Passing Notes On Dark Nights

Dear Felicia
Yesterday when I went to the movie theater, noticing the difference in size between movie theaters in the city and the gargantuan cultural monuments that lie in the center of suburban towns, I stood in line for batman witnessing the congregations that take place to the experiential laboratory of real citizens. Grandfather and grand daughter waiting in line for her first movie-going experience, a mom wearing a fanny pack staring out at the parking lot collecting her family from the shores of the theater entrance, little old ladies with purses full of newspaper-clipped coupons, contemplating friendship and the past awaiting their conditioning into the present world.
In Social Science Survey, my senior year of high school, I remember examining sitcoms through the decades that pumped the particular family values of the times into the collective subconscious of the American public. Yesterday, going into Batman, I pondered the significance of re-introducing a brand name such as Batman or Indiana Jones into the public consciousness, and what that might mean to present day citizens. For one thing, the brand name is more profitable because there is a legacy, and therefore a predisposed interest. But more than that, the characters, whether or not the same characters, they appear to be and are thus closer to the archetypes we have already constructed for ourselves concerning the hero and the villain. It is in this that the subconscious is most potently penetrated and altered without our conscious knowing, if we so treat the cinema, this entertainment which we consume without apprehensions, as a break from the familiarity of our real lives in order to rendezvous with the familiarity of our imaginary ones.
Walking into the theater, the lights had already dimmed and begun playing the previews; I sat down in my chair 8 rows in front of the projection screen that spanned the majority of my viewing lens, coupled with surround sound that ensconced me in my seat from all directions. As if I was slowly being oven-cooked on timer, two and a half hours until the lights come back on and I emerge into the real world, a new bird.
The last preview to come on before the Dark Night began was “THE END…(trailer scene flashing)…IS NOW…(more scenes flashing)…TERMINATOR 4 with CHRISTIAN BALE…(Apocalyptic scenes of the machine war fastest flashing to trailer climax)…ARE YOU READY?”
The Dark Night begins with the scene of the Joker manipulating a group of burglars while robbing a bank, killing them all off as well as a bank clerk, and taking all the money for himself. His next appearance, in a conference between the mafia and the black gangs, Joker prances in and proposes that cops are cracking down on crime because of the new Vigilante hero, Batman, who has decided the systems of control weren’t effective enough and taken control into his own hands, has bred equally mystifying and theatrical opposition. “Why would I want to kill you? I love you. You created me. You complete me.” The joker whispers to Batman in an interrogation room, “I don’t plan, I just do whatever comes to me. I’m here to show all of you what happens when you try to control what you can’t control.”
The Joker reacts to the scenes as if they were a play, getting off on the unpredictable, the surprising, reacting to Batman’s extravagant heroism with an equally extravagant portrayal of the villain. “Just play the game with me,” he says.
Standing in an underground warehouse in front of a pyramid of cash, the Joker’s lackies douse the pile in gasoline and light the place up to the grave dismay of the Hispanic gang-leader to whom the Joker stares in the face and says, “This is my city. All you care about is money. I just want to see the world burn.”
The most evil of villains have no motives of money, of power, no personal motives of any kind, but simply the curiosity of seeing how far they can push the world, what sort of madness that can become of them in the face of the world, and what more madness that causes them to project. Throughout the course of the movie, The Joker’s twisted actions become more reasonable, and we begin to emphasize. At the credits, Batman is more of a villain than anyone else, very understandably because he began the game. For the rivalry between the Joker and Batman is a product of what happens when you make a play of the world.
In our real lives, which I believe are now more than ever driven by the media we consume, we see the excitement in real life between the guise of the imaginary worlds we are immersed in and the characters we’ve become in our own minds. The imaginary has been disregarded as imaginary for so long, just as the concept of the unconscious has become so classically accepted, that we disregard the lack of disparity between what real life appears to be and what in our imagination is driving and constructing the real world, to which we relate all other worlds, real or imagined.
Mothers in fanny packs ushering together her kids watches Desperate Housewives and knows, “this is not my life, because I can see the differences.” On the surface level, this is not her life, because she is subconsciously scheming away from that life, because she has seen it and made the comparison. There is, however, something intriguing about that life that finds its way to the surface. In learning how not to think, we learn how to think. In learning what to avoid and what’s most useful for personal goals, we learn what to believe.
