Last night, I saw "Batman, the Dark Knight" for the first time. Aside from being a great movie and featuring ridiculous good performances from the late Heath Ledger and others, it got me thinking. I've noticed a huge shift in the way movie makers are portraying both reality and fantasy since 9/11. First, there is the obvious increase in the number of movies about governmental intrigue, CIA spy junk, invasion of privacy and other things reflecting and amplifying reality. However, yesterday I noticed that the Joker was referred to as a "terrorist" several times in the movie.
Let's think about this: a comic book villain whose sole motivation is to sow chaos and destroy civilization is being equated directly with people who reap violence in order to achieve a political or military goal. The last time we saw the Joker, he was a brilliant but somewhat goofy character in Jack Nicholson who when killing people turned them into caricatures of death in a grotesquely cute way with exaggerated smiles burnt into the corpses faces. Contrast this to Ledger's Joker who tells conflicting and gory stories of how he got his smile scars before cutting people's faces open with a knife. Nicholson's Joker wants to create chaos, but for him it's all a big joke. Ledger's Joker is just scary. He enjoys chaos because it causes good people to do evil things and even become evil embodied, and says this explicitly in one scene.
The scene that got me thinking about the connection to politics was (cover your eyes if you haven't seen the movie yet) when the massive prisoner seems to be about to blow up the innocents' ferry boat and instead throws the detonator out the window, showing one of the only moments of redemption and hope. What has exploded Barack Obama's political stature from non-existent to presidential nominee of the Democrats is "Hope" as political platform. Go back 8 years to the post-Lewinsky election. Can you imagine any politician even being able to raise the slightest amount of money based on "hope," let alone win the nomination of either party? What gives Barack's message such potency is that it is the extreme opposite to what we see from the Dick Cheney camp. Continuous war against an enemy that has neither a defined name, a defined country, or a clear target is a guaranteed recipe for despair and extreme paranoia. Especially when the only unifying things for this enemy is that they are a few thousand people amongst the 1 billion plus who practice the world's most populous religion, and they are out to get us.
Barack's successful message of hope is a direct extreme opposite of the fear and militarism practiced by the establishment, and thus it is very, very important for us to understand what this could mean to us as citizens. Why? Extremes sometimes balance each other out by pulling towards the middle, but when they remain separate and intensely opposite, they create what we used to know as "extremists," those who cling to the far fringes of an idea where the air is thin, intense and rational thought disappears into distant memory. To be blunt, if you support Barack because he makes you feel hopeful, this is only slightly less scary to me than supporting Bush because he makes you feel safe. These emotions have the same root: escaping fear.
I happen to personally enjoy both feeling safe and feeling hopeful, but more important to me as a voter is how the candidates will handle themselves in day-to-day workings. Do they have the intellect to differentiate between opinion and fact? Can they understand the importance of peer-reviewed science and how to translate this into public policy? How do they handle conflict amongst the people around them, and how do they handle external conflict imposed upon them by circumstance? Do they have the ability to see long-term consequences and understand short-term methods of handling them? Answering these questions for me means looking both at their positions, how they have evolved (especially convenient changes in the past 2 years based on polling), news on how their campaign has been run, and what was important to the candidates before they had any idea of burnishing their public image in order to run for political office.
Returning to the movies, the best example of how our psyche has changed with regards to thrillers comes from the 1998 movie "The Siege" starring Denzel Washington, Annette Benning and Bruce Willis with Tony Shaloub in a supporting role years before he hit it big time with "Monk." Willis plays the evil power-hungry general who takes the law into his own hands and is ultimately punished by the strength of the Constitution. The movie starts out with terrorist bombings in New York City that escalate from a bus to destruction of a building by a car bomb. In a key moment, Washington walks in on an interrogation of an Arab who is sitting naked in a shower room of a Brooklyn football stadium and Willis starts to discuss "alternative protocols" like waterboarding. Washington here delivers his big speech that concludes with "what if what they really want is for us to bend the law a little bit, shred the constitution just a little bit? Because if you torture this man, they will have won. They have already won!" At the time, this seemed to be the most remote, horrendously extreme possibility, that an American would even consider torturing a detainee, and it is this act (and the subsequent execution of the prisoner by Willis) that Washington cites in the arrest warrant at the conclusion of the movie (sorry to spoil another one).
Fast forward to today, where in the Republican primary, all but a couple of candidates publicly supported using torture as an interrogation method - and tried to use it to become the nominee for president, and torture was authorized by the Justice Department, the vice president and the president, none of whom have faced even a trial for their decisions. Is it any wonder hope has been transformed from an ideal into a powerful political tool?
