We’ve decided that the best platform for this blog is no longer wordpress and we’ll be shifting to substack instead. We have plans for a podcast in the future and substack just makes more sense for hosting that along with our writing. All previous articles have been moved to perspectivesonpopculture.substack.com (until I can attach perspectivesonpopculture.com to the new site, which should be within the week) but you can now sign up for the substack newsletter to be alerted to new articles when we post them!
My latest article will go out tomorrow at 9am EST on April 29th, here’s a preview!
The release of the second part of Villeneuve’s Dune has led to some speculation about whether and when we will get a movie for Dune Messiah (and possibly stories beyond that).
However, this brings up the question of why we even have Dune Messiah in the first place. By itself, Dune was a perfect story that did everything it needed to do.
Dune told a story that showed how power attracts the corruptible, and even those who are not corrupt when thrust into a position of power still can’t do good even if they want to. The forces that create a leader, what we always see with populism, may worship a god-king, but they are a force that exists beyond the cult leader. Let’s be honest, Donald Trump has only three ideas in his head—1. He needs to be praised at all times 2. Power is good 3. Non-whites are bad—but around him has grown a fascist party that will use him, just as he uses them for his self-glorification, to destroy democracy. It wasn’t Trump’s intent to start with, and he’s evil for being okay with it, but he didn’t set out to burn the world down. He just wanted to be racist and be worshipped for being an ugly, fat, mentally challenged person who has been found by a jury to have committed sexual assault (notice I didn’t say he’s a rapist because he hasn’t been convicted of that crime, only found responsible for such an act in a civil trial…just like OJ was never convicted of murder but found responsible in a civil trial…so Trump is no more a rapist than OJ is a murderer)…but I digress.
The book was about how popular leaders are because even if they don’t want to cause problems, their existence feeds a destructive movement…in this case, Muad’Dib’s Jihad which will end up killing over 60 billions people. The book’s point was that we should never look to heroes to solve our problems because hero worship always leads to the whirlwind that will destroy everything in its path, even if that isn’t the hero’s intention. Paul could see the future, and he couldn’t stop it—no other figurehead, even the best-intentioned ones, had a better chance.
The only way to dispel such a movement is for the hero to die. (Watch MAGA. It won’t be Trump losing in November that ends MAGA. The end of MAGA will only be his death…at which point the many factions of this abomination of a movement will eat each other as they all try to get on top.)
But was this the message anyone who read the first book got? Not entirely.
Readers thought Paul was a hero to be praised. Idiots responded that Paul represented the “white savior” trope… even though he is anything but a savior. Sixty billion people die in his Jihad. There is nothing heroic about what he did, and he would be the first character to point that out as he tried to avoid it for the entirety of the first book.
So, since people didn’t get the first book, Frank Herbert had to write a second book that is honestly a bit of a downer because it’s just a string of scenes where Paul is talking about the destruction he created and could stop, culminating with the death of his wife, and ending the madness in his name by walking into the desert to die. All the other books stem from unresolved plot points at the end of Dune Messiah…but had people gotten the original point, Dune could have just stood on its own.
This raises a bigger problem in how people read: People often don’t read what is written; they read what they want.
Here are just a few examples.
Milton Friedman wrote an article where he talks about how companies shouldn’t concern themselves with ephemeral cultural clashes of the moment but focus only on long-term profits (and he twice in the article directly talks about long-term outlooks and three times condemns short-term thinking). What happens? Idiotic businessmen read only the words “only care about profits” and proceed to engage in nothing but short-term thinking and left-of-center intellectuals rather than condemn the businessmen for being idiots and pointing out that they were going against what Friedman say: “Damn Friedman, who is putting short-term profits above anything else.”
Before the latest round of right-wing banning of books for vile reasons,…left-of-center idiots wanted to ban Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird, books that outright condemn racism. Why? Both books use a word starting with “N,” even though, in both cases, the use is to show the evil of those who use such words.
F. Scott Fitzgerald thought he was clear that we should dislike Gatsby…but everyone seems to love him.
Fight Club is making fun of all the incels who love it.
Machiavelli, tongue in cheek, wrote a book about how terrible tyrants could be and why you shouldn’t let them be in charge…everyone took it as a call for tyrants.
And the list goes on.
People need to improve at discerning the meaning.
Now, what can we do about this? Well, the obvious Dune answer might be that we to start instituting the Gom Jabbar test on more people, but this seems inefficient at best to implement—and let’s be honest, ignoring the weird part where Villeneuve added Feyd passing the test (which he should not have been able to) that is a lot of dead bodies to deal with as I doubt most people could pass it (certainly not a single Trump voter). So, while it would get the job done, it’s probably not something we can do. A shame.
The problem is that, at best, the only option is to have a better education, which, regrettably, will only fix part of it because years of teaching have taught me that you can only teach the person who wants to learn. But for those who want to learn, I recommend the habit of questioning your premise, seeing if anyone agrees with you, looking for evidence of your point, looking for what would count as counter-evidence, and actively looking for that.
But until then, I am afraid we will just have to deal with idiots who only go looking for what they want and ignore what the author is saying and try to respond with concrete details to prove that they did not read what the work was saying.
With the second part of Dennis Villanueva’s Dune out, I think it’s time to talk about the larger series of Dune, its themes, how they changed over time, and the quality (or lack thereof).
I think the easiest way to break up the series is into these parts.
Dune
Just the first book by itself. Honestly, this is one of the few stopping points around, so if you don’t want to read a lot stop with this one. The book follows Paul Atredies as he becomes Emperor of the known universe.
I will say that no other book anywhere in the series will match the quality of this single volume. It can be argued that a lot of the series as a whole can rival or even exceed what this single volume does, but the series also has a lot of flaws and simply can go on forever on exposition, setups, and diatribes that aren’t necessary. So, if you just want to read this book, that’s fine, but I argue once you go past this volume, you can’t stop until you get the ending presented by Sandworms of Dune.
But this volume presents a lot of themes dealing with ecology, evolution, social structures, the power of religion, and, most importantly, that leaders can never be trusted. Ever. It does this by providing the perfect leader, a man who has a mind that reasons like a computer, which has virtue directing his every call, who has known love and loves about those close to him but also has compassion for people he had never met, and who has the ability to see the future with near perfect clarity. He is the ideal leader.
And he is a genocidal butcher.
That is what happens when you put your faith in a leader and give up on things like laws, democracy, and systems. Every cult of personality in politics will lead to destruction, even if the person behind that cult is a good person. Why? Because cults of personality have a power and force that even the person at the center can’t inhibit. And worse is when you have the kind of person who revels in a cult of personality, and they encourage the whirlwind of destruction.
Despite the fact that liberal democratic republics make no appearance anywhere in the entire Dune series, the whole thing is a statement of why we need those kinds of governments because to give up on them puts us at the whims of strongmen. Maybe they’ll be indifferent to keeping a status quo that sees no evolution like Emperor Corino (but even he will destroy others when he feels threatened), but more often, we will be under the heel of men like the Baron Harkonen because vicious people always thrive in systems that do not rely on law and rights. But even if you want to put all your faith in descent men like the Atredies, it will still always result in suffering because a cult of personality cannot be anything but destructive.
