I am a fan of Skyfall for
all sorts of reasons. I find it amusing that Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote not only the new Bond
movies together but also the two parodic Johnny
English films. Before they started
on the six Bond movies they had written Let Him Have It, the dark and tragic story of Derek Bentley, a man hanged for a
crime who
very probably had ‘diminished responsibility’ for. As
the Bond movies have progressed they have I think – and with some exceptions –
become more emotionally and morally complex,
revealing Bonds emotional vulnerability and existential doubts about his
trade. Patriotism
alone is no longer enough to justify the
actions of those who the State has ‘licensed to kill’. The original Fleming chauvinism and sexism
have moved slowly away. M became a
woman (as had happened in the real Security Services) and Bond has fallen in
love with two women - even if I found
this deeply unconvincing in SPECTRE. I do remember the 1969 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service of course, but that was hardly typical of the genre a the time.
Throughout literature and the movies there runs a long line of
‘heroic’ figures whose morality is not binary.
They are not ‘white hats’ fighting
the ‘black hats’. They invite us to consider the greys. And none more so than Batman, The Dark
Knight.
In this film good people do bad things, sometimes to the people
they love and for what they think are good reasons. They do bad things or they allow someone else
do them. Is this the good cop, bad cop thing? asks
the prisoner in the interrogation room. Not
exactly says the good cop, leaving his partner to do his worst. The prisoner is the Joker, the cop’s partner
is the Batman. In the same scene
the Joker taunts the Batman, saying you
have nothing to threaten me with; nothing you can do with all your strength. In the
shadow of 9/11 and 7/7 we in the mighty West know the futility of our nuclear
and conventional strength when opposed by the suicide bomber or the terrorist
with a weapon of mass destruction in a suitcase. He also asks why ‘the violent death of an
innocent civilian on our streets is given more moral and tragic weight than the
deaths of half a dozen of our soldiers in a war zone’. Is it, as he suggests,
because the soldier’s lives and deaths are part of the plan, the inevitable
consequences of our deliberate political and military actions? Is that why we
accept these deaths, daily, with regret but not outrage? Torture is also a tendentious question. Does it
make moral sense to torture one person in order to save the lives of many? If
we choose not to use all the means available to us to extract the information
needed to save them are they simply paying for our moral scruples, to salve our
consciences? We are even reminded
that when Rome suspended its constitution to give temporary war-time power to
Caesar he betrayed that trust by taking it for life. The Batman develops a massive monitoring
system using mobile phones in order to track The Joker. I have to find this man he tells Lucius Fox, his friend and
technical wizard. At what cost? asks
Lucius. This is unethical and dangerous. This is too much power for one man to
have. Too much power for any government we might surmise in the light of
later revelations about British and American spying agencies being given access to similar monitoring of their own
civilians.
The Dark Knight searches
the human heart and finds hope there. It
is not easy to find it amid the pessimism and despair but the hope lies in
this; we are not perfect and the battle with our own moral greyness will go on,
but despite our corruptibility and self-delusion, despite our moral
uncertainty, despite our habit of creating and depending on heroes - and then
scapegoating them - in the end we have no one else to trust but ourselves. We are not perfect, but we are good enough.
So the white search-light eventually says trust
the people. Perhaps there is a message here for our guardians, elected and
self-appointed. Guardians need power,
and power tends to corrupt. Guardians,
even with the best on intentions, mislead and even lie to those they are
guarding - for the good of the people
of course. But we should not lie to
those we are responsible to. We should not lie to those who ought to be able to
trust us. We should not lie to those we trust. Trust the people. For a longer consideration of this movie you
could go to Rays of Light In The Dark Knight
posted in this blog in August 2011, after Jesus The Lion King and Beowulf: a two dimensional hero?
Toy
Story 3 obviously it built on its popular
predecessors - but it pushed its audience’s emotional limits in new ways. Peril is one thing, and very common in
successful movies, but as the Toys were pushed towards their destruction here
the audiences emotion were really stretched.
The prime value they displayed
was togetherness. They would face death
together. I think
it was hugely brave of Pixar to expect its audience to rise to the emotional
challenge.
With Tim Burton’s underwhelming 2010 Alice In Wonderland in there I am disappointed
not to see any of the excellent Pixar movies included. I will not comment on Frozen (other than to say
that it is not Pixarlated enough for me), but I have long seen the Pixar movies
providing a good moral and social education for any child, or adult.
I think Toy
Story 3 (2010) followed, and then the list reverts to that above. However I am sure these gross takings are governed by the inflation of ticket prices,
and do not reflect bums-on-seats, especially as concessionary prices were not
given for many blockbuster/3D movies on first release.
If you are interested in a list of 100 ‘Movies
That Help Us Live Better’ according to a Christian site you can go to Movies
& Meaning.com.
