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“Lost in a Roman Wilderness of Pain”: Film and Television After 9/11

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

Here’s an article I published on film and television after 9/11 in Film International; above, Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, which is discussed in the article (see link below).

As I argue in the essay, “In the years following 9/11, the arts have been transformed into a mirror of the fear, death, paranoia and uncertainty that now pervades American existence. The disaster of the Twin Towers has transformed the cultural landscape profoundly, inescapably, and forever; it’s one of those defining moments in which a culture is shaped anew by the social events that impact it. Fear, death, and paranoia are the new social currency. What is celebrated now is not art; it’s artifice. Our culture now reifies itself with unrelenting images of destruction, from such television series as Life After People (2008-2010), which predicted what might happen in a post-apocalyptic future; to films like Andrew Niccol’s In Time (2011), in which life expectancy is a commodity to be bought and sold, and the rich have all the cards, including potential immortality.

New York, arguably the artistic hub of the United States, has become a museum of itself, seeking to recreate the past by selling off the totemic paintings, sculptures and other art works of the pre 9/11 era for outrageous prices to the stratospherically rich. The emptiness of every aspect of post 9/11 art, except where it deals with themes of pain, destruction and violence, is everywhere apparent; pop music – once a potent force for social change – has largely been transformed into mindless escapism, even as the digitization of culture wipes out record stores, bookstores, and video stores, as text, music, and images become streamed liked utilities – available for a price, stored in a cloud, accessed only by a continual outlay of cash by the consumer.

The more original and authentic arts are being attacked vigorously everywhere by the ruling classes throughout the world, because they are dangerous; they offer a voice to the individual, in a society that now seeks to rule by forced consensus. This is part of the conglomerization of art; it’s become a corporate commodity, a trophy, rather than something that an individual creates. More than ever, it seems true that the best artist is a dead artist, because there’s a limited supply of his or her work, which can be sold as a commodity, and the best celebrity spokesperson is also a corpse, because the iconic images of Kerouac, Bogart, Hepburn and Taylor can be used to sell anything, without the slightest risk of possible future scandal, or an unflattering headline. All their future is in the past, and thus it can be recycled, packaged, and used to sell new goods to those too young to remember the world the way it was. Spectacle, as in films such as Zack Snyder’s call to war, 300 (2007), has replaced content, and action has replaced thought. Music cues tell you how to feel; when to feel sad, when to rejoice. Everything is laid out in a clear, schematic design. The films of the 21st century are designed, because of their ever-increasing cost, for mass audiences, leaving no one behind.”

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

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Posted in Criticism, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Film Industry, Film Theory, Humanities, Life, Pop Culture, Reviews | Comments Off

Daniel Lindvall on Cosmopolis

Monday, November 5th, 2012

Daniel Lindvall has a brief but brilliant essay on David Cronenberg’s film Cosmopolis in the web journal Film International.

As Lindvall writes, “The economic divide that places a super-wealthy elite in a condition of invulnerability, social and physical isolation, simultaneously blocks the ability to empathize. The distance separating them from the rest of us becomes so great that they simply lose the ability to see us as proper fellow humans. The logic of the market that transforms everything and everyone into commodities does the rest. When a yuppie looks at us we should probably imagine that he looks at us much as we might look at a dog. Of course there are all sorts of dogs; good dogs, cute dogs, difficult dogs, dangerous dogs, dogs that need to be put down. This is the psychological realism that was captured with such steely elegance by Mary Harron and Christian Bale when they brought American Psycho to the screen in 2000. Patrick Bateman is the image of a monstrous, deranged neoliberalism at its peek; invincible and opaque. No matter how far into madness Bateman takes his blood thirst the world cannot see through the polished masque that he ritually dons every morning with the help of his battery of ultra-exclusive skin care products.