This book is a masterpiece of watching Paul wrestle with this problem. He can either embrace the whirlwind that will lead to billions dying because of him or accept the death of those he loves—not to mention himself—and watch unjust butchers continue to torture people. But the main reason he doesn’t turn back is he keeps hope alive that he can find a way out that will not result in genocide…spoilers, he can’t. But once committed to the path of being the leader to rally around, he finds that, as with all cults of personality, the force of the cult is what drives things, not the person at the center. That might seem odd, but think about the fact that Hitler was a moron who never came up with a single coherent plan other than “let’s invade Russia in the winter”—he didn’t come up with the actual plans for taking over (that was Goebels, Hess, and Spears), he wasn’t there when the plans for the Final Solution were drawn up, he wasn’t a military mastermind behind even the early victories he was just a figurehead. The movement has a power of its own. Same with Trump. Trump has the IQ of a rotting turnip and doesn’t hold a single political thought other than he hates other countries and thinks he should get everything his infantile brain wants…but the movement around him has spawned a practical on how to turn the nation into a fascist nightmare in only a couple year if he gets back in office. The movement has power beyond the leader.
Sadly, for Paul, even being a good man with perfect knowledge of the future isn’t enough to stop that destruction.
The Golden Path: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune
These cover the story of the evolution of humanity. It concludes Paul’s story and carries the story through the long and tragic life of his son, Leto.
If you decide to go on, this is the next segment you must get through. I honestly feel that stopping here would be a letdown, but some people find the end of God Emperor a satisfying ending.
But this part of the story follows Paul’s reign into the reign of his son, Leto II.
Remember that part where the first book was about how all heroes are terrible… this is either doubling down on that or showing you what a hero would have to do to not be terrible (and to do that they have to be unspeakably terrible). While I won’t get too much into the details, the basic theme is that Leto II, the God Emperor, sets out to ensure that humanity will never again be ruled over by one person like it has been ruled over by him, his father, and ten millennia of emperors before them. Part of this is forcing the evolution of the species to ensure that beings who can see into the future can never take control again, but also by inflicting five thousand years of absolute tyranny on civilization, stiffing the desire to be free for so long that when it is let loose, it will never be put back in the bottle again.
This is also where the books start bringing the real hero of all the books besides the first one, Duncan Idaho. A minor character in the first book who dies is restored through a cloning process called a ghola, and his memories are restored. Over the course of his reign, Leto II will go through a long series of Duncans, getting a new one each time the last one dies. This allows there to be some continuity from the start of the story to the end, but it causes Duncan a lot of pain.
I will be honest: this is some of the most difficult writing to get through. Messiah and Children are arguably the weakest of Herbert’s entries in the series, and God Emperor is vastly more cerebral with vastly little action to move the themes forward—it’s mostly musing of a giant worm diety, which he has some very insightful thoughts on human nature, but it’s not a book you can just blaze through over a long weekend.
With God Emperor, it is also at this point that the quotes at the beginning of chapters starts becoming more important than the actual content of the story.
Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune
These books start a new part of the Dune saga, no longer focusing on the Atredies but through their loyal friend Duncan Idaho. Sadly, Frank Herbert died before he could finish the story he started to tell with this section. But the section starts with the universe thousands of years after the death of the God-Emperor and the universe being free for the first time in a long time. It does not solve all the problems, but it has alleviated a lot of them. But then some of those who, for the first time, tried to expand past the boundaries of the galaxy seem to be coming back with a vengeance. This part of the story is the fight of the Bene Gesserit and Duncan Idaho to save humanity from this returning problem.
I will be honest: these books, while a stronger story, are a little weird in that there is an odd obsession with sex that was not there in the previous books—sex was there…but an army of dominatrixes who can turn any man into their slaves through a good roll in the hay is not exactly where I thought this story was going to end up.
But in this part of the story, we also get Super Duncan (which is what happens when you have a Duncan Ghola not just remember his first life, BUT ALL OF HIS LIVES WITH THE GOD EMPEROR together). Paul and Leto II may have been able to rely on the memories of all their ancestors for insight, but Duncan is working with 5000 years of one mind, and it offers insights that neither of the Atredies had.
But, again, these books end on a cliffhanger where the returning armies explain they were merely running from something far worse…
Which leads us to the none Frank Herbert books…
House Atredies, House Harkonen, House Corino, The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine, Crusade, The Battle of Corin, Hunters of Dune, Sandworms of Dune
Technically, these titles consist of three different parts (a prequel trilogy to Dune taking place only a generation before, a prequel to the entire series in the distant past, and the two books that offer the conclusion to Chapterhouse Dune), but the prequels set up the events in the last two and you kind of have to take it as a whole.
Now, these books can get fairly controversial with some Dune fans. Purists scream that it’s raping the memory of Frank Herbert and his son Brian is just after a cash grab (as if Frank wasn’t after money when he wrote these, and as if every author if they find something that pays the bills they don’t usually write a little more in that direction). Are they up to Dune’s high level of writing? No, they’re not. But neither is any other book in the series that Frank Herbert wrote. Dune by itself is a singular book. There are few books in science fiction, hell, only a couple dozen in all of literature that compare. Of the House Trilogy, there are parts that I find far more insightful than anything in Heretics of Dune and its weird introduction to sex slavery. In the Jihad Trilogy Erasmus is one of the most interesting characters—he starts as something inhuman, a metal Mengele who sees people as only subjects for experiments but who, over the course of time, learns to respect human life and then envies it, finally dying in a moment that is almost tragic.
I will admit the books are not at the level of, say, the first four books of Dune, but they were something Herbert planned for, although I’ll probably never be sure how closely Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson followed the plans set out by Frank Herbert’s plans…but as an author, I doubt any book I have ever finished looked exactly like what my original notes had been.
One of the problems I have with the last two books is that there seems to be a build-up to an idea of the soul, which, up to this point, had not been present in the fairly agnostic (if not atheistic) Dune series. With two goals of Paul running around at once, there seems to be the sense that only one of them will be able to regain his memories (and thus his soul)…but the way the two Pauls’s problems are resolved is a little different than what I would have said was being thematically set up (which actually suggest to me that Herbert and Anderson were following some detailed early notes, but didn’t have the insight to see where Frank was going). Further, Baron Ghola having to deal with the voice of Aliya, who was his granddaughter, seems to not make sense given that so much of the argument of Dune has been that when achieving prescience, the person reaching this level is tapping into the genetic memories of all their ancestors (which was when Herbert wrote still an idea that sci-fi played with but has since been shown to be an idea that doesn’t even have enough basis for science fiction to play with and is just pseudoscientific bullshit.). My suspicion is that this issues may have come from Frank Herbert’s notes—that in his older age, he was leaning more toward the spiritual and less toward the agnostic tendencies seen in most of his earlier writing, but that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson either didn’t fully grasp where Herbert’s notes were directing or decided that the sci-fi audience of the books would have approved of a spiritual ending that seemed to fly in the face of so many things that Dune originally stood for (even if it was where the original author wanted to go) and moved the plot back to a squarely “scientific” (at least scientific by the standards of the Dune Universe) and not fly in the face of what people were expecting. There is a long history of authors having to cater to the wants and expectations of audiences even if they wanted to say something else, and already taking so much flak for not being Frank Herbert, I feel they decided to play it safe even if the original notes had something far more ambitious in mind. But I will only be able to test this theory if Herbert and Anderson were to release copies of Frank Herbert’s notes; it’s not an impossibility, but certainly not something I would hold my breath for. As such, the last novels are thematically muddled. We do aget ends of the thematic themes of human evolution as an unstoppable force, and personal endings for many of the characters are certainly pleasing, but they still never quite reach the heights that the first novel reached.
A whole of other books that fill in the blanks for the timeline of Dune
(By my lack of specificity, you know I’m not going to have a lot of praise here).
