Scripts, scripts and more scripts!

For those who want a text copy, I have the scripts to the three most recent episodes. Apologies for not getting them up sooner. Between moving to a new home and being out of town for a convention, I've been extremely busy. Everything is settling down now. 

You may notice some extra material in the scripts that did not make it into the episodes for a variety of reasons. Here you go:

The Dark Knight Trilogy:

 AUDIO 1
 [Begins 0:35] What is justice? This question at its core is among the most fundamental to we need to answer for ourselves because how we perceive justice defines how we believe the world should operate. [DK 1:37:02] This question is also broached in Christopher Nolan's trilogy of films about [Begins 2:10:57] Batman: those being 2005's Batman Begins, [DK 1:24:28] 2008's The Dark Knight and [DKR 2:36:51] 2012's The Dark Knight Rises. [Begins 25:40] Bruce Wayne's quest is narratively related to justice – the films explicitly state their intentions and themes in unsubtle, unambiguous phrasing – [Begins 1:03:20] but the mere existence of a Batman cannot help but touch upon how we view justice because his existence is illegal, his actions unsanctioned. [Begins 1:05:40] These films collide with a variety of different philosophies as they relate to justice and the rightness and wrongness of behavior.
 [Begins 1:14:50] Moreover, if the audience cheers for Batman, what does that say about us? Does Batman's brutal treatment of the criminal element of Gotham City satisfy a part of ourselves that desire such treatment against those we condemn?  [Begins 1:44:27] Batman is sometimes portrayed as a paragon of good, but if he were not, who would he be accountable to? [Begins 1:54:50] Batman as depicted in Nolan's films is far more sympathetic than the more recent film version, but even so, many superhero movies contain an unknowingly fascist outlook.  
 [Begins 1:57:40] PART 1: BATMAN AND THE ELUSIVENESS OF JUSTICE
 AUDIO 2
 [Begins 25:22] In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne plots to murder Joe Chill, the man who murdered his parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. [Begins 25:50]Someone else murders Chill before he is able to do so. [Begins 26:17] When he reveals this to longtime friend Rachel Dawes, he claims that he parents deserved justice. The word justice is loosely defined as the administration of what is fair by impartial means. [Begins 27:00] This is admittedly not particularly helpful. Rachel claims that Bruce is not talking about justice and that he is actually referring to revenge. Bruce claims that sometimes they are the same thing, [Begins 27:35] Rachel strongly disagrees, stating the clinical definition of justice about impartiality and also setting up the central conflict of the film trilogy.
 [Begins 1:57:00] Not the conflict between the protagonist and the various antagonists of the three films but the thematic conflict among the various ways in which people view justice. [Begins 25:40] When Bruce Wayne plotted to murder Joe Chill as punishment for his shattered childhood, he was trying to enact what is called [Begins 27:35] Retributive Justice, the theory that the best response to a crime is a proportionate punishment. This theory of justice is ancient. [Begins 28:00 overlay] The Sixth King of the First Babylonian Dynasty said “Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers...” [Begins 32:37] Codified laws existed far before that, though. Among the oldest known evidence of a law code are tablets from the ancient city Ebla. They date to about 2400 B.C. — approximately 600 years before Hammurabi's Code.  
  AUDIO 3  
 [Begins 1:33:02] When the Gotham City Police Department arrests criminals for a heinous crimes and the justice system sentences them to long prison terms, this is not retributive justice since it does not mete out punishment in equal, barbaric fashion. [DKR 1:57:58] Capital punishment would be considered retributive justice, as it metes out an exact punishment based on the crime. [Begins 25:30] But if Bruce Wayne had murdered Joe Chill, would that be ANY kind of justice, retributive or otherwise? [Begins 27:45] He is not an agent of the law. Rachel claims that revenge is not about justice and that it is about making the perpetrator of revenge feel better. This may have some weight, especially as it pertains to Bruce.  
  [Begins 25:38] Joe Chill was still murdered. If Bruce believed it would be morally right for Chill to die, he would not have been upset that it was not he who pulled the trigger. [Begins 27:15] He wanted to be the one to do it to make himself feel better. But that brings up another question: [Begins 1:33:25] Bruce Wayne never becomes an agent of the law, even when he becomes Batman. Is nothing he is doing JUST? [Begins 1:58:37] Batman clearly develops a more altruistic philosophy after the death of Joe Chill. He genuinely wants to save Gotham City, and does that multiple times, [Begins 2:01:10] but regardless of his motives and outcomes, he is still waging an extralegal assault on a city with no oversight or authority mandated by the public.  
  AUDIO 4  
  [Begins 2:09:29] Batman's symbol is the duality of man and animal, and this theme surfaces throughout the trilogy, [DK 35:55] especially in The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan is exploring human nature. [DK 2:13:13] Batman and the Joker growl and bark. [DK 8:07] In The Dark Knight, gangsters brings Rottweilers to a drug deal. The gangsters  don't stand a chance against Batman, [DK 12:44] but the animals injure him. [DK 1:50:04] The Joker admits that he is beast, claiming that he is like "a dog chasing cars". [DK 2:09:17] He unleashes a pack of attack dogs on Batman.    [DK 1:59:31] During the social experiment with the two ships, we get a clue into Batman's philosophy. One ship is named 'Liberty' and filled with random civilians, [DK 2:07:00] and the other is named ‘Spirit’ and filled with convicted criminals. [DK 2:12:35] The Joker’s goal – in Batman's own words – is to 'break' the city's 'spirit'. When it fails, Batman tells the Joker that Gotham City “still has spirit,” meaning that human beings are not animals. [DK 2:13:28] Batman's conflict between “liberty” and “spirit” in The Dark Knight trilogy is protecting what he believes is the spirit of the law, while violating said laws – [DK 2:18:26] the difference between laws that protect us – liberty – and the nature of human beings regardless of law – spirit.    

