressing it.

            Cut to the chase: fervidus Aeneas – the adjective again shows that Aeneas has lost control of his rage – “sank his sword into his enemy’s breast.” Turnus dies with a groan and his spirit flies off to a cold hell. It’s a great scene. It terminates very abruptly. Scholars that want to see the end of the poem as a fulfilment of justice skate around the words: fervidus, volvens oculos, (the saevi feels like a transferred epithet for monimenta) and furiis accensus et ira

terribilis “burning with fury and terrible rage” makes Aeneas sound a lot like Achilles. The implication to me is pretty clear. We get a VERY dramatic conclusion, but we also get to feel some ambivalence about the uses of violence and how it always tends toward chaos and insanity. It is never terribly conducive to building stability and harmony. Instead, it looks like more blood vendetta. And that’s why it’s my favorite Big Finish.