The Kids Are Alright

I started not understanding Occupy Wall Street's purpose. I fell into the media trap of reciting a talking point: they have no message! But the more I spoke to members of the movement, people online, people at Occupy Seattle itself (yes, I've been a few times), the purpose and message became more clear. Occupy started focusing itself as well, which helped. Switch to Credit Unions? Yeah, I get that. And old friend who worked in finance until 2008 (heh) has been telling us the same thing for months. The Beautiful Competition's been saying it for years.

The more I learned about Occupy, the more I realized I've seen this before. I was quite an activist in my college days: supporting Nader in 2000, working on a certain filmmaker's TV show, railing against corporate greed and a fundamentally corrupt system.

Youthful Indiscretions

After Bush was elected and 9/11 happened any sort of discourse about these subjects came to a grinding halt for several years--while the very interests we sought to highlight proceeded to continue their ruin of our economy. Not just the American economy mind you, but the global economy.

It's been a strange past month. I've watched as friends and family attack the Occupy movement with a variety of strawmen and non sequitors. I've seen relations of those family members struggle to try to find a job several months out of college--hardly a unique phenomenon, and one that's central to the heart of the Occupy movement.

Yes, it's the protesters who are messy.

They're not too proud to go and flip burgers (despite being told that incurring tens of thousands in debt is the way to avoid burger-flipping): it's just that there aren't enough burger-flipping jobs available. "They should shut up and get a job" in response to Occupy is the response you'd make only if you were utterly clueless about the economic situation in this country (and now spreading into the EU.)

There is a certain amount of irony here: the very boomers whose protests in the civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War are the same people who simply don't understand Occupy, for whatever reason. I was reminded yesterday of a verse written by these very boomers more than 45 years ago, which are oddly prophetic for Occupy. Here's a video to accompany it.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

Much of this coalesced last week when I read this stunning article about a Catholic's loss of faith after the Penn State pedophilia scandal. It's not so much about a loss of religious faith but a loss of faith in institutions, leaders, and those who should be serving as role models. In a way it's the loss of faith in the boomers who protested war but put us in this situation by allowing the monied interests to have their way with America. I grew up on The Simpsons: the first episode to hit Fox came out in my very formative fifth grade year. The Occupy grew up on South Park, a far more nihilistic cartoon lampooning literally everything. For The Simpsons generation, there are institutions we should still be able to trust. For the Occupy generation, the South Park generation, just a few years younger than me, they have been raised to suspect and distrust literally everything.

It's an isolating proposition. It's the ultimate existentialism, a body of internal self-reliance that would probably scare the ever-loving shit out of most people who rely on religion, leaders, institutions, or something for meaning. As the boomers drift around like boats on the ocean taking refuge in new age nonsense while ignoring the economic ruin they've enabled if not condoned, the South Park generation is taking to the streets.

Occupy Paper Street

In a Facebook conversation the other day about the above article I mentioned how much that nihilism reminded me of the film Fight Club. If there's a movie that encapsulates what we were trying to achieve (or at least, Cassandra-like, trying to bring attention to) in the last 90s, Fight Club would be it. It isn't a glorification of violence and anti-establishment behavior: the film is a warning that a corrupt and awful system stacked against those who enter it at a young age will inevitably reach a breaking point.

The Simpsons generation still trusted too much in the ability for things to sort themselves out. We were drowned by the jingoism following 9/11, the patriotism suppositories forced on us by the extreme right who said anyone who questioned their actions were traitors while the literally robbed us blind and ruined 99.9% of us while they made out like the bandits they were.

This isn't to say that we don't have our place in Occupy, as do the boomers who have joined and supported it, as do the Vietnam vets who are protesting, the 84-year-old retirees who have been pepper sprayed, as does anyone who understands what's happening here (what it is, is exactly clear--if you've been paying attention.) But fundamentally it isn't our movement. It belongs to the South Park generation.

They've watched as the institutions they have been told will uplift and protect them have repeatedly, fundamentally and systemically failed.  And rather than accepting this fate they have taken to the streets, formed General Assemblies, put into action fundamental democratic principles, and enacted steps to raise awareness and start taking things back. They are doing what we tried and failed to do 10 years ago.

