…A struggle between the divine and the mythical, Jacob and the Angel as point of departure and building block for a political struggle that of necessity and consequence collides and challenges the established law. Since the beginning, there has always been a relationship between justice and violence in the institution of law and resistance to it. It is more deeper than the often superficial, revolutionary calls for justice, which are often satisfied by changing the present laws with others thought to be more just; violent mythical contentions that nonetheless are antagonistic to more deep-seated divine yearnings.
Interesting piece from David Graeber cited below in excerpt. Nothing really earth shattering here, but well expressed, putting into a pop culture context many of the ideas expressed in Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, and the idea of perpetuity of the law. Benjamin delineated two competing sides to his utopian project. Essentially, Benjamin did not dismiss political violence,but instead, studied its status and its underpinnings within what he termed a pessimistic context which was articulated in a claim that only the divine permits us to speak of justice, a kind of transformation of the utopian project, to spring it out of the box that had wedged it within a secular history and framework. In the end, fundamental and genuine change, – not the authenticity hoax of an Obama and his alleged Marxist tea-in-the-salon dabblings- is only conceivable, attainable, by an overthrow, and insurrection against history itself.
From Benjamin’s perspective, all the revolutionary attempts to attain utopia, from Thomas More, St-Augustine, Marx, Freud et al. are exposed as a fraud, a plastic, collapsable vanity of a mythic forces that suffer from buckled knee syndrome when confronting the messianic. Poetically and artistically this manifests itself on a synthesis of the legacy of thought on the idea of redemption and the utopian tradition leading to a re-jigging once the cat is out of the bag in a lawless, quasi-anarchistic new frontier. And the Hollywood industrial culture industry has been very adept at appropriating this narrative towards forwarding its own agenda…
( see link at end)…Let me clarify one thing from the start: Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight Rises really is a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda. Nolan, the director, claims the script was written before the movement even started, and that the famous scenes of the occupation of New York (“Gotham”) were really inspired by Dickens’ account of the French Revolution.
Read More:http://www.comicvine.com/legion-of-super-heroes-/37-103850/
This is probably true, but it’s disingenuous. Everyone knows Hollywood scripts are continually being rewritten while movies are in production, and that when it comes to messaging, even details like where a scene is shot (“I know, let’s have the cops face off with Bane’s followers right in front of the New York Stock Exchange!”) or a minor change of wording (“let’s change ‘take control of’ to ‘occupy’”) can make all the difference. Then there’s the fact that the villains actually do attack the Stock Exchange. Still, it’s precisely this ambition, the filmmaker’s willingness to take on the great issues of the day, that ruins the movie.
It’s sad, because both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight had moments of genuine eloquence. In the first films of the trilogy, Nolan has some interesting things to say about human psychology, and, particularly, about the relationship between creativity and violence. The Dark Knight Rises is more ambitious. It dares to speak on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times. And in doing so, it stuttered into incoherence.
…What are superhero movies really all about? What could explain the sudden explosion of such movies—one so dramatic that it sometimes seems that comic book-based movies are replacing sci-fi as the main form of Hollywood special effects blockbuster, almost as rapidly as the cop movie replaced the Western as the dominant action genre in the ‘70s?
Why, in the process, have familiar superheroes suddenly been given complex interiority: family backgrounds, ambivalence, moral crises and self-doubt? And why does the very fact of their receiving a soul seem to force them to also choose some kind of explicit political orientation? One could argue that this happened first not with a comic-book character, but with James Bond. Casino Royale gave Bond psychological depth for the first time. By the very next movie he was saving indigenous communities in Bolivia from evil transnational water privatizers. Spiderman, too, broke left in his latest cinematic incarnation, just as Batman broke right….<
Read More:http://culturevisuelle.org/blog/11062
… Let’s start at the beginning, by looking specifically at the comic book stories where the TV shows, cartoon series and blockbuster movies ultimately came from. Comic-book superheroes were originally a mid-century phenomenon, and like all mid-century pop culture phenomena, they are essentially Freudian.