In the past, belief systems were constructed out of necessity for political and economic control. Such as, my tribe needs to do business with this merchant who is directed by this empire, I should practice this system of beliefs because it benefits my tribes wellbeing. Heath Ledger needed to become the Joker for his job, to believe what he believes to get inside of the characters head. To get inside such a character, I would imagine, would cause any good actor some inner turmoil, an attack of conscience that could very easily make God crash down and some itchy pieces of identity to be unearthed, that once unearthed could never fully be repressed. The idea that this struggle caused Heath Ledger to kill himself brings us as an audience closer to the character.
This is because all celebrities are characters of characters that we can relate with. The characters they play in the movies are how we experience them in our real lives, but are backed by the fact that they are played by real people, who we might be able to come across in the real world. When a part an actor plays causes the actor to die in his real life, his performance of the part that killed him affects us on a more real level because the character in the movie extends out of the imaginary world into the real world. This plays into how we consume this media.
Because we can love Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You, and see his career take off, then watch his greatest performance as the Joker and still love him, and then know that he killed himself, it becomes not the real life of Heath Ledger that affects us, but the life of his characters which is more real. We know the actors as real people, but the characters are how we learn and know them as real people. On screen, we understand we are looking at an imaginary world, but when we go home and watch Entertainment Tonight, we make the distinction that the actors have real lives and screen lives, but we cannot distinguish between who they are on screen and who they are in the real world. This makes the imaginary world on screen more real to us.
This correlates with what we see on our television screens in the news. We have come to expect a certain amount of entertainment from the real world, because we experience the real world in relation to the imaginary world. In office now, we’ve got the villain, the character George Bush constructed as the Big Dumb Idiot who has reeked havoc, who because we have been brought to believe is affecting our real lives, deserves an equal rival, a character to save us from the tyranny in our real life. Barack Obama is that character. In this play we call politics, tension has been mounting and we yearn for climax, for the opposing forces to meet, to cause a riot of reconciliation. But what that riot entails is left to the forces of chance, to the forces of our unconscious. Because we are conditioned to viewing the imaginary world with a particular eye, we are apt to expect the same from the real world. We have our villain and we have our hero. Our media is constructing our expectations, constructing our beliefs, and in doing so constructs the unfolding of the future.
Plato and Aristotle’s call for the need of art criticism was born out of being conscious of what the people need to censor from the masses, to keep our minds in check, so that our world does not fall apart. Over time, criticism has become about criticizing high art, separating the criticism from the information consumed in the daily lives of normal people. Criticism does not concern itself with art that does not live up to a certain standard or time period, therefore the information that is truly affecting the workings of the real world gets lost. This is not to say that we’ve done something wrong. There’s really no use in dwelling on that. It is perhaps useful to deconstruct how the real world is conducted in the face of popular culture. How the imaginary world that we do not choose to apprehend as anything other than imaginary actually plays into the conduct of our own characters in our real lives. How the imaginary and real roles of characters we relate with affect how we view our own character.
The World has become a play. The archetypes change gradually over time in the subtle underlying forces of our own character’s actions. We go into the theaters and lock into our news stations to learn what our world is and come out ready to be a player in that world. In lieu of our country’s political standings, out of concern for the tragedy seen in both real and imaginary worlds and their interplay, we construct our beliefs about who we are, what our purpose is, what we need to do in this world; what part we play. As the Joker shows in the new Batman, Chaos can finally overcome control when you play hero and villain games on the stage of the world. Life as we know it now, life which has always been changing anyway, will quickly turn itself on its ear, because we have all become characters in an imaginary storyline, simply reacting to what we have to react to. Real life resembles a story, so we act on what we know about stories, and chaos ensues.
Control dies because the individual can only do whatever he feels is necessary to do. Life becomes the playing out of chaos, which constructs all, which there was never any use in trying to control. In a culture so used to feeling secure, feeling comforted in passing the control off to higher powers and not submitting to the unpredictability of chaos; were the control to break down, the chaos would appear even more chaotic because its happening in the real world and in comparison to the way real life has been constructed in the imaginary world. For me, this will be the end of life, as we know it; but I believe our media is prepping us.