The 28-year old financial billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), whose continuously disrupted journey across Manhattan in a sound proof limousine is narrated in Cosmopolis, is every bit as mentally estranged from the everyday world around him as Bateman and just as brutally indifferent. But Packer’s universe is falling apart around him, assaulted both by anti-capitalist protesters and a market that suddenly turns unpredictable. In the course of the film’s 108 minutes he loses everything. Seen as a story about the financial crisis as such this is obviously not a very realistic depiction. With very few exceptions, the ultra-rich have become even richer, protected with absolute loyalty by the neoliberal state that remains the slavishly obedient guarantor of their wealth and power.

But Cosmopolis is, perhaps, rather more realistic if understood as the nightmare of the contemporary yuppie in a time when neither the vulnerability of the economy in itself nor the realization of Earth’s incapacity to sustain the capitalist production system can be fully repressed. Perhaps, then, what we see here is the initial crumbling of the psychological foundation of the yuppie, the sociopathic self-confidence.

Erich Hobsbawm has spoken of “the short twentieth century,” from the outbreak of World War One to the fall of the Soviet Union. Giovanni Arrighi, on the other hand, wrote about “the long twentieth century,” starting with the Great Depression of 1873-96. Perhaps we could also speak of “the long 1980s” of unlimited neoliberal self-confidence, beginning with the election of the first Thatcher government and possibly reaching the beginning of its end with the Lehman Brothers crash in September 2008. Then again, Eric Packer may well wake up from his nightmare once more, like he did after the initial crisis of the twenty-first century, the period when Don DeLillo’s here adapted novel was written. After all, the yuppie has proven just as difficult to kill off as those other monsters of the long 1980s, Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers.”

This is sharp, cogent, impassioned writing, on a topic that is of ever greater importance as the economic scale becomes ever more skewed not only in the United States, but around the world. Cosmopolis is a slick, sleek, and ultimately superficial film, and not one of Cronenberg’s best by a long shot, but then again, the world the film depicts is equally empty, as is Pattinson’s character, which is why, perhaps, the film wasn’t a financial success. For all of its surface sheen, the world Cosmopolis depicts is ultimately the domain of the dead, people interested only in money and status symbol consumption, and perhaps that cuts too close to heart of what has become, in the eyes of some, the “American Dream.” There’s no such thing as equality in this film; only a financially enforced hierarchy in which there are winners and losers. Money is simply a way of keeping score. And when Pattinson’s character loses all his money, there’s nothing left of his life to salvage. In the cold, insular, spectacularly self-absorbed world of Cosmopolis, all anyone wants is cash.

As the fictitious Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) famously observed in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, “It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.”

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Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 4

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Peter Cook as The Prince of Darkness in Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967).

Part Four of my essay on “Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s” appeared today in Film International, along with links back to parts 1, 2, and 3.

I start the essay with these thoughts: ”As the 1960s drew to a close, so did the string of dark comedies; the real world was bleak enough, and audiences began to prize artificial optimism over satiric criticism. John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was seen at the time as aberrational; but by the end of the decade, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X had also been assassinated, and the public’s taste for “sick humor” started to wane. Simply surviving seemed a tough enough goal. Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967), an updating of the Faust legend with Peter Cook as Satan and Dudley Moore as the hapless Stanley Moon, a short order cook, offered a graphic demonstration of the hopelessness of ambition. Stanley wants to be loved by Margaret (Eleanor Bron), a waitress at the Wimpy hamburger restaurant he works in, and Satan promises to help him in his quest with a series of seven wishes, but every time Stanley thinks up what he imagines to be a foolproof plan for romantic bliss, Satan can’t resist adding a little wrinkle to frustrate Stanley’s dreams.

For one wish, Stanley asks to be a pop star, and his wish is granted; shrieking a wanton ballad of unbridled lust, ‘Love Me,’ on television, he seems to have attained Margaret’s love, until Satan, appearing in the role of a rival pop singer, begins intoning a dirge-like song of rejection (‘You turn me off – go away – you disgust me – I’m not available’) that proves to be the next new trend in rock music, rendering Stanley’s pleading ballads obsolete. Stanley’s numerous other attempts to seduce Margaret, as an intellectual bachelor, and finally as a nun, also fail to work. In the end of the film, Stanley manages to escape from Satan’s clutches through a loophole in his contract, and is back at his old post, frying burgers, but this time, content with his lot. The film’s message is clear; one must be content with what one has, and not hope for more. Ambition, in a sense, is potentially disastrous.”

