21/01: Reflection on Mariner's Essay on The Joker and Batman
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
Don't miss reading Martian Mariner's recent post on Heath Ledger's posthumous win for his portrayal of The Joker. In his post, Mariner reflects on the difficulty of making Good interesting in fiction.
Mariner reminded me of Simone Weil's reflections on this problem. From her Notebooks:
Literature and Morality. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore "imaginative literature" is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art--and only genius can do that.
Her longest sustained attention to this problem is found in the essay "Morality and Literature." Here is the opening paragraph:
Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.
This problem attaches to fiction itself intrinsically, she asserts. This is because there are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. In other words, precisely because fiction is separated from truth and its necessity it cannot make good interesting and is able to make evil attractive. (For Weil "fiction" is bigger than literature and includes most of our memory, hopes and dreams, etc. unless we are unflinchingly attached to truth.)
A genius, in his maturity, she thought, can overcome this limit of fiction, because the mature genius is able to write truth. Such genius is rare. In the West she lists
This sense of gravity, which only genius can impart, is found in the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in certain plays of Shakespeare, in Racine's Phedre alone among French tragedies, in several comedies of Moliere, in the Grand Testament of Villon. There, good and evil appear in their truth.
She held writers (I don't think she ever considered movies) to the standard of truth. From her essay "The Responsibility of Writers":
Writers do not have to be professors of morals, but they do have to express the human condition. And nothing concerns human life so essentially, for every man at every moment, as good and evil. When literature becomes indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to to excellence.
Perhaps the power of The Dark Knight comes from its attention to the reality of good and evil, even if the writers and director lacked the genius to make good more interesting than evil.
Mariner reminded me of Simone Weil's reflections on this problem. From her Notebooks:
Literature and Morality. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore "imaginative literature" is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art--and only genius can do that.
Her longest sustained attention to this problem is found in the essay "Morality and Literature." Here is the opening paragraph:
Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.
This problem attaches to fiction itself intrinsically, she asserts. This is because there are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. In other words, precisely because fiction is separated from truth and its necessity it cannot make good interesting and is able to make evil attractive. (For Weil "fiction" is bigger than literature and includes most of our memory, hopes and dreams, etc. unless we are unflinchingly attached to truth.)
A genius, in his maturity, she thought, can overcome this limit of fiction, because the mature genius is able to write truth. Such genius is rare. In the West she lists
This sense of gravity, which only genius can impart, is found in the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in certain plays of Shakespeare, in Racine's Phedre alone among French tragedies, in several comedies of Moliere, in the Grand Testament of Villon. There, good and evil appear in their truth.
She held writers (I don't think she ever considered movies) to the standard of truth. From her essay "The Responsibility of Writers":
Writers do not have to be professors of morals, but they do have to express the human condition. And nothing concerns human life so essentially, for every man at every moment, as good and evil. When literature becomes indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to to excellence.
Perhaps the power of The Dark Knight comes from its attention to the reality of good and evil, even if the writers and director lacked the genius to make good more interesting than evil.