The fact is that the modern publishing world is much like the modern film world. All existing intellectual property and very little originality. I won’t name names, but we all know that a lot of authors are continuing their series and publishing two or more books a year by just having ghostwriters fill out the plot outlines they provide. And be it the original author just spewing out one book after another without soul or ghostwriters pushing out slews of heartless novels that continue the story but add nothing to the characters, it’s why almost all series seem to become pointless after a while.
I have not read all of the other books in the Dune series, and maybe they don’t all fit this category, but what I did read (Paul, Winds, Mentats, Sisterhood, Navigators) felt like it fit in this category. They weren’t bad; they’re fine if you just want to spend time in the universe, but they add nothing, ask no new questions, and offer no new answers or insights. They’re comfort books at this point. If you enjoy them, that’s fine, but it will never be anything anyone will ever reference, nor will it be something that anyone will ever likely gain anything deep from other than a couple hours of distraction. Up to you, but I personally don’t think they’re worth what they want for books nowadays.
We will soon have the second Dune film to watch, and we desperately hope that Dennis Villanueva can stick the landing with this fill. He has given himself a lot to do as he never bothered to fully explain what the Spice or the Kwisatz Haderach was in the first film, but I have some faith that he can do this. (But I also remember that he gave us Prisoners, a movie that ends with a man’s life hanging on whether or not the dumbest cop in the world will do his job, and in which we never get an answer). All the trailers suggest that the second part understands the thematic points of Frank Herbert’s book and should be able to do everything it needs to do.
Source Wikimedia
But even if we get a perfect second part to Dune, the sad part is that we will never get to see some of the most relevant parts of the Dune books on the big screen…mainly because they don’t occur until later in the series (starting with book 5…and putting book four on the big or small screen is probably an impossibility that no one will ever figure out how to get around). So, while we will never see it on screen, I thought it might be important to bring up one of the more important issues of the Dune series because it’s something that everyone needs to think about right now.
Spoilers ahead, but quite frankly, Dune is a series about themes and characters, and if you’re reading for the plot, you’re already not getting the point.
For those who don’t know, Dune is a world with only one sentient living species in the galaxy: Humans. But humans have evolved or trained themselves in specific areas. At the lowest levels, you have the Suk Doctors and Swordmasters, who would give our medical elite and Seal Team 6 a run for their money but are still just skilled at what they do. You have Mentats, which trains people to think with the depth and complexity of a computer (because computers were banned after a massive war had to be fought to end the tyranny of thinking machines). The Bene Gesserit, through selective breeding and extreme training, are women (and very few men over the course of the books) who have complete control of their bodies down to where they can control every single chemical reaction if they want to. You have the Guild Navigators who, through the massive consumption of Spice, have mutated into beings that can see through time and space (which is what allows near-instantaneous travel throughout the galaxy).
And then you have the Bene Tleilax. A group that kept themselves hidden away from the rest of humanity so much that they’ve devolved into something not quite human. They’re probably the most hated group in the Dune universe from the moment they’re introduced. They’re backstabbing, secretive, and religiously fanatical…oh and they are arrogant, thinking they’re the only true followers of god and the ones the rest of the universe should be bowing down to (if that sounds familiar to the news, you’re right but it’s going to get worse). They’re masters of biological manipulation: growing organs, making artificial organ replacements, growing clones of people (called Gholas), and even creating a sub-race of slaves called face dancers (who can manipulate their appearance to be anything they want to be). And they do this through something called an axolotl tank. At first, you might think it’s just a glass tube, but they grow their genetic matter—that is the impression when they’re first mentioned in the series—or you might think of the weird but cute axolotl salamander. Either way, it sounds innocuous and harmless and something you shouldn’t worry about…but you really should. Because the Tleiaxu are not just arrogant religious pricks, they’re are misogynists. Extreme misogynists. They feel that women serve no purpose other than being a receptacle to grow children (and other things). The women of the Bene Tleilax are lobotomized and used only as wombs. And that should sound disgusting.
Frank Herbert (and later authors) in this series that its incredibly powerful women have always defined, was trying to show just because we have this wonderful future where numerous books have tried to demonstrate feminist values, also didn’t want us to forget the other side is out there…and it needs to be condemned. At the time, axolotl tanks were first described as being a lobotomized woman in a book in the 1980s when Roe v Wade had yet to be overturned by illiterate shit-for-brains treasonous judges, and it was only a theoretical about how much social conservatives (fascist or reactionactionary seems more apropos now than conservative) hated women. Sure, we had Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale as a vision of what this bunch of religious zealots wanted to do with women, but, quite frankly, it seems that that was a little optimistic with the Commander still wanting to have the pretense of an emotional relationship with his slave—Gilead seems liberal compared to what we’re seeing come out from states that have put in abortion bans. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at some of the sick shit going on….
There isn’t a concern for the life of the fetus, the mother, or women in general. Even Gilead would have cared enough to make sure that the fertility of women wasn’t harmed.
Nope. This is a full-on Dune-style Bene Tleilax attitude we’re seeing among the GOP. To the political leaders and religious zealots of the states that are banning abortion, the life of the fetus isn’t important because most of these cases do not involve a fetus that could live long enough to become a human being, and they certainly don’t care about maintaining the women for fertility (even for producing more workers as you might have thought the most base of them wanted a couple of years ago) because they seem hellbent on killing or rendering women infertile (and low and behold you can’t have more kids if you’re dead), not to mention the fact they want to destroy one of the best ways to improve fertility, IVF— no they just seem out to make the point that women are not people in the eyes of the law, they’re not even slaves. They are disposable and easily replaceable receptacles for which no concern should ever be shown. They’re axolotl tanks and nothing more than that to the vile shit that runs red states. The GOP, like the Tleilaxu, wants to make it clear that women are not human, not worthy of respect and must be treated as something to be used without any concern and discarded when it can no longer be of use.
So, if you want to get into the mind of the GOP when it comes to women, I suggest you read further into the Dune series and find out just what the GOP plans are going to be if they get into power.
I recently saw someone say that the Republicans greatest tool for bringing about their fascist dreams was the Constitution of the United States. The argument fell into arguing that the Constitution was set up for minority rule and was designed to be harmful to democracy, and the terrible rulings from the Supreme and lower courts were because the Right was holding to the original intent of the Constitution. I saw these comments on TikTok, so I’m going to assume the academic making them was rushing to get ideas quickly in a format that is in no way designed for intelligent conversation…however, the problem is that they are repeating a lot of popular myths about America and the American government that does need to be addressed because they are harmful…And I don’t mean normal ‘I wish people would learn history’ harmful, but it is harming the movement which is opposed to fascism and tyranny.”
The first myth is that the Founding Fathers had one vision of what the government should be. What a crock. The Musical 1776 did an excellent job of showing that the Founding Fathers of the Second Continental Congress were a rowdy, cantankerous bunch that seldom agreed on anything. They certainly glossed over a lot because it was a movie, but they showed that most of the men had to often be cajoled into agreeing on a lot of things. Some wanted thirteen independent nations; some wanted one nation, and others felt they should just make peace with Britain; John Dickinson, I’m sure, was doing whatever would be the worst for all humanity. They didn’t have a single vision. But regrettably, few remember this musical and its sometimes lackluster musical selection. John Adams, trying to favor Adams’ (and Giamatti’s) ability to speechify, glossed over even more of the struggles and reduced them to a few backroom deals. But the worst is Hamilton, which doesn’t cover the cluster fuck of arguments at the Constitutional Convention. This is mainly because Alexander Hamilton was a little bitch who, after giving a long argument in favor of creating a monarchy, was so hated that no one would listen to him, so he pouted and left for New York until it was time to sign the final draft. But anyone who has ever studied the Constitutional Convention knows that thing was constantly at risk of falling apart, and for all we want to talk about the vision of the Founding Fathers, none of them were happy with it; they just thought it was the best they could get. If there was a consistent vision, it was that it would set up a framework to protect property rights and the rule of law, be just efficient enough to prevent insurrection or invasion, and be a place to work out differences. Otherwise, while I’m sure Hamilton had a few quiet supporters, the vast majority of the people who signed the Constitution were fully expecting state government to remain the primary source of power in government. It is designed not to give people power through the federal government; it is designed to prevent the government from doing a lot. Most of the people who had a hand in the Constitution said that there wasn’t originally a Bill of Rights because the federal government could only work on the limited powers granted to it in Article I Section 8–they saw a Bill of Rights as a way for budding tyrants to say “well this isn’t listed in your Bill of Rights, so it’s not a right and we can legislate it” (you know, like that traitor to humanity Alito argued in Dobbs). Very limited power was their goal. And it’s sad that we don’t have any form of popular media to show what a shit show the Constitutional Convention was because it would be great to never hear that there was one will or plan with the Founding Fathers.
