The Liberal War on... Comic Books?

George Will is in a bit of a tizzy because "progressives" do crazy things like talking to scientists when they form opinions. He insists that this transforms progressivism into a "faith-based program" premised upon a "cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform." To a degree he's describing a subset of liberalism from some decades ago, but not a type that actually worked from social science. He's describing the reactionary counterpart to, say, himself - who operates from the belief that social science is unnecessary, or should only be examined to the degree that it supports his own pre-existing beliefs, as he forges ahead with his own personal agenda.

Take for example the "welfare state" George Will despises. If you look at the facts, it is largely a success story. Many millions of people have received assistance when they were at the poverty line and subsequently were able to both rise out of poverty and reach self-sufficiency. There are a lot of people who are now successful, even wealthy, who were on food stamps as children. The typical recipient of welfare has historically been a single parent who, following a crisis such as divorce, needed a bit of financial help for a period of up to three years to get back on her feet. (Yes, it's usually but not always the mother). The downside, of course, is that a system that wasn't really designed but instead came together in an ad hoc manner also served to create cultures of dependency and poverty among long-term welfare recipients. It's not immediately clear what the alternatives are - after all, even with welfare reform we still provide support for families with minor children - but it is clear that you can't win the 'war on poverty' simply by giving people money (or benefits that can be used in a restricted manner, such as food stamps or a rent subsidy). Heck - we know that from what often follows a middle class windfall, such as an inheritance or lottery win.

Of course, this isn't a one-sided picture. As Will himself exemplifies, conservatives are sometimes proud in their contempt of science. Will's current column addresses social science, but he's previously embarrassed himself with his attacks on the hard sciences. Don't bore him with anything that may get in the way of his jerking knee. So we get "conservative" solutions to crime and poverty such as "three strikes" laws, "compassionate conservatism", "faith-based initiatives" where government money is passed through religious organizations rather than being used for the direct support of people in need, etc., and... they prove ineffective or even counter-productive. But, you know, whatever, right?

Recently, John Casey at The Nonsequitur compared the logical fallacies of Michael Gerson to those of George Will, touching on this column:

Our point here is that Gerson attempts to make the Willian hollow man move–"liberalism" is the key word usually, or "progressivism" (hey look it up in today's Post!). It basically goes like this. Mention the word "liberalism," and do not mention the words of any particular liberal–you're not dialoguing with them (that's critical)–and set up a hollow man. Then engage hollow man, showing hollow man argument to be foolish, liberals as a consequence to be lazy, dishonest thinkers, etc.

What does Will offer up as "evidence" that progressives are puritanical and censorious? Nothing, really - after providing a largely irrelevant and partial history of censorship of comic books, he quotes somebody who makes that bare claim.

The lawyer for the video-game industry warned the Supreme Court that "the land is awash" with contemporary versions of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), the crusader for censorship of indecency, as he spaciously defined it. "Today's crusaders," the lawyer said, "come less from the pulpit than from university social science departments, but their goals and tactics remain the same."

Will is apparently alluding to Schwarzenegger v Entertainment Merchants Ass'n, but I'm not sure where he found that quote - it doesn't appear to come from either the brief or oral argument. To the extent that he's alluding to the respondent's brief, although the brief does (as you might expect) cherry-pick past overstatements of the potential harm of new media to argue that we should assume that current criticism of videogames are overstated, which I admit to be an appealing argument despite (or perhaps because of) it's obviously fallacious nature (a mix of ad hominem tu quoque, guilt by association and appeal to ridicule), but how convenient for Mr. Will. "Somebody else says something I agree with so I can simply quote that person instead of providing actual evidence for my thesis or substantiating my hollow man argument."

The primary target of George Will's essay is the late Fredric Wertham. (Note to John Casey: George Will is apparently not afraid to "name names" when the targets of his criticisms are... dead, partially undermining the parenthetical portion of your suggestion that he only "nam[es] opponents who can respond (or whose words can be checked).") A big problem here is that Will doesn't actually present any evidence that this solitary, deceased figure upon which his argument is premised was in fact a "progressive". He appears to have been a Marxist. He does appear to have been concerned with the impact of modern culture on children. Or perhaps he doesn't believe that Wertham was a progressive, but it's enough that a book he wrote on the subject "was praised by the the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills", also long deceased, with Will attaching the label "progressive" to his name apparently out of convenience - at some point he had to at least try to make his case, so why not find a guy who has been dead for almost fifty years, call him a progressive, say that he praised the book of another dead guy who doesn't appear to have been a progressive in any meaningful sense, and call it a day?

