Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been writing posts on ways that I see Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy interacting with Plato’s Republic. I’m sure that next time I watch the films I will see even more connections, but for now I’m ready to move on to other topics. To cap off this series, here are three closing thoughts—or rather, as it turned out, three more posts combined together. 

First, although earlier I had written about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, oddly enough I didn’t think much at all about the literal caves Bruce falls into, first in Batman Begins (the cave that becomes the Bat-Cave) and then in The Dark Knight Rises (the prison pit into which he is cast by Bane). Yet these also fit the allegory. 

The scene where young Bruce falls into the well on his family’s estate, and his father descends by a rope to pull him out, supports my suggestion that Thomas Wayne is the closest thing Gotham City has to a philosopher-king. In pulling his son out of the well, he resembles how the prisoner-turned-philosopher returns to the cave to free others of their ignorance. After all, he tells Bruce in that moment, “Don’t be afraid,” and fear is the result of ignorance. To quote Ducard again, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Speaking of Ducard, this scene of Thomas and Bruce in the cave underlines the fundamental differences between Thomas and Ducard, his foil. Ducard, with his corrupted understanding of justice, cannot really lead anyone out of the cave, and while Thomas dispels fear, Ducard instead preys upon it. When Bruce is in the prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises, he learns that Ducard once descended into that cave to exact vengeance on those who killed his wife. Just as when he attacked Gotham in Batman Begins, he did not descend into the cave to liberate captives but to slaughter them. If Thomas represents the aristocratic soul, Ducard represents the tyrannical one.

As Timothy Lawrence and I discussed in a FilmFisher dialogue some years ago, the tension between Bruce and his alter-ego Batman corresponds to how Bruce is caught between these two mentors. The choice he faces is whether to become more like his father or more like Ducard. I see now that this conflict can be rephrased in Platonic terms: Will Bruce, having a timocratic soul driven by a love of honor, evolve into a wisdom-lover or devolve into someone who is ruled by his appetites? 

I think Bruce does become more like his father, and more like a philosopher, in the end. In Rises, he defies his fear in order to climb out of the prison pit; he liberates Gotham from the League of Shadows (again, “Shadows” suggests the shadows of the Plato’s cave); and finally, he passes the mantle of Gotham’s protector to Blake. Significantly, as I pointed out in that FilmFisher dialogue, well before I ever read Plato, “The first scene of the first film has Bruce falling into the cave, and the last shot of the last film has Blake rising on a platform in the cave.” If Thomas descended into the cave to lift out Bruce, Bruce descends into the cave to lift out Blake. Republic envisions a process by which the philosopher-kings would raise up and train their successors, and that succession is reflected in the beginning and end of the trilogy.

Second, for all the similarities between the films and Plato’s Republic, Nolan seems to refute the idea of using myths and useful falsehoods to govern the kallipolis. 

As Plato’s Socrates lays out a theoretical blueprint for the ideal republic, on two occasions Socrates devises a myth that would be used to convince the next generation to abide by the republic’s laws and prefer justice to injustice: The Myth of the Metals in Book III, and the Myth of Er in Book X. The Dark Knight ends and The Dark Knight Rises opens with a myth or useful falsehood invented by Batman. He convinces Jim Gordon to lie about the fate of Harvey Dent, in order to keep the city from being demoralized by Dent’s corruption. The lie does motivate the city to stamp out organized crime, but once the truth is revealed, the results are reversed, and the city is plunged into a worse chaos than before.

In contrast, The Dark Knight Rises concludes with Gotham receiving a true myth to inspire the citizens to justice. The city watches Batman fly the bomb away from the city. Although the audience knows that Bruce somehow escaped the detonation, this doesn’t drain the action of its meaning or nobility. He really did save the city. Blake thinks it unfair that people don’t know it was Bruce Wayne who saved them, but Gordon is right: “They know who it was; it was the Batman.” Earlier in the film, in two different scenes, Bruce/Batman had told Blake and then Gordon that the point of Batman’s secret identity is that “A hero can be anyone.” That is why a statue of Batman—a symbol of justice that can be embodied by anyone—is dedicated at the end of the film, not a statue of Bruce Wayne. This statue represents a better, truer Myth of the Metals or Myth of Er.

Third, I return to the way Plato treats the state of the just/unjust city as analogous to the state of the just/unjust soul. If Bruce becomes more just in the end, does Gotham? 

As I’ve already touched on above, Bruce can be said to become more just because of how he grows to resemble his father, and as I said in the first post, because of how he persists in pursuing justice even when no one rewards him for it. Indeed, when Bruce fakes his own death, for all Gotham City knows, he died a very unjust man. In the Republic, justice is a combination of moderation, courage, and wisdom, but any citizen would be forgiven for thinking Bruce was immoderate (“Look how he wasted his inheritance on pleasures!”) and cowardly (“Look how he ran for cover when the Joker attacked his home!”) and foolish (“Look how poorly he managed his company!”). In reality, the case could be made that Bruce is (or becomes) moderate, courageous, and wise. Moderate, he is never corrupted by the profligate playboy persona he plays before the public. Courageous, he overcomes his fears and holds to his conviction against killing even when he is sorely tempted to abandon it. Wise, he continues to seek after true justice and will not settle for the false alternatives propounded by Ducard (like Polemarchus, that justice involves doing harm to enemies), Falcone (like Thrasymachus, that justice is whatever benefits the strong), the Joker (embracing the view that Glaucon summarizes, that being just isn’t worth the effort), or Dent (that only chance is just).

But what about the city? In the previous post, I closed with the troubling suggestion that, because of its slide from aristocracy to tyranny over the course of three films, “Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning.” And so I find myself in arriving at the same answer as I did at the end of the dialogue I wrote with Tim: it doesn’t seem like Gotham is capable of becoming a just city. Bruce would seem to have failed to make it more just. Maybe Alfred is right and Bruce went about it all wrong, misdirecting his energies to be a guardian of the city as Batman and not doing enough to be a philosopher-king like his father.

However, this may be the result of asking the wrong question, the result of assessing Bruce by the wrong objective. In his own words, Bruce’s objective was never to make the city more just but to give it a vision of justice. He tells Alfred in Batman Begins, before returning to Gotham, that “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol—as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” And if that was the goal, he would seem to have succeeded in the end. Gotham does not become a just city, but with the example and symbol of Batman as its inspiration, it could become one yet.

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part III

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Third, is Gotham City’s descent from order to chaos over the course of the three films a reflection of Socrates’ theory of how the ideal kallipolis can devolve into a tyranny? 