The second myth is that the Founding Fathers were against democracy and wanted a republic. Now this is technically true, BUT it misses that these words mean very different things then and now. The democracy that the Founding Fathers were against was the kind of mass demagoguery that France tried a few years later to bloody results. To them, democracy meant a government where the plurality, almost under the sway of a single demagogue, could push through anything they wanted with no checks on power, no due process, no protections for the minority, no consistency in law or contract, only the momentary whim of the tyrant and his eagerly following audience. You know, exactly what Trump and his MAGA scum want. To the Founding Fathers, a Republic meant a government with representative government, where the majority would rule but had to conform to the form, regulations, methods, due processes, and existing laws. It was a government that protected rights, primarily by not getting involved in private lives. It was a government that had competing points of power that were supposed to be in contention (it is a damn shame that the Founding Fathers did not plan for political parties), where each branch would be very protective of its power. Now when we say either democracy or republic now, we’re referring to something much closer to what the Founding Fathers meant by a republic, and we should accept in common parlance they’re essentially interchangeable and that any idiot who wants to argue about it is dumb. If you want to be accurate by technical academic standards, we are a Constitutional democratic Republic (the capitals there are correct)…but when the average person says democracy in this country or any other, they mean that. Even most of the immature twits on TikTok calling for “Eat the rich’ who think ‘capitalism’ means “everything I don’t like” and not a detailed definition of practices aren’t arguing for the kind of democracy that the Founding Fathers were against. (That kind of idiocy is reserved for libertarians, anacaps, and anarchists…which are all the same thing in practice).
Tacked onto that is that when people say, “The Founding Fathers didn’t believe in democracy,” what they really mean is, “The Founding Fathers didn’t believe in universal suffrage.” Duh. They would have never considered it. It was so far out there that it was never a thought that would have occurred to them. And you can damn them for that, but just keep in mind that there are certainly things that even the most progressive people do now that 300 years we will all be damned for as unenlightened barbarians, but it will, in many cases, be over things we had never even thought to consider. So damn them or accept that you can’t expect people to be vastly ahead of their time. But some make it appear as if there was some kind of QAnon-imagined Illuminati conspiracy to keep themselves in power by not expanding suffrage. That is not remotely the case. They looked at most of Europe, where there was no such things as suffrage, or England, where only a few landholders had suffrage, and then looked at the possibility of making every male a landholder capable of suffrage (hell, there was even a state extending voting rights to women before Jefferson put a stop to that). They thought they were doing a great job in extending suffrage even if their cultural myopia ignored non-whites and women. So they weren’t out to keep their power controlled in some kind of vile cabal out of the Protocols of the Elder of Zion.
And I get where part of the problem is. Modern media seldom deals with these terms in context or out. Yeah, you have a few shows that praise democracy and occasionally republic. But the few times I’ve seen either even attempted to be defined are in two John Wayne movies (“The Alamo” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”), and both times, the definition was kinda wrong. But the bigger problem, I think, is that we have nothing in the cultural Zeitgeist that informs people that words change meaning over time. Nothing. And you might wonder how you would do that in popular media. To which I respond, Star Trek did an episode on memes before memes were miming, and currently, we are in a small renaissance sci-fi and fantasy. It would be nice if someone dealt with how words change meaning over time.
Then there is a myth that they made the Constitution hard to change to hold onto their power base. First of all, the 2/3rds of both Houses of Congress and 3/4th of the states are infinitely easier to make changes than the 100% agreement that the Articles of Confederation required. Also, let’s remember there were 13 states (26 senators, 65 house members). That means for passage, 2/3rds of that is 18 senators and 44 House members, and only nine states. Not hard to get that many people to agree on anything. If you read their writings, it’s clear they never imagined the size of the US. They probably could more readily conceive of the internal combustion engine than a Senate of 100 members, a House of 435 members, and the continental pseudo-empire that the US is. The fact that it would be impossible to pass an amendment now is not an intentional feature of the Founding Father’s plan; it is the fault of not seeing what would happen. It’s a flaw, not an intentional feature. Not to mention pretty much none of them thought the Constitution would last a hundred years without the country breaking into smaller parts or having another massive rewrite like they were doing. And why do people not believe this? Almost every show about politics either shows it to be corrupt conspiracies where progress is intentionally thwarted or incompetent corruption that can’t do anything. No one points out that it’s the idiots in public demanding bullshit and racism and putting useless morons in power that are the core of the problem (we can only hope the next round of COVID takes out the unvaccinated and ends our suffering).
The last myth I want to cover in detail is that the modern conservative courts are holding to a strict constitutionalist interpretation of the Constitution to make all their MAGA decisions. Bullshit. Yes, that is what the justices will say. But the Constitution was, first and foremost, a document to limit the powers of government, not expand them into Nazi territory.
There are a lot of smaller myths about the Constitution that those on the left like to trade in, but the core point here is that be it in media, public statements by commentators and academics, and filtering down to the average person on what is vaguely called the left in that the Constitution is the weapon of the MAGA morons because it was supposed to be. But it’s not.
Granted, the core problem is not how much the left embraces the Constitution; it is the prevalence of willful ignorance among the hoi polloi, but that is not going to end on the right if the left and middle do nothing to combat their own willful ignorance. And to do that, we need to see that the Constitution is a powerful weapon. For instance, the Constitution gives no power whatsoever to the government to regulate immigration. None. Madison, in Federalist 42, makes it clear that anyone who thinks open borders are not an absolute guarantee is a blithering idiot. It was never meant to be a power, and any enforcement of such a law is as unconstitutional as it is unethical. The 9th Amendment makes it clear that Alito’s fascist argument in Dobbs is unconstitutional, several of the Founding Fathers wrote in praise of abortion, and the rest would never have even thought to comment…but if they were alive now, the only disagreement among the Founding Fathers would be who would get to beat to death the five fascist justices who voted for Dobbs. The Founding Fathers would point out that everything Trump did rose to the level of High Crimes and Misdemeanors as the Constitution intended. As is the case of every conservative justice who lied to Congress when they said they’d uphold precedent. The Constitution’s protections of due process make Qualified Immunity and civil forfeiture null and void. The Constitution’s limited powers restrict all the vile behavior that Trump wants to do in his next term (god help us). I could list dozens of things. The Constitution already has most of the safeguards we need against this bastard. And if the left and the middle would start using it as a truncheon to beat them within every single argument instead of embracing a lie that the Constitution is on the fascists’s side, then in every argument, they will either have a spin-off more and more preposterous lies or concede they don’t care about the Constitution and this nation’s ideals. Will that convince them that they’re wrong and they should give up their evil? No. But if at every level, from popular media to individual arguments, we backed them into that corner, people on the edges would fall away from their bigotry and tyranny, and those margins make a difference.