AUDIO 5  

[DK 9:22]Batman is portrayed as the best case scenario for a vigilante, one that can only exist in fiction. Vigilante justice is typified by lynch mobs, hate groups and terrorists more than caped crusaders. [DK 14:36] So, what are these movies saying about justice? And what do they say about the audience's perception of what is just? [DKR 2:36:25] One could argue that the film actually does take a stand against Batman's methods by having Bruce Wayne retiring, suggesting that the world does not need a Batman and should not have a Batman, [DKR 2:36:14] buuuut then Detective Blake is shown in the Batcave with triumphant music playing, indicating he will be the new Batman and we should all be happy about that.    

[DK 1:56:04] Lucious Fox admonishes Batman for taking control of Gotham City's cell phones to find the Joker – calling it “unethical” – but the film does that conclude this, only Fox does. [DK 18:25] For one thing, everything Fox has done to assist Batman, an illegal vigilante, has been unethical. Definitely illegal and certainly violating the ethics of his position in the company. [DK 1:56:53] For another, he still does it. He goes along with Batman's illegal surveillance, dismantling the machine only afterward. [DK 2:07:15] But the film does not present Batman's surveillance as wrong if it shows that it conclusively worked and that nobody was harmed because of it. [DK 2:15:01] The film presents illegal surveillance as troubling but incredibly effective and necessary.  

AUDIO 6  

[DK 1:55:45] In witnessing this, the audience is seeing the philosophy of consequentialism in action, which states that the morality of an action is judged solely on its results. [DK 1:56:21] If Batman can violate the rights of every citizen of Gotham but attain a positive outcome and, frankly, not get caught and suffer public outrage, [DK 1:56:54] then consequentialism would say that he did nothing wrong. [DK 1:59:35] A similar view is utilitarianism, which posits that an action is based on whether or not is maximizes utility, in this case, the well-being of the people. [DK 2:01:05 overlay]19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill once said of this “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”  

[DK 2:02:00] Maximizing happiness sounds all well and good, but utilitarianism has also be used to justify unspeakable things, like slavery, because it maximizes happiness for the vast majority all the while dehumanizing a minority. [DK 2:04:55] It should be noted that utilitarianism as a broad philosophical and political concept does not factor the extralegal activities of Batman into the equation. He has no real [DK 2:08:55] authority to make decisions with wide-reaching implications, no authority to enact his utilitarian goals. And what of those goals? Primarily, Batman wants to keep criminals off the streets, [DK 2:18:39] but our justice system does not accommodate a Batman. [DK 10:21] When he defeats Scarecrow in the beginning of The Dark Knight, for example, tying them up does not mean that they will be prosecuted. [DK 16:35] When the police arrive, they may be able to arrest those who have active warrants out for them, major figures like Scarecrow himself, [DK 10:11] but Batman catching a criminal in the act is not tantamount to a police officer catching him in the act.    

AUDIO 7  

[DK 9:08] They may not be able to arrest them based on simply being tied up by Batman, and even if Batman left some evidence behind that would implicate them, the criminal justice system can remove evidence   from [DK 7:54] the equation if it had been obtained illegally, like, say, if found by a brutal vigilante with no legal authority. Evidence has been thrown out for far less than that. [DK 10:22] A Batman copycat with no useful skills asks the real Batman “What's the difference between you and me?” Batman makes a joke, [DK 26:42] and the audience is meant to laugh, but legally speaking, there is no difference. And in this particular instance, there is also no difference in efficacy of criminal prosecution. [DK 35:18] Batman's philosophy might come into question when he holds on to more idealized morals like the unwillingness to kill. [DK 2:14:09] If Batman were a true utilitarian or consequentialist, then wouldn't he believe in the overall rightness of the death of the Joker? [DK 2:24:07] Batman retains some deeply-held altruistic principles, almost Kantian in nature. 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said “Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.” [Begins 36:25] Kantian morality is incredibly strict, as there are few if any exceptions to our morals. Batman refuses to, as he puts it, become an assassin. [DK 2:14:28] Yet, when people ask “Why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker?” it misses the question that should precede: “What authority does Batman possess to kill the Joker?” [DK 2:21:34] He has none. That is not a condemnation of Batman, at least he recognizes this. But the audience that asks this? It's a bizarre question because it presupposes Batman's responsibility. [DK 2:22:11] Let's pretend Batman has legal authority to do what he does. He is tacitly endorsed by Jim Gordon who eventually becomes commissioner, after all. So, let's pretend he has roughly the same authority as a police officer.      AUDIO 8  

