Whether life is imitating art or art is imitating life, mainstream society is in pretty bad shape right now. I am a self-confessed movie addict and ‘nerd’ and recently watched three movies that culturally literate society, and the media, have been very excited about: 300, Wanted, and The Dark Knight. What shocked me more than the movies themselves was the almost complete lack of outrage from the majority of people who saw those movies. These are movies that have crossed into the realm of ugly propaganda with hot button connections to controversial current events and yet so-called intelligent people are more likely to drool over their coolness than denounce their ideology.
You don’t need to have written a thesis on Black Athena or Greek Democracy to get why 300 should be unacceptable by current standards of awareness. The Spartans were a brutal military dictatorship that used slaves for labor. They eventually toppled the fledgling Athenian democracy during business as usual — fighting other Hellenic states. That ancient Greeks were a bunch of enlightened freedom loving whites holding out for democracy in a cruel world is a classic myth cultivated to boost racist empires in the time of colonization. In the movie 300, Zack Snyder exaggerates the myth to outrageous proportions. The Spartans become heroic supermen that would bring a tear to the eye of yesterday’s supremacist and the Persians get literally demonized — turned into demons and monsters. The whole affair is then fetish-ized to the nines without a shred of irony or comment.
The Dark Knight asks us what can be done when people with morals and decency face up to an enemy with none. It explores the avenues from three perspectives: Gordon the police officer, Batman the vigilante, and Harvey Dent/Rachel Dawes as the letter of the book method. The Joker plays out the terror scenarios on the city and presents us with an evil force that can’t be understood or reasoned with. For anyone who doesn’t live in a cave, this movie is a heavy-handed exploration of the War on Terror and terrorism itself. It happily follows far-right propaganda on the matter without batting an eyelid. It starts right at the beginning with the false premise that underlies all ‘war on terror’ propaganda — that terrorists, people we label as such, are crazed evildoers with no values or agenda and they simply have to be stopped or they will go on horrific rampages for no reason.
I’m sorry Christopher Nolan and all the talented people that worked on this movie but: terrorists do have grievances and view themselves as part of a conflict. These conflicts have histories. Intelligent people should seek to resolve these conflicts peacefully and not get behind mythmaking designed to continue the dehumanizing spiral of violence on both sides. The term propaganda implies intent to deceive and if that intent was not there at any level then we have to conclude that these values are completely internalized by the film makers.
This brings us to Wanted. This movie is unlike the other two in that it doesn’t make a direct comment on practical events or identified ideologies so to speak. Wanted is assaulting us with a more nihilistic abstract that is far reaching and universal. The premise of the movie is this: you have to kill people to save people. It’s tough but there are skilled people who will do this and to ask why or seek more details will only cause trouble. What’s more, who to kill is revealed by a higher power that you should follow without question. Do I need to explain real-world parallels or explain why this is offensive? The scene where the train falls into the ravine is also perhaps the most nihilistic and amoral vision of collateral damage committed to film.
I’m not a book burner or a banner. Edward Said writes in Orientalism that works written in the colonial ideology should not be dismissed entirely. They are multi-faceted complex texts. They are historical records, they are prejudiced and they are technically brilliant, they are repulsive and at the same time influential within a canon. But to talk about extreme texts such as the three movies I mention and not acknowledge their ideology at all is to accept their ideas as normal or uncontroversial. What does it say about us that a large majority of literate, educated people are literally worshipping these movies without a single passing comment on what I have discussed above?
These are clear examples of the bad outweighing the good. As for me, the battle scenes in Birth Of A Nation don’t offset it’s race hatred. The set pieces in Triumph Of The Will don’t make up for Fascism. Vivien Leigh’s performance in Gone With The Wind doesn’t make up for Slavery. And, I’m not going to excuse rampaging slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq because the Batbike is like … really cool, man.