Those margins add up to fascist losses. It may not add up to the advancement society needs, but stopping the people who want to burn the nation to the ground is what we have to deal with first. That’s a democracy; you win by making the argument over and over and over again and win a few people at the margins every time. So do not concede one of our best weapons, the Constitution, to the other side.
So what you need to do is, like all things involving the fight for democracy, start studying. Read books on the creation of the nation, on Constitutional law, on people and ideals that were at the start and throughout. Because even though those people were, like all humans, flawed beyond the telling of it, they wanted something better for their posterity, and that is still a tool against tyranny.
And yeah, I think the Constitution needs some improvements. But that isn’t going to happen until we stop the MAGA fascist. So let’s embrace the document, force them to either lie or admit it’s not on their side, and win.
So last time, we talked about the sources for all of Nolan’s work, and now it’s time to talk about the themes of his works and how they all follow a pretty classical understanding of virtue and vice. This fits with his pattern as we discussed before:
Movie/ Virtue/ Classic Work Batman Begins Prudence The Aeneid The Dark Knight Temperance Othello The Dark KnightRises Justice A Tale of Two Cities The Prestige Courage Faust Inception Faith Theseus in the Labyrinth Interstellar Love The Odyssey, Heart of Darkness Dunkirk Hope The Iliad Tenet Friendship King Arthur Oppenheimer Hubris? Medea?
What’s interesting is that perpetually stupid National Review critic Armond White (who is the kind of man who bitches about Disney films not being as deep as avante garde tomes no one has ever heard of—because that’s how we all view Disney films, right?) timely posted this gem just a couple days ago: “There’s always a moral vacancy in Nolan’s films.” Now, I understand that National Review has fallen from what was once a place of intellectual height to the depths of being an apologists for fascism and bigotry, so it’s not terribly surprising Armond has no ability to like anything that isn’t he can’t read his bigotry into (and he’s not very good at reading film). But to any normal viewer, you can see the moral core of all of Nolan’s films, and for the in depth viewer you can see that it’s a moral core based on a nuanced understanding of virtue based ethical philosophy (so something they have no use for over at National Review).
We can break Nolan’s understanding of ethics into three groups. The first is what is referred to as the Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice. These come from Ancient Greek philosophy, most notably the ethical writings of Aristotle, and are considered the foundation of all virtue-based ethics as almost all correct acts can be traced back to these four.
The next group is called the Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love. Coming from the writing of St. Paul, specifically 1 Corinthians 13:13, “And now these three remain: Faith, Hope and Love. But the greatest of these is Love.” They tend to make up for the somewhat agnostic views of Aristotle, who saw nothing but the world in front of him (although the virtue of love is clearly within a lot of his works, just always between the lines).
Finally, I just have to stick his last two on a side part. Friendship and Hubris. Friendship is a virtue Aristotle deals with in detail…and as to Hubris, which certainly isn’t a virtue, it’s an absolute negation of virtue (which can still be relevant in talking about virtue). It is purely my speculation on what Oppenheimer will be about, so I may have to write a whole article explaining why my guesses were wrong, but that will have to wait until the strikes are over
While we might usually start with the Cardinal Virtues, as they’re the foundation of all virtue ethics, it will probably be easier to start with the Theological ones as they’re more clearly pointed to in the movies.
The virtue of Love is not only about romantic love; it is a translation of the Latin caritas, and further from the Greek ἀγάπη, which can also be translated as compassion or charity. It is the feeling of love for another because they are human, and that is worthy of love; maybe it might be best understood if we looked to the Hindu equivalent of Namaste (“the divine in me recognizes and bows in respect to the divine within you”). And it is this kind of love that is directly referenced in Nolan’s Interstellar with the following conversation:
Cooper: You’re a scientist, Brand.
Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn’t something that we invented. It’s… observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing…
Brand: We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that?
Cooper: None.
Brand: Maybe it means something more – something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it. All right, Cooper. Yes. The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
The movie, from a strictly plot-based nature, is talking about gravity and its effects on the physical universe takes time to compare to love, as it’s pretty much the only other thing that is so readily detectable across time and space. And it is the bonds of love, especially parent to child, that flow through every moment of this film, but also the compassion that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (Anne Hathaway) share not only allows for Cooper to sacrifice himself for Brand (which is what allows him to enter the tesseract and find the answer that will save all humanity) but also that same bond that calls on him to leave at the end to again find Brand as she is setting up a new world. This movie is probably the clearest case of Nolan just outright saying what the theme is.
From the trailer for Dunkirk
The next most obvious is the theme of Hope in Dunkirk. The virtue of Hope has a two-part requirement that we both desire some better outcome and that we believe its attainment is possible. It is the act of will that allows us to push forward against adversity. And while it is never stated directly in dialogue, the marketing for Dunkirk made it quite clear that “Hope is a weapon.” And we see this virtue being the point of discussion between boat owner Dawson (Mark Rylance), who believes that he can succeed in saving lives, and the fearful soldier, played by Cillian Murphy, who believes there is no hope, as well as the conversations between Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) and Col. Winnant (James D’Arcy) about the possibility of success for the rescue of the soldiers. We further see it when Bolton and Farrier (Tom Hardy) take the risk of remaining on French soil because they believe their actions can lead to a greater good down the line. And it is finally punctuated with the last words of the film being an edited reading of Churchill’s famous “We Shall Never Surrender,” which offers the hopeful promise of victory over fascism (which we really could use again today):
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Finally, the last theological virtue, Faith, believes in that which cannot be proved by reason, experience, or knowledge alone at this time and is a very misused one. Fools will often try to supplant facts with Faith seeing them as somehow being in contradiction when, in fact, they’re supposed to be in harmony. Faith is supposed to be for those places where reason and science have yet to provide answers, make us provide reasonable questions and reflection on what is known (or at least believed to be known), but not to ignore reason. And while Faith goes hand in hand with Hope, as we cannot hope if we don’t have Faith that there is a better future, Faith is the starting point, the idea that leads to Hope. And we see this dealt with in Nolan’s Inception as it deals with ideas, radical notions, like Faith. Faith can be a dangerous thing, as shown in the film when Mal (Leonardo DiCaprio) had absolute Faith that the world wasn’t real and she was in a dream—it was an idea she needed while stuck in limbo but led to her doom when in the real world. But Cobb and Saito (Ken Wantanabe), in the end, realize that they can escape limbo by “taking a leap of faith” (have to love when Nolan spells it out for you), which is what they need to do to return to the real world. And in the last act of the movie, Cobb not caring whether the top falls or not (it does, at the top at the end, you can hear the pitch going down, suggesting it is slowing, which never occurred in the dream) shows he has Faith finally that the world he is in is the real one. And we, as the audience, should have the same Faith, even if we are not given the final piece of proof that the top falls.
Next, we come to Aristotle’s four Cardinal Virtues. Prudence (knowing what is good for us), Moderation (choosing the right amount of those goods as everything can be over or underdone), Fortitude (having the will to do what we know is right), and Justice (treating others according to their merits, and demanding that we be treated only according to our merit). These are the classic cardinal virtues, and to maintain them (and it is something you maintain, you can’t just achieve them and be done; it’s a constant struggle to keep them) requires self-reflection, education, reason, and common sense, and will to demand of ourselves nothing less. There are many other virtues, Aristotle and Aquinas are quite good at detailing them, but these are the ones you have to start with from which all other virtues flow. They are practically impossible to separate from each other, and they all reinforce each other.