[DK 1:27:12] Would the same people who wonder why Batman does not murder the Joker also ask [DKR 13:30] “Why don't the police murder more and more criminals? Why shouldn't they murder all the bad guys?” … One should not even have to answer that. [DKR 22:00] Police are not meant to be executioners. We understandably get very upset when some police officers abuse their power. It is far too much power for anyone to possess. [DKR 2:08:10] Justice is distributed over a variety of systems: law enforcement, legal prosecution, the right to a defense, a judge, a jury, correctional facilities, etc. [DKR 2:15:15] Batman has no authority to be Batman, but at least he recognizes that what he is doing is not entirely right – [DK 2:21:58] he claims he is no hero at the end of The Dark Knight – and refuses to use his dubious position to its most extreme ends because even he knows that is not justice.    

[Begins 27:18] Going back to Bruce's conversation with Rachel, he claims that the system she has so much faith in is broken, therefore justifying in his mind at least violating the letter of the law to [Begins 59:21] preserve the spirit, unilaterally granting himself what is roughly the authority that a police officer has, [1:05:24] but even Batman cannot justify murder because there is nothing even within the spirit of the law that would claim that agents of law enforcement are authorized executioners.  

AUDIO 9
 [Begins 1:28:21] It is tempting to state a complete moral equivalence between Batman and the villains of Gotham City based on their unlawful behavior, but this ignores both their intentions and the consequences of their actions. [Begins 1:31:53] So, let's give Batman a break for a moment and focus on characters who are almost objectively worse. Batman, classically, claims that criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot, [Begins 1:43:15] but over the course of the trilogy, he comes into contact with those who have grander motives. [Begins 2:10:29] In spite of what Batman says, his rogues gallery is populated with men and women who commit their crimes for reasons contrary to what he believes. [Begins 5:00] In Batman Begins, Ra's al-Ghul and the League of Shadows contend that the decadence of Gotham's elite and the scum of Gotham's [Begins 17:57] underworld are so great and so vile that the only solution is to wipe the city off the map, destroying it to save the rest of the world.
 [Begins 37:53] Logically speaking, this does not make sense. This is like solving a hostage situation by killing the hostages. However, Ra's al-Ghul, [DKR 2:18:54] and by extension Talia al-Ghul and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, are enacting a form of justice that has less in common with the laws of man and more in common [DKR 2:31:16] with divine retribution: a supernatural punishment by a deity that circumvents human law and conventions. Destroying an entire city or civilization is a common occurrence in religion and mythology. [DKR 2:36:37] The flood narrative appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a cataclysm brought about by the great gods Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, Ennugi, and Ea. [Begins 7:14] It famously reoccurs in Hebrew scriptures, as the Abrahamic God condemns humankind for its wickedness. There is a version in Hinduism as well.    
  AUDIO 10  
 [Begins 17:05] Not to mention Biblical accounts of individual cities destroyed by the wrath of God for its residents' alleged sins. [Begins 1:47:50] The condemnation of Gotham City by Ra's al-Ghul has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with Biblical destruction. But the difference between secular justice and law inspired by religion is not so clear and not so divided. [Begins 24:27] Even in governments that do not sanction an official national religion and maintain some level of separation between religion and the state, [Begins 25:29] religious doctrine influences secular law due to the individual beliefs of politicians and their desire to conform the laws of man with the laws of their God, regardless of the beliefs of their electorate. [Begins 28:09] A man familiar with both law and theistic philosophy, 19th century lawyer and writer Robert G. Ingersoll, once scathingly said “...why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?”    
 [DKR 1:44:26] Ra's al-Ghul may not be a god, but he does operate much like one: he claims immortality, whether that is true or not, he believes himself having greater authority than the laws of man, [DKR 1:45:23] he condemns allegedly wicked cities to destruction, and he never questions the rightness of his actions, assuming his will must be correct. [DKR 1:57:51] According to the Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, the Hebrew words tsedeq and mishpat and the Greek [DKR 2:02:47] dikaiosyne are all used to describe “justice” in the Bible. In about half the cases in which “justice” or “just” or some variant is used, both the King James Version and the American [DKR 2:05:30] Standard Revised Version of the Holy Bible re-translate and change the words to “right,” “righteous,” or “righteousness” – NOT justice.  
  AUDIO 11
 [DKR 34:22] Moving to another figure in Batman's rogues gallery, Selina Kyle tells Bruce Wayne that there's a storm coming, and that when it hits because when it hits, he and his rich friends will wonder [DKR 35:28] how they thought they you could “live so large” – as she puts it, and leave so little for everyone else. [DKR 2:22:45] Although she does not explicitly name it, Selina Kyle is referring to Distributive Justice, the just allocation of goods in a society. [Begins 26:47] Egalitarian distributive justice or equality-based justice states that everyone should receive roughly the same, [Begins 31:38] needs-based justice states goods should be distributed based on individual needs, [Begins 1:08:46] and a meritocracy or merit-based justice states that goods should be distributed unequally based on what someone deserves. This is commonly associated with capitalism.  
 [DKR 34:20] The Dark Knight trilogy exists something close to the third because it is set in America, but Kyle's assertion is that Bruce Wayne did not earn his wealth – he inherited it. [DKR 35:28] He has done many altruistic things with his wealth, the Wayne Foundation, for example, but his mere existence as a billionaire casts doubt on merit-based distributive justice. [DKR 11:32] If, by definition, justice is meant to be impartial and fair, then this – Kyle would argue – is not justice. [DK 1:55:11] Harvey Dent, previously holding traditional, unambiguous law and order beliefs about justice, is physically and emotionally scarred. [DK 2:18:59] He adopts a version of justice that results from a flip of a coin, stating that it is perfect fairness. As previously said here, justice has its roots in the concept of fairness, [DK 2:19:45] but Dent's coin flip, though impartial, is also random. If someone built a randomizing computer program that chose a random person to be murdered, one could that argue that it is fair and [DK 2:21:13] impartial but not just. Fairness is part of justice but not the sum of it. [DK 23:27] As for Batman's most famous nemesis, the concept of justice in the abstract simply does not exist.
 
