Fire in a crowded theater: The Dark Knight, Plato, and censorship

Oddly, on the day of the Aurora tragedy I listened to a lecture about censorship, as advocated by Plato in The Republic.  (Here‘s the Open Yale course I’ve been listening to.  It’s good!)  It’s interesting that one of the foundational documents of Western civilization advocates strict government censorship of poetry and drama, for the good of the person and the benefit of the state.  Here is Plato (in the voice of Socrates) in Book X:

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things–they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

In earlier books he raises the issue in the context of educating the young who will be rulers of the state.

As a nation, we have free speech built into our DNA. As a writer, I have no wish for my work to be censored (or, worse, forbidden).  As a parent, though, I’m awfully glad that I’m past the time when I had to worry about whether my kids would be allowed to watch R-rated movies or play M-rated games or listen to songs with explicit lyrics.  It was exhausting!

There aren’t any good answers here — it’s easy enough to see the flaws in Plato’s strategy, especially in a state with 300 million citizens.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep thinking about it.  And we need to recognize the downside of the choices we have made as a society.

I’m obviously not the target for the Batman movies.  I saw The Dark Knight at home on my little TV, and to me the violence just seemed over the top and stupid.  But I could imagine the impact of the experience on the big screen.  And once upon a time I was young enough to spend my time fantasizing about living in the worlds I experienced in movies and novels.  We know nothing about the shooter’s motives (or even if he had any), but it looks like the world of The Dark Knight was the one he chose to inhabit.  And that’s pretty scary.

House Plots

House, M.D. is going off the air after eight seasons.

It’s one of the few shows I watch consistently.  Like most network shows, it has a very formulaic structure:

  1. Someone has some interesting medical event happen to him before the opening credits.
  2. House’s team makes their initial diagnoses, which are invariably wrong.
  3. Some kind of workplace or personal subplot starts taking place in conjunction with the main save-the-patient plot. We also delve into the patient’s life–and generally we discover that the patient is lying about something, and his personal life is much more complicated than we expected.
  4. An exciting medical event happens about mid-way through the show–a seizure, blood leaking out of the eyeballs, etc.  Can this patient be saved?
  5. The patient keeps getting worse.  Finally, House makes some connection between the workplace subplot and the patient’s disease and comes up with the correct diagnosis in the nick of time.

Here’s what I find interesting: The plot is structured as a standard mystery story, but it’s missing a key element of standard mysteries–namely, the viewer has no way of guessing the outcome, because we’re not doctors.  Furthermore, we couldn’t care less whether the patient actually has typhus or lupus or a brain tumor or some rare genetic disease that only affects people who have been to Ethiopia in the past decade.  We’re just along for the ride.  It’s a tribute to the acting and the writing that House works as well as it does.

Two more points about House:

  • House is portrayed as a jerk, and part of his jerkness is that he’s a thoroughgoing atheist.  But throughout the entire series his skepticism always turns out to be justified: there are no miracles; there are no sentimental endings where someone’s prayers are answered.
  • Anyone who can portray both House and Bertie Wooster has got to be some kind of great actor.  Let’s hope Hugh Laurie gets more great roles.  After the money he made on House, he can afford to be choosy.

 

Anonymous

I have only myself to blame for attempting to watch this movie.  My most trusted advisors warned against it; if I had bothered to consult my healthcare professionals, they would have warned against it, too.  But still, I thought: it’s in my Netflix queue, so it’s sort of free.  What harm could it do?  I was wrong.

Anonymous is a historical thriller based on the Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship–the idea the Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare.  This theory is universally dismissed by Shakespearean scholars, which of course Oxfordians claim is evidence that they must be onto something–otherwise, why would those scholars be so defensive?  Yeesh.

My idiotic theory for watching the movie was that fiction doesn’t have to be historically accurate to be entertaining.  I thought Inglourious Basterds was entertaining, in a dopey sort of way, even though, er, that’s not the way World War II actually played out.  And Shakespeare in Love was utterly delightful, despite taking its share of liberties with the Shakespeare story.  ButAnonymous is so bad on so many different levels that I only made it through 59 minutes and 40 seconds of it, according to my DVD player.  Here are a few of its problems:

  • The screenwriter decided he wanted the central plot to be a thriller about the Essex rebellion, with the conceit that Essex was Queen Elizabeth’s son and Oxford was his father.  This means the script has to fit in endless amounts of exposition to explain the political situation.
  • Maybe in a fruitless attempt to counteract all that dull exposition, the script scrambles the time sequence till you have no idea what’s supposed to be happening when.  It doesn’t help that the movie blithely ignores actual historical chronology, so that Christopher Marlowe shows up when he’s dead, and Henry V is played as if no one had heard of Henry IV Part One or Two.  (Also, according to the movie, de Vere wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he was about fourteen.  I didn’t get to the part where apparently Shakespeare’s company is hired to put on Richard III to coincide with Essex’s rebellion, instead of Richard II, which is what actually happened.  Why did the movie bother to make that change? Richard IIIis about an evil usurper–how would that help rally the public to support a usurpation?)
  • None of the characters has the slightest depth or significance, including de Vere, who doesn’t do or say anything to suggest that he could have written the plays.  He mostly just sits around looking aristocratic.

