Sunday, February 22, 2009

Trustworthy Historical Fiction: The Documented Novel

Most of us have had the experience of commenting to our friends about a movie, "Well, it was pretty good, but it wasn't as good as the book." Or sometimes we read historical fiction or see a movie based on a historical event and come away disappointed that the work played fast and loose with the known historical facts. Such experiences give the knowledgable reader or movie-goer a feeling of helplessness ("Why can't they get it right for once!") and increases one's skepticism about the entire genre of historical fiction. How can we trust what we read or see in movies?

Enter Paul L. Maier, professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University, author of several scholarly books related to the religio-political history of the ancient world, who has created a genre of fiction that he calls the "documented novel." A documented novel can be defined as a work of historical fiction which includes notes directing the reader to the primary source material which corroborates the validity of the character or plot development.

In three novels about Christian history, Maier has employed footnotes to document the validity of his plot developments in much the same way that historians document their sources to ensure academic honesty and facilitate further research. Maier states in the preface to The Flames of Rome, "I have not tampered with known facts in retelling [the story]--unlike almost all historical novelists--nor invented characters that could never match the kind who actually lived in this era. The factual undergirding is documented in the Notes, some of which unveil new historical data."

In his devotion to historical fact, Maier has adopted three rules. First, all characters in the book are actual persons whose names appear in the written records of the era. Second, unless by an unintended error on his own part, the actions of persons (characters) in the book accord with the historical record of those deeds. Third, where evidence is lacking in the historical record, Maier, like any historian, makes an informed decision (an educated guess, if you will), which can be inferred from the facts on record.

One good example would be the reconstruction of the trial of Paul of Tarsus in The Flames of Rome, to which Maier accords a five-paragraph explanation in his Notes, saying, "On the basis of all scraps of evidence in the prison epistles (the above passages in which Paul looks forward to a positive resolution of his case), the political situation in both Palestine and Rome, and the known court procedure in appeals to the emperor, I have endeavored to reconstruct the trial as set forth in the text." Readers can make their own determination, as they do with all historical writing, as to whether the reconstruction holds water.

Maier has written three novels in this genre: Pontius Pilate (1968), The Flames of Rome (1981), and the best-selling novel A Skeleton in God's Closet (1993).

His sources include primary materials such as the writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Livy, Josephus, Juvenal, Lucan, Lucian, Marital, Pliny, Plutarch, Seneca, Strabo, and Christian ancients such as Clement of Rome, Luke, Paul, Peter, Tertullian, and others. This is an enormous aid to the reader who might not otherwise know where to begin to track down features of the story in the works of the ancients.

Maier's expose of the distortions in novelist Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code was included in the well-known DVD The DaVinci Delusion, hosted by D. James Kennedy, Ph.D. His comments in that debate boost his credentials as a historian who values the fiction writer's devotion to historical accuracy--and one who is able and willing to expose nonsense masquerading as historically supported fiction when necessary. Unlike the rest of us, as a historian who deals with this source material on a daily basis, Dr. Maier has the ability to flip pages in Dan Brown's face, so to speak, in order to nail down his defense of historical accuracy.

Dr. Maier's documented novels are also a remarkable assist to students who become confused by all the different voices in the marketplace. How can one know whom to trust? Oh, that all writers of historical fiction would so document their work! Dr. Maier, do you have students who are willing to carry on this tradition in the twenty-first century?
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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Bibliography

  • Williams, Charles. The Greater Trumps. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950.

A special thanks also to the following people, who shared their information and insights with me as I strove to understand what was happening in this movie: my son, Tom Roesler; my students, Elliott K., Jack K., Kara H., Wesley N., and Michael S.; my colleague, Michael Witherspoon; and Pastor George Granberry, Heartland Community Church, Wichita, KS. I greatly appreciate the comments and insights of each of them, but any misperceptions of Scripture that may appear are solely my own.
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Part IV: Man

  • Satan has vowed to avenge himself against God by destroying God’s Creation, and though he might be delighted to destroy any aspect of Creation, he particularly delights in corrupting man. “Your adversary the devil,” Peter said, “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him” (I Pet. 5:8-9a). Peter was writing to Jewish Christians (“elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia”) and probably pagan converts as well, but the situation he explains is not unique to them. “Resist him, firm in your faith,” he continues, “knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world” (5:9) and, arguably, throughout time as well, as the ancient conflict resounds through the centuries and ultimately to the edge of Doom.

