Every blog on the internet is probably talking about year end lists and recollections and highlights and other summative activities. And I suppose I will too, seeing as how I'm here and I'm not that tired. Waking up at two in the afternoon will do it. So here are a selection of things I've done, seen, observed, began, finished, and whatever else you can say to describe 2008 for me.
As we began . . .
This is what I like to call an upswing year. After 2007, it could not have gotten much worse, barring utter catastrophe such as the death of close friends or a meteor striking the city and destroying it instead of giving me marginally badass superpowers. 2007 saw my first genuine professional crisis since deciding to be a university-based philosopher, with my MA thesis examination metaphorically akin to receiving severe shrapnel wounds. That year was bookended by the catastrophic shattering of two of my closest friendships, first KB and then RH. Things only began to look up on New Year's Eve, which I thought would be my last New Year's Eve in St John's. I spent it partying with one of my nearest and dearest, Chris. Arse that he can be at times, he's had my back at moments when no one else was willing, and stood up for me when no one else would and I deserved it least. He helped me end 2007 optimistically, and by the end of that year, optimism was practically a miracle.
Best Professional Deliverance: McMaster's Acceptance Call
On my way out of a Dance Party of Newfoundland sketch show, I turned my phone back on and immediately got a call from my mother. McMaster philosophy called my house while I was in the theatre with good news. I got home and called back to hear Elisabeth Gedge the department head congratulate me for my acceptance and give me a run-down of their funding package.
Since moving to Hamilton for the program, I have found an apartment perfect for me with low cost, in an excellent downtown neighbourhood, near everything that's important for my daily life: grocery store, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, the liquor store, and good neighbours. My friends Johnny and Allyson have both started at McMaster sociology, and I got them apartments in the same building as me. My supervisor, Barry Allen, is ideal for what I want to write, how I want to approach the project, and how I work. The people at my department support experimentation in writing style, outsized personalities, and professional ambition, all of which define me and my work. Right now, I'm ahead of the game on thesis planning, was one of the few grad students who needed no extensions on any course work, connect well with the undergraduates I teach, and have one publication and two conference presentations pending approval.
Most Awesome Energizer: Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, and Fucked Up
Since I don't work at a newspaper anymore, I don't have access to a pile of new music. However, some of what I've heard on youtube and sought out has treated me well. Probably the best new music I've discovered was a Toronto punk band called Fucked Up. Rarely has sound been so visceral than when it's coming out of speakers playing their second record, The Chemistry of Common Life. Being a punk band, one would gravitate to their being rage experts. But their lyrics revolve around all sorts of existential dread and elevation, all the possibility of human emotion distilled into rock and blasted at you. They take you apart and put you back together molecule by molecule.
As for Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, they wrote a work of classical music that drags me to places only Beethoven (among the classical genre) has done before. It's the perfect complement to a damn-near perfect film. More on that below.
Best Ethical Treatise: The Dark Knight
Since I don't work at a newspaper or a radio station anymore, I don't have access to free movies. But The Dark Knight completely redefined what I thought a pop movie could do. No studio head would ever be crazy enough to sink this much money into a film that embodies pure terror and forces it into the audience's gut. But The Dark Knight did, and actually made enough money to buy most of Africa. I saw it five times during its theatrical run, will buy the dvd, and probably see it during the re-release later this month.
The Dark Knight revolves around problems that I think are at the heart of ethics: What will you do in the face of horror so great it seemed impossible? It presents the intensity of every element of life under threat, and asks if it's possible to build the strength within yourself to hold on to your ideals when all that you love most and all that you've worked for is about to crumble. That the answer can be a credible, powerful, fully knowledgeable Yes makes this film all the greater.
Most Unexpected Re-Awakening of Political Ideals: Barack Obama
Speaking of saying Yes, this man is the new President of the United States. For a long time, I've been a cynic who reduced politics to fearmongering, corruption, a dreary pragmatism, and avoidance of violence. Then this guy wins an election by appealing to all the positive potentials of humanity, and is set to govern along those principles. Pragmatism is not dreary, but an inclusive merging and negotiation of formerly competing interests in the face of common problems. Corruption can be fought by enacting that ideal of a fraternal community in your words and deeds every day in your life. Almost everyone I know predicts his assassination, but I expect him to live into the 2050s. He's shown that we can better the world by demanding that the world be better and acting on that demand. My cynicism will never die as long as I can laugh at my enemies, but my pessimism has been strangled. I did it myself.