Umberto Eco once remarked that comic book stories already operate a little bit like dreams: the same plot is repeated, obsessive-compulsively, over and over; nothing changes; and even as the backdrop for the stories shifts from Great Depression to World War to post-war prosperity, the heroes, whether they are Superman, Wonder Woman, the Green Hornet, or the Mighty Thor, seem to exist in an eternal present, never aging, always the same….
…Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.
—he world’s first Muslim cartoon superheroes have taken the Arab world by storm, and now they are headed for British television screens. Named the 99, as each possesses one of Allah’s 99 attributes, the characters include a burka-clad woman named Batina the Hidden and a Saudi Arabian Hulk-type man named Jabbar the Powerful.
They have proved a hit from Morocco to Indonesia and were recently named as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the world by Forbes magazine.
Now they are being brought to British television by Endemol, the production company behind Big Brother, with a mission to instill Islamic values in children across all faiths.
However, despite being called the 99, there will never be a full cast of 99 superheroes since it is forbidden to depict all Allah’s attributes.—Read More:http://www.belch.com/blog/category/comics/page/3/
… After all, the heroes of even the most right-leaning action movies seem to spend much of their time smashing up suburban shopping malls, something many of us would like to do at some point in our lives. In the case of most comic book superheroes, however, the mayhem has extremely conservative political implications. To understand why requires a brief digression on the question of constituent power.
IV. Costumed superheroes ultimately battle criminals in the name of the law—even if they themselves often operate outside a strictly legal framework. But in the modern state, the very status of law is a problem. This is because of a basic logical paradox: no system can generate itself.
Any power capable of creating a system of law cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from somewhere else. …
…So, laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up). It’s okay for police to use violence because they are enforcing the law; the law is legitimate because it’s rooted in the constitution; the constitution is legitimate because it comes from the people; the people created the constitution by acts of illegal violence. The obvious question, then, is: how does one tell the difference between “the people” and a mere rampaging mob?…
…The Left, chastened by the disasters of the 20th century, has largely moved away from its older celebration of revolutionary violence, preferring non-violent forms of resistance. Those who act in the name of something higher than the law can do so precisely because they don’t act like a rampaging mob.
For the Right, on the other hand—and this has been true since the rise of fascism in the ‘20s—the very idea that there is something special about revolutionary violence, anything that makes it different from mere criminal violence, is so much self-righteous twaddle. Violence is violence. But that doesn’t mean a rampaging mob can’t be “the people,” because violence is the real source of law and political order anyway. Any successful deployment of violence is, in its own way, a form of constituent power.
This is why, as Walter Benjamin noted, we cannot help but admire the “great criminal”: because, as so many movie posters put it, “he makes his own law.” After all, any criminal organization does, inevitably, begin developing its own—often quite elaborate—set of internal laws. They have to, as a way of controlling what would otherwise be completely random violence. From the right-wing perspective, that’s all that law ever is. It is a means of controlling the very violence that brings it into being, and through which it is ultimately enforced.
…What does all this have to do with costumed superheroes? Well, everything. Because this is exactly the space that superheroes, and super-villains, also inhabit. An inherently fascist space, inhabited only by gangsters, would-be dictators, police, and thugs, with endlessly blurring lines between them.
…They aren’t fascists. They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.
..It’s in this sense that the logic of the superhero plot is profoundly, deeply conservative. Ultimately, the division between Left- and Right-wing sensibilities turns on one’s attitude towards the imagination. For the Left, imagination, creativity, by extension production, the power to bring new things and new social arrangements into being, is always to be celebrated. It is the source of all real value in the world. For the Right, it is dangerous, and ultimately evil. The urge to create is also a destructive urge. This kind of sensibility was rife in the popular Freudianism of the day: the Id was the motor of the psyche, but also amoral; if really unleashed, it would lead to an orgy of destruction. This is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction. Conservatives wish to defend us against that possibility. Fascists wish to unleash it anyway. They aspire to be, as Hitler imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds, blood, and sinews of humanity….