 [DK 1:28:44]  PART 2: THE JOKER AND MORAL NIHILISM
 AUDIO 12
 [Begins 31:32] In The Dark Knight trilogy, Batman's belief about the alleged cowardice of crime is expanded to mean he believes criminals are desperate due to the poverty referenced in Batman Begins [DK 23:55] – but when he encounters the Joker, a man who does not appear to want anything tangible, it shakes his worldview. [DK 43:10] He spent years infiltrating the world of criminals, even remarking that the understood them, but when confronted with the Joker, he does not know how to react.
 [DK 54:17] Alfred famously tells Batman that some men simply want to watch the world burn, but that is not entirely accurate. [DK 55:03] The Joker's sadism may contribute to who he is, but that is not his core – his philosophy. [DK 1:27:32] Everything The Joker says and does suggest that he subscribes to nihilism, an extreme form of skeptical philosophy that declares that nothing has inherent value. [DK 1:52:10] Nihilism has various branches, like metaphysical nihilism that states that physical objects may not even exist, epistemological nihilism which is skeptical of all knowledge, but in terms of the Joker, [DK 2:13:20] he is the embodiment of existential and moral nihilism, the former stating that nothing has true value and the latter stating the actions have no true value, no rightness or wrongness.
 AUDIO 13
 [DK 1:30:03] There is a kind of hopelessness that comes with nihilism, but the Joker, upon realizing what he believes to be the truth of the universe and of humankind, has instead opted to play along with the game, to laugh at it. [DK 1:33:34] He tells Batman that society's morality, society's code is a bad joke. He finds that the only natural thing to do with a world that makes no sense is to laugh in its face.    
 [DK 2:11:50] 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said much of the same: “When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, 'You are welcome,' at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.”
 
 AUDIO 14
 [DK 23:55] Laughing at the void is a manner in which to stay in the face of nihilism, and the Joker's sanity is always in question. In one scene, after being called insane, he insists that he is not [DK 1:28:44] and later remarks that he is simply ahead of the curve, meaning his actions are based on knowledge, on his philosophical viewpoint more than some undiagnosed social disorder. [DK 2:13:50] In another scene, he claims that madness is like gravity, and that all one needs is a little push. Distinct from existential nihilism is [DK 1:22:23] moral nihilism, the view that nothing is inherently right or wrong and that actions do not contain value. This is sometimes confused with moral relativism, which states that actions have situational value only, [DK 1:24:03] but The Joker places no value, no rightness, no wrongness to his actions regardless of where he is or what he is doing. [DK 1:27:40] His philosophy is therefore moral nihilism. [DK 1:52:33] The Joker destroying a hospital, by his philosophical standards, would have no greater or less value than Batman sacrificing himself to save Gotham City.
 