You can read the entire essay by clicking here, or on the image above.

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Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s — Part 3

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

I have a new article out today; part three of my essay on “Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s,” in the journal Film International.

Here’s the opening paragraphs: “Death has often been used to comic effect in films, but an all out assault on what Jessica Mitford termed “the American way of death” is another thing entirely. Loosely based on Evelyn Waugh’s acerbic novel of the same name on life, death, and the attendant collapse of civilization in Hollywood, Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965) was a stand alone film even in a decade devoted to dark humor; indeed, it was boldly advertised as ‘the motion picture with something to offend everyone,’ and largely lived up to its billing. Though hampered by Haskell Wexler’s uncharacteristically stolid camerawork (Richardson hired Wexler because of his signature handheld ‘newsreel’ style, but was appalled when Wexler categorically refused to utilize it on the film – more on this later) and an uneven screenplay by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood, the film still succeeds on a number of counts. America was becoming death obsessed in the mid 1960s, with the costs of funerals and memorials rising dramatically.

The Loved One centers on the Whispering Glades cemetery – a stand in for Hollywood’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park – where the corrupt Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy (Jonathan Winters) presides over a kingdom of death. His key aide is Mr. Joyboy (a suitably effete Rod Steiger), who is the chief embalmer, assisted by Aimee Thanatogenous (Anjanette Comer), who helps to ‘make up’ the corpses that pass through Whispering Glades for their final public appearance. Into this complicated scenario comes Dennis Barlow (a very young Robert Morse), as a clueless Briton trying to ingratiate himself with the ‘British Colony’ in Hollywood, with the help of his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud). Dennis falls madly in love with Aimee, but Joyboy is also attracted to her, and a love match ensues.

Meanwhile, the ‘Blessed Reverend’ is becoming worried that Whispering Glades is no longer a money spawning operation. The graveyard is filling up, and he’s running out of room; at first, Glenworthy tries to increase profits by holding back-to-back weddings and funerals in the same chapel, each performed in a matter of minutes, with canned music cues (both presided over by the unctuous actor Ed Reimers in an unbilled cameo; in real life, Reimers shilled for both Crest Toothpaste and Allstate Insurance). But it’s not enough; something has to give. Suddenly, Reverend Glenworthy is seized with an inspiration. Instead of a cemetery, Whispering Glades can be turned into a retirement complex, assuring continual turnover and a constant stream of revenue. There’s only one problem; what to do with all those pesky bodies buried at Whispering Glades? ‘There’s got to be a way to get those stiffs off my property!’ Glenworthy barks to one of his subordinates, and indeed, there is.”

You can read the entire article by clicking here, or on the image at the top of this post.

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Posted in Criticism, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Foreign Films, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Pop Culture, Satire | Comments Off

Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 2

Monday, August 27th, 2012

Out this morning (August 27, 2012) is Part Two of my four part series on Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s in Film International.

The scene above is from Stanley Kramer’s epic comedy of wretched excess, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, about which I have this to say: “Back in America, producer/director Stanley Kramer was readying a much more ambitious project, perhaps the most overwhelmingly brutal comedy ever made: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). With a cast featuring literally every living comedian in either a leading, cameo, or supporting role, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, The Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, and everyone else in between, the film, budgeted at a then-colossal $9.4 million, was of such epic proportion that when released at 192 minutes (in two parts, with a 15 minute intermission), after preview screenings of 210 minutes, it was one of the most spectacular films of the year, regardless of genre.

