Anti-hero cinema is simply a desperate effort to defend liberalism against social rebellion. If we reject the modern model of the Western state, we are going to see what we see in the movie “Joker” or the series “Pingwin”: rape, chaos and revolution. After all, the last defender of conventional culture – Batman – in this planet is just gone.
Reflection on what the mythical planet of Gotham would look like without Batman is highly tempting for the creators. Among another things, she was proposed by the tv series “Gotham”, in which the Dark Knight is only gradually preparing for his role. There, however, we feel that justice will come.
In the series “Pingwin” and in the movie “Joker” about justice there is virtually no way. due to the fact that the creators besides offer us a imagination of a planet where there is no place for culture, but a kind of counterculture dominates. There are no heroes there who do justice, and who, even if they fall, conflict with each other, fighting their own weaknesses. The Triumphs are holy, for that they are cruel and idolatrous, who are not punished for wrongdoing. Even if it touches their suffering, it is the work of chance or successful intrigue of the opponent.
Aristotle rightly wrote in the work “Politics” that the top weaknesses of human nature are the lusts of the flesh and gluttony. Interestingly, both Joker and Penguin were so designed by directors, successively: Todd Phillips and Matt Reeves, that they struggle, successively with the disorder of bodily lusts and unrestrained appetite. Of course, Joker is not a classical pervert, but he simply cannot control his own emotions. He tries to build male-female relationships clumsyly due to the fact that he is emotionally out of control. He does not know what it truly is to meet 2 people in actual and boundless devotion.
The Penguin, in turn, is simply a common obstetrician who, at times, hides an authentic cruelty under the face of even a comic sybarite.
In both cases, giving relief to these desires is simply a completely lateral subject. Neither the Joker becomes a murderer due to his inability to control lust nor the Penguin psychopath due to gluttony. Yet, they both neglect in their struggles with their own flesh.
The communicative of these 2 anti-heroes is simply a clumsy effort to defend what critics of modern times call "anticulture"—that is, liberal order, wobbling in positions, as American elites facing Donald Trump's election triumph know best. Gotham, in the mainstream opinion of the creators of “Pingwin” and “Joker”, just needs a return to liberalism: an omnipotent government that will bring the needed water in the desert of order with legal regulations and force. Not adequate Batman, or the anti-liberal world.
The diagnosis of the creators of anti-hero cinema is truly simple: do you want safety and peace? Leave it to us – elites who built this planet and will manage perfectly with the restoration of homeostasis system. All you gotta do is not bother.
Chaos versus restoring order?
Usually publicists or researchers at the beginning of their more or little palpable works, admit their views, making the reader aware of who he starts with. I'm an absolute fan of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. another films telling about the Bat Man are either worth the worst curse heresies, or they're good productions, but they're besides comic books, and sometimes they rub against pastiche (Burton films).
However, even Nolan, even though he paid tribute to the hero cinema with his batman paintings, hesitated whether he actually modus operandi his main character leads to a better world. In an absolutely superb image of the Dark Knight, we see the unexpected fall of the Batman-ordered world. This is to the surprise of the Bat Man, a series of successes in bringing justice interrupts his inconspicuous fool, a psychopath out of nowhere who cannot be stopped, or Joker.
Batman only manages to regain control by utilizing fresh technologies to eavesdrop all of Gotham. So again they won the totalitarian tools, the power of centralism, the liberal obsession of control of nature, the belief that man is so corrupt (or, following Rousseau – destroyed by civilization) that he should be subjected to force from the institutions of the state in order to regain peace and balance. Nature appears not as an auxiliary origin with which to work, but as an obstacle to the eventual liberation of an individual.
And yet Batman – in part besides concerns Nolan's imagination – is simply a denial of the request for an all-powerful government. In the image “Batman. The beginning” we see the Bat Man crossing the limits of the law, but the law established by the liberal government, that is, 1 who has no request to cultivate the virtue of justice. Gotham law is corrupt, we would say today: this law does not work. And Batman, although we will call him instinctively a rebel, a hooligan, a villain, or a kind from a dark star, actually acts on the basis of natural law: he discerns what justice is and seeks to reconstruct it.
He succeeds at last, but pays a advanced price for it: he is rejected by liberal order. No 1 in this planet needs a man to remember breaking the glass walls of the panopticon, ripping the head off of a leviathan, restoring culture by paying tribute to the nature of man. The rulers of Gotham view this attitude as dangerous. Nature must be controlled, and if necessary: reject it, in the name of the inherently understood freedom. After all, Batman restrains the ambitions of the rich, the dark desires of the officials, the dark deeds of the law. And he's out of control. We don't request individual like that alive.
Batman has to go.
That's why Batman had to leave. In “Pingwin” or “Joker” it is not there, due to the fact that it would only interfere with the arranged communicative sequence. After all, he is an alien body, individual who deprives the modern liberal state of legitimacy. Without it, the puzzle just fits better together.
Both Matt Reeves' show and Todd Philipps' movie are expected to be a warning, which happens if we reject liberal order. Gotham is simply a planet bent towards the decline of liberalism, or alternatively a planet which is perceived present by the possible of anti-liberal rebellion of progressive liberalism.
Reeves and Phillips are insistent that we can't do this without the state. Human lusts are specified a terrible and unbridled component that the only chance of stopping them is by a strong state. A planet without strong leadership in Gotham, set on fire by Joker and raped by Penguin, is America after 4 years of Trump's second term, France in which won the National Unity or the Hungarians Victor Orban. No 1 can convince me that this is simply a work of chance that the Joker Phillips and Penguin Reeves are people who are fast to get in contact with simple people, leader of rebellion against “unfair” power.
In this narrative, Batman, recalling that order and order have sources another than the law, is no longer needed.
Krzysztof Gędłek
