You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 21st, 2008.
Watching the whole episode is rewarding.
I’m planning in the next couple days — probably tomorrow — to do the first in a series of posts on Forgotten Comics Characters, beginning with mid-nineties footnote Blackwulf. But until then, here’s something to hold you over.
Science fiction and fantasy are particularly derivative genres. It’s very hard to get away with anything original in either without people challenging its right to be included among the ossified pantheon of Heinlein and Robert Jordan. Both have their standard tropes, their impassable mountains, their ancient laws, and God help you should you transgress them. Fans of fantasy want brutal orcs, standoffish, isolated centaurs, Elvish archers and knights who become kings. They want the Single Horrifying Evil That Must Be Stopped Lest Free Men Suffer The Yoke Of Slavery, and as a result, they want villains who are easy to kill. No, not villains that die easily, but villains that make on you no moral demands.
It’s the same in science fiction. Regardless of the overall plot, the aliens you kill must be reptilian monsters or giant spiders, something inhuman that demands a violence because it cannot be otherwise dealt with. Their war must always be Like No War Before It, and the stakes must demand the utmost brutality and vigor in prosecuting man’s vengeance. Sometimes, the aliens are violent expansionists, Nazis who would crush a free universe, or they’re the Borg, acting with a single mind and undermining everything we hold dear. I say “we” because we always sympathize with the protagonists’ faction.
In fantasy, our enemies are evil people affiliated with dark, warmaking gods, to which we only respond with violence because they’ve provoked us. But every time, our actions are justified and celebrated. Humanity destroys the troll armies or the Cylon base ship, and we toss their agents out the airlock. Such things are necessary, we say. Their brutality demands a brutality of our own.
Doesn’t this sound like a romp? Imagine a once-pure and holy kingdom overwhelmed with a degenerate mutant population which actively tries to destroy it from within. These mutant scum have wormed their way into positions of power from which they can easily devastate the good people under them, destroying them, beating them into submission. They are also the servants of a false and vile religion, and their practices are the sickest you can imagine, offering young girls in sacrifice and committing ritual rape. But the people cannot stop them without a hero.
And so a hero rises, up from a forgotten line of ancient kings, the true rulers of the land. With his holy weapon and his devoted band, he drives the wicked from the land and kills all who resist him. He is dashingly handsome, sexually virile, the ideal man. Sounds like a fun book!
And I’ve read it. I’ve read it time and again. It’s a popular trope, a casual narrative that has wormed its way into our subconscious and props up so much of both fantasy and science fiction. It has elements of Star Wars, The Matrix, and Lord of the Rings. And we root like hell for that strong, young king.
And it never occurs to us that he’s Hitler.
That basic story was the narrative holding up Nazism. Call the kingdom “Germany” and the mutant degenerates “Jews, Homosexuals, and Gypsies,” and it should all be clear. Nazism was replete with the same imagery of teutonic folklore that permeates traditional fantasy, with the same hero-king, and both were informed by the same elemental fascism.
I read Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream when I was in high school. It is not an especially good book. It’s a stereotypical pulp, with overwrought writing, an “a-b-c” plot progression, and an idealized hero. The story is roughly the generic plot I sketched out earlier, and it really only has one thing going for it: it purports to be a fantasy novel written by Adolf Hitler.
It is what’s called a “false document,” an artifact of its own fictional world, alongside Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail. In the world of The Iron Dream, Hitler moved to the United States after the First World War and became a pulp illustrator and writer. The Russians conquered Europe and the US is allied with Imperial Japan in the 1970’s, and in 1953, he wrote The Lord of the Swastika. It had a strong affect on much of the US, becoming wildly popular and affecting the political arena, where the swastika has become a symbol of those advocating strong, efficient government and a vigorous military policy to combat the Greater Soviet Union.
Spinrad writes:
To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler’s saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable.
Almost everyone got the point…
And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. “This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it,” the gist of it went. “Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?”
I read this book in my formative years, and it’s informed most of my work since then. I’ve made real effort to avoid these Hero With A Thousand Faces stories and tell little speculative fiction and historical fiction stories with a Catholic sensibility, like my “The Ways of Things,” which is about resurrection, and “Bolingbroke,” about man’s ability always to escape oppression even without a mighty military effort (it’s also about a dragon).
But it’s everywhere, isn’t it?
Well, this blog recently made two-thousand hits, and in celebration, I’ve redesigned the masthead to include the work of Sean Galloway, one of my favorite illustrators.
This made the rounds a year or so back, but I’ve always loved it. So I thought, in a thick Brooklyn accent, “Hey, maybes all’a yous who reads my blag will wanna givit anudder go!”
The Catholic social-networking site xt3 has put up audio for most of the talks and homilies from WYD online for all of us who just couldn’t afford to spend three-thousand dollars on a trip to Australia.
I’ve been dreading reviewing this movie. I haven’t had the opportunity to really mull it over, consider how it applies to the rest of the mythology, or even give it a good, second viewing. For me to be able to speak intelligently about something like this, I would probably need to catch the movie again and spend the evening discussing it with some of my more philosophically and pop-culturally knowledgable friends to really draw out some good fruit here to display. I haven’t been able to do any of that,
But thanks to friend-of-the-blog Nick Milne, I don’t bloody have to! He’s written a positively extraordinary review of the movie over at The Daily Kraken (which is a great name for a blog, by the way) and I’m happy to let him get the credit for his hard work.
(I would also like to note that, at some point, I would really like to start a movie review with “If this was 1920, people would be blown away by this movie. The sound, the color! But it’s not 1920, and this is a pile of crap.”)
An excerpt:
For the Joker is not an evil man; he is Evil itself, illogical, unmotivated, unpredictable, and (seemingly) unstoppable. He cares nothing for his own safety or enrichment. All he wants, if he can be said to want anything, is to seek out goodness and order, no matter where they are, and destroy them completely. The spine-chilling soliloquies he delivers are quite masterfully wrought, in this regard. The whole interrogation scene around the middle of the film is great, but his entirely accurate taunt as Batman is beating him senseless has a sort of staggering depth to it: “You’ve got nothing – nothing – you can threaten me with. Nothing you can do with all of your strength!” This is what Despair and Futility say when they meet Hope and Purpose.
The Dark Knight captures all of this perfectly; whereas Batman Begins was about a man “becoming a concept” in the creation of the symbol that is Batman, in this case we have something more terrible still: a concept becoming a man. The Joker’s lack of origins (and his lies about same) make this quite compelling, and his constant, serpent-like contortions and rhetorical eloquence lend him a menace that hearkens back to a Being that our general parents once had the misfortune to meet face to face, however briefly. His clothes show no sign of having been made in a conventional way (”clothes are custom,” Lt. Gordon muses; “no tags, no labels”), for such would require far more organization and planning and general order than he would allow. The film’s marvelous score (by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) has no “Joker’s Theme” that plays when he’s around; it is instead just an awful, stomach-churning chord, drawn out uncomfortably long. Any actually melodic music would need too much co-operation and artistic sympathy, and the Joker can brook neither.
SPOILER ALERT
Something he didn’t touch on, which I feel needs at least a good mention, is the story’s element of inevitability. There is an undercurrent of fate rolling through the whole movie, showing the lie to the Joker’s claims, but it’s grim, full of terror and foreboding. During the Harvey-Rachel hostage situation, for example, there’s the simple reality that Rachel has to die. The film has been demanding a sacrifice from the get go, building up to this decisive, destructive moment.
