Violence in Film: An Adult View

I don't do film reviews any more, but sometimes I will write about films as a springboard for views on another subject. I recently saw one of last year's major films, The Dark Knight, and I was impressed. It was a brilliant entertainment, by far the best superhero movie I've seen. While its most exciting achievement was the amazing performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker (tragically, his last), the film worked on other levels as well: as a clever sendup of superhero films in general -- here the criminals punish the citizens of Gotham because Batman is their protector, not in spite of him -- and as a meditation on the deep, tribal need of society for the hero to protect us from our own appetite for evil, which we can never give up, but will never admit.

Director Christopher Nolan did an unusually skillful job. In execution, the film was solid and imaginative; there were no weak elements. Conceptually, however, there was a major one: the character of Batman himself. There is no way I can accept any person who chooses to behave in such a preposterous manner as a mature adult. Dressing up in Halloween costume to shoot it out with one dimensional (if even that) bad guys is a kid's fantasy. But it was never my fantasy, even as a kid. The real bad guys of this world, such as suicidal terrorsts, see themselves as heroes, and the list of grievances they have against society are often -- when seen from their perspective -- a legitimate reason to act. Only not in the ways they have chosen.

For me, a more satisfying film, one that has a genuinely adult perspective on violence, is Steven Spielberg's Munich. We see how an undeniably barbaric act -- the slaughter of the Israeli athletes at the Olympics -- can be the impetus for a secret, extravagantly organized campaign to kill the terrorists responsible for it, and for this to be undertaken as a political necessity. Unlike Batman, the Israeli team seeks out their chosen victims in moments of peaceful relaxation, often with their families, who are innocent, but will be killed anyway.

Also unlike Batman, the leader of the Israeli team experiences a transformation in his attitude towards violence. Sure, Batman suffers emotionally as well, but never from the act of killing. After all, these are bad guys, and they must be stopped. Conveniently, he is always around to kill them just when they are doing their bad guy things again. But the hero of the Spielberg film has poor timing. He is unable to move out of the way of his own humanity, which is, of course, always within him. The revulsion against the act of killing, even of our enemies, is almost a character in the film. By the end, we are meant to see his rejection of violence as a way of life, even when justified, as a kind of heroic act. But maybe not super-heroic.