Batman Begins with the issue of Prudence and knowing what the right thing to do is. Namely, whether Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) will kill the man who killed his parents, the criminal brought to him by League of Shadows, and finally, not saving Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson). While Ra’s going on and on about the will to act in a Machiavellian or Nietzschian way, it is Bruce who points out that the right thing must first be focused on before the action will act is engaged.
The next installment, The Dark Knight, deals with the degrees that are relevant to Temperance. Aristotle said of this virtue:
For instance, fear, confidence and appetite and anger and pity, and, in general, pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well, but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue. (Nicomachean Ethics 1106b.20)
And it is this balance that Bruce has to strive for in this film, while Joker (Heath Ledger) is an embodiment of the chaos that Temperance is utterly opposed to and which Harvey Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart) gives up trying to achieve and gives his whole control over to a coin. We see it in the choice of the two ships; it might have been just for the scum of Gotham to all die…but not at the bidding of the Joker because that was not the right time, place, or manner for Justice. Bruce meanwhile has to decide whether to continue fighting or turn himself in, whether there is a time and place when a highly invasive technology to stop a greater evil, and last but not least, when there is a time and place for truth and when a lie Dent’s evil served a greater good. The last choice that this was not the time and place for truth (just as Alfred (Michael Caine) decided not to share Rachel’s (Maggie Gyllenhaal) last decision with Bruce) does have consequences down the road, but at that moment, the lie was the right thing to do.
And finally, The Dark Knight Trilogy ends with a discussion of Justice. In the classical sense, Justice is not just about the punishment of crimes but also about the reward of right deeds. It is a balancing of all accounts, more connected to the Eastern idea of karma, where everyone will be given what they deserve, than a simple legal concept. Much of the film is about exposing Bane’s (Tom Hardy) leftist lies about tearing down the privileged of Gotham to benefit the underclasses, which benefits neither as except for Dagget (Ben Mendelsohn), the rich of Gotham don’t seem better or worse than in reality, which might mean they may not have been worthy of their wealth but neither were they worthy of French Revolution kinds of butchery (this is not a Gotham that comes with a Court of Owls). Nor have Bane’s followers done anything to be worthy of the kinds of benefits he promises them but never delivers. (And that’s before we get into the horseshoe theory nature of Bane and Talia’s (Marion Cotillard) fascist tendencies that seek to use fear to keep society in line by destroying Gotham.). But we also see that Selina (Anne Hathaway), despite being a criminal, is worthy of redemption and that Bruce does deserve the happy ending that he has earned.
(And as all of these virtues are tied together, I could easily point out where all the Cardinal Virtues are in each of the films, but these were the ones that stood out most).
Finally, for the Cardinal Virtues, we come to The Prestige, where every single character lacks the courage or, as the ancients called it, Fortitude, the will, to do what is right. Both brothers who are known as Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), have multiple opportunities to end the cycle of revenge, both Bordens could tell the women they love the truth, and Angier could certainly not engage in the mass murder of his clones…but none of them does. This isn’t an issue of Prudence, as they all know what the right thing is, and Temperance or Justice has nothing to do with the horrors they engage in, but every choice they make, which is always the wrong choice, is a failure of their Fortitude. And with each choice, they damn themselves further and further.
We then come to the last two movies, Tenet and Oppenheimer. The emotional impact of Tenet comes with the Protagonist’s (John David Washington) relationships with Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), and to a lesser degree Ives (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), which shows Aristotle’s three types of friendship (Virtue, Pleasure, and Utility). The Protagonist’s relationship with Neil is a true friendship, even though he has yet to experience them; they have a long bond based on mutual admiration and concern; his relationship with Kat is a pleasure friendship—one based on the fact that he likes and respected her, and feels indebted to her for her help, but which he does not continue after they naturally part way; and he has a working relationship with the prickly Ives. This is an important part that needs to be covered for anyone discussing virtues, as Aristotle makes it clear in his ethical discussions that without friendship, all the other virtues and their rewards in life are meaningless.
And for Oppenheimer, I expect that he will be looking at the complete lack of virtue, the sin that Greeks hated most of all, hubris. Oppenheimer’s famous quote: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” is either hubristic from his idea that he had taken on the power of a god or hubristic from the result of his belief that he and his fellow scientists had the right to play god and create the weapon they did. Or both. But while most of us haven’t seen it yet, I predict that Hubris will be the underlying theme of this movie…but who knows.
Are some of these a little shoehorned? Maybe. But for every place I have to over-accentuate one virtue, I can point to three or four of the others in the works. Virtue ethics is part of the underlying psychology of all Western literature, but I think it’s safe to say that this is a topic that Nolan has studied and thought about to some degree while he was structuring his films.
But there is, of course, one theme that is present in all of Nolan’s works that does not come from Classical philosophy, and that is the ever-present theme of time. Time has been an issue for Nolan since his first film, Following, where we have a traditional film noir trick of only being shown the planning of the crime before it ever happens. Then we have the muddled backward storytelling of Memento that put Nolan on the map for much of Hollywood. Insomnia deals with time in the sense that the sun never sets during the course of the film, The Prestige is nonlinear stories within stories, Inception has time running at different speeds, Interstellar has time dilation from gravity being a central point, Dunkirk tells three stories at different paces, Tenet which literally have time move backward, and now Oppenheimer, where the theory of Relativity and it’s effects on time, will undoubtedly be mentioned at least once. I will admit that aside from the heavy flashbacks of the first and third installments, The Dark Knight Trilogy doesn’t rely heavily on time as a theme…but we also know how dumb idiots at WB and DC can be when demanding strict adherence to storytelling that the bottom of the barrel can understand2. While Nolan wants us to think about virtue in our personal ethics, he also wants us to take a step back and consider the metaphysics of time. And only the worst kind of fool could see these movies as being devoid of ethical discussions.
The new Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer, is coming out next year, and we have no idea what it is about. None. It’s starring Cillian Murphy and obviously has something to do with the creation of the first atomic bomb (but more than that)…but this is still all we know. Thus it seems like a good time to look back on what Christopher Nolan has previously given us. And when we look back on Nolan’s work, we see a pretty clear pattern. First, every movie is based on a classic work of literature. We’ll deal with the themes and how they follow a classic vision of ethics in a second article, but it should be noted that each work has a central theme of one of the cardinal or theological virtues of classical philosophy (Prudence, Temperance, Courage, Justice, Faith, Hope, and Charity).
It works out as follows:
Movie/ Virtue/ Classic Work Batman Begins Prudence The Aeneid The Dark Knight Temperance Othello The Dark KnightRises Justice A Tale of Two Cities The Prestige Courage Faust Inception Faith Theseus in the Labyrinth Interstellar Love The Odyssey, Heart of Darkness Dunkirk Hope The Iliad Tenet Friendship King Arthur Oppenheimer Hubris? Medea?
And I admit that is a pretty sweeping claim, so let’s go over a few things to justify this position.