I did enjoy this part of Will's criticism of Wertham:

Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the "homoerotic tendencies" were patent.

If Will were a thoughtful person, or even bothered to do slight research on his subject, he would likely have quickly discovered that over the past several decades comic books have devoted considerable amount of space to the tension between superhero action and vigilantism, a considerable evolution from the J. Jonah Jameson attacks on Spiderman. We're well past the early conceit of Superman being deputized so as to make him an all-powerful partner of law enforcement, and well into the era of the "Dark Knight", the brooding Batman with his acceptance that he's a vigilante and his oddly set internal compass defining the lines he's not willing to cross. As for the notion that Batman and Robin could be construed as in a homosexual relationship, some fifty-six years ago Wertham may have been among the first to say it out loud, but he was far from the last. The oft-referenced panel of that era:

Moving to modern times, it's hard to miss the Dynamic Duo as the inspiration for this parody:

But let's give Will his due.... Let's say that fifty-six years ago one "progressive" wrote a book critical of popular culture, suggesting that comic books have a negative influence on young people, and that another "progressive" stated that he liked the book. So what? My guess is that a lot of conservatives and religious leaders also endorsed Wertham's book. Certainly if you look to the subsequent history of censorship, book banning, and odd theories about which cartoon figures might be gay, you'll find far more examples coming from the political right than the political left. Even Will's penultimate reference to Anthony Comstock is to a man whose censoriousness appears to have been driven by his religious beliefs, and not even will purports him to have been a "progressive". Yes, if you limit your search to social science you'll find that it is largely produced by... social scientists. But is that really a surprise?

And you know what else? Sure, by today's standards the "disturbing" images from comic books of the early 1950's seem pretty tame, but that doesn't of itself mean that the images at issue from the current generation of video games are as tame, or will be viewed as innocuous in a half-century. Nor would it necessarily be good for society if the graphic, photo-realistic nature of future video game violence were so overwhelming that today's near photo-realistic images of death and mayhem seem innocuous. I am not presenting a slippery slope argument - I'm not favoring the banning of video games or arguing that if we don't take action now we'll see much worse stuff in the future - but I am observing the general trend and, yes, that trend suggests that video games will continue to become more photorealistic in their violence, and that the comparison to sixty-year-old comic books will be even less apt than Will's current effort.

In what should be a surprise to no one, in fact you can find examples of people who want to "protect the children" from the insidious effects of popular culture on all points of the political spectrum. Contrary to Will's argument that on the political left this is driven by social science research, in fact it's largely driven by a personal sense that certain aspects of popular culture cannot possibly be good for kids. If social science, in whole or in part, seems to back that up, obviously you will see advocates of child protection embrace those elements when they make their case for censorship. For goodness sake, the name at the top of the case to which Will alludes is that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man whose personal fortune was built on action movies, and who is presently the Republican Governor of California (although I'll duly note that the A.G. is a Democrat). Couldn't Will have at least dragged Tipper Gore or Joe Lieberman into his editorial, rather than carrying on about events from a half-century or more ago? Has he turned into Grandpa Simpson?

Batman and the Conservative Movie List

In his much ridiculed editorial in which he gushingly compares G.W. to Batman, Andrew Klavan endorses a set of movies as representing "conservative values".

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Conversely, time after time, left-wing films about the war on terror -- films like "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted" -- which preach moral equivalence and advocate surrender, that disrespect the military and their mission, that seem unable to distinguish the difference between America and Islamo-fascism, have bombed more spectacularly than Operation Shock and Awe.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Now if he spent some time actually thinking about things, he might realize that movies that come across as preachy and condescending frequently stumble at the box office. Politics are beside the point. He might also recall the adulatory reviews given by the likes of Charles Krauthammer and William F. Buckley Jr. to "Master and Commander", a movie surprisingly void of such conservative film icons as scantily clad Spartans or men wearing masks and tights. And it might occur to him that Hollywood films with huge special effects budgets often succeed despite a lack of overall merit. His inability to find any conservative themes in successful live action films suggests either that he has a poor overall concept of conservatism, or that he doesn't get out of the house much. He's apparently also missed the wild success of Wall-E, despite the contention of various self-described conservatives that it's left-wing propaganda.

