Two-Face: American military identity in blockbuster films

“The man in the black pajamas, dude. Worthy fucking adversary.”
-Walter Sobcheck, The Big Lebowski

In the summer of 2008 Americans fell in love with a terrorist. Heath Ledger’s widely praised portrayal of the classic Batman villain the Joker made The Dark Knight the second-most-successful American film of all time. Audiences loved watching this inventive madman blow up public buildings, kill city officials and turn an entire society upside down, using only the most rudimentary weapons. Indeed, the Joker made the film’s ostensible hero, the billionaire-turned-high-tech-crime-fighter Batman look bland and impotent by comparison. This perverse character’s popularity may seem shocking, but upon further analysis this affection is less unusual. The Dark Knight’s main characters represent the two irreconcilable identities Americans evoke when they imagine themselves as warriors better than any popular characters in recent memory: the rag-tag underdog and the invincible military machine.

Davy Crockett and company

On the one hand, Americans feel a great affection for their country’s massive armed forces, flocking to air shows and parades so children can admire advanced weaponry and the expertise required to operate it. This love, of course, leads many Americans to despise as cowards “asymmetric warriors” such as guerrillas, terrorists and insurgents who use crude armaments and operate in the shadows, avoiding the kind of direct confrontations where America’s conventional forces can exploit their considerable advantages. Never was this disgust more powerful than in the days after September 11th, when the United States was staggered by an operation that cost less than a house in the New York suburbs.

On the other hand, Americans treasure the notion that their country was born of a ragged, anti-colonialist insurgency waged by Minutemen and the survivors of Valley Forge. This mythology is preserved in a widespread gun culture and the storyteller in all of us understands that scrappy guerillas simply make better heroes than cogs in a well-oiled military machine. Their individual fortitude, practical creativity, sense of showmanship and capacity for self-reinvention powerfully resonate in the American psyche. Small bands of weary fighters also tend to fit better into conventional film narratives and mis-en-scene than large armies.

American insurgents tend to surface in films about the country’s early wars, in which participants could more easily lay some claim to that title. The Mel Gibson vehicle The Patriot, for instance, takes great pleasure in exaggerating the bureaucracy and ineffectiveness of the British army during the Revolutionary War. The film repeatedly depicts American farmers (and children) mowing down tight formations of redcoats from behind rocks and trees, before melting back into the hillsides and forests they know so well. Despite their numerous military failures, part-time colonial soldiers have inspired contemporary paramilitary groups like The Michigan Militia and the infamous “Minutemen” border patrol organization.

Civil War films like Gettysburg and Ken Burns' The Civil War express admiration for the creativity and fortitude of the under-resourced, pre-industrial Confederacy. They focus on the charisma and daring of Confederate guerillas like Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who held off much larger Union forces with imaginative and often ruthless tactics. Similarly, newspapers and, later, Hollywood films transformed the former Confederate guerilla and murderous train-robber Jesse James into the American Robin Hood, creating the nation’s first real pop-culture icon. Despite their ostensible treason, American storytellers and filmmakers tend to find Confederates preferable to their Union counterparts, who are widely portrayed as incompetent or effeminate bureaucrats. Journalist Tony Horwitz notes that this guerrilla romance creates problems for organizers of Civil War re-enactments, as too many participants choose to fight for the historically small Confederate army.

This tension in American national military identity surfaced during the Vietnam War, when the country found itself in the frustrating role of an occupying colonial superpower. U.S. Forces dropped more ordinances on the small country than the total amount dropped by the Allies in World War II only to be outmatched by ill-equipped Vietcong insurgents. In his Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis asked a group of Revolutionary War re-enactors if they identified with the Vietnamese “freedom fighters” and received a resounding “no”, but there was little question that some kind of psychological identification was going on. Apocalypse Now and Platoon portrayed American soldiers shedding traditional military respectability to find their inner guerrillas. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch amplified the violence and guerilla flavor that had always been part of Westerns and gangster films. On and beyond, guerrilla warfare pioneers like Che Guevera and T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) continue to spark widespread interest amongst Americans.

As the United States asserted its geopolitical dominance near the end of the Cold War, the simultaneous rise of the action film provided an outlet for guerilla impulses, and filmmakers resorted to increasingly implausible reversals to transform triumphant Americans into desperate guerillas. In Rambo’s First Blood, for example, a traumatized Vietnam veteran must use his wilderness survival skills to fight off a corrupt small town police force intent on killing him. In the infamously violent Red Dawn, American high schoolers played by Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze respond to a surprise Soviet invasion by mounting a near-suicidal insurgency in the forests around their Colorado town. This dynamic reached its natural extreme with Air Force One, in which the president’s famous airplane is hijacked by a Soviet splinter group. Abruptly removed from his secure role as Commander-in-Chief, Harrison Ford is forced to sneak around his own plane bashing well-armed terrorists with office chairs.