 [DK 5:05] In the beginning of The Dark Knight, we are introduced to the Joker as he robs a bank. [DK 5:37] One of his victims demands to know what the Joker believes in. He replies “I believe...whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you stranger.” [DK 24:38] This is not a meaningless introduction or random quote. The original quote that the Joker is appropriating, “That which does not kill you makes you stronger,” was said by [DK 25:49] 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a historical figure commonly associated with nihilism. He said “...the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking, and 'Why' finds no answer ... Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the plough; one destroys ...”     
 AUDIO 15
 [DK 1:48:40] The Joker believes that humans are not innately good and are more likely innately bad. In the 17th  century, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said much the same, albeit for completely different reasons. [DK 1:52: 58] “To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues. No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
 But Hobbes was referring to the English Civil War, and he had different intentions than the Joker. To Hobbes, he believed human beings were not innately good, and he proposed a strong government that could enforce justice as absolutely necessary to maintain order, institutions and individuals which the Joker would call “schemers.” Hobbes may not have believed human beings were inherently righteous, but he did have good intentions married to his pessimism. The Joker, conversely, has no interest in building these structures – he, instead, wants to demolish them. So, the Joker would agree with those who say human beings are not innately good, but his goals – the ruination of society – is the opposite.  Speaking of government, one might ascribe the term “anarchist” to the Joker, but anarchy generally revolves around the belief that leaders are naturally immoral and that human beings would be better off without them. The Joker makes no distinction between good and evil. Anarchy is not just something someone spray paints on a wall in high school to look edgy – it's a philosophy about what is right and wrong, and to a moral nihilist like the Joker, that has no value.    
 AUDIO 16
 [Party] Most fictional antagonists fight against goodness or corrupt goodness – whereas the Joker wishes to prove that goodness does not actually exist, that if given the right circumstances, civilized people – as he puts it – will eat each other. He believes in the frailty and meaninglessness of the justice system. As he says towards the end of the film, his motivations have nothing to do with tangible rewards like money. His goal is to send a message, as he says. He is trying to prove a point through a violent social experiment. His ends are philosophical and abstract, not physical. The Joker plans his experiments to be seen by the public, to prove that life is a sick joke, that order is an illusion, that human beings are no better than himself and that righteousness has no inherent value. [Harvey] Some succeed, as he provokes Harvey Dent into becoming the villainous Two-Face, [Boat] but some fail. He unsuccessfully tries to get two groups of people on boats to murder the other. They consider it but ultimately choose to maintain their humanity. The Joker is surprised by this but still seems to believe he is correct in his worldview.   
 Nihilism, particularly moral nihilism, has a few fundamental flaws that make it untenable from an abstract, existential standpoint and from an applicable day-to-day perspective. And I'm not referring simply to the Joker, who takes the philosophy of nihilism to dangerous, unheard of lengths. Most nihilists are not the Joker. In fact, no nihilists are the Joker because the Joker does not exist. Anyway, a fundamental flaw in nihilism is that value is impossible to be reduced to nothing. A reductionists view of value cannot eradicate some level of value that we at least assign to objects and actions.
 AUDIO 17
 [Hospital] If the Joker truly believes nothing has value, why is he still alive? Why is any nihilist still alive? Even if someone's life is the absolute worst, by choosing to remain conscious within the universe, one is tacitly assigning value to existence over non-existence. Value cannot be reduced to nothing. Nihilists would argue that does not matter because existential nihilism is more about inherent value than assigned value, but even if that were correct, it still does not make nihilism applicable to life and human interaction. If the answer to every question is “It does not matter.” then nobody would do anything. You would not go to the store to buy food, even though you require food to exist, because according to nihilism, food has no value.   
 A nihilist, if taking their philosophy to its logical extreme, cannot live for very long. Nihilism sounds freeing at a glance, the philosophical equivalent of “whatever” – but it is a philosophy that cannot maintain anything, from social interaction to government to life itself. The Joker tempts Batman to kill him, suggesting the villain may believe his life holds no value as nihilism suggests, but in another scene, he seems excited about the prospect that he and Batman will compete over the soul of Gotham forever, that they are destined to do this. A nihilist should not believe in destiny.   
 AUDIO 18
 [Interrogation] In another scene, the Joker assigns value to Batman, joking that The Dark Knight “completes” him. Not believing in inherent “meaning” to the universe is not the same as the dismissal of value. Existentialist philosophers are not necessarily nihilists, for example. Jean-Paul Sartre, a 20th century French philosopher once famously said “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] meaning.” Disbelieving in cosmic, theistic meaning to the universe – a divine plan -- is not the same as devaluing everything or seeing no reason to assign value to anything. Sartre and other existentialists believe in designing a personal, reasonable moral code. Existentialism states that an individual life can have meaning, and therefore value, if the individual chooses to give it that meaning. The Joker, clearly, does not see it that way.
 But with this in mind, what are the Joker's true motivations? One might argue that his need to prove righteousness does not exist is not a goal for his philosophy to expand externally or to “send a message” as he says but to prove something to himself, internally, and justify his own actions and his own sadistic desires. To make himself feel more at ease with the monster that he is. A disbelief in cosmic meaning does not necessarily lead to disbelief in, well, everything. The Joker is...wrong. Wrong philosophically and wrong in action. He is a mass murderer and a terrorist, and is not meant to be sympathetic, no matter how many contrarian memes claim otherwise. He is an excellent character, but he is a monster.
 [fade to slow motion shot]
 AUDIO 19
 In The Dark Knight trilogy, we see that even the most noble among us – the Harvey Dents of the world, the white knights – are corruptible. That is something the film trilogy does well – it allows us to question how good our heroes really are. Where it fails is its messaging on how much we should applaud Batman. It casts doubt on the need for Batman, but at the same time, the finale of The Dark Knight Rises implies that Detective Blake will take on the mantle of the bat in Bruce Wayne's absence, and the framing of this clearly wants us to be excited for this. It occasionally admonishes Batman's actions but also shows those who do so are also complicit in said actions, and when he “goes too far” – he always ends up saving the day by doing so. At the end of The Dark Knight, an innocent child says Batman didn't do anything wrong. You can't condemn something and show the perpetrator is always right in the end. The message gets muddied.
 The film does not make the audience agree with Alfred Pennyworth about Bruce Wayne giving up being Batman, it has us root for Batman, 'cause he's so cool and he punches Bane really hard and has the BEST car. The best. And if Batman cripples someone, then, hey, they probably deserved it. Because he's Batman! He doesn't have to play by society's rules. All that bureaucracy just gets in the way of what's really important: violence. sighs In one of the trilogy's most famous scenes, Jim Gordon says that Batman is not the hero Gotham needs right now but the hero Gotham deserves. What kind of hero do WE deserve?
 