The Early Films (Following, Memento, Insomnia) For this discussion, I feel these early films of Christopher Nolan should not be included in the discussion of his source material and thematic meaning. The first two major films he created, Following and Memento, seem to be more about Nolan establishing and working out his stylist’s touches (non-linear storytelling, reveals that cause all previous information to be reevaluated, a neo-noir feel in non-noir stories). We could talk about their thematic material, but it is clear that these movies are more about style than substance, as is often the case in any artist’s work. Insomnia being a work directly adapted from a previous script for an English audience, a relatively faithful adaptation as I understand it, is another point of Nolan establishing his credentials before being allowed to do what he wants. Not to say that these aren’t good films. They are. They are a must for anyone who likes the works of Christopher Nolan. But they are still movies that lack the substantive depth of the later films of his later works. He was still learning how to use the camera to craft stories, doing stories other people had come up with, or simply reining his style. Every filmmaker’s early work isn’t usually their best work, and Nolan is no exception—even if his early work is still better than most directors at the peak of their career. What we can draw from these is that Nolan never seems to see linear time as a constant in storytelling. Following goes back and forth in time and perspective, and Memento is famous for having two different timelines (one going forward, one going backward) that meet together at the climax of the story only occurs in the middle of the story. Insomnia has a more linear progression, but it is the only time when Nolan seems to be just using another person’s work and not deviating too much from the way that the story was originally written. And this is important to understand that time is rarely a constant in Nolan films because otherwise, you’ll get lost quickly. Batman Begins starts with a series of flashbacks, Prestige is told from several overlapping timelines, Inception has time work differently in every level of the dream, Interstellar has time travel and relativistic time dilation, and Dunkirk tells three different stories operations over different periods of time that all come to one single climax, Tenet literary makes you watch things going forward and in reverse at the same time. Time is the most fluid thing in Nolan’s films, and this is important to understand. If one of the most constant things in existence is fluid, then you have to understand that everything from there is something up for discussion, not just to be mindlessly absorbed.
So let’s discuss how all Nolan films are drawn from classic literature. From here, it might be best not to take the movie in chronological order but start with the strongest points so you can see where this thesis is coming from and move on to what I will admit are cases where I am either missing the obvious connection or I am open to other works of literature comparisons if someone has any suggestions.
Inception (Theseus in the Labyrinth) This is probably the easiest case of showing the source of all Nolan stories comes from classic literature. In both cases, we have our hero, either Theseus or Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), having to run through a massive series of mazes (the literal maze of Crete’s Labyrinth and the mazes that Cobb and Ariadne (Elliot Page) make up for the dream) and finally, in both cases, both heroes are led out of the maze by a woman* named Ariadne. In the movie, Cobb’s wife (and his guilt) Mal (Marion Cotillard) serves the function of the Minotaur that needs to be killed. You even get a healthy dose of the father/son relationship themes of the original story in both Cobb’s relationship with his father-in-law (Michael Caine) and the broken relationship between Robert and Maurice (Murphy and Pete Postlethwaite). The fact is that anyone who can’t see the seeds of Theseus in Inception is not being intellectually honest.
The Dark Knight Returns (A Tale of Two Cities) Now the obvious part here is that at Bruce’s (Christian Bale) empty grave, you have Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) reading Sydney Carton’s final speech from A Tale of Two Cities to both honor Bruce’s supposed sacrifice and show how Gotham would recover. But the parallels hardly end there. Dicken’s classic shows what life was like during The Terror of the French Revolution, and that is easily paralleled in Selina’s (Anne Hathaway) early pseudo-Marxist “eat the rich” speeches, which parallel the claptrap of equality that the early French Republic shouted but never seemed to live up to, the images the condos of the rich being torn apart and of course the courtroom trials overseen by The Scarecrow (Murphy) with Bane (Tom Hardy) winding a string of twine is a direct reference to Madame DeFarge from Dicken’s novel who sat at court knitting.
The Dark Knight (Othello) The last two were obvious, where you had direct references to the original work, and it gets a little harder from here. The first thing to understand about Othello is that the play is mostly about how Othello responds to Iago, an embodiment of the devil on our shoulders. Iago, as this embodiment of evil, can’t be given anything like a human motive, as he is supposed to be the darkness inside us, and so he has a myriad of motives depending on who he is talking to. To Roderigo, who wants to be respected by Desdemona’s father, Iago bitches about his lack of promotion; to Brabantio, who is horrified by his daughter marrying a black man Iago shoves out a string of racist statements; to his bitter wife, he shows her the same bitterness, to old Othello is unsure of why his wife loves him he offers jealousy, to Cassio who is a good person he can only encourage him to have more than one drink, and to the perfect Desdemona Iago can’t reflect negativity that isn’t there so he’s quite likable when around her. In between this, he offers motives of revenge, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, and just evil to the audience hoping that one of those will stick. Why? Because Iago is without motive. He is evil for evil’s sake. You could say, like the Joker (Heath Ledger), he’s an agent of chaos. Further, this constant shifting of Iago’s motive is mirrored in The Dark Knight. A comic book character’s motive, hero or villain, is tied up in their origin story, and so to have as many motives as Iago, you’d have to constantly change your origin story…just as the Joker constantly changes his story of “You wanna know how I got these scars?” The fact that the love triangle of Othello-Desdemona-Cassio and Harvey-Rachel-Bruce helps show that, in this case, it is Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) who is the equivalent of Othello. He may not be responsible for killing Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal) like Othello is for killing Desdemona, but Harvey and Othello have a darker second face their devils can play on to ensure both destroy their legacy. The difference is that while Othello may plead to “Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, nor set down in malice” Bruce and Gordon can’t speak the truth of Dent if they are to keep their dream alive.
Interstellar (The Odyssey) Still, in the category of obvious comparisons, this one does give a few problems in that it has some distracting elements. The most distracting element is that you have Michael Caine repeatedly quoting from “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which works thematically as the character thinks that Earth is going to die with all the fatalism of the poem and none of its heroic moments. As I am sure this film is The Odyssey, it’s strange that Nolan didn’t pick Tennyson’s “Ulysses” where the lines of “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” would have fit just as well as all the places “Do Not Go Gentle” was used, but that does not take away from the core points. And what are those points? First, you have a story about a man going on a long adventure whose goal is to get back home to his family (for Odysseus, it is his wife and son), for Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to get back to his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain/Ellen Burstyn). Both Odysseus is blown off course by storms at sea (in Interstellar, it is a giant wave on a water planet that causes them to lose 20 years of time on their project). Both men have to navigate the narrow passage—for Odysseus is Scylla and Charybdis; for Cooper, it is piloting close enough to a black hole for the ship to get enough momentum to make it to its last destination but not so close that the ship is destroyed. Both take a trip to the underworld where they see people from their past—literally, for Odysseus, for Cooper, it is seeing a tesseract representation of time past the event horizon of a singularity. Both are guided by godlike figures, Odysseus has Athena, and Cooper has the distant future of humanity. And, of course, both men, after getting home and seeing the ones they loved, go back out from home for more adventures in the unknown. It’s too many parallels to be simply the fact that certain archetypes are in every story. The parent-child relationship, the being blown off course by storms, and the leaving after coming home is too specific. However, there is that middle portion of Interstellar where the crew is betrayed by Dr. Mann (Matt Damon—on a side note, this is the third movie about the US government wasting time and resources to save Matt Damon after Private Ryan and The Martian…we all need to agree that if Damon gets lost again, we’re just leaving him). And the whole process of several times referring to Mann as the best of anyone who worked on the project just screams all the praise for Kurtz that Marlowe hears in the heart of Darkness, and just as Kurtz has become a barbarian, Mann is a lunatic. I can see that Cyclops, Cattle of Helios, Circe, or Calypso were not going to work as the basis for this section, but it is still odd to switch books mid-movie. But it is not the only time that Nolan draws from more than one story.