—This made me smile, an homage to Milton Glaser’s poster of Bob Dylan. The headline to the interior article about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Ben Bernanke, is another homage, to Bob Dylan’s song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
Read More:http://maxboam.wordpress.com/page/2/
…If the message was that rebellious imagination was okay as long as it was kept out of politics, and simply confined to consumer choices (clothes, cars, and accessories), this had become a message that even executive producers could easily get behind.
…As himself he is almost completely dysfunctional, incapable of forming friendships or romantic attachments, uninterested in work unless it somehow reinforces his morbid obsessions. The hero was so obviously crazy, and the movie so obviously about his battle with his own craziness, that it’s not a problem that the villains are just a series of ego-appendages, especially in the first film of the trilogy: Ra’s al Ghul (the bad father), the Crime boss (the successful businessman), the Scarecrow (who drives the businessman insane.) There’s nothing particularly appealing about any of them, but that doesn’t matter: they’re all just shards and tessera of the hero’s shattered mind. As a result, there’s obviously a political message. Or so it seems. When you create a movie out of characters so encrusted with myth and canon history, no director is entirely in control of his material.
—Read More:http://www.tcampbell.net/john/
…Nolan’s villains, in short, are always anarchists, but they’re always very peculiar anarchists, of a sort that seem to exist only in the filmmaker’s imagination. They are anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt. The Joker, the real hero of the second movie, makes all of this explicit: he is the Id become philosopher.
The Joker is nameless, has no origin other than whatever he whimsically invents on any particular occasion, and it’s not even clear what his powers are. Yet he is, inexorably, powerful. The Joker is a pure force of self-creation, a poem written by himself. His only purpose in life appears to be an obsessive need to prove to others first, that everything is and can only be poetry—and second, that poetry is evil.
… So here we are back to the central theme of the early superhero universes: a prolonged reflection on the dangers of the human imagination, how the reader’s own desire to immerse oneself in a world driven by artistic imperatives is living proof of why that the imagination must always be carefully contained.
…The end, when Bruce and Commissioner Gordon settle on the plan to scapegoat Batman and create a false myth around the martyrdom of Harvey Dent, is nothing short of a confession that politics is identical to the art of fiction. The Joker was right: redemption lies only in the fact that the violence, the deception, can be turned back upon itself. Nolan would have done well to leave it at that….
—After throwing the first pitch, Wayne Gretzky enjoyed last night’s Blue Jays game from the TD Comfort Zone!—
…The economy collapsed. Not because of the manipulations of some secret society of warrior monks, but because of a bunch of financial managers who, living in Nolan’s bubble world and sharing his assumptions about the endlessness of popular manipulability, turned out to be wrong. There was a mass popular response. It did not take the form of a frenetic search for messianic saviors, mixed with outbreaks of nihilist violence: increasingly, it took the form of a series of real popular movements, even revolutionary movements, toppling regimes in the Middle East and occupying squares everywhere from Cleveland to Karachi, trying to create new forms of democracy.
Constituent power had reappeared, and in an imaginative, radical, and remarkably non-violent form. This is precisely the kind of situation a superhero universe cannot address. In Nolan’s world, something like Occupy could only have been the product of some tiny group of ingenious manipulators who really are pursuing some secret agenda….
…Why does Bane wish to lead the people in a social revolution, if he’s just going to nuke them all in a few weeks anyway? It’s anyone’s guess. He claims that before you destroy someone, first you must give them hope. So is the message that utopian dreams can only lead to nihilistic violence? Presumably something like that, but it’s singularly unconvincing, since the plan to kill everyone came first, and the revolution was a decorative afterthought. In fact, what happens to the city can only possibly make sense as a material echo of what’s always been most important: what’s happening in Bruce Wayne’s tortured brain.
In the end, Batman and the Gotham police rise from their respective dungeons and join forces to battle the evil Occupiers outside the Stock Exchange, Batman fakes his own death disposing of the bomb, and Bruce ends up with Catwoman in Florence. A new phony martyr legend is born and the people of Gotham are pacified. In case of further trouble, we are assured there is also a potential heir to Batman, a disillusioned police officer named Robin. The movie finally ends, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
These ads for a bank contain a certain element of their own anger and violent revolutionary possibilities from within…..
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