(A small caution - I'm going to reveal some plot elements for the listed films so, if you haven't yet seen them and intend to do so, proceed with caution.)

The bigger problem with Klavan's analysis is not just that he's wrong about conservatism only being depicted in adaptations of children's stories and comic books. It's his vision of conservatism as exemplified by Batman engaged in a Manichean battle against absolute evil, and projecting that comic book universe onto the real world. If that's not silly enough, even within Batman's simplified universe, Klavan sees no nuance nor does he have any sense of Batman's internal struggle. This is perhaps exemplified by Klavan's similarly child-like take on the other films he lists as emblematic of conservatism.

Let's start with Narnia and Lord of the Rings, films set in a mystical, magical world. Why, to someone like Klavan, are these films "conservative"? Is it because they're materially different from the story lines of, say, the Harry Potter films? Or is it because the authors wove Christian theology into their texts? Obviously, the latter. So is Klavan arguing that any movie that attempts to teach religion is "conservative" in nature, or is he instead arguing that any film that arguably advances Christianity, preferably Christianity locked in a literal battle against the forces of absolute evil, is "conservative"? By all appearances it's the latter.

Klavan also seems to believe that this is the first time that Narnia or Lord of the Rings have been adapted to the screen. Hardly. The films he adores represent the first time they were adapted as big budget films using cutting edge special effects. Just as Klavan doesn't mind if messages he deems "conservative" are lost in all that high tech eye candy, a lot of audience members don't mind if those same themes (or themes that Klavan might describe as liberal, even within those same films) appear somewhere alongside or behind all that eye candy. If Klavan truly cared about the themes, for example, he would be advocating one of the earlier, more literal and less splashy adaptations of Narnia. Or, if you can imagine, even telling people to "read the books".

Given his conflation of conservatism with Christianity, it is interesting to see Klavan include 300 in his list of "conservative" films. Of course, 300 plays it safe - Leonidas is depicted as being in contempt of the priests, and the uncomfortable details of Spartan life are carefully elided from the depiction. That gives Klavan a sufficiently sanitized Sparta, in which he again perceives a battle of absolute good against absolute evil. If he were even slightly predisposed to do so, this enables him to avoid having to stop and think, "Other than it's extraordinary militarism, what is it about Sparta that I see as representing 'conservative' values?"

In his comic book universe, Klavan also doesn't need to consider the other side of the coin. He sees Leonidas as the representation of all that is good in the world, fighting to the death against a much stronger enemy in order to protect his way of life. But the film can be viewed another way - with the preening Xerxes, taking up a military campaign left unfinished by his father and confusing his own will with the will of God, leads his forces on a mission to defeat an enemy that it overwhelms in terms of power, money, and resources, but due to bad planning and bad strategy suffers significant embarrassment and unnecessary casualties before correcting his initial bad strategy. Meanwhile, Leonidas fights to preserve a religion and way of life that Klavan would, to put it mildly, find distasteful in practice - although given his apparent propensities, Klavan might not mind the monarchal power structure. What's the conservative message, again?

But Klavan's superhero comic book brand of "conservatism" isn't sufficiently reflective to see the other interpretation. He sees the world in comic book terms of good against evil, and when you're "good" there's nothing you can do that isn't justified in the fight against "evil". Truly, Klavan sees the enemies of America is Orc-like beings who don't know that "that freedom is better than slavery, that love is better than hate, kindness better than cruelty, tolerance better than bigotry". If you're "evil" there's no need to worry about collateral damage - when you're battling Mordor, everybody on the other side is fair game. Obliterating the entire enemy civilization is not only justified, it's the right thing to do.

In describing conservatism, Klavan writes,

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They're wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

This, of course, is a classic dodge - a caricatured view, attributed to an amorphous "they". Does it matter that no actual "leftist" can be produced who has ever said such a thing? What Klavan mischaracterizes is the position taken by people who, unlike him, don't see the real world through the paradigm of a comic book. People who recognize that the real world doesn't break down, as Klavan and other simple minds want to believe, into absolute good and absolute evil. There lies the nuance. And of course, there lies one of Klavan's other "conservative" films, "Spiderman 3".