In Republic Book VIII, Socrates says there are five kinds of cities. His ideal, healthy city is the kallipolis ruled by an aristocracy of one or more wisdom-loving philosopher-kings. The other four are each “diseased cities,” diseased because they are ruled by leaders who love or live for something other than wisdom (p. 214 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). They are the timocracy, in which the leaders love honor most of all; the oligarchy, in which the leaders love money and how it satisfies their necessary appetites; the democracy, in which the people use their liberty to follow their unnecessary appetites; and the tyranny, in which the city is terrorized by someone who is himself tyrannized by his own lawless appetites. Plato puts the five cities in this order because, as his Socrates sees it, the kallipolis—kind of like the nuclear bomb in The Dark Knight Rises—“must decay” sooner or later (216). The kallipolis will fall, not to external enemies, but to “civil war breaking out within the ruling group itself” (215). It will corrode from within. First, it will regress to a timocracy, which will then turn into an oligarchy, and so on.

I think that Gotham City reflects all five types of cities at different points in The Dark Knight Trilogy, and in this same order.

First, in the flashbacks of Batman Begins, Gotham is like the wisdom-loving aristocracy—or at least, it’s trying to be. Although he isn’t the mayor, the aristocratic Thomas Wayne is the spiritual leader of the city. He uses his billions to better the city and—like the philosopher-king compelled to go back down into the cave—he doesn’t sit idly by enjoying his privileges in his mansion on a hilltop outside the city, but works as a doctor in the city. That’s appropriate given how Plato portrays cities as either sick or healthy, and good rulers as good physicians. Thomas Wayne is seeking to find a way to cure Gotham’s citizens, both physically as individuals and economically as a whole, and he seems to be having some success—until he is killed by one of the very people he is trying to help. Then, just as the aristocrat’s son can become a timocrat if he sees how the love of wisdom seemed to fail his father, Bruce grows up to be someone more likely to jump into a fight to defend his honor than engage in philosophical inquiry. He drops out of college and tries to avenge his father.

Following Thomas Wayne’s death, the Gotham City of Batman Begins is a timocracy in that it is caught in a constant tug-of-war between two groups of people who are governed by codes of honor: the police and the Falcone crime family. On the one side, Commissioner Loeb hates Batman because, as a vigilante, he makes him look bad—that is, causes him to lose honor. Batman succeeding where the police have failed shows them to be too corrupt or inept to be the guardians of the city. On the other side, Falcone says to Bruce, “Yeah, you got spirit, kid. I'll give you that. More than your old man, anyway.” It is the people who are led by the spirited element of the tripartite soul who are most concerned with honor. 

Then, in The Dark Knight, Gotham City is more like an oligarchy. In the iconic bank heist opening, the banker allied with the mob tells the robbers that “criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect.” Instead, as the Joker puts it to a mobster later in the film, “All you care about is money.” Indeed, much of the film is about money. Batman, Jim Gordon, and Harvey Dent are trying to cut off the mob’s sources of funding and put its leaders in prison on charges of racketeering. The mob hires the Joker to help them get their money back. A police officer’s debts drive her to betray Dent and Rachel.

The oligarchy continues into The Dark Knight Rises, although under a different guise. The money-laundering mob has been defeated, but now the great conflict in Gotham is between the haves and have-nots, which finally boils over into an open war. Bane deposes the oligarchy French Revolution-style—recall that the ending of the film quotes from A Tale of Two Cities—and he tells the downtrodden masses, “we give it back to you, the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please.” This sounds a lot like what Socrates says of citizens in the democracy: “each of them will arrange his own life in whatever manner pleases him” (227).

But, as Batman and his allies know, Bane’s Gotham isn’t really free. It is under the sway of whoever is holding the trigger to the nuclear bomb that is carted around the city. That person turns out to be the daughter of Henri Ducard, Batman’s nemesis in the first film, and all her actions are controlled by the all-consuming desire to finish his mission of destroying the city. Gotham is under her tyranny, and she herself is a slave to her own wrath and warped understanding of “true justice.” 

If this reading is correct, Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning. Ominously, Plato only portrays how a kallipolis can be lost, not how it can be gained, as if there were no way back from the brink of tyranny’s destruction. I’m going to think on that problem a bit more and return later with a fourth and final post in this series.

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part II

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Second, are the actions of the League of Shadows in Batman Begins a parody of the Allegory of the Cave?

In Republic Book VII Socrates illustrates how the future rulers of the just city must be educated for public service by likening them to people who have lived all their lives chained in a cave, backs turned to the entrance. All these prisoners can see are shadows cast by a fire behind them. Consequently, “the prisoners … believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows” (p. 187 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). When a prisoner is freed, he learns—with painful difficulty at first as his eyes adjust to the light—that the two-dimensional shadows were cast by three-dimensional objects that are quite different from what he thought them to be, and that—what is even more startling and disorienting—there is a whole world outside the cave, illuminated by a gigantic sun, of which the fire in the cave was but a pale imitation. In the same way, the future ruler must be led away from ignorance and mistaking opinions for knowledge. Then, after being taught how to rightly perceive “the visible realm” (inside the cave) with his senses, he must be taught how to rightly perceive “the intelligible realm” (outside the cave) by the “the form of the good” (the sun) (189). Finally, after the “founders [of the city] … compel the best natures … to make the ascent and see the good,” those fortunate few must be compelled “to go down again to the prisoners in the cave” and lead them by the wisdom they’ve received (191).

At the beginning of Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is likewise held in a prison, where he is found by the League of Shadows’ spokesperson, Henri Ducard. Bruce wound up in prison because he was seeking to understand the nature of justice by practicing injustice, but Ducard tells him this method has caused him to lose his way. Instead, Ducard tells him he should “devote [him]self to an ideal”—that is, he needs to seek the form of the good, the form of justice. Bruce is released from the darkness of his cell and journeys upward into the mountains to be trained by Ducard in the (mostly martial) arts needed to pursue what is advertised to him as “true justice.” Then, at the completion of his training, he learns that the League wants to send him back to Gotham. He was selected for this task, they say, because he is “Gotham’s favored son.” Like one of the select cave-dwellers, he was freed of his chains and brought into knowledge so that he would return to the people he left behind in the state of ignorance. However, the League’s charge to Bruce is that he help them destroy Gotham, not save it.

Not surprisingly, the League of Shadows’ definition of “true justice” is much narrower than what Socrates and his interlocutors determine in the Republic. In Book IV, justice is a balance of moderation, courage, and wisdom. Ducard also says, “Justice is balance,” but only of the retributive, eye-for-an-eye variety. (“You burned my house and left me for dead. Consider us even.”) But even on that front the League’s conception of justice is actually imbalanced. If according to Socrates justice is each one doing his own duty and each one’s rights being maintained, then the League presuming to have a prerogative to destroy a whole city, both the guilty and the guiltless together, is unjust. So although the League gave Bruce the impression that they could lead him all the way out of the cave and into the sunlight to behold the form of justice, they’ve only led him to where the fire is—or worse, to just another dead end inside the cave—trying to pass off their malformed understanding of justice as the real thing. Realizing their error and the threat they pose to the justice they claim to champion, Bruce’s right response is to use their own fire against them—literally. Their mountaintop castle explodes.

At the end of the film, Ducard and the League of Shadows reappear to carry out the mission Bruce refused—and their planned method for destroying the city again recalls the allegory. They use a device called a microwave emitter to release a fear toxin into the air that causes people to have waking nightmares and attack one another. Microwaves are along the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. So, the League of Shadows uses light to cast figures on the cave wall that would terrify the cave’s prisoners into self-destruction. Instead of descending into the cave to free the prisoners and show them that the shadows are not the reality, they descend into the cave to torture them by taking advantage of how, as Ducard puts it, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Bruce, by contrast, takes Ducard’s original advice to pursue an indestructible ideal, which he does by creating Batman, an indestructible symbol to represent the ideal of justice. With that symbol he seeks to draw the eyes of Gotham out of the darkness of the cave and into the light. Fittingly, Gordon’s bat-symbol beacon is a moonlike mix of light and shadow in the night sky.

Plato’s Republic and Nolan’s Gotham, Part I

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.] 

First, is Lucius Fox’s sonar device in The Dark Knight a response to the myth of the Ring of Gyges? 

In Republic Book II Glaucon tells Socrates the story of Gyges to illustrate the commonplace belief “that one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be.” Gyges found a ring that made him invisible and used it to “do injustice with impunity.” Glaucon’s point is that, because “every man believes that injustice is far more profitable to himself than justice,” no one would use the ring any other way if he could get away with it  (p. 36 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation).

In The Dark Knight, the Joker believes something similar, that Gotham’s best citizens only act virtuously when it is socially reinforced: “You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these, these civilized people, they'll eat each other.” 

But unbeknownst to the Joker, Bruce has access to a sonar device, courtesy of Lucius Fox, that works almost the same as the Ring of Gyges: it allows him to see anything happening anywhere in Gotham while not being seen. Bruce intends to use it only to find and catch the Joker, but because he recognizes its potential corrupting power, he has Lucius operate it instead, then destroy it—which he does. That Lucius can wield the power of the sonar device without abusing it, then freely let it go once it has served its one justifiable purpose, shows that the Joker is wrong. Even when the chips are down, there are people who will stick to their moral code. Or, to use Glaucon’s terms, there are people who will be just willingly and without compulsion, because they believe that injustice is ruinous in and of itself, even if no one punishes it, and that justice is profitable in and of itself, even if no one rewards it. Certainly, no one ever rewards Bruce and Lucius for their self-denying restraint, because no one else knows the sonar device ever existed. 

This last point reminds me of Blake’s complaint to Gordon in the next film, that no one in Gotham will ever know that it was Bruce Wayne who saved them. But that anonymity is precisely what shows that Bruce is a just man in the end.

Linus and Lucy

Today I was watching the classic 1965 TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and realized two things, one following from the other.

First, the simple, satisfying elegance and the sturdy timelessness of the show could be explained in part by noting how closely the story follows the elemental mythic pattern of the Hero’s Journey—or at least, how neatly it follows the Christopher Vogler version of the Hero’s Journey that I learned in college. 

Charlie Brown is depressed at how he is unable to enjoy a materialistic Christmas like everyone else seems to be (The Ordinary World). Lucy suggests he can get into the holiday spirit by directing the Christmas play (The Call to Adventure), an offer he resists at first because of his inexperience with directing (The Refusal of the Call). When he enters the school auditorium (Crossing the Threshold), Charlie Brown encounters multiple challenges to his attempt to direct the play (Tests, Allies, and Enemies), culminating in being sent to select a Christmas tree, which is really a test of whether he too will succumb to a materialist approach to Christmas (The Approach to the Innermost Cave). Brutally mocked for selecting the tiniest, frailest tree (The Ordeal), Charlie Brown finally asks for someone to please tell him what Christmas is about. Linus answers by telling him the story of Christ’s birth (The Reward). This satisfies Charlie Brown and, having nothing more to gain from trying to direct the play, he promptly goes home with his tree (The Road Back and The Return with the Elixir [the elixir being the meaning of Christmas]). He tries and fails to decorate the tree, and flees the scene in a new bout of discouragement. Then Lucy and Linus and the rest of the kids from the play appear to restore the tree, mend their relationship with Charlie Brown and lifting his spirits (The Resurrection).

You might have noticed I left out one of Vogel’s twelve steps in the Hero’s Journey: The Meeting with the Mentor. It was in trying to decide who Charlie Brown’s mentor is in this story—is it Linus, or is it Lucy?—that I had my second realization: The brother-sister pair of Linus and Lucy are both mentors to Charlie Brown—or, more precisely, the siblings vie to be Charlie Brown’s mentor. The contrast between the two of them is central to the story, as the dramatic question turns out to be which mentor he will ultimately follow.

Lucy represents a worldly understanding of Christmas. Linus represents the Christian understanding. When Lucy hears of Charlie Brown’s problem—his depression over the apparent meaninglessness of Christmas—she thinks the solution is social and material: Get involved in a group project and accept rather than resist the commercialization of Christmas. Linus eventually reveals that the solution is theological and spiritual: Charlie Brown needs to know that Christ is the meaning of Christmas. Lucy counsels Charlie Brown with the language of psychiatry she picked up while watching TV. Linus counsels Charlie Brown with the narrative of Luke he memorized from reading Scripture. Lucy wants a shiny artificial tree and can see no value in the humble organic tree Charlie Brown chose instead. Linus is the first after Charlie Brown to recognize the tree’s hidden potential. We could say Lucy lives by sight and Linus by faith. Consequently, Lucy directs Charlie Brown’s attention to the earth. (Notice she tells him what she really wants for Christmas is real estate). Linus directs Charlie Brown’s attention to the heavens, telling him about the angelic host who proclaimed, “Christ is born in Bethlehem.”

New Article: 30 Films for 30 Years

I just posted an article on my 30 favorite films. I posted a similar list of 25 films 5 years ago, and had meant to follow that up with lists of 25 albums and 25 books. Maybe this time around I’ll see the project through.

P.S.: I highly recommend this short article by Tim Lawrence. This is what inspired me to start calling my favorite films “Film Friends.”

Films and Shows I’m Thankful For in 2023

In 2020, I started a Thanksgiving tradition of posting on Letterboxd a list of twelve films or shows I was most thankful to have discovered, rediscovered, reappraised, or otherwise gained a greater appreciation for in the past year. (Click here to see the previous lists.) Here are my picks for 2023. I’m thankful for …

Ahsoka (a discovery): As a fan of Dave Filoni’s Clone Wars and Rebels shows and of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, I was glad to see this live-action continuation of Ahsoka, Sabine, and Ezra’s stories, staged in a very prequel-esque way. (P.S.: I reflected on the surprising prominence of the theme of homecoming in a recent Notebook post.)

The Apartment (a discovery): In the latter half of the year I made a point of watching more Old Hollywood films as a way of counterbalancing the usual recency bias in my film-viewing. This included finally seeing three classic, iconic films by Billy Wilder, a major director who, inexplicably, was never on my radar. I can’t say I loved any of them. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment are each shockingly dark compared to the usual studio productions of the time, and each unsettled me with their unflinching exposés of human depravity. But The Apartment has stuck with me thanks to its redemptive ending.

Avatar: The Way of Water (a discovery—but also a reappraisal): I was biased against the first Avatar long before seeing it and derided it when I finally did in 2012. It turns out I like that film now, and its sequel even more so. If we must have films consisting of 99.99% hyper-realistic CG, then let more of them be like this: films that explore new worlds to help us appreciate the beauty in this one, just as James Cameron’s lavish attention to Pandora’s marine ecosystem is an expression of his love for Earth’s. (P.S.: Between watching this and reading Arctic Dreams and Moby-Dick, the past twelve months were the Year of the Whale for me.)

From Up on Poppy Hill (a discovery): Another pleasant Studio Ghibli film that, like Only Yesterday, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, is driven more by atmosphere than by plot. The evocation of a highly specific place and time is very effective here.  

Killers of the Flower Moon (a discovery): This is a good film worthy of this list in its own right—I’m thankful this dark chapter in our nation’s history is getting needed attention—but I include it here primarily because I got to see it with my dad last week. We hadn’t been to see a movie together in a long time, and in the days following we were both sobered by reminders that our lives are fragile. More than anything else on Thanksgiving Day, I was thankful for him.

The Lost City of Z (a discovery): Apparently, I’ve selected two films based on nonfiction books by David Grann. It’s a shame this cross between Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey set in the jungle has been lost to public awareness in the recesses of the Amazon streaming catalogue (how ironic).

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (a discovery): A cute, quirky, and thoughtful stop-motion and live-action hybrid about a googly-eyed shell, his grandmother, and the human neighbor who makes a documentary about them.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part I (a discovery): I love how this franchise has matured and evolved in its Christopher McQuarrie era, and although I’m still not reconciled to what happened to [REDACTED], I’m convinced this is the most thematically rich chapter in the franchise. Seeing this in theaters with two friends who had never seen an M:I film before was a highlight of my movie-going this year.

October Sky (a rediscovery): I’ve always been a fan of Joe Johnston, a director who excels at old-fashioned blockbuster filmmaking in works like Jumanji, The Rocketeer, and the first Captain America. But this film, about rocket-building high schoolers in a dead-end coal-mining town, might be his best. At least, it’s the most emotionally satisfying. The way it ultimately honors the small town and the protagonist’s difficult father, instead of reducing them to easy caricatures, surprised me.

Porco Rosso (a greater appreciation): Porco Rosso was almost on my Thanksgiving 2022 list. It has risen from 5th to 3rd place in my ranking of Miyazaki films, but the film is also included on this list to represent the multiple times I got to see Miyazaki’s work on the big screen in 2023: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, and The Wind Rises this summer; and, Lord willing, The Boy and the Heron in a few weeks.  

Raising Arizona (a discovery): I didn’t know a Coen Brothers film could be this silly and this sentimental. It makes me smile just to think about it.

The Rings of Power (a discovery): The first season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel show is not what I had feared it would be and far better than its negative reception suggests. It is also—whatever liberties are taken with the lore—surprisingly congruous with Tolkien’s moral vision. I really hope we’ll get to see the other seasons. (P.S.: This year I also got to see the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen—another movie-going highlight.)

New Article: Reading with the Jedi

I have a new article, titled “The Dead Speak!: Reading with the Jedi,” that was published today over at the Mere Orthodoxy blog. It combines several of my favorite things: Star Wars, reading and reading ethics, and quoting from C. S. Lewis and Alan Jacobs. I am grateful to Tim Lawrence for his feedback on the early drafts, and to Jake Meador for publishing the article.

Disney Animation and Expressive Individualism

It is often said that Disney films, at least in the past few decades, espouse expressive individualism. I have thought the same thing, and still think it is largely the case. However, over time I have realized that three among my favorite Disney animated films, all three of them from what to me is the most eclectic and daring period in Disney Animation’s recent history—The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Treasure Planet (2002), and Brother Bear (2003)—each show the dangers of expressive individualism and suggest that maturity involves submitting to community standards and accountability. So, in fairness to the creators of these films, while the generalization is mostly true, we shouldn’t paint all of Disney’s productions with such a broad brush.

First, in my debut article for FilmFisher in 2018, I had this to say about Brother Bear:  

Charles Taylor has described secular individualism this way: “People are called upon to be true of themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.” [The quotation is from Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 14.]

This statement could describe the hero’s journey of several Disney protagonists. But Brother Bear subverts Disney’s individualistic mythos. To adapt Taylor’s words: Kenai is never told to be true to himself. That would actually be disastrous, because what Kenai learns about himself is ugly and shameful. In biblical terms, he is a sinner at heart, not a saint. Instead, he is told by Tanana to pattern his life after love, something outside himself. In the end, he does not seek his own fulfillment, but another’s good. If Kenai had had his way, he never would have determined that path for himself. At first, he outright rejected it as folly. Others dictated the content of his attainment of mature manhood. The spirits chose his totem, Tanana and his brothers told him to follow his totem, and the spirits set him on a path to reconciliation when he abandoned his totem. If Taylor is right, and my analysis of Brother Bear is on to something, this truly is a counter-cultural message.

Second, when I wrote an article on Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2020, I argued the former may not be as individualistic as it certainly seems to be:

The trouble with making the moral of the film “chart your own course,” in the individualistic sense, is that the film, intentionally or not, presents strong reasons against that kind of philosophy. Captain Flint charted his own course, and died alone. Silver charts his own course, but realizes “you give up a few things, chasing a dream” — in his case, parts of his own body. Worst of all, Jim’s father, for all we can tell, charted his own course, and he abandoned his wife and son. But the moral exemplars of the film — Sarah, Dr. Doppler, and Captain Amelia — are marked by their principles, discipline, and service. They take initiative and responsibility for themselves, but never without regard for others. Jim matures when he honors his mother, submits to Captain Amelia’s leadership, and follows Silver’s instructions. When Jim does start charting his own course, he fights to protect his friends, not to pursue his own interests. When Silver invites Jim to join him for a life of open, endless possibilities, the course he charts instead is toward a life constrained by limitations. He enrolls in the Naval Academy — and militaries, schools, and military schools especially, are not places for expansive, self-determining individualism.

In the next paragraph, I quoted the same Charles Taylor passage I had used in the Brother Bear article, and then continued: 

Up until I was working on this article, I always thought Silver’s speech exemplified this kind of thinking. That may still be the case. After all, Taylor’s description encapsulates the Disney ethos. But as I now consider the speech within the context of the film, it seems to take on a newer and truer meaning. Perhaps, even as Jim is called to be true to himself, he is also called to be true to others. Perhaps those others still need to tell him who he should be, and even better, help him become who he should be. Otherwise, if Jim pushes everyone away, who will be there to catch the light coming off him?

Third, I haven’t written an article on The Emperor’s New Groove—not yet—but here is the short version of my argument it is not in favor of expressive individualism: Is there any character in all of Disney who is more expressively individualistic than Emperor Kuzco, and isn’t he clearly portrayed as a terribly selfish and destructive person who needs to change and start showing concern for others?

All this leads me to two takeaways: 

One, as seen with Treasure Planet, the characters in these films can say one thing (“chart your own course”) while the story can silently undercut those words (the character saying those words is not a moral exemplar). This is why we have to consider every scene in the context of the whole. We have to consider subtext. 

But, two, this presents a difficulty: the target audience for these films is not very good at detecting subtext. When I grew up watching Silver say “Chart your own course,” I took it as the unchallenged viewpoint of the whole film. Similarly, most of the kids who grow up with Frozen likely do not pick up the irony that “Let It Go” is being sung by someone who, swinging the pendulum too far the other way in a response to a restrictive upbringing, is in danger of hurting herself and others. So, those who are reluctant to show these films to children, lest they encourage them to have a me-first mentality, have a point. However, what if these films could be used to help young viewers, when they are ready for it, learn how to recognize subtext? In the context of a discussion with a parent or teacher, these films that seem to espouse expressive individualism could be used to help inoculate against it.

Emphatic Evangelicalism

One of the books I have most benefitted from reading this year is Fred Sanders’ The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010). I had picked up the book for the obvious reason of wanting to grow in my understanding of the Trinity, but what struck me about the book from its first pages on is that it is also a defense of the neglected resources available in evangelical theology.

Sanders admits that “evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology” and that “the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness” (11). This causes some to develop what I’ll call an “Evangelical Inferiority Complex.” “Many evangelicals,” Sanders writes, “seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. … When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources” (12).

If the primary goal of the book is to show how “the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel” (10), the second goal is to show that this thesis is and always has been entirely at home in evangelical thought: in fact, Sanders argues “evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church” (9). This in turn serves a third goal: “to reintroduce evangelical Protestants to what is best in our own tradition” (13). To borrow the title of another, more recent Crossway book, The Deep Things of God is a work of “theological retrieval for evangelicals.” 

But how did evangelicals get into this situation of being “radically Trinitarian without knowing it” (12)? How did we drift from our historical depths into “theological and spiritual shallowness” (11)? Sanders’ answer to these questions is what has reverberated in my mind ever since I read the book’s Introduction in January, and my reason for writing this post: evangelicalism is “emphatic”—that is, “It has made strategic choices about what should be emphasized when presenting the fullness of the faith” (14). In particular, evangelicals major on “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven”—and, Sanders stresses, “These are the right things to emphasize” (15, italics added). It isn’t wrong that we are so emphatic about these doctrines. The problem, though, is that in our enthusiasm for them we can tend to forget that “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven” only make sense, only have weight and meaning, in the context of a host of other doctrines. “When a message is all emphasis,” Sanders explains, “everything is equally important and you are always shouting” (17). If I wrote this whole post in italics, the italics wouldn’t mean anything. If everything is a nail, what is there left to nail down? After a certain point, emphatic evangelicalism can become “anemic,” “reductionist,” and open to the charge of “anti-intellectualism” (16-17).

But a healthy, robust evangelicalism does have things to say about the doctrines that surround and support our major emphases. “What is needed,” Sanders argues, “is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background” (19). And this “restoration of the background” can be had by learning from many of our evangelical forebears.

Homesteading and Homecoming

In my previous post about homeworlds in Star Wars, I noted how the final episode of The Mandalorian Season 3 ends with Mando and Grogu getting “a homestead” (from what I recall, that is exactly what the show calls it), and with the Mandalorians reclaiming their homeworld of Mandalore. This reminded me of the following passages from Edward S. Casey’s book, Getting Back into Place (Indiana UP, 2nd edition, 2009). I thought of citing Casey then, but the post was already far too long.

“Ends of journeys fall into two extreme exemplars: homesteading and homecoming. In homesteading, I journey to a new place that will become my future home-place. The homesteading place is typically unknown to me . . . . But I am determined to settle down for the long term in this novel place. . . . I commit myself to remaining in the new place for a stretch of time sufficient for building a significant future life there” (290). 

“In homecoming, the duration of this alliance is no longer of major importance. What matters most now is the fact of return to the same place. . . . [T]he issue is that of returning not to the identical spot in space but to a place that may itself have changed in the meanwhile. . . . [I]t is . . . everyone’s destiny who has returned home only to discover striking differences” (290). 

That last point is one major reason why so few people—both in the Star Wars galaxy and in our own—return to an old home for more than a brief visit. 

Looking for Home Across the Stars

There are two things about the final episode of the Ahsoka series, released over a week ago on Disney+, that struck me as highly unusual—or at least exceedingly rare—for a Star Wars story. Coming from a franchise that tends to follow nomadic characters from planet to planet to planet as they fight to determine the fate of “the galaxy” in general, both of these things are reminders that people also have attachments to particular places—and if they don’t, probably should.

First, the episode (“The Jedi, the Witch, and the Warlord”) retrospectively clarified just how much the entire eight-episode serial is largely about bringing one character home. Ahsoka is roughly the Star Wars equivalent of The Odyssey. Ezra Bridger is lost in exile in a far-off galaxy, is found, and is sent back to his own galaxy—and, implicitly, back to his homeworld of Lothal. 

Second, there is a fascinating exchange between Grand Admiral Thrawn, the once-and-future big-bad of the Star Wars universe outside the films, and his second-in-command, the witch Morgan Elsbeth. Concluding their last conversation, Thrawn says, “For the Empire.” Behind his back and under her breath, Morgan counters, “For Dathomir.” That is, whereas Thrawn is fighting to reinstate a galaxy-wide regime, Morgan’s objective is local and personal: to restore the fortunes of her homeworld. Morgan is still one of the villains, but this revelation of her loyalty to a particular place makes her more sympathetic, and her choice to collude with a man who only exploits that loyalty more tragic.

However, to test my hypothesis that it is unusual or rare to find homeworld-centric characters or storylines in Star Wars, I searched through my memory for other examples and noticed a pattern. It isn’t so unusual or rare after all, depending on where you look. Ezra’s love for Lothal and Morgan’s love for Dathomir only have a few analogues in the films (by which I mean the nine-episode Skywalker Saga, Rogue One, and Solo), but the longing for a homeworld—whether to return to one, to protect or liberate one, or to find and settle down on one—keeps cropping up in the shows (namely, in Filoni’s Clone Wars, Rebels, Bad Batch, and Ahsoka; in Favreau’s Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett; and in Gilroy’s Andor).

It’s not that there aren’t characters in the films that identify themselves with particular planets. Padme Amidala fights to save Naboo from a Trade Federation takeover in The Phantom Menace, and she expresses the desire to return to Naboo to raise her child in Revenge of the Sith. Her daughter, Leia Organa, is frequently associated with the planet of Alderaan. The scoundrel Lando Calrissian reforms his ways, settles down on Bespin, and though he fails to protect Cloud City from an imperial takeover in The Empire Strikes Back, he certainly tried. 

But these characters are the exception. The protagonist of the Original Trilogy is Luke Skywalker, who leaves Tatooine behind and only returns briefly to settle unfinished business. The same is true of his father, Anakin Skywalker, the protagonist of the Prequel Trilogy. Both are very vocal about their lack of love for Tatooine. The protagonist of the Sequel Trilogy, Rey, also grows up on a desert planet, but her repeated insistence in The Force Awakens that she needs to return to Jakku is only in the vain hope that her parents will come back to find her there. In Solo, Han only plans to return to Corellia to save his girlfriend. (Speaking of Han Solo, the closest thing to home in most of the films is the Millennium Falcon. Home is where the Falcon is.) In Rogue One, rebels go into battle crying “For Jedha!”—but that’s different from Morgan’s “For Dathomir!” It’s not because Jedha is their homeworld, but because of what the Empire did to that planet. It’s their version of “Remember the Alamo!”

In the films, to live a long, peaceful life on a homeworld seems an impossibility. It’s something Padme, Leia, or Lando would want, but can’t have. (In Leia’s case, the Empire destroys Alderaan.) Perhaps because it’s so hard to realize with all the devastating star wars going on, it seems most of the characters have given up on the ideal, if they ever aspired to it in the first place. Just look at what happens—or rather, what doesn’t—when a war is over. The Original and Sequel Trilogies both end with the rebels celebrating victory together, but where do they go afterward? Unlike the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, they have no Shire to fight for and then return to.

The Prequels seem to offer a subtle critique of this lack of localized loyalties. To compare the franchise to The Lord of the Rings again, the Jedi Temple is the closest analogue to Rivendell—but what a contrast! Rivendell is warm and earthy. The Jedi Temple is cold and cerebral. The Jedi Code’s ascetic ban on attachments must extend to places. The Jedi are taken away from their homeworlds in early childhood, never to return, and as much as they may consider the Temple their home, they aren’t bothering to make it cozy. It’s probably also significant that the Temple is on Coruscant, the most cosmopolitan planet in the galaxy. But what is most telling in the Prequels is that Palpatine, like Padme, is from Naboo—and he uses their homeworld as a pawn in a political power play, subjecting his people and their culture to death and destruction while he watches from aloof, anonymous Coruscant. The Jedi may think attachment is a liability, but Palpatine’s lack of attachments is part of what makes him so dangerous. Conversely, a love of home turns out to be part of what saves the day. Just as how, in The Return of the Jedi, Palpatine did not count on Luke and Vader’s attachment to each other, in The Phantom Menace, the one thing he did not count on was Padme’s attachment to their homeworld.  

Now, back to the shows.

Of course, Ezra’s close identification with his homeworld in Ahsoka is nothing new for his characterization. Across the four seasons of Rebels, Ezra frequently returned to Lothal, and the final season was about his fight to liberate it from imperial occupation. Indeed, it was the sacrifice he made to achieve that liberation that led to his exile in that show’s finale. In the latter seasons of The Clone Wars, there is a real sense of loss when Ahsoka not only leaves behind the Jedi, but also leaves behind the Temple, which in turn leaves her adrift in the galaxy, looking for someplace to belong. In the second season of The Bad Batch, the Batch find an island paradise and begin to seriously consider staying put instead of being mercenaries. Likewise, The Mandalorian Season 3 ends with Mando and Grogu getting their own homestead, and with the Mandalorians finally retaking their homeworld. (The Mandalorians are strongly reminiscent of the Israelites returning to the Promised Land from Egyptian slavery or Babylonian exile.) The first season of Andor begins and ends on the planet that Andor and his adoptive parents call home, and the writers show an anthropological interest in the customs of different planetary cultures to a degree rarely seen anywhere else in the franchise. Finally, and in the weirdest development of all, The Book of Boba Fett contends that even the most famously dispassionate bounty hunter needs a home: first he is adopted by Tusken Raiders, and then he becomes Tatooine’s new daimyo. 

The strangeness of that last example only serves to underscore what seems to be a significant concern in the shows, acting perhaps as a corrective to how the films largely tended to make the planets mere backgrounds. The shows recognize that people can’t really love or be at home in a vast, impersonal galaxy, but they can love and be at home on a planet of their own.

P.S. October 17: Tim Lawrence makes the fair point that “Padmé’s attachment to her homeworld is part of what makes Palpatine's manipulation work. It’s what gets her to vote him into power. So attachment to a homeworld is ambiguous – just like Luke’s family attachments in [Return of the Jedi], it can be manipulated by/lead to evil (Luke nearly kills Vader because of his attachment to Leia) and can also frustrate/prevent evil (Luke refuses to kill Vader because of his attachment). This double sided quality is probably why the Jedi forbid it in both cases (home and family).” 

On further reflection, I would add that this same ambivalence about place is seen with the two other characters from the films that I cited as positive examples of an attachment to place: Leia and Lando. In A New Hope, Tarkin and Vader threaten to destroy Leia’s homeworld to get her to betray the rebels. (She (comp)lies, but they destroy Alderaan anyway.) And in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader threatens Lando with putting Cloud City under Imperial control to get him to betray Han (and then keeps altering the deal).  

In Memoriam: Michael Gambon

One of my favorite actors passed away on September 27. Of the fifty films currently on my list of “Film Friends,” Michael Gambon played a significant role in five of them. He was Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)—his first time in the role—and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)—the one in which he was given the most room to shine. He played Lord Charles Fox in Amazing Grace (2006). He was the voice of Farmer Bean in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and the narrator of Hail, Caesar! (2016). (Technically, he’s in six of my Film Friends—but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 [2010] doesn’t really count.) I don’t know anything about who he was or what he was like off-camera, but his work on the screen suggests a versatile talent and a reliable professional, someone who would give each assignment his best no matter the film’s genre, target audience, or budget. That in turn suggests a humility. He seems to have been an actor who called attention to his characters and their place in the stories they were a part of, not to himself. But all I know for sure is how much his performances enhanced these films that mean so much to me. So this week, in his honor, four of the above films are displayed at the top of my Letterboxd profile, and Nicholas Hooper’s score for Half-Blood Prince—which includes a requiem for Dumbledore—is playing in my car. I am saddened by Gambon’s passing, and grateful for his work.

Big Idea: A Cautionary Tale

In Fall 2013, when I was a undergrad at Biola University, Phil Vischer—the founder of Big Idea, creator of VeggieTales, and voice of Bob the Tomato and a host of other characters—gave a talk to a packed gymnasium of people who had grown up watching his videos. I was one of them, and what Vischer had to say that night played a significant part in the long story of how and why I decided to quit filmmaking. That is a long story for another time, but I share that autobiographical detail here to suggest how much Big Idea has been to me a paradigmatic example—a cautionary tale, really—of the challenges facing Christian individuals and institutions engaged in culture-making and cultural engagement. This summer, I finally read Vischer’s memoir, Me, Myself & Bob (Nelson, 2006). Here are some takeaways from the passages dealing with how Vischer lost control of the company in the early 2000’s. 

One: An organization needs to be led by both a Head and a Heart. 

Among the problems that led to Big Idea’s bankruptcy was that Vischer was a dreamer surrounded by yes-men and took increasingly expensive risks. Yet if at the other extreme the company had been led by someone concerned only with the financial bottom-line, that would have stifled creative experimentation. So Vischer concludes that “The balance between creative inspiration and good stewardship of resources is vital to any successful enterprise” (211). He cites the example of Walt Disney’s life-long collaboration with his older brother Roy: “The key to the partnership of Walt and Roy was mutual submission, based in genuine love for each other. … In hindsight, perhaps the simplest explanation for the failure of Big Idea Productions is this: I never found my Roy” (213). The administratively-gifted Head and the visionary Heart need to work together to accomplish anything worthwhile long-term.

Two: Enough with the obsession with growth. 

Big Idea grew at an unsustainable rate, and it would have been able to do more good over the long-haul if it had stayed smaller. Vischer argues that “Real impact today comes from building great relationships, not huge organizations. More overhead equals less flexibility to pursue unexpected opportunities” (219). As the saying goes, “More money, more problems”—but also, more people, more problems; more projects, more problems. Big Idea’s meltdown is a warning for churches, Christian schools, and other parachurch organizations that think that numerical growth means they must be doing something right.

Three: Be explicit and consistent about the organization’s theological commitments, and make sure all employees at least know what those are and can respect them.

This is closely related to the second takeaway. For Big Idea to scale up to the size Vischer over-ambitiously envisioned for it, it was almost inevitably going to have to attract more non-Christian talent (not to mention non-Christian investors). Vischer confesses that, “the more we hired, the less Christian Big Idea became” (125). He goes on to say that “I shared my passion for Christian ministry through creative media with everyone but my own staff, because, frankly, I wasn’t sure many of the folks at Big Idea would buy into it” (126–27). This is an almost-guaranteed recipe for mission drift and internal divisions: “My vagueness about Big Idea’s true mission and values led to a profoundly confused, dysfunctional workplace. By the time I had figured out the problem, it was too late to do much about it” (223).

Vischer advises leaders to “Build a team that rows in the same direction” (222). However, he adds the qualification that, “This doesn’t mean everyone needs to think the same, look the same, or talk the same—that sort of conformity leads to groupthink and failure. Diversity is a wonderful thing, as long as the diversity isn’t around the purpose and values of the group itself. … I hired some Christians who didn’t fit and some non-Christians who did. The key was that each employee—from the receptionist to the president—was excited about Big Idea’s mission and the Christian values we promoted” (222). I’m not sure about that last part. There are some “Christian values” that only a Christian could be “excited about,” and while maybe the “receptionist” doesn’t have to a Christian, the “president” and everyone making the defining creative and financial decisions should be. But I do take Vischer’s point that not everyone has to be theologically aligned on every single issue for a non-church, non-denominational Christian organization to be able to accomplish its goals.

The Good King by Ghost Ship

One of the good things to come out of Mars Hill Church was that it gave birth to a number of Christian bands that, even after Mars Hill’s collapse, continued to produce music that is both theologically rich and stylistically eclectic. My favorite Mars Hill Bands are Citizens, Kings Kaleidoscope, and The Sing Team, but I also really like Ghost Ship’s debut album, The Good King (2013). One of the things I like about the album is its thematic unity. True to its title, every song is about Christ the Good King and His character and deeds. Even the songs not explicitly on this theme fit within this framework. The songs on the album are also, I am convinced, arranged as a chiasmus.

Tracks with asterisks after them (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) refer to Christ’s kingship, but the central track of the album, the turning point of the chiasmus, is entirely dedicated to enumerating His kingly attributes.

Tracks 1 and 11: “Mediator” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”

Christ the Good King is the intercessor through whom we are reconciled to God and through whom we pray to God.

Tracks 2 and 10: “Orion” and “Where Were You”

Both songs are based on Job 38. Christ the Good King is sovereign over all creation, yet also shows intimate concern for us.

Tracks 3* and 9: “Lion Man” and “Behold the Lamb of God”

Christ the Good King is both conquering lion and sacrificial lamb.

Tracks 4* and 8*: “Jude Doxology” and “The Gospel”

Christ the Good King is our savior, redeeming us from slavery to sin and death.

Tracks 5* and 7*: “Son of David” and “Holy, Holy, Holy”

Christ the Good King removes spiritual blindness so that we can see Him as He is. (In this rendition of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” a Trinitarian hymn, the last line is changed to place emphasis on God the Son as “King of kings.”) 

Track 6*: “The Truth”

“The Truth” at the heart of the album, thematically and numerically, is Christ the Good King. This King is “mighty,” “loving,” “sovereign,” and “faithful.”

Love and Death in Pirates of the Caribbean

In my post yesterday, I sketched out a proposed chiastic structure for Dead Man’s Chest, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I identified as the turning point:

Scene X: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

The turning point should be a thematically significant moment if it is to be at the heart of a true ring composition. I didn’t think this one scene could carry that much weight. It’s a major action set-piece, but doesn’t have much going for it narratively. Later in the day I talked with Tim Lawrence about it, and he helped me identify that the turning point should actually be two scenes: this one, and the scene preceding it. So here’s a revised theory of the turning point:

Scene X’: Norrington learns how he can get a pardon from Becket; Elizabeth, using Jack’s compass, realizes she has an attraction for Jack

Scene X”: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

Adding Scene X’ fits with the patterns I’ve already traced. It brings in another key Norrington moment to complement Scenes B’ (arrest warrant) and B” (pardon); it sets up Jack and Elizabeth’s flirtation in Scene G” (which deepens Jack’s betrayal of Will in Scene G’); and it is also relevant to the ring because it involves Jack’s compass, complementing Scenes D’ (compass confused) and D” (compass clear).

But why does the turning point need to include both X’ and X”? It’s because X’ complements A’, and X” complements A”:

Scene A’: A wedding without a groom (teacups filled with rain)

Scene A”: A wake without a body (mugs filled with grog)

The film opens with Will and Elizabeth’s wedding being cancelled because Becket arrests them for treason. Then, in Scene X’, we realize that Jack is another threat to Will and Elizabeth’s ability to marry. Immediately following this, Scene X” gives a preview of how the Kraken will finally destroy the Black Pearl and consume Jack. Then, the final scene of the film shows the survivors grieving that event, a fate they fought throughout the film to avoid. So Scenes X’ and X” really are the twinned turning point scenes of the film because they are also twinned with the film’s bookends.

More than that, this ring composition makes sense for the film—it’s not something I’m imposing on the film arbitrarily—because the whole story, at heart, is about characters who try to avoid marriage, death, or both. The beginning, middle, and end points of the ring only reinforce this. 

The film begins with a wedding without a groom. Something comes in between a man and his commitment to a woman, and all that this commitment would entail: fidelity, stability, fatherhood. In Will’s case, the hindrance was unwanted. But Davy Jones cut his own heart out so he could forsake his beloved, and although Bootstrap Bill stuck around long enough to father Will, he did not stay behind to raise him. Jones and Bootstrap chose the supposed freedom represented by the sea and by piracy over the responsibility of the hearth. In the turning point of the film, Elizabeth realizes she is likewise tempted to bail on her own wedding. For a moment, the desire to be with a pirate (and thus become a pirate herself) is more compelling.

The film ends with a funeral without a body. Yet just as no one can really miss their own wedding, no one can really miss their own funeral. In the film, people keep trying to forestall the inevitable, with disastrous results. Dying sailors sign on to join Davy Jones’ crew so they can delay Judgment Day by one hundred years—and proceed to experience one hundred years of hell on earth. Jack keeps scheming after ways to not have to die in exchange for the extra thirteen years Jones gave him—and how many sailors have to die for his folly before he finally runs out of schemes? The turning point scene in which Will watches the Kraken take down a merchant ship gives Will ideas for how to stop the Kraken from taking down the Black Pearl, but those strategies can only buy Jack a little more time. The Kraken that swallowed Jack’s hat is like the crocodile that swallowed Captain Hook’s clock: a living reminder of the shortness of time and the certainty of death.

But how do these two themes—marriage and death—relate? What’s the connection between the wedding and the funeral, and between Elizabeth’s choice between two men and Jack’s looming appointment with the Kraken? Here’s my theory: marriage is one way of dying to self to serve the good of another, and thus avoid a different and far worse kind of death. Jones, Bootstrap, and Jack each refuse sacrificial love so they can live to serve themselves, and the end result for each of them is death, not just physical but spiritual. A man could skip his wedding, but if that is a harbinger of a life-long pattern of living for himself, the result won’t be a funeral without a body, but a funeral without mourners, and worse, an eternity alone. 

Fortunately for Jack, in the eleventh hour he realizes he cannot abandon his friends and crew, and he willingly risks his own life to save them. This doesn’t keep the Kraken at bay, but it does mean Jack is mourned as “a good man.” In contrast, the heart of Davy Jones locked away in a chest—a refusal of death by love—reminds me of this passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (HarperOne, 2017): 

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and you heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell” (155-156, italics added).

The choice facing all these characters is the same one facing all of us: Death being inevitable, when and how do we want to die? We can either submit ourselves to small daily deaths now, or we can die eternally later.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Ring

I rewatched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest a few days ago, and that prompted me to dust off and post this theory of mine that the film has a chiastic, circular pattern. It makes sense for the film to have a ring structure, given that the fate Jack Sparrow is avoiding from the start eventually (inevitably?) comes to pass, and given that there are two different times that characters get stuck moving in circles (literally). I’ll admit, however, that a weakness of this theory is that the turning point in a ring structure should be the story’s most important scene. At least in the way I’ve organized things below, I’m not convinced that X marks the spot.

Scene A’: A wedding without a groom (teacups filled with rain)

Scene B’: Becket issues an arrest warrant for Norrington

Scene C’: Jack uses the death of a prisoner to cover his escape; Jack emerges from a coffin (a mock resurrection)

Scene D’: Jack gets the black spot; Jack loses his hat; Jack’s compass is confused

Scene E’: The Kraken attacks ship #1; Jack’s hat is blamed for the attack but it’s Jack’s fault

Scene F’:  Jack goes to an island to escape the Kraken; Jack is almost sacrificed; Will is trapped in a sphere

Scene G’: Jack betrays Will, who asked him for help to save Elizabeth; The black spot disappears (a three-day reprieve begins) 

Scene H’: Will is imprisoned on the Dutchman; Bootstrap Bill whips Will

Scene X (turning point?): The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

Scene H”: Will hides aboard the Dutchman; Bootstrap Bill is imprisoned for helping Will

Scene G”: Jack tempts Elizabeth, who asked him for help to save Will; The black spot reemerges (the three-day reprieve ends) 

Scene F”: Jack goes to an island to control the Kraken; Jack falls into an open grave; Will is trapped in a wheel

Scene E”: The Kraken attacks ship #3; Everyone knows it’s Jack’s fault

Scene D”: Jack’s compass is clear; Jack gets his hat back; Jack meets the fate promised by the black spot 

Scene C”: Jack is swallowed by the Kraken (a death—for now); Elizabeth uses Jack’s death to cover the crew’s escape

Scene B”: Norrington obtains Becket’s pardon

Scene A”: A wake without a body (mugs filled with grog)

P.S. September 8: See my follow-up post here.

The Problem with Highways

From Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity, 2008):

“What does [the interstate highway] assume about the way the world should be? The world should be smoother and faster, and the world should be safer—its corners, hills and valleys literally rounded off in the interests of efficiency. Rivers and mountains should be scenery, not obstacles. The perceived distance from one place to the next should shrink—the mile should seem like a short distance rather than a long one. Consistency from place to place is more valuable than the particulars of each place—uniform in signage and road markings, fixed radii for curves and angles for exit ramps, and identical rules of the road should make local knowledge unnecessary. We should be able to go anywhere and feel more or less at home. Goods from far away should become more economically competitive with goods from nearby; goods nearby should have new markets in places far away” (33).

And from John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin, 2017):

“These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing” (89-90).

“Localness is not gone but it is going. … [N]o region can hold out for long against the highway, the high-tension line, and the national television. What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless” (107).

The Problem with Maps

From John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin, 2017):

“For weeks I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not reality at all—they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails” (23).

“There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. … Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains” (70).

And from Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000):

“In setting out, however, the traveler immediately confronts the problem of the map, an organization of the land according to a certain sense of space and an evaluation of what is important. I traveled everywhere with maps, no one of which was entirely accurate. They were the projection of a wish that the space could be this well organized. You cannot blame the maps, of course; nor can you travel without them. I was glad to pull them out of a pack or a back pocket and find clarification. … I knew that mixture of satisfaction and desire—to know exactly how one is situated in the vastness; and the wish to fully comprehend the space a map renders and sets borders to. But I would try to be wary. Even a good map, one with the lines and symbols of a handwritten geography on it, where [Yi-Fu] Tuan’s ‘spaces’ have been turned into ‘places,’ masquerades as an authority. What we hold are but approximations of what is out there. Neatly folded simulacra” (279-280).

That last phrase, “Neatly folded simulacra,” recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph short story, “On Exactitude in Science.” 

P.S. September 4: When I put these quotations by Steinbeck and Lopez together, I had no idea that Lopez was a Steinbeck fan and had once met him when attending summer camp with Steinbeck’s sons. 

"The People Who Change Nature"

“A Yup’ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, ‘the people who change nature’” (39).

“What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve” (313).

From Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000).