The Virgin Suicides:

 AUDIO 1
 The Virgin Suicides is a 1999 film directed by Sofia Coppola. In the mid-70's, a young girl named Cecilia Lisbon attempts to kill herself. She and her sisters live in a strict household in which they are carefully monitored by their parents. Cecilia tries again, this time committing suicide. In the aftermath, the parents crack down on their daughters even more, limiting their access to the outside world. After relenting for only one night to allow them to go to a dance, one daughter, Lux, does not make it home until morning. This results in an even greater and more thorough lockdown, even taking the daughters out of school.
 As all this happens, neighborhood boys try to make contact with them. They find a diary, they read from it, they call the house, but they find that they still do not understand the minds of the daughters. One evening, the boys go over to their house in hopes of taking them driving but discover that the daughters have all committed suicide, not leaving a note or giving any explanation why. In the future, the boys still discuss it from time to time, never comprehending what happened that night.
 AUDIO 2   
 Over the course of the film, the boys admit that they cannot do justice to the Lisbon girls' story. When they read from Cecilia's journal, the adult narrator, the voice of one of the boys, remark that the girls have the boys all figured out, but the opposite is not true, that the girls will always be a mystery to them. They speak of the girls as dreamers, as magical. It's a form of worship of the allegedly mysterious quality of women that is usually the consequence of not being direct. When the girls are still in school, one boy makes a half-hearted attempt to speak to one but immediately gives up. The mystery of women is a self-fulfilling prophecy of men, assuming too great a difference, relying on the mythology of the mysterious female mind and not actually just talking as equals.
 When the girls are taken out of school, the boys spend a week thinking of elaborate plans to communicate with them, and no idea is direct. One idea was to use a kite with a banner, a plan that the narrator said had logistical problems. It takes them a week to decide what to do: just call them on the phone. Even when they do, the boys communicate only in songs from records instead of pleading for information. There are clueless, but the film only hints at the fact that their cluelessness is entirely their own doing and the not the byproduct of these allegedly mysterious girls. Because of all this, the boys are unreliable narrators. The boys' knowledge of the girls is tied to what they can see, but this means their gaze ends at the surface. Because of this, the neighborhood boys have no more idea what goes on inside the girls' minds than they can SEE the girls' thoughts.
 AUDIO 3
 They stare through telescopes and binoculars. This is their insight: only visual, only physical. When the boys describe the girls, they use photographic language, but these images of the girls are useless without context and substance. The girls' strict Catholic upbringing is shown in visuals, in symbols. The girls write notes on plastic cards of the Virgin Mary. In Christianity, Mary was made pregnant by God, though she was still a virgin. Mary, in many ways, is a passive figure for God's will, much in the way that the girls, all seemingly virgins at the beginning of the film, are also passive figures in their home, their parents controlling every aspect of their lives.
 The Bible prophecizes Mary's role, just as the boys reveal the ending of the story in the beginning. The strict control of their parents, hiding the girls in their homes, creates an atmosphere of psychological harm and uncertainty. The borders that the parents put up end up being the undoing of the girls. Cecilia commits suicide by flinging herself onto the fence – the physical border in place of the psychological border that the parents put up between their daughters and the outside world. The daughters limits their knowledge, they put up these walls, these borders, and ultimately, Cecilia kills herself on such a border.
 AUDIO 4
