On Beauty and Batman

In his inimitable style, Bad Catholic in an interview explains why the modern world will be saved by beauty:

Q: Another favorite topic of yours is Beauty. Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said that “beauty will save the world.” Why is beauty so important and how can we harness its power?

It’s very simple, actually. There are three Transcendentals, three infinite goals that man naturally strives for. He strives for Goodness (that which he should obey), Truth (that which he should believe), and Beauty (that which he should admire.)

To the Christian worldview, these three Transcendentals, in their perfection, are God Himself. God is goodness, truth and beauty. (This, by the way, implies that goodness=truth=beauty (Keats was right!) but I digress.)

In their imperfect form—that is, in all man’s pitiful attempts to be Good, to know Truth, and to reach Beauty—God is pointed to. They are each images of God. Now our culture got rid of the Good with the introduction of moral relativism—it has been limited to the self, to the I Am The Arbiter of My Own Morality. It got rid of Truth with the public school system—my truth is not your truth, and I promise that statement is true. So we’re left with Beauty as the our last hope to avoid damning ourselves to a delightfully vague and relative Hell.  (Emph. mine.)

It reminds me, rather of Barbara Nicolosi's lecture on "Haunting Moments" in film: those parts of a film that catch your breath away, that transcend the film itself, that become holy because they are true, and good, and beautiful.  She gives many examples - one of my favorite ones being from that delightful Danish film, Babette's Feast (watch here from about 1:38 on...but make sure you put on captions!)- but I might also add the "I pardon you" moment from Schindler's List, Samwise Gamgee's "There's good in this world, Mr. Frodo - and it's worth fighting for!" (or pretty much anything Sam), or a host of others.

So I'd like to talk quickly about two superhero movies which - I'm going to presume - everyone in America (or enough of everyone) has seen.  That is: Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises.

WARNING!  SPOILERS!

I saw Spiderman first - although no where near its release date - since I was nervous about yet another superhero movie.  I find that too often these sorts of things just become an expensive and dull way to watch someone else play an Epic Video Game - but all of the summer fare this year (the wonderful Avengers very much included) has at least been thoughtful.

Back to Spiderman.  A friend of mine finally convinced me to see it, citing the excellent acting as sure bait to get me to the theatre.  Nor was she wrong.  The trailers inevitably give the Everything Is Action edit, but the film itself is less about the stunts (although those are many) and more about the relationships between Peter and the various people in his life.  Most luminous, for me, was the final haunting moment: when Peter, battered from his final fight with the monster he created, manages to remember to bring home the eggs that his Aunt had asked him to get.

It's a simple, small, silly human thing.  And it's true.  Every day we battle our work, our boredom, our feelings of being trapped or caught, of not loving as much as we could, of financial or family woes, or just plain being tired - we battle them, and we bring back the eggs.

A battered Spidy looks better to me than the pristine Batman.

However, in The Dark Knight Rises, I was hard pressed to find a moment of beauty.  In the wake of the terrible shooting in Colorado at the midnight premiere of the latest Dark Knight movie, I therefore found myself approaching the film (in a movie theatre!) with fear and trembling.  I went with my father, located all the exits as I entered, and planned on hitting the floor should a gunman come in.

As you may have deduced, my precautions were unwarranted, and I was subjected to no worse terror than having a total stranger sit a mere single seat away from me.  The nerve.

However, while I was watching the movie, I found myself perhaps more disturbed than if a merely physical assault had battered at me.  The third Batman movie centers around the villain Bane who is built up as someone having ideals very much like the extremists of the French Terror.  (One visual where Bane appears to be knitting something at a mock court was not lost on this lover of all thing French Revolutiony, Mme. Defarge!)

The violence in the film, however, verged on the pornographic.  I can't quite put my finger on why it felt so invasive - perhaps the spectre of the Colorado tragedy hung over my head - but I would put forth that the violence was worsened because the movie (and, I feel, the whole trilogy) lacked grace.

Sure, there was some attempt at light in the person of John Blake (later Robin) played by that excellent Nolan hat trick actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  However, John Blake's adulation of the Commissioner proved to be ill-founded; his attempts to save the children failed; and in the end he gave up on working through the system of the law.  Ergo, our one true hero in the film gives up on the mechanics of grace within the chronology of the film (if not the possibility of grace post-film).

Moreover, Batman himself is Ivanhoed - that is, out of the picture literally and figuratively - for the majority of the movie.  And those times he is crucified, as every good action hero should be, he comes across a somewhat unwilling victim, so that his "final act" feels more selfish than salvific.

Where does this leave the Avengers?  Somewhere inbetween.  I don't know that it's a beautiful movie (neither is Spiderman, for the record - he's just more beautiful to this author in comparison to his fellow summer fare), but as written by that Doge of Dialogue, Joss Whedon, it's at least light-hearted, and surprisingly less atheistic than his usual offerings.  It even, perhaps inadvertently, has a haunting moment, when an elderly German man refuses to bow to Loki, the Norse "puny god" of mischief.

Loki: In the end, you will always kneel.


Elderly German Man:  But not to you.

Man will be saved by beauty - although beauty comes in many forms.  It comes not only in the roses, but in the thorns.  It comes not only in the risen Christ, but in the ravaged Christ upon the cross.  Beauty is in the wrinkles, and the jokes that aren't funny, and the woman who gets up at five with her children, and with the man who goes to a job he hates for a family he loves.

The job of the artist, then, is to hold a mirror up to nature - to show man his beauty by showing man His scars.