Films based on September 11th and the intractable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed this game completely. Filmmakers found it difficult to portray insurgents at all, even as villains, at a time when American soldiers were being killed every day by irregulars using old Soviet rifles and improvised explosive devices. But as the public’s disgust with the “War on Terror” mounted, Hollywood took a different tack, directly critiquing U.S. military involvements with a long series of high budget star vehicles patterned after the Vietnam-era blockbusters. Over the past few years, these films have flopped at the box office with an incredible consistency and disappeared into the pop culture memory hole. Does anyone remember recent failures like World Trade Center, The Kingdom, Kingdom of Heaven, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, Munich, Grace is Gone, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Redacted, United 93, Jarhead, or War Inc?¹

“Welcome to a world without rules”: Ledger’s Joker
Somehow The Dark Knight manages to trot out all of the “War on Terror’s” key features in the realm of mass entertainment, a task at which these previous films had failed. The Joker assassinates public officials, releases execution videos, deploys suicide bombers, destroys public buildings, ambushes armored convoys and turns vehicles of mass transit into deadly weapons. Batman pursues a familiar form of American unilateralist justice, using Bush Administration ploys like extraordinary rendition, “heightened interrogation techniques” and extra-legal surveillance. Gotham City is also transformed, from the familiar New York stand-in of the Batman comics into a failed nation-state with a corrupt, ineffectual government. Unable to protect its citizens or officials from the warlords and terrorist organization that fight to control it, the city eventually calls in the same American National Guard forces deployed in Iraq. The film collapses the physical and psychological distance between the debacle of 9/11 and the succeeding ones in the Middle East, throwing everything into one turgid package.

But The Dark Knight does not merely blanket its narrative with obvious references to terrorism and insurgency; it mobilizes all of its cinematic bravura to argue for the effectiveness of these forms of asymmetric warfare. The notion that Batman, a single martial arts expert with some cool tools, could defeat legions of machine-gun-wielding thugs has always been hard to accept, but the film’s incarnation of the Joker is surprisingly plausible. We find it easy to believe that a single charismatic man with a few crazed followers and some explosives could bring a world-class city to its knees. To foster this sense of realism, the Joker repeatedly calls attention to his own lack of military infrastructure: “Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets,” he says. “I am a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder and gasoline. You know the thing that they have in common? They are cheap.”

Lest you believe these terrorism themes are subtly expressed, consider the following quotes. The first is a discussion of terrorism by radical anarcho-primitivist Derrick Jensen in his book Endgame: Resistance. The second, nearly identical sentiment is expressed by the Joker himself in a dramatic monologue:

“Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.”

Now compare with:

“Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little mayor will die, everybody loses their minds. Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.”

Like any successful terrorist, the Joker relies on an excellent sense of showmanship and surprise to milk minimal resources for maximum traumatic impact, and this is why American audiences love him so dearly. He is, moreover, a great American entrepreneur in the mold of P.T. Barnum (“Our organization is small but there is room for aggressive expansion”). Using cleverness and an intimate knowledge of his “customers,” he builds himself up quickly from nothing in a setting where other criminals have large organization and advantages: “This city deserves a better class of criminal, and I am going to give it to them,” he proclaims, with an earnestness that would put Horatio Alger to shame. “You’ll see. I’ll show you.” But he is, more than anything, a trickster – carnivalesque in the most literal sense – who, after gaining our sympathy, takes us point by point through all of the real world traumas of the last seven years and turns them into engaging burlesques.

The corresponding failure of the privileged Batman to defeat this villain using the gizmos and gadgets of his massive defense company should be profoundly disturbing to Americans reared on notions of American military superiority. “You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with, nothing to do with all of your strength,” proclaims the Joker in a particularly searing indictment. Furthermore, director Christopher Nolan has argued repeatedly that the Joker is attracted to terrorizing Gotham not in spite of Batman’s strength, but because of it. The film’s poster portrays Batman standing below a skyscraper with a burning, airplane-sized hole in its side, a scene that does not occur in the film [see poster here]. The gaping wound also happens to be in the shape of his own Bat symbol, pointing to Batman’s profound sense of guilt for being the magnet that attracted violence to the city he is sworn to protect. It is hard to imagine a more succinct depiction of historian Chalmers Johnson’s concept of “blowback": the way U.S. military overreach turns American civilians into targets for revenge. In the end, Batman only escalates and destabilizes the conflicts in which he intervenes, exiting the film as the shamed enemy of the citizens of Gotham, blamed for the deaths of several police officers. As film critic Dana Stevens put it, “The movie seems to arrive at much the same conclusion about Batman as Americans have about Bush: Thanks to this guy, we're well and thoroughly screwed.”

It makes sense that Batman, America’s only billion-dollar film noir franchise, has provided a forum for Americans to ask such dark questions about their own national identity. The film, with its five-act structure, almost three-hour running time and relentless emphasis on public trauma, provides the kind of blockbuster self-flagellation Americans haven’t desired since Vietnam. Some might think that the film’s twin focus on ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism and the emotional and physical trauma that is a constant motif would make it too real to serve as an effective form of therapy, but the opposite is true. This precise revisiting is exactly how catharsis is achieved: one by one America’s traumas are brought back to the surface, and relived playfully in the fantasy world of Gotham City. Here viewers are free just this once to follow their deeper instincts, regardless of their political ideologies: sympathy for ragtag ingenuity and a healthy distrust of blind force and hubris.

Notes:

1. Recent documentaries on American military imbroglios have fared even worse than their fiction counterparts. Filmmaker Alex Gibney recently won the Best Documentary Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, but the much-publicized film went on to make $274,661 at the box office. He sued his distributor for releasing the film so badly, unable to believe that audiences didn’t want to learn about American torture techniques. Nonetheless, Errol Morris’ much lauded torture documentary Standard Operating Procedure fared even worse.

David Golann is a journalist and tinkerer who is seemingly incapable of escaping from New England. He currently toils at Rhode Island Public Radio.