 In the neighborhood, trees are cut down to prevent a disease from spreading. When the town tries to cut down the Lisbon girls' tree, they surround it. The connection between the health of the Lisbon family and the trees are clear. Both are gradually dying, and the girls, though they eventually commit  suicide, are trying to hang on to something from their lives. We see the tree at pivotal moments the film, like this one in which Lux comes home late from the prom after losing her virginity.  
  The father lives in obliviousness. He cannot or does not try to connect to people on an individual or emotional basis. When Cecilia dies and the priest comes to visit, the father can only talk about sports. When he finds Cecilia, he says nothing. He's a teacher, and he lives in facts, but finds no practical use for them. When he talks about his own interests and people walk away, he keeps talking. Ignorance is half is what is needed for tragedy to strike in his home. The mother is harsh and vindictive. She provides no warmth for her daughters. She is the other half of what is needed. In this scene, the father teaches a class venn diagrams. He is A, the mother is B, and the intersection is the dangerous atmosphere they have created for their daughters.  
  AUDIO 5  
 Though the boys' superficial investigation into the lives of the girls' the motives behind their suicides may be persona and specific, the exploration of love and loss is more universal. The deaths are tragic not only for the obvious reason but because they occur in an unremarkable setting and with unremarkable motives. Rather than the boys sorting through the evidence of a grand caper or heist or mass murder plot, they sort through the trappings of ordinary life. The suicides are terrible, of course, but the boys and, indeed, the rest of the town reacts as if it is just another story in the newspaper. When Cecilia dies, the boys simply walk away, not offering comfort to the family or running for help or reacting much at all. This is a suburban town, and suburban towns operate on the “none of our business” principle.  
  They eventually make it their business, but again, only through superficial evidence and watching Lux have sex on her roof rather than, say, calling child protective services to look in on the girls' home life.  The boys make these ordinary girls into mysterious creatures in their minds, but they are still ordinary girls. When Cecilia dies, the school has an assembly, but everything is done in a sanitized, uninvolved way, so that no real progress is made and no real insight is gained. It's perfunctory, something expected of them, but that is all.  
  AUDIO 6
 One might claim that the mystery of the suicides is not that mysterious. The Libson girls obviously had a challenging home life, and teenage suicide is common. However, that ignores the more complicated catalysts for suicide. People mistakenly think those who are depressed and have suicidal ideation are just “sad” or going through a difficult period, but suicidal ideation is often a combination of genetic, physical, and environmental risk factors: everything from low levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin to a history of mental illness in the family to a bombardment of life-changing events.    
  The boys' search for evidence of what happened will always be fruitless because they can never look into their minds. They keep searching for some tangible reason, like some origin story that will completely explain the unexplainable. When you're young, when you're in high school, your mind believes that this is life. Your mind has no basis for comparison. It can't even comprehend the fact that this is a brief, minor stop along the road. Teenagers know, logically, if you ask them, that they will grow up and that none of this will be important anymore, but it's hard to separate the logical from what feels like the only life they have known. It is the totality of what they have experienced. So, if life is awful in high school, the mind plays tricks and makes one think that life just IS AWFUL.  
  AUDIO 7  
  The Libson girls don't know anything except life in their suffocating home. This is life. This is all that there is. In the future, the boys – now grown – all talk about the Libson girls from time to time, according to the narrator. They look back, and they are confused because they are looking at physical evidence but have forgotten what it FEELS like to be that young. The feeling that this is all there is. And of course they are still obsessed with it all. How can you mourn something you don't understand? 