Despite the movement's many shortcomings (see, we can't do anything without questioning the institution!) it has the best chance of success of any political movement since the 1960s. It's their time. They have my support. Their success won't be stunted but enabled by their fundamental distrust in the institutions that lead us here--all of them. Those kids are alright.

Fight Knight Round 2

Recently I wrote a blog post comparing The Dark Knight and Fight Club, and Roger and GZ both gave me a run for my money (in a good way) in the comments. The essence of the original post was:

Both Fight Club and The Dark Knight are cultural artefacts, capturing something essential about the sociological contexts in which they were made. Fight Club features a vaguely anarchist anit-hero that attempts to overcome a similarly vague sense of ennui through various small acts of terrorism (and in the end, detonating a series of empty buildings of credit card companies.) Dark Knight's villain is a far more sinister psychopath, who thinks nothing of taking innocent lives in a quest of seemingly senseless rage.

After the discussion from the last post and having had the pleasure of watching The Dark Knight again since, I think my prior conclusions may have been wrong, specifically about the Joker's motives and what that means.

Understand: the Joker is an unreliable narrator at best, and his story does change based on who he's talking to. When speaking to the gangsters, he puts things in the context of money and power. When he's talking to Harvey Dent, he becomes the 'dog chasing cars.' His 'how I got my scars' story changes every time he tells it, and in the end how he got the scars isn't important, because his motivation doesn't necessarily stem from a logical (to us, if not him) reaction to something in his past. There's a habit of trying to assign meaning and motivation to characters based on past experiences, and there's a good deal of scientific evidence to back up why we do this; even over-the-top real-life sociopaths or serial killers like Ed Gein or John Wayne Gacy have troubled pasts, events that influence their later descents into madness. No doubt the Joker had similar experiences, but the film pointedly decides not to explore them, as the point is more than his plan is somewhat more motiveless. If anything, whatever he experienced separated him so greatly from reality that his view of humanity is of a species no better than animals, where the rules of civilization are just lies constructed over the massive id lurking beneath the surface.

This is most obvious in his conversation with Batman at the end of the film, but the pivotal moment comes before, when the Joker is talking to Batman in the interrogation room. Batman has but one rule: no killing. But, the Joker tells him, he'll have to take one life to save another - either Rachael or Harvey will have to die (and indeed, one of them does.) But this isn't Batman's choice per se, it's more of a Sophie's Choice moment. That one will die is inevitable, and Batman's finger isn't on the trigger - he just decides who will die (incorrectly, it turns out, but nevermind.)

Rewind even further to the beginning of the film, when Bruce and Alfred are talking about Rachael. Alfred asks if Bruce will have him (Alfred) followed on his day off. 'If you ever took one I might,' Bruce quips. 'Know your limits, Master Wayne,' Alfred responds seriously. 'Batman has no limits,' Bruce replies.

Except he clearly does have a limit, and that is what the Joker is trying to push. His murdering cops and innocents (and innocent cops) is nothing more than a function of trying to get Batman to break this last limit. Harvey Dent was relatively simple to turn into Two-Face, but Batman's single principle turns out to be far harder, and it's clear that this fascinates the Joker. If anything - 'we're going to be doing this forever,' as he says, is his motivation. His various plots may be nothing more than ways to get at Batman and make him break, because if he can do that then truly everyone is corruptible. Harvey was Gotham's 'White Knight' in public and it was important that he not fall, despite privately doing so, and conversely Batman could be the 'Dark Knight,' tarnished when he needed to be, because in the end the only people to whom it matters whether Batman is a killer are the Joker and Batman himself. This is, in a way, the 'point' of the film but it's worth clarifying here.

So while Tyler Durden is anarchy and action for the eventual sake of liberation and being constructive (in his view, anyway), the Joker has no such noble pretensions; in fact, his ultimate goal doesn't concern people at all, but merely Batman himself as a kind of plaything for the Joker's own amusement. So what does that say about us, that our villains have reached a point where the events in their lives that influence how the ended up no longer matter, where their motivations are personal and a body count in the hundreds is quite literally collateral damage? I could make some meaningless political connection, or try again to connect it to the military-industrial complex, but I don't necessarily think either would be correct or honest. I just don't know. Instead, I'm going to leave the question open; Fight Club didn't make sense to me in its sociological context until several years later, and I reckon that The Dark Knight will be similar.