In Spiderman 3, Peter Parker encounters, oh, let's call it "space goo". The "space goo" is transformative - with it, Peter Parker is faster, stronger, more confident, more capable, and happier, but also angrier, increasingly ruthless and at risk of losing himself. He has a climactic battle with the space goo, but it's a visual manifestation of an internal struggle - what is the price of power, and who does he want to be? This struggle is depicted alongside the culmination of another story line - Parker's lust for revenge against the man who killed his uncle. In the first film, Parker's nascent powers led to his setting off a series of events that led to his uncle's death, and in turn engaging in a confrontation with the man he believed to have killed his uncle, leading to that man's death. But in this film he realizes that a different man, who along the way has been transformed into the Sandman, is the actual killer.

When under the influence of the "space goo", Parker confronts Sandman and, after a dramatic battle, appears to drown him. But the Sandman is able to reconstitute himself for the final battle sequence. Parker, freed of the influence of the space goo, learns the details of the death of his uncle - that the killing was not a remorseless act of cruelty, but was an accidental act by a tormented man. Parker forgives him.

So you'll have to excuse me, but I'm at something of a loss as to how Klavan saw that film and missed all of the internal struggle and nuance. How he missed Parker's recognition that something he had seen for years as an act of absolute evil was, in fact, something that could be understood and forgiven. He didn't hear the filmmaker's frequent voiceover of the word's of Parker's uncle, "With great power comes great responsibility." But then, Klavan is exceptionally confused as to what it means to hold a moral view in which there is no nuance:

And when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values;¹ and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror.

I am left wondering, does Klavan see Cruel to be Kind as a conservative anthem? He truly sees no nuance in the idea that you must at times violate your own moral code in order to preserve your values, or fight wars in order to preserve peace? Or, is it more accurate to say, he isn't being honest about it, probably not with himself and certainly not with his readers. Klavan's simplicity only serves to highlight something else he has overlooked in his "conservative" films - at least the better of them - they ask that members of their audience consider not only the circumstances under which you might be tempted to violate your moral code, but also the price of violating that code.

That, of course, brings us to the final of Klavan's examples, "The Dark Knight". In films that don't meet his measure of "conservatism", Klavan tells us,

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly [morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right] vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us.

Perhaps that's why "Batman Begins" didn't make his list - with Bruce Wayne joining the League of Shadows under the tutelage of Ra's Al Ghul, until he learns that Al Ghul plans to end Gotham City's decadence and corruption by destroying it, whereas Wayne still sees the city as being valuable and full of good people who are worth saving. In a flash, Wayne's mentor and ally becomes a villain. Their common cause, to rid the world of decadence and crime, gets tangled up in Wayne's beliefs that the ends don't always justify the means. Transposing this into the real world, the implication is that Al Ghul would have happily razed Falluajah, while Batman would have sought to root out the bad guys while saving the city and protecting innocents.

Similarly, where Klavan apparently sees the latest Batman film as vindicating torture and mistreatment of prisoners, he has apparently disregarded the substance of the three scenes where prisoners are confronted with violence. First, the noble Harvey Dent is pushed to the point that he's going to try to beat information out of a suspect. Batman stops him and lectures him, not only because the suspect is mentally ill and is unlikely to have any useful information, but also because of what it would mean for Dent if his actions became known - he would lose his moral high ground, his prosecutions would collapse, criminals would go free. This, of course, creates a context and a contrast for the second sequence - Batman in control versus Batman out of control.

That second sequence involves a literal ticking time bomb scenario, where The Joker taunts and provokes Batman. Batman takes the bait and pays a price - The Joker is manipulating him into running down the clock to the point where he must choose which of two friends to save. The third again involves The Joker, this time manipulating the police officer who is guarding him into a physical attack. That ends with The Joker taking the officer hostage, resulting both in immediate catastrophe and his escape to wreak even more havoc on the city.