MirrorMask:

 AUDIO 1
 Mirrormask is a 2005 fantasy film directed by Dave McKean and written by Neil Gaiman. Helena works for family at the circus. She refuses to perform, angering her mother. Helena's mother must have an operation, which complicates the daughter's feelings for her. One night, Helena awakes in a fantasy world. She meets Valentine, a performer and juggler. Helena and Valentine discover that the Queen of this world is searching for her daughter, who looks just like Helena. In the real world, a doppleganger has taken Helena's place, presumed to be the Queen's daughter.
 The dark queen wants to control Helena, a replacement for her daughter. Helena and Valentine search for the Mirrormask, the charm that allowed the doppleganger to take Helena's place in the real world. They switch places – the dark queen may or may not have learned to treat her real daughter better – and Helena's mother comes through the operation safely. Helena meets a young man who speaks and behaves exactly like Valentine but does not recall being Valentine, leaving the narrative ambiguous as to whether or not Helena's experiences were all a dream.
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 AUDIO 2
 Mostly due to the times in which they were written, classic fairy tales contain old world values. Little Red Riding Hood, for example, should stay on the right path to her grandmother – her family – lest she be overtaken by the violent, even sexual advances of the wolf. Guard your virginity. Listen to your parents. Modern reimaginings of fairy tales, particularly those from the Disney Renaissance up until today, challenge old world values -- maybe too G-rated and too gently to be subversive – but at least transgressive.
 The most common transgressive element is the denial of parental authority and old customs. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel's father, King Triton, objects to his daughter's love interest, and Ariel is at least narratively proven right in the end. Jasmine rejects her father's insistence that she follow the old law of arranged marriages. Mulan shreds antiquated gender roles and saves China. Post-Renaissance, Rapunzel not only does not trust her mother, but the parental figure is actively working against her. Merida refuses to marry based on her parents' wishes as well, but Pixar's transgressive fairy tale  takes a mature tact and acknowledges that Merida is correct in wanting to choose her own path but sympathetic to her mother. Transgressive retellings are appealing.   
 AUDIO 3
 And so, it is not too surprising that in Mirrormask, a modern fairy tale with no centuries-old source material, Helena is fighting against what she believes to be the oppression of her mother's watchful eye and control. In the beginning of the film, her mother insists that she come perform, but Helena, no longer a child, does not want to be part of the circus anymore. She threatens to leave, and following this, her mother becomes ill. Helena sees the eyes of spiders watching everything she does. In the end, she meets up with a spider-monster mother. This shows Helena’s struggle with parental supervision, particularly her own mother.   
 The sphinxes represent Helena’s lack of control. They appear, get in Helena's way, demand answers to riddles. These sphinxes represent controlling people in her life, like her parents or the doctors. In the same way the sphinxes will not give Helena freedom; her parents will not give her freedom. In the same way, the doctors will not give Helena the freedom to be around her mother. The dark queen is how Helena sometimes pictures her own mother. Towards the end, Helena – mistaken for the dark queen's daughter – tells the queen that she needs to love her daughter but not possess her. Mirrormask's transgressive fairy tale has the most in common thematically with Brave, as both films are less about rejecting parents and more about teaching both mother and daughter how to have a stable, healthy relationship. In this, Mirrormask is a very mature fairy tale.   
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 AUDIO 4
 Helena does not vanquish her mother, like in Tangled. She makes peace with her. Helena does not run away. She is still not old enough to live on her own. Fantasy and fairy tales often traffic in using dreams as methods of transport – of transition – into the allegory of the mind. In The Wizard of Oz, the movie – not the books that depict a more factual Oz – Dorothy's desire to leave home is given shape as a mythical world, her friends recast as aspects of her personality – things she needs to grow up, like intelligence, courage and kindness. This psychological and allegorical interpretation of fairy tales reoccurs in Mirrormask, as Helena's fantasy world may or may not have existed but definitely taught her something and allowed her to grow up.
 In his book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettleheim expounded on this. “The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual. … The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.”  
  AUDIO 5
 Helena is forced to cope with her mother’s pending operation, and she does this by escaping into her fantasy world. The doppleganger's actions give her insight into her own behavior. The Mirrormask acts as a portal between the conscious and unconscious worlds as well as a charm, a tool for controlling the shadow. In Jungian psychology, which admittedly is no longer the height of psychiatry, the shadow refers to aspects of oneself that are hidden in the unconscious. This shadow can surface and cause uncharacteristic behavior either in the short-term or long-term. He once said “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”  
  In the film, we see that these shadows – physical shadows, not figurative or psychological shadows – are slowly devouring the fantasy world. There is no more balance, and without balance, there is chaos. The doppleganger, this figurative shadow does not only physically resemble Helena. For everything that she is, the shadow is the opposite. Helena creates art. The shadow destroys it. Helena’s moral challenge is not simply defeating the shadow but rather absorbing it, owning it and being conscious of how it affects her behavior, like, say, lashing out against her mother. In psychology, the shadow is not so much the enemy as it is part of oneself. It cannot be vanquished, but a truce can be reached, much like Helena reaches with her mother. The White Queen represents Helena's desire to protect her sick mother, and the Black Queen is Helena's fear of being subservient to her. Helena's search is inward, a search of discovery.    
  AUDIO 6
  Everyone in the fantasy world wears masks, but she does not. She shows herself. Valentine asks Helena, “How do you know if you’re happy or sad without a mask?” Helena's life in the real world is full of masks, not just physical masks in the circus but the feeling of having to be phony to the audience, to pretend to be happy to her parents, always the performer in one way or another, not having a life outside the circus or real friends. The Mirrormask is different. It forces the shadow to look at itself. When the real Helena – the self, the ego – wears the Mirrormask, the shadow is kept within the shadow world, and when the shadow Helena wears it, the ego Helena is trapped. This disharmony is unacceptable and makes both the shadow Helena and the ego Helena miserable. A compromise between the conscious and unconscious must be made, and they do, and Helena is better for it in the end.    

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AUDIO 7  

Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian psychoanalyst, wrote that fairy tales help one understand the collective unconscious, a Jungian concept. According to her, unlike myths, fairy tales are not layered with cultural, national, or religious meaning. She said  “Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes...Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolic pictures and events and is discoverable in these.”   
  Mirrormask draws upon other fairy tales – like Sleeping Beauty in this scene – but it creates a mythos all its own. A world of masks both literal and figurative, of real and unreal, of light and shadow.