But what is most striking about the film, in the end, is not its epic dimension or scope (the film was shot in ‘Ultra Panavision,’ then touted as the new seamless form of Cinerama, a popular 1950s three camera, three projector process that produced an illusion of depth), but rather the film’s view of life, which is acerbic in the extreme. The premise of the film is slim; an aging gangster, ‘Smiler’ Grogan (Durante), runs off the highway in his car, and with his dying words, tells a group of ‘good Samaritans’ who have stopped to help him that there is $350,000 in stolen loot stashed under a ‘big W’ in the fictional Santa Rosita State Park in California, and the money is theirs, if they can find it. With that, Grogan dies, literally ‘kicking a bucket’ down the culvert as he does so. Almost immediately, the passersby begin fighting amongst themselves for the money, and soon each one is trying to stop the others from leaving the park, and finding the $350,000. The film then becomes a literally mind-numbing orgy of violence and destruction, as gas stations, supermarkets, cars, planes, and anything else in sight is destroyed with ritualistic, almost sadistic fetishism.

The members of the group are shadowed in their quest by Captain T. G. Culpepper (Spencer Tracy, in one of his last roles), the Chief of Detection of the Santa Rosita Police Department, but in the end, he, too, succumbs to the temptation of ‘Smiler’s’ loot, and tries to abscond with the entire fortune, tricking the others into thinking he will turn it in to his superiors at police headquarters. When the group discovers they’ve been tricked, they give chase, and in the end all wind up in the hospital as a result of injuries sustained in their pursuit, including Captain Culpepper. All their efforts have availed them nothing, and in the bargain, all face lengthy hospital stays while they recuperate. The film has developed a cult following other the years, and certainly, in terms of excess, violence, and spectacle, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is one of the most expensive and epic “dark” comedies ever produced.

Yet the majority of humor in the film derives from outright cruelty – Ethel Merman perpetually screaming at her on-screen husband, Milton Berle, or anyone else in her line of fire; Phil Silvers offering a lift to the stranded Jonathan Winters, who is puffing along in the desert on a child’s bicycle; when Winters throws the bike away, Silvers speeds off, leaving him in the dust; Sid Caesar and Edie Adams locked in a basement full of exploding fireworks – and as many critics remarked at the time, the sheer wastage of the film is appalling. During one sequence in a supermarket, literally thousands of cans of food are split open and ruined, food that would be fit for any pantry shelf, and all that motivates the film’s central characters is greed, anger, lust and avarice. As a compelling vision of the dark side of the American dream, the film certainly succeeds. But when viewing the film, one can’t help but wonder how much of it was conscious, and how much simply a byproduct of the movie’s brutal trajectory.

Lured on by the ‘promise’ of instant wealth, the protagonists of Kramer’s film are locked into a headlong race to their own destruction, and they lay waste to everything they touch in the process. The film remains controversial to this day for its sheer overkill; how many more car crashes can the mind absorb? How many more shouting matches? How much more destruction? There seems to be no answer forthcoming in the film, which ends with Ethel Merman’s character slipping on a banana peel in the hospital ward where all of her co-stars are convalescing. At this, everyone starts laughing hysterically. Humiliation, pain, violence, cruelty; is this really the stuff of comedy? Yet the colossal perversity of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World remains a monument to over indulgence; ‘give me more, more, more,’ the film seems to say – which is just what its protagonists want, as well.”

You can read the entire article by clicking here, or on the image above.

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Posted in Criticism, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Film Industry, Film Theory, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Interviews, Pop Culture, Reviews, Satire | Comments Off

Embracing The Apocalypse: A World Without People

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has a new essay in the latest issue of Film International, “Embracing the Apocalypse: A World Without People,” examining visions of the future as imagined by various Dystopian films and television programs.

As she writes, “Human-centered popular folktales of Apocalypse and Doomsday narratives of every imaginable scenario are undeniably as powerful and plentiful as they have been from the beginnings of human narrative tradition. Indeed, apocalyptic events permeate a plethora of grand narratives from myriad cultures and textual sources that prominently, almost ecstatically, feature and carefully describe the gory details of our violent end times. They are set in the future, and almost all revolve around human-centered stories complete with often similarly violent narratives, inevitable tropes of conflict, judgment, drama, and resolution, the stops we require of any genre or tradition in human narrative form.

