Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight Rises, The French Revolution, and Slavoj Žižek

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 9:17 PM, XXXXXX XXXX wrote:
My evaluation of the final Nolan Batman: it's counterrevolutionary propaganda. Straight up. The point of the movie is to delegitimize anti-capitalist revolutionary sentiment and action. It's not subtle about this. Morrison has always maintained that the Batman mythos is about class warfare, and this movie makes that pretty well explicit.

I guess that's an encouraging sign. The ruling class is, I guess, really scared right now. It's amazing how heavy-handed the movie is about it.

Anyway. Aside from that ideological creepiness, it's fine. Not as well crafted as the first two (it tries to pack way too much mythology into a single movie, and as a result it fairly bursts at the seams), but beautiful and well acted.

So then I started reading this

I haven't seen the movie, but I'm interested in the degree to which the French Revolution is maybe misunderstood by these commentators. Maybe my own interpretation of the French Revolution is misunderstood, and as a direct result of my recent aquaintance with Slavoj Zižek.

Let's Talk About It

In re: this.

Whoever fights against the empire, becomes the empire. [or something along those lines] — Philip K. Dick [as told to Tezcatlipoca]

I think this is important. I think there's a misconception that to be "political" one must address the "political system" on it's own terms. I'd say that every work can't help but be political. "The kids these days" have seen the failures of previous generations. Instead, I would suggest that this generation (or whatever) is (possibly unknowingly) taking a much more magical approach, simply willing the past in to non-existence by ignoring it.
Even Solidarity Rock is an example of this. It has to be an apolitical operation in order to function at all. By focusing exclusively on fostering creative expression, and not on "politics", we're able to help build a different kind of future that would be out of reach if we were explicitly political. Everyone has their own politics, sure, but that's not even so important as just doing the work.
It's like Burroughs said, it's the word virus. As long as we keep feeding it it will continue to grow in power. We need to starve the word virus. Communicate without words. Though it would be easier, though I'm not convinced how fruitful, in the end, if we just started using words differently. If you look back at popular music in the early 20th century, you notice that they're often communicating the same types of sentiments that we do now, but it's all talked about in a very coded way. Nothing was explicit. We could attempt a coup by shifting our language use in such a way, but, like I said, I'm concerned that would only give power to a different type of word virus. Then again, isn't that how evolution is supposed to work?
We are living in a soviet police state, it's just masquerading as a free society, though that's not to saw we're powerless as actors within said police state. We're going to have to learn to communicate in code, just like they did in Poland.

*imagines a society where all disputes are settled via freestyle music competitions*

But of course, I'm just speaking for myself. I have no idea how indicative these ideas are of the broader population. Though I'd definitely like to see where this discussion leads...

recurring dream

recurring dream I'm a black kid in some sort of group home. I'm, like, the tough kid, the kid you don't want to cross, the kid who doesn't give a shit about shit. Something happens, or maybe it doesn't. Maybe the home is out in the woods, like a retreat, or maybe it's just in the city, I think it changes depending on the dream Eventually I grab a bicycle and just get the fuck out of there. I might punch out someone first, I might not. I might do it sneakily, or might just rely on sheer speed to get out of a chase.

Also, the furniture in my living room was rearranged---seemingly almost specifically to prevent me from working out comfortably.

Also, I took a large shit in my dream. No big, except when I tried to flush it and realized I'd created a veritable iceberg of shit in the toilet bowl, and flushing caused it to emerge and a huge part of it broke off outside the toilet bowl. It had structural integrity at first, but once that big piece broke off and fell on the floor, I knew it was soft and would be a motherfucker to clean up.

Magicks

Nov 17 or 18, 1996. Monday.

I was driving my car, but controlling it remotely, like a drone car. Which made it easier to weave in and out of traffic. But then I lost sight of it, and couldn't find it. I guess it'd gone off somewhere, crashed into the woods near a police officers picnic. So, y'know, I had to go searching for my car, but without telling any of the cops, who conveniently would've been the people mostly likely to know where the car had gone. I didn't want them to know that I'd been driving recklessly, and I didn't want to fuck up the truck. Which was, like, sorta the truck, and sorta my car, but it also had Jamee's car alarm. I would periodically hit the panic button, to get a sense of where off in the distance the car was. It took a little bit of figuring out, but I did figure that the car was moving, and somebody would turn off the alarm every time I started it. Turns out it'd been found by some manner of mountain man, who was dressed up like the Yeti's from The Mighty Boosh, where the "fur" of the yeti was actually the hair of people and animals that the mountain men had scalped. I think at some point I might've found his home out in the woods, and I might've run in to his family. Last thing I recall was climbing a hill badly, to get at the built in computer interface that all hills *obviously* have. Dwaine Groth was there, I recall feeling awkwardness stemming from the conflict between his blue-collarness and my white-collarness. THought I'd since him since grade 6, but... I don't think so.