Looking at these three sequences, the first could be compared to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, often for little to no intelligence gain, at the expense of the U.S. moral high ground. The second impeaches conservative's favorite "what if" torture scenario - the "ticking time bomb". The third illustrates how giving in to your baser instincts, no matter how badly your target deserves it, may not only backfire - it may be exactly what your target wants you to do. Which of those three scenes is the endorsement of President Bush that Klavan imagines? And at the end of the film, when Batman takes the fall for somebody else's bad acts in order to preserve the integrity of the government, what's the parallel in the Bush Administration? Whenever scandal has stricken, the Bush Administration's spine degenerates into Jello, and every effort is made to place the blame on the smallest, least significant of actors.

Let's not fail to address the portion of the film that Klavan-style "conservatives" most see as vindication - Batman's transformation of the city's cellular phones into sonar devices that allow him to see and hear pretty much everything that is happening anywhere in the city. This is compared to the Bush Administration's illegal surveillance practices.

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

That assumes something not in evidence - that Bush has or ever had any wish to "re-establish" the former boundaries of the law, rather than establishing a permanent surveillance society. It also assumes that, despite his open contempt for the constitutional limits on his office, we owe Bush that type of benefit of the doubt. But what makes this example more interesting is that, contrary to the prisoner abuse sequences, this high tech surveillance tool works. Batman is able to locate The Joker and save the lives of some hostages. But unlike G.W. or defenders like Klavan, Batman doesn't attempt to reinvent his means - he recognizes that he is acting outside the law, a vigilante.² He doesn't trust himself with his surveillance tools, placing them into the hands of the morally upright Lucius Fox and ensuring their destruction upon the capture of The Joker. Is it that this intense surveillance would have no further utility in fighting crime, or defeating more conventional crime bosses or lesser "super villains"? Hardly.

Instead we are brought back to "Batman Begins", with a narrative from Alfred about a criminal in Burma who cared nothing about profit, but simply wanted to sow chaos and watch the world burn. How did they stop him? They burned the forest. The Ra's Al Ghul solution. Given the choice between the unacceptable, "burning" Gotham City, and a massive invasion of its citizens' privacy, Batman chose the latter. Within this framework, Lucius Fox and pretty much everybody in the audience was on board - between the urgency of the situation and the checks and balances Batman imposed upon himself, and its depiction as being used solely for a narrow, focused search for The Joker, I doubt that anybody in the audience was thinking, "No, turn that horrible machine off and preserve the people's privacy." But at the end of the day, Batman did not embrace the Bush Administration's desire for unlimited, unchecked surveillance of innocent civilians, and he again rejected the concept of "burning the forest". Batman's world view is vindicated - in Batman's world, given the opportunity, even a literal boat load of hardened criminals will "do the right thing".

What's really going on in Batman? The creator of the film is taking some questions raised by the real world and presenting them in a manner that appears intended to challenge the audience. When is the unjustifiable justified? What is the line that should never be crossed? When Batman saves The Joker, the filmmaker is playing to that part of each audience member that would rather see him plummet to his death. But that's one of the lines Batman won't cross, and it's a line the Joker sees (and exploits) as a weakness.

Whatever your political alignment, if you recognize the questions posed by the film and fail to see their ambiguity, you've missed the point. Can you listen to Bruce Wayne's opinions on government and the type of men it needs, yet retain the delusion that he would vote for Bush? Klavan mocks movie stars who "strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes", but apparently has forgotten Bush's infamous "mission accomplished" dress-up day.

But then, even at the comic book level, if you have more than a passing familiarity with characters like Spiderman and Batman and fail to see their inherent duality - the internal struggles that goes along with their external battles - you never really had a chance of picking up on the larger themes.³
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1. This is a philosophy Klavan apparently views as consistent with Christian values.

2. There's an earlier sequence that works largely in parallel with the surveillance theme, in which Batman bypasses law, diplomacy and extradition treaties in order to pluck a criminal out of China and deposit him in Gotham City for the police to prosecute. That's perhaps the least nuanced depiction of Batman's vigilantism, being presented primarily to foreshadow the later surveillance sequences and to give us some action and splashy special effects.

3. You might also argue that it should be impossible to miss themes of duality in a film that depicts the transformation of the city's brightest light into the villain, Two-Face. But in fairness, Klavan may know he's spouting nonsense, but may be simply trying to draw attention to himself in order to promote his next book.