At the center of apocalyptic vision we find, perhaps predictably, a human-dominant form of speciesism, revealing a widespread, almost universally held belief in the dominance of human beings as a species. Human beings are placed at the center of events and narratives, even narratives that don’t involve human beings. This is something that often goes unnoticed, but it is especially notable in apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic and depeopled futuristic visions.

The plethora of doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic narratives are far too numerous to list, from religious scripture and Revelations, to secular visions of end times, to the myriad, often bizarre and insane sounding predictions of the end by various individuals and groups. All are narratives of human-centered destruction; some invoke the end of the earth, and some portray the end of people and human civilization; but all embrace, and seem to enjoy visions of the end. We cannot agree on much, but people agree that the end is near, the end is coming, and the end is usually defined as the end of people and human civilization.”

You can read the entire article by clicking here, or on the image above; fascinating work in an area that is largely unexplored.

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Posted in Criticism, Documentaries, Film Criticism, Film History, Film Theory, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Life, New Technology, Pop Culture, Reviews, Television | Comments Off

Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s – Part 1

Monday, August 20th, 2012

I have a new essay in the journal Film International, entitled Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s.

It’s a long piece, so the journal is running it in four parts, one each Monday starting today, Monday August 20, 2012. You can watch this space for further installments in the series; for the moment, here’s the beginning of the essay for your delectation;

“There’s a story about an adolescent boy who was taken to a psychiatrist. The doctor drew a rectangle on a sheet of paper and showed it to the boy. ‘What does it make you think of?’ he asked. The boy looked at it and said, ‘Sex.’ The doctor got the same response when he drew a circle on the paper. When he had drawn a triangle and an octagon and an ellipse with the same results, he said, ‘Son, you need help.’ The boy was amazed. ‘But, doc,’ he protested, ‘you’re the one that’s drawing the dirty pictures!’” (Zern 1958: n.p.)

In the 1960s, themes which had previously been dealt with only in the most serious fashion were suddenly subject to burlesque, or parody, as filmmakers and audiences sought to move beyond the strained seriousness that characterized many of the most respected problem films of the 1960s. In such films as Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and A Bucket of Blood (1959), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), William Castle’s The Old Dark House (1963), George Axelrod’s Lord Love A Duck (1966), Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968), Tony Richardson’s The Loved One (1965), Roy Boulting’s I’m All Right, Jack (1959), Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled (1967), Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name (1967), Karel Reisz’s Morgan! A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope (1969), to say nothing of Richard Lester’s The Knack… and How to Get It (1965), as well as Kevin Billington’s acidic political comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), viewers embraced a new vision of the world unfettered by the constraints of prior censorship, and wedded to a sense of the absurdity of life, in which all previous values were suddenly called into question, and found either morally or socially bankrupt. These films, which treated such subjects as war, sex, death, the workplace, national politics and the family with studied irreverence, found both a willing audience, and a place in the emerging national consciousness of the post JFK assassination era.”

You can read the rest of part one by clicking here; see you next week for Part Two, and so on.

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Posted in Criticism, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Film Theory, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Pop Culture, Satire | Comments Off

Subverting Capitalism and Blind Faith: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs

Monday, August 20th, 2012

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster has a fascinating piece on Pascal Laugier’s controversial film Martyrs (2008) in the current issue of Film International. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“It’s not a likable movie. Even me, myself, I hate the film.” (Pascal Laugier)

Pascal Laugier’s radically experimental horror film Martyrs (2008) is a persuasive and explosive leveling of capitalism, which is not limited to materialism, the Catholic Church, the cynical genre of torture porn, and the widespread embrace of anti-humanist postmodern irony. Martyrs joins the work of Pasolini, Bava, Bataille and other confrontational artists, including Luis Buñuel. Specifically, Martyrs recalls the eye-slitting scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. It directly assaults viewers with both detestable visuals and agonizing sounds of pain, in an almost unbearable filmic experience of terror that rouses the even the most cynical viewer from her/his postmodern stance of superiority. Martyrs makes the viewer responsible for the reinforcement of institutionalized capitalism, particularly religion, and more specifically religion’s obsessive embrace of death, its insistence on afterlife, its abuse of women, and its concomitant obsession with martyrdom. It is also a critique of the consumer of the horror film and an astounding film in and of itself.”