  • If in an allegorical sense Batman represents Christ and the Joker represents Satan, who, then, represents Man? Though the citizens of Gotham City display biblically accurate portrayals of Man, humankind is primarily represented in The Dark Knight through Harvey Dent, the newly elected district attorney in Gotham City. The story of Harvey Dent is best approached chronologically. When we first meet Dent, he is giving a news conference which references his desire to bring the criminal element of the city under control. He then retires to a meeting with Lt. Gordon in which the audience learns that Gordon, unlike Dent, knows the identity of the Batman. As time passes, mob violence continues to spiral in the city, and though the audience knows full well the level of Evil the Batman is fighting, the citizens think he fights only “against flesh and blood,” which in their mind amounts to a more limited evil, what we typically call crime. The citizens express their dismay that the Batman is not producing the results they desire as fast as they would like and, worse, that the level of violence has been ratcheted up. This aspect of Man’s character is summed up well in the complaint of Habakkuk:
    • O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?
    • Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?
    • Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?
    • Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.
    • So the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth.
    • For the wicked surround the righteous; so justice goes forth perverted (1:2-8).

  • Upset and fearful, the citizens put pressure on Dent to expose the Batman, on whom they wish to place blame; the theater audience, however, knows that the real reason for the increase in violence has been the introduction of the Joker into the equation. Though Dent does not know the identity of the Batman, he has come to trust him, primarily by learning to trust his girlfriend, Rachel, and fellow city employee, Lt. Gordon, both of whom vouch for the sincerity of the Batman.

  • Thus, at a news conference organized to call for the Batman to reveal himself and answer to the citizens for what they perceive as his limitations, Dent, martyr-like, says to the crowd and the television camera, “I am the Batman.” He allows himself to be handcuffed and led off in much the same way that Paul willingly submitted to imprisonment in the cause of Christ.

  • Though it would not be correct to say that Paul ever claimed, “I am the Christ,” there is evidence that he accepted imprisonment in Christ’s name. This story is recorded in Acts 16, where Luke writes that Paul and Silas were once jailed for driving a demon out of a girl by calling upon the name of Jesus. The power of Jesus being incorrectly attributed to Paul and Silas, the two were arrested and imprisoned. They accepted their confinement without complaint, even remaining in jail voluntarily when they could have escaped after an earthquake brought the jail walls down around them (Acts 16:25-28). Thus, like Paul and Silas, Dent accepts the misplaced condemnation of the citizens and is led off willingly to jail.

  • Secondly, Harvey Dent can be said to represent what people of the Middle Ages called Everyman in that, like all human beings, Dent has a fallen nature, which gives him the propensity to sin and the ability to turn against God. In short, Dent is capable of both good and evil, a capacity which can be traced back to the Garden where the Man and the Woman were told by the Deceiver to go ahead and eat the forbidden fruit. “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4-5). The idea that Man has two faces (good and evil) is clearly stated in the movie. Early in the movie, we find that Dent, in his role as “Gotham City’s white knight,” often “makes his own luck” by flipping a coin to see which choice he should make. We eventually learn that his coin has two heads (two faces, if you will).

  • In his role as the white knight, both of the faces represent Dent’s goodness. The coin does not have a side that might be called “tails.” But later in the movie, as a result of the explosion caused by the Joker, one of the faces of the coin becomes so scratched up that it is clearly different from the side of the coin that represents “heads.” The change in the coin parallels the physical and spiritual change in Harvey Dent, a change which emerges from the most horrific event of the film.

  • Here is how it plays out: Set free from arrest through the agency of the Batman, Dent is driven off supposedly to meet Rachel. However, we later learn that the Joker has arranged for both Dent and Rachel to be driven off by officers whom he has corrupted into his service. The two are isolated from each other and tied to barrels of oil which will ignite upon the Joker’s signal. They manage by means of cell phone to communicate with each other at which time the audience learns that only one of them will be saved. Naturally assuming that Batman will come to the rescue of Rachel (a modern-day damsel in distress), Dent decides to take his fate into his own hands. Attempting to escape, Dent tips his chair over, spilling a barrel of oil as well. As the oil leaks out, Dent’s body and face become completely soaked. Therefore, when Batman does arrive to save him, an explosion is triggered, and the left side of Dent’s face, now soaked in gasoline, burns almost completely away. As he lies in the hospital, he reminds Lt. Gordon that the officers in the precinct used to call him by the nickname Harvey Two-Face. At this point in time, he most certainly is “two-faced.” So what does it mean, Scripturally speaking, to be a Harvey Two-Face? The two faces of man are expressed in Scripture as the image of God and the image of “the man of dust” (1 Cor. 15:49). At the moment of humankind’s Creation, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). In this way, humans have at least a reflection of glory, specifically the glory of the Creator who spoke them into existence. But after the fall, Man received the curse of Adam, the man of dust: “[F]or you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 1:19b).

  • These, then, are the two faces of Harvey Dent—one of God, one of Adam. These are the two faces of Everyman