Anyway, let me commend to you James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? if you want to clear your head and actually learn something about this odd little corner of the world.  Shapiro makes the interesting point that the authorship question started up in earnest when an eighteenth-century editor made the mistake of examining Shakespeare’s works for clues to Shakespeare’s biography.  Once you start down that path, anyone can follow, and before too long you’ve got people looking for coded messages in the text, and you’ve got Freud saying, hey, Hamlet has an Oedipal complex so the guy who wrote it must have had an Oedipal complex, too.  This sort of approach says more about the theorist than it does about Shakespeare.

The World’s Oldest Dickens Movie?

This is supposedly the death of Jo the crossing-sweep from Bleak House, filmed in 1901:

Love the understated acting and the smooth camera movement.  But something is lost in the translation from book to cinema.  Here is what Dickens actually wrote (thanks, Project Gutenberg!) As always, the sentimentality is almost too much for the modern sensibility.  But it works.  And note the way he pulls the camera back in the final short paragraph — just far enough to indict an entire society.  Tell me that it doesn’t give you goosebumps.

"Well, Jo! What is the matter? Don't be frightened."

“I thought,” says Jo, who has started and is looking round, “I thought I was in Tom-all-Alone’s agin. Ain’t there nobody here but you, Mr. Woodcot?”

“Nobody.”

“And I ain’t took back to Tom-all-Alone’s. Am I, sir?”

“No.” Jo closes his eyes, muttering, “I’m wery thankful.”

After watching him closely a little while, Allan puts his mouth very near his ear and says to him in a low, distinct voice, “Jo! Did you ever know a prayer?”

“Never knowd nothink, sir.”

“Not so much as one short prayer?”

“No, sir. Nothink at all. Mr. Chadbands he wos a-prayin wunst at Mr. Sangsby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a-speakin to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out
nothink on it. Different times there was other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone’s a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t’other ‘wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded to be a-talking to
theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t’others, and not a-talkin to us. WE never knowd nothink. I never knowd what it wos all about.”

It takes him a long time to say this, and few but an experienced and attentive listener could hear, or, hearing, understand him. After a short relapse into sleep or stupor, he makes, of a sudden, a strong
effort to get out of bed.

“Stay, Jo! What now?”

“It’s time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir,” he returns with a wild look.

“Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?”

“Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It’s time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
berried. He used fur to say to me, ‘I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,’ he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have come there to be laid along with him.”

“By and by, Jo. By and by.”

“Ah! P’raps they wouldn’t do it if I wos to go myself. But will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?”

“I will, indeed.”

“Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They’ll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it’s allus locked. And there’s a step there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It’s turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?”

“It is coming fast, Jo.”

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.

“Jo, my poor fellow!”

“I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I’m a-gropin–a-gropin–let me catch hold of your hand.”

“Jo, can you say what I say?”

“I’ll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it’s good.”

“Our Father.”

“Our Father! Yes, that’s wery good, sir.”

“Which art in heaven.”

“Art in heaven–is the light a-comin, sir?”

“It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!”

“Hallowed be–thy–”

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Notes on Moneyball

So let’s get off cosmology and talk a little baseball.

I finally saw Moneyball last night, in time for the Oscars.  Some comments:

  • For weeks Moneyball has been at the top of my Netflix queue, but they never sent it to me, so I finally had to get it on-demand from Verizon.  Netflix is having problems with its business model, seems to me.
  • Paul DePodesta (the original for Jonah Hill’s character) didn’t allow his name to be used in the movie.  I don’t know which came first — DePodesta refusing permission to use his name or the decision to make the character fat and unathletic (DePodesta is neither).  Oddly, they also made the character a Yale graduate, whereas DePodesta went to Harvard.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin was tired of writing about Harvard characters after The Social Network.  Or maybe they thought that going to Yale went along with being fat and unathletic.  (Jonah Hill was terrific, by the way.)
  • The movie glosses over the central difficulty with the pure Moneyball approach — that it ignores the player’s character in favor of his statistics.  The scene where Billy Beane yells at Jeremy Giambi is great — but we aren’t reminded that the scouts explicitly warned Billy about Giambi’s character when his name came up before the season.  On-base percentage isn’t everything.
  • Of the nominated movies I’ve seen, I think The Descendants probably has a better adapted screenplay than Moneyball.  But the Ricardo Rincon trade scene with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill was Aaron Sorkin at his best — almost as good as the opening scene of The Social Network. Nobody writes dialogue for intelligent people as well as Sorkin.
  • I was wondering how the movie would handle the ending; after all (spoiler alert, I guess), Billy Beane has never won anything with his Moneyball theory.  It takes the odd approach of using the Red Sox World Series win in 2004 as its happy ending — since John Henry embraced Moneyball when he bought the franchise.  OK, I guess…  The problem for Billy Beane, of course, was that once big-budget teams started copying his methods, he was pretty much back where he started — trying to make things work with a shoestring budget.

The Worst Movie Ever Made

I Don’t Know How She Does It.

I’m not talking about the stuff on Mystery Science Theater.  This is a movie with A-list actors (well B+-list actors) directed by a guy who made a movie I liked (Emma).

“4.3!” — IMDB

“Insipid, unfunny, and cliché-ridden!” — Washington Post

“Witless!” — San Francisco Chronicle

We watched about twenty minutes of it, and we felt as though our brains were turning to oatmeal.

Here’s the official trailer.  I dare you to watch the whole thing: