“A Hard Dose of Reality”
Published by Antigone July 20th, 2008 in Punkass!This weekend, I watched the movie “Dark Knight” twice (once on opening night, and once when my Hubby came back down from the sky) and the movie “Camp” off of Netflix*. Now, the two movies really don’t have much to do with each other: one is a dark, modern-day morality play with lots of explosions, and the other is a lighthearted drameidy about outcasts at a drama camp. But, both have something in common in regards to what is “true”.
In “Camp”, there is a down-on-his-luck director, who berates the campers for failing to be “normal”. He felt they needed “a hard dose of reality, and (he) gave it to them with both barrels”. He was upset that they were happy, being the weird little people they were together, and felt they should know the world was a cruel, wicked place that was going to chew them up and spit them out.
SPOILERS for Dark Knight after the fold.
In “Dark Knight”, near the end of the movie, the Joker does a twisted version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (using actual prisoners, no less), with two ferry boats. Each boat is stuck in the middle of the river, with explosives wired to it, and each captain is given a detonator to the other ship. Now, Joker gave them until midnight, and then he threatened to blow them both up. But, if one Ship A chooses to blow up Ship B, then Ship A gets to go free. Joker expected them to blow each other up: but neither did.**
Joker was not the only one who thought that they would blow each other up. While leaving the theater, I heard plenty of people who said that that wouldn’t happen, that one of the ships would immediately blow the other one up. That in reality, people really are only concerned with themselves. (An entire movie of explodium- made***, building, cars, and windows, and THIS is what people fixate on as unrealistic?).
What these two films have in common is this perception that people are cruel, and that will never change, and you can’t trust them to be otherwise (which, thankfully, both movies go on to contradict). Why do people seem to think that all the horrible qualities of humans are the more “real” qualities? No one is going to deny that people are sometimes selfish, fearful, and stupid. But just as often, they are giving, brave, and creative. Why is the former more real than the latter? Why are we told that we can’t rely on people to be kind, but we can rely on them to be cruel?
My life is filled with examples of people, from close friends to complete strangers, giving me a helping hand, and my life has been no where near this fairy-tale experience. These experiences of kindness are just as real as my experiences of cruelty: and I can just as reliably predict that there will be more experiences of kindness in my future as I can that there will be cruelty. This cynical quality people have about others restrains true progress from happening: conservatives routinely “explain” that welfare will just be exploited by the lazy, that if we have universal health care that there will be no motivation for people to be healthy, and that we need to bomb foreign countries because that is “the only thing they understand”. The progressive side tends to be much more optimistic, but still has it nihilistic, pseudo-anarchistic elements.
When did this become a good thing? When was this determined to be “the truth” about life? It was before I was born: one of the first things my parents taught me was distrust. But, this belief is a pitiable thing; cynicism should be mourned, not celebrated. How did we get here?
And how can we change it?
*Huge aside: Netflix is awesome. I truly don’t know what I’d do without it: I can’t watch 90% of the movies I get off of it in this market.
**Bit of a squee moment: this series of scenes was EXCELLENTLY done, in an already excellent movie. It felt real- like these are real people having to put up with this surreal experience.
***Explodium is what my friends and I have determined everything in an action film is made out of. Explodium is lightweight, easy to produce and mold, and resistant to amazing temperature ranges. Unfortunately, it has the side-effect of exploding at the lightest tap, and seeks out collisions more often than Ford Pintos. This is an excellent article about the baffling properties of expodium, although they never say it by name.
TDKOMG. I even fail to mind that it’s misogynistic as all hell! So so good, will get IMAX tickets as soon as they’re done being sold out.
That out of the way, I hear you, but I think the problem is that while a kindness will get you through the day, a cruelty can last forever. I am not a cynical person; as a teenager I used to hitch-hike a fair bit, and encountered nothing but kindness from my lifts. One incidence of cruelty and I would likely never have done it again, if it was even still a choice. There’s this expectation that for the world to be perfect, we need a neverending run of kindnesses, and that isn’t going to happen and we all know it - so living well is about managing cruelty and overcoming it as best we can.
I saw The Dark Knight yesterday and people started clapping when the prisoner threw the detonator out the window. It was kind of cute, but also weird. Midnight openings for big movies tend to be rowdy in that particular theater, but this was a plain ol Sunday matinee.