So watch this space in five years' time for an additional post on the subject.

Knight Club

I was discussing art with the Beautiful Competition over a lovely dinner of Italian food, pink Champagne and lemon gelato last evening (it's a difficult life, isn't it?) and we got on the subject of film. I've been thinking a lot about The Dark Knight lately, which I've reviewed before, as a cultural touchstone or artefact: that is, something that captures a certain kind of zeitgeist. I realized that I like Dark Knight for many of the same reasons I like another artefact film: Fight Club. They're excellent films to examine side-by-side.

Fight Club came out in 1999, and managed to capture the late Clinton-era zeitgeist in a way that no other film can claim. The notion of office workers, bored by their jobs and betrayed by promises that they would be ‘rock gods or movie stars' turning to small-scale domestic terrorism to show their dissatisfaction reflected a growing ennui among the young professional class. It was a film born from economic safety, a remote threat of real terrorism (can you imagine Fight Club being released after 9/11?) and a view that the villain is not only likable, he's something to which we might aspire as he's just an aspect of us.

Other images I associate with this time are almost straight out of the film: the pictures of the impotently-smashed windows of Starbucks' and McDonalds during the so-called Battle of Seattle WTO protests. Rather than striking at the true culprits, it's as though the anarchists decided upon direct action for direct action's sake, vandalizing franchises that represented something tangentally associated with the targets of their rage. They struck against the same coffee shops where they purchased their own tall skinny soy lattes, as if what they hated the most was something inside themselves.

Then consider Dark Knight, where a much more separated hero battles a villain who is more like a force of Nature. Bruce Wayne is the military-industrial complex, a do-gooding rich person who feels that the best way to alleviate crime is not to redistribute wealth or fund educational programs, but to physically beat criminals and purchase hotels by writing personal checks. His superpowers consist of nothing more than access to the latest military weapons technology that in turn fuels his vast personal fortune when he's not using it to hit escaped mental patients.

On the other side is the Joker, a literal wildcard who makes quite clear that he wishes only to cause destruction and chaos. He has no logical plan or reasoning – he is, by his own admission, a ‘dog chasing cars, and wouldn't know what to do if [he] caught one' – acting entirely on instinct. His villainy comes not from any rhyme or reason; in fact, it's difficult to even call it evil as it doesn't appear to be motivated by a need to cause harm other than the opposite of the established order. In a way, it's a perfect and safe Western dream: good people in the military-corporate network keeping us safe from forces of darkness that cannot (or we simply refuse to take the time to) be understood.

Don't get me wrong; I loved the Dark Knight but its overtones are difficult to ignore. It's interesting to compare the two films as far as what they indicate of the national mindset, what makes a ‘hero' and what's acceptable both for heroes and villains. In fact, are the villains actually us? How much are we like them? These questions are nothing new to comics or stories, but the ways in which the answers change are very indicative of how our mindset shifts, however subtly. In this case, I think it reflects a growing cynicism, that the ennui of the late 1990s was replaced first with a renewed optimism and faith in leadership, government and military which was the squandered and eventually taken advantage of, creating a reaction possibly more cynical than the previous one.

Oddly enough, it's not the heroes in these films that are the most accurate reflections of the times but the villains themselves. Tyler Durden's rage against the corporate machine manifesting as minor acts of terrorism and simple human empowerment with material denial is a perfect model of the aimless feeling of basic dissent we exhibited at the end of the 1990s. Clinton lied, but he lied about getting blowjobs. The economy looked pretty good. We weren't involved in any foreign wars, and had the full backing of NATO and the UN in Kosovo.

The Joker is us now, rage without focus, the anti-structure. Whatever's in place is bad, because it's inherently corrupt and probably going to screw us anyway. Piles of money in shipping containers? Just stuff to be burned, because hey, the guys at the top have been bleeding it out of the good citizen of Gotham anyway. And we should probably be punished in some way because we're complacent in putting these power structures in place to begin with. The commoners are as much to blame as anyone else, and it's better just to burn it all and start again.

It's hard to imagine a Joker smashing a Starbucks', but it's also hard to imagine Tyler Durden forcing commoners and criminals to face a prisoner's dilemma. And it's hard to imagine us accepting either doing those things, exactly because it would be so out of context of the times.