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July 22, 2008

Dear Matthew,

I’m glad I finally read your letter tonight, I’m all wired off of the coffee we made earlier… you left my house about 45 minutes ago and I’m still awake and your words are directing my scattered thoughts.
Our media is indeed prepping us – and in turn that means that we are prepping ourselves. We are the creators, we are the audience, and we are the critics. Our imaginary worlds in virtual reality and the real world are one and the same – we learn about ourselves from both, simultaneously. The imaginary is the virtual, the imaginary is the real. The virtual tells us how we think about the chaos presented to us, and the real shows us what tools we can use. And always vice versa. The virtual and the real are both chaotic entities that are used for a common unit of understanding. It is here where I have began to realize in the time we’ve spent talking together that you are a man who speaks of what may come, what the future holds, and what we, as humanity, is leading towards. As I came to recognize this I began to see that I speak of the compressed moment, of here, of now, of seeing it all at our fingertips, in this life, today, at the moment I am typing this, and also at the time you are reading this. This is what I have constructed to understand – this is how I control the chaos, with these words, describing you describing me, understanding what parts we play in this particular discussion. We play the same parts, bouncing off of each other, balancing each other out amidst the chaos that we have come to know, have always known.
I also know our parts are constantly evolving into different characters, which is why we never get sick of the reality of the virtual or the virtual reality, because we are always finding new things, seeing new characters, interacting with them and seeing ourselves in them completely – the chaos of culture, in all it’s costumes, is the factor that pushes evolution. There are extremes, heroes and villains, but that is because it is the only way we know how to understand ourselves. We see each other and everyone around us in exaggerated form – it is the only way we can begin to understand the superficial, i.e. cultural, parts of ourselves. Batman is the joker, and the joker is Batman, evil and good combined in one film – that is the only way humans can comprehend the contradictions within their own souls, by seeing a split, by recognizing a difference between two characters – and it is the difference and understanding the symbolism of the difference when the contradictions come to a chaotic ease… in the recognition of one sole unit called the soul.
Heath Ledger is totally dreamy and I can’t wait to see the movie… for many reasons, but mostly because I’ve been in love with Heath Ledger since I was fourteen.
The subconscious and the unconscious are funny things. Now I think that I don’t care about them or understanding the forces at work there – that always leads to wanting power and control in the conscious mind, and leads to failure surely just because you can’t fully go back in time, you can only go back in time halfway … cultural studies leads me back to psychoanalysis all the time, but the true part for me is the journey through my own reality rather than finding the reasons why that reality has been created. (Think about Einstein, he would be opposite of this, he went back into time and only got halfway and then ended up controlling a large bit of historical chaos. That’s cool. I don’t want to do anything like that, I like the way things are, usually). Psychoanalysis and physics never match up to actuality, at least for me, there’s always like ten different parts missing… definitely a great source of intrigue, but sometimes I’d rather enjoy the ride with a good heart rather than a sound mind. I can say Heath Ledger is totally dreamy and all the psychoanalysis and the physics will be there inside of it anyway, but first I have to say that Heath Ledger is totally dreamy. I have to initialize a thought first, before it can be studied. Culture is funny. I’m sleepy and rambling.

Batman. The Joker. Batman is real and the Joker is a figment of Batman’s imagination. Duh. We all begin the game. We are heroes of reality.

The Joker. Batman. The Joker is real and Batman is a figment of the Joker’s imagination.
Duh. We all are villains fighting the ideals of those in power; the “heroes”.

The rest all have to play with and against us just as we play with and against ourselves.


Heath Ledger is still totally dreamy and dreams are destiny in real time. Oh but Val Kilmer was dreamy too in Batman Forever… but that was like totally nine years ago…
or something like that.

Does this make sense? I don’t care.

You write stories, I’ll take notes, we’ll both be entertained, I like your character, I want to kiss you, you are dreamy too, and I’m going to sleep.

I’ll write more tomorrow. I hope this wasn’t supposed to sound like a professional letter or anything.

Yay letters!

I love you.


Yours yours yours,
Felicia