The Prestige (Faust) The Prestige draws from three different stories. In this story of three magicians’ ego games, we have three versions of Faust. The brother, played by Bale, who dies, is representative of the oldest version of Faust from its Germanic origins. He is so taken with his desire to know more he ruins his life and falls into the trap laid by Angier (Hugh Jackman), which leads to not only the destruction of his life but the lives of everyone around him, much like the earliest version of the Faust tale. Angier is also destroyed by his need to one-up his opponent. And he commits numerous sins and loses everything, but he also, like the Faust of Christopher Marlowe’s play, has a moment of realization of what it was all about. A lot of good it did him. Angier is also the one who most explicitly makes a deal with the devil in the form of Tesla (David Bowie), who, like any good devil, warns you of what you risk taking him up on his offer but still gives you the instrument of your destruction. Finally, the brother who lived, like Goethe’s Faust, loses much of what he had in life but is eventually forgiven and allowed into paradise (or to at least raise his daughter).
Tenet (King Arthur) So this one becomes more difficult to argue. Time, and forcing us to perceive it in new ways, is key to almost all Nolan films, but this is the first time when time travel is so explicitly the central point of the movie. My main point for this is in T.H. White’s unspeakably pretentious tome, The Once and Future King; he added the idea that Merlin aged backward, which was how he was able to know the future—ever since its publication. This point seems to have worked its way into a lot of popular Arthurian lore. No other work of what might be considered classic literature has anything resembling such an emphasis on the perception of time, so it’s hard to conceive of any other possible source for Nolan on this point. With that in mind, our Protagonist (John David Washington) (who is never actually named) becomes Merlin, a man who is in control of all the major levers in a war for survival that can only be won by knowing what is going to happen in the future. From this, it begins to become obvious that Neil (Robert Pattinson), his friend and protege, is King Arthur, who dies in the course of the film (sorry if you didn’t get that) but who will also be a part of the Protagonist future (much like Merlin aging backward would have seen Arthur’s death long before meeting and training him), or, as Neil states near the end of the film, “You’ve got a future in the past.” Further, the way they all seek an item referred to as the Algorithm (a device that can destroy the world by turning the flow of time backward) comes off very much like the quest for the Holy Grail. There are other little things like the Protagonist’s boss being named “Fay,” a likely reference to Morgan le Fay, or the character of Priya’s double-crossing nature having aspects of Nimue, but these are admittedly weaker. Admittedly this becomes a much weaker comparison, and I would argue that he only used Arthur as a jumping-off point rather than something we should be making clear comparisons to, as with The Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, or Inception.
Dunkirk (The Iliad) Dunkirk takes a lot, believing that it’s the Iliad. You first have to start with the idea that Nolan, since Batman Begins (or at least The Prestige), has always started with a classic work in mind. With that in place, you have to then look for a work of literature that fits and then see if there are any points that fit. There isn’t a lot to choose from for a besieged army looking to escape; in fact, in literature, ignoring some hideously obscure Medieval texts, there is The Iliad and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. And Seven Against Thebes, with its themes of brother against brother and the besieged party turning back the besieges, really doesn’t fit. So we have the Iliad as the only other work that even vaguely fits. But what could further point to the Iliad? First, you have Cillian Murphy (whom we know Nolan always wanted to make the central figure of any movie, to the point that he initially tried to make Murphy Batman before the studio quashed that idea) as the unnamed soldier who at first wants never go back and run away, to the point that he accidentally kills a young man in the process, but by the end of it has overcome his fears and willing to rejoin the fight. This parallels Achilles’ desire to turn back and leave the war. Further, during the voyage, he receives advice on how to be a soldier from an older man, much like Achilles receives from Odysseus. I feel it’s a tenuous connection, but the ship owned by the old man is named Moonstone, which might have a relationship to Troy’s defender Diana, but I will admit this is, at present, a bit of a stretch. However, the name seems to be an important part, as it is something that Nolan had complete freedom to pick. If we accept this as the origin, then the fight of the pilot Farrier (Hardy), who saves the rest of the characters from a Luftwaffe attack, comes off very much like the battles of Diomedes during The Iliad, a hero able to hurt even the god Ares. The problem with putting this with the Iliad is you have to apply both Trojan and Greek parts of the story to besieged British forces, as Kenneth Branagh’s General character comes off as more of a Priam-like character than any of the Greeks.
Batman Begins (The Aeneid) I think this is The Aeneid. Mainly because it’s about a young man having to fight to recreate the home he lost earlier in life. That is the extent of the parallel that I can see, and I’d be happier to believe this is still before Nolan had complete control over the films he directed and thus didn’t have a jumping-off point for this film. It’s a weak connection, I admit, and in the future, I may throw it out entirely.
This does allow us to speculate a little what Oppenheimer will really be about. You will need a story about a man who destroyed his life through acts of destruction that he originally sought out, and knowing a bit about Oppenheimer’s life and how the woman in his life, and her communist affiliations, ruined the latter part of Oppenheimer’s career, I think we will find this movie’s origin is the tale of Jason and Medea, with completion of the bomb serving as the Golden Fleece. That would at least be my suspicion, and I look forward to seeing if there are more points in the film that point back to Medea or direct me to another work of literature.
*the character may have been played by a man, but the character is female in the movie.
It’s been a while since I talked about pop culture, so I decided it might be a good day for it.
Let’s talk about why I don’t usually watch or read dystopian/post-apocalyptic content anymore.
As popular as they are, I just can’t watch them and it’s not because life is already dystopian enough as it is…though that definitely plays a part. As much as my mom wants to watch The Handmaid’s Tale with me, I don’t know if I really want to watch a show that looks more and more like the reality of life in politically red states. The main reason is that they offer and encourage a fundamentally flawed view of humanity in almost every case.
My podcast this week looked at the impact of the Age of Enlightenment on the foundations of the American Revolution (oh yeah, I have a podcast now, I forgot to mention that…it’s been a while since I wrote anything on this site, oops.) and of course, Thomas Hobbes comes up because he’s a major philosopher of The Enlightenment, even if some of us might prefer he wasn’t.
Social media, be it from clickbait articles on the myriad of pop culture websites to old Tumblr posts, the remaining few tweets, and the current trend of TikTok posts, often follow a certain current within fandoms. For reasons that defy reason, everyone, even most devoted Star Trek fans, view Kirk as a womanizer even though in all the episodes, he’s described as introverted, still on good terms with the women he once dated, and occasionally good at seducing women in the midst of a mission when the mission calls for such action (more akin a member of the French underground sleeping with Nazis for information than James Bond screwing anything that can give consent). I bring this up because occasionally, a fandom adopts an interpretation of a character that is so bizarre it defies explanation—like J.J. Abrahms’ interpretation of every character in the Star Trek and Star Wars universe—just nothing but absolute bullshit. Or many DC Fans have this weird belief that Superman and Batman never kill anyone because they have a vision from a narrow band of cartoons from their childhood. And this is a problem because it is substituting a false belief when there are actual details from the work in question. This might seem pointless because it’s only a comic book or TV show, but it’s where the habits of analysis begin, not end…and if you don’t think those habits have real world ramifications, you’re fooling yourself.
There seems to be an unspoken rule of the career of M. Night Shyamalan: If he’s directing something based on his original writing, it is likely good; if he is directing something based on someone else’s work, it’s unspeakable shit. Sixth Sense, Unbreakable/Split/Glass, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Visit are all based on his own work, all good (sometimes niche) but good. Last Airbender, After Earth, and Old are all based on work based on other people’s writing and all utter shit not worth seeing. True, The Happening is M. Night’s own disaster, but not everyone bats a 1.000 (I did see a strong argument that it’s supposed to be bad, lambasting 50’s horror flicks…but even if that’s the case, he didn’t signal what he was doing very well). And sadly, this new film Knock at the Cabin, based on the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, is no exception in being a movie you can easily skip for all time.
So, fair warning, there are a lot of spoilers coming up.
Perspectives On Pop Culture 