You can read the rest of this excellent essay by clicking here.

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Posted in Criticism, Experimental Cinema, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film Theory, Foreign Films, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Pop Culture, Reviews | Comments Off

Fascism for the 21st Century: Daniel Lindvall on The Dark Knight Rises

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Daniel Lindvall, the editor in chief of the distinguished journal Film International, has just written a brilliant essay on the new Batman film, which deftly summarizes the elitist concerns of the film, and Nolan’s work on the series as a whole.

As Lindvall writes, in part, “without the help of a time machine, watching the The Dark Knight Rises on a big screen will probably remain the closest I’ll ever get to what experiencing a Wagnerian propaganda spectacle in 1930’s Berlin must have felt like. It is not just the celebration of the übermensch in shiny black body armour, the fetishization of his equally shiny black military vehicles and war equipment, nor even the literal horde of police in dark uniforms – a police force now collectively redeemed, cleansed of all corruption – that fight by the hero’s side in the final battle of Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga. And it isn’t just the utter contempt that all of Nolan’s Batman films have for anyone looking like they may not be able to afford a home on Gotham City’s equivalent of Manhattan’s Upper West Side – police, loyal servants and orphans excepted.

Here ‘the 99 per cent’ figure only as easy-to-manipulate potential recruits to a violent mob led by psychopaths. And it isn’t, in itself, the demonization of Asia as the home of coldly inhuman intelligence and cruelty. Or that evil is so often connected to physical deformity. Hero worship, gun fetishism, glorification of the armed forces of the state, racism – none of this is new to the genre. But in this ultimate instalment, Nolan’s Batman trilogy combines it all into a story that reaches the deepest recesses of the bourgeois soul and unquestioningly celebrates the authoritarian darkness it finds there.

Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) is not just your ordinary superhero or vigilante. Even if the films make much of his tragically (self-)imposed social isolation this does not make him an outsider or an outcast. His place is above, not outside of, society. He is no bullied loner accidentally gaining super powers, like Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and he’s no rebellious cop, like Dirty Harry Callahan.

Bruce Wayne’s powers rest ultimately on material wealth, and not just any wealth, but control over an inherited corporate empire whose main source of profit comes from the arms trade. Batman’s moral code may forbid him the use of deadly violence, but it doesn’t forbid him making a luxury living out of peddling weapons to Pentagon, including, for instance, a machine capable of vaporizing the enemy’s water supplies, intended for use in desert wars. One wonders which desert wars?

The rather worn-out question explicitly posed throughout the trilogy – whether or not it is right to take the law into your own hands – is therefore really the question about the relation between capital and the state, the arms industry and the public armed forces. Batman is a contemporary saga about the shadowy world of post-9/11 ‘security’ arrangements operating under the jurisdiction of anti-democratic ‘anti-terror’ laws and supra-legal authority in a world where the borders between the state and private corporations are increasingly permeable, whilst power escapes ever further away from the influence and scrutiny of ordinary citizens.

Of course, the Batman films never seriously questioned this form of authority in any way other than purely rhetorically. Anyone in the Gotham City universe that criticizes Batman is always portrayed as silly, ineffective, corrupt or crooked. However, if there was ever any doubt at all, The Dark Knight Rises does away with it spectacularly as the city, in an unusually distasteful scene even for this film, erects a statue of its hero pictured as a sternly watchful warrior saint.”

You can read the entire review here; brilliant rhetorical writing.

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About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of numerous books and more than 70 articles on film and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at 402.472.6064 or wdixon1@unl.edu.

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