Most Accurate Picture of My Inner Life: Spaced
This was the best dvd purchase of my life, even more than my Doctor Who collection. The show has a story structure and headspace that displays almost precisely how I think: flying in a hundred directions at once, but all together making perfect sense. And a soul that just wants to be loved, and to love in return. And it's the funniest show in the world.
Sign of Future Film Stardom: Justin Madol
Justin is a friend from my Muse days who's directing a zombie movie in St John's. I ran into him on New Year's Eve when we were each at parties across the street from each other. We talked, drunkenly, for a while about our plans for the future. He talked about the film, and wanting to establish himself as a director. I talked about my novel, which is unfinished, but now almost three hundred pages and good enough at least to publish. He said that I should write something to adapt to film for him to make, and one of the ideas in my vault could work very well as a film. Undesirables is a plan for a novella about people trying to live quiet lives, but are resentfully excluded from it. One case is a Muslim immigrant suspected of terror ties, and the other case is a former sex offender. There might be a homosexual there too, but I'm not sure yet. It could make for a good low-budget drama. Call me when I finish the PhD, JM. Won't be long.
Showing posts with label Batman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Batman. Show all posts
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Friday, August 15, 2008
Batman, Overman
There can be considerable overlap between art and philosophy, and not only in the obvious field of the philosophy of aesthetics. In a way, I think the best art is ethical philosophy, and the best ethical philosophy is such a work of art. That statement wasn't clear at all, so allow me to give a very broad example of what I think this overlap can do.
Just before I left Newfoundland, I had a conversation with a friend about what we both took The Dark Knight to be. One of his philosophical interests is post-colonial philosophy, which he shares with me. But I also love Nietzsche, and I've read more of this than he has. One of the things we talked about regarding Dark Knight was its conservative interpretation. Here we have a hero, Batman, who spies on the populace and allows himself to be provoked into torturing a villain, presumably for the greater good. On this interpretation, Batman is a figure who justifies the Bush-Cheney administration, taking on evil tasks to protect the innocent from a terrorist. I definitely think you can interpret Dark Knight in this way, but there's also another understanding of the film that resonates with me, and I think speaks a much more profound truth.
Harvey Dent says, having dinner with Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." This phrase encapsulates how I understand Dark Knight. Just because he's Batman, that doesn't make everything he does morally acceptable. This isn't about justification of any action like spying or torture or police brutality. It's about the confrontation of a person who holds himself to be good with the abyss. And when you stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back at you. Where I pick up from there is that when the abyss stares back at you, you have to be strong enough not to become an abyss yourself.
The three characters at the centre of Dark Knight's ethical confrontation that I've just described are Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon. The abyss, personified as The Joker, forces them to confront themselves, and what they are willing to do to achieve their ends. Because if you go too far, you betray the good intentions you started with. "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Of those three, Harvey wasn't strong enough to resist the abyss, and abandoned his ideals as he embraced revenge in his final rampage. Everything Harvey did as Two-Face was a surrender to The Joker's will to destruction. He believed everything The Joker told him in that hospital room, and acted precisely according to plan.
Jim and Bruce are strong enough to take up the burdens necessary to sustain their ideals. Bruce refuses to kill The Joker because that would betray his principles about murder. And he and Jim are both strong enough to cover up Harvey's crimes, and maintain the fiction of incorruptibility that keeps hope in Gotham alive.
My post-colonial friend expressed concern when I advocated an ethics inspired from Nietzsche's talk about strength, believing that this kind of thinking leads to fascism, and the triumph of the one with the bigger gun. But the strength I mean is the kind of strength to affirm your life, to overcome petty, reactive desires like revenge and resentment. This is the strength to maintain your ethical stance even in the face of the most incredible temptation to break it.
This strength is value neutral, of course. The Joker refuses to abandon his ethical stance, which is that all are corruptible, and he will corrupt them through fear, terror, and paranoia. The writing style of philosophy proper is working out ethical systems. Grammatically, they are a series of positive statements. Starting from premises about what is good or what standards the good must satisfy, the straight philosopher works out theories and corollaries that elaborate this concept of good. Just read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice as the best example of this I know.
But the actual collision of ethical systems is something I'm not sure this style of philosophizing I've described can help us with. When two incompatible ethical systems collide, can anything settle the collision except war? Are we really faced with what The Joker describes in his last lines in Dark Knight, "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."? I'm not sure of the answer here yet, but I think stories like Dark Knight offer us a way of understanding these collisions, and how they would play out. The best way to solve this problem of the limitation of philosophy is, I think, to figure out how to combine the philosophical grammar of positive statements with the narrative grammar of the morally ambiguous situation.
I'm certainly thinking modestly here, aren't I?
Just before I left Newfoundland, I had a conversation with a friend about what we both took The Dark Knight to be. One of his philosophical interests is post-colonial philosophy, which he shares with me. But I also love Nietzsche, and I've read more of this than he has. One of the things we talked about regarding Dark Knight was its conservative interpretation. Here we have a hero, Batman, who spies on the populace and allows himself to be provoked into torturing a villain, presumably for the greater good. On this interpretation, Batman is a figure who justifies the Bush-Cheney administration, taking on evil tasks to protect the innocent from a terrorist. I definitely think you can interpret Dark Knight in this way, but there's also another understanding of the film that resonates with me, and I think speaks a much more profound truth.
Harvey Dent says, having dinner with Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." This phrase encapsulates how I understand Dark Knight. Just because he's Batman, that doesn't make everything he does morally acceptable. This isn't about justification of any action like spying or torture or police brutality. It's about the confrontation of a person who holds himself to be good with the abyss. And when you stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back at you. Where I pick up from there is that when the abyss stares back at you, you have to be strong enough not to become an abyss yourself.
The three characters at the centre of Dark Knight's ethical confrontation that I've just described are Bruce Wayne, Harvey Dent, and Jim Gordon. The abyss, personified as The Joker, forces them to confront themselves, and what they are willing to do to achieve their ends. Because if you go too far, you betray the good intentions you started with. "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Of those three, Harvey wasn't strong enough to resist the abyss, and abandoned his ideals as he embraced revenge in his final rampage. Everything Harvey did as Two-Face was a surrender to The Joker's will to destruction. He believed everything The Joker told him in that hospital room, and acted precisely according to plan.
Jim and Bruce are strong enough to take up the burdens necessary to sustain their ideals. Bruce refuses to kill The Joker because that would betray his principles about murder. And he and Jim are both strong enough to cover up Harvey's crimes, and maintain the fiction of incorruptibility that keeps hope in Gotham alive.
My post-colonial friend expressed concern when I advocated an ethics inspired from Nietzsche's talk about strength, believing that this kind of thinking leads to fascism, and the triumph of the one with the bigger gun. But the strength I mean is the kind of strength to affirm your life, to overcome petty, reactive desires like revenge and resentment. This is the strength to maintain your ethical stance even in the face of the most incredible temptation to break it.
This strength is value neutral, of course. The Joker refuses to abandon his ethical stance, which is that all are corruptible, and he will corrupt them through fear, terror, and paranoia. The writing style of philosophy proper is working out ethical systems. Grammatically, they are a series of positive statements. Starting from premises about what is good or what standards the good must satisfy, the straight philosopher works out theories and corollaries that elaborate this concept of good. Just read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice as the best example of this I know.
But the actual collision of ethical systems is something I'm not sure this style of philosophizing I've described can help us with. When two incompatible ethical systems collide, can anything settle the collision except war? Are we really faced with what The Joker describes in his last lines in Dark Knight, "an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."? I'm not sure of the answer here yet, but I think stories like Dark Knight offer us a way of understanding these collisions, and how they would play out. The best way to solve this problem of the limitation of philosophy is, I think, to figure out how to combine the philosophical grammar of positive statements with the narrative grammar of the morally ambiguous situation.
I'm certainly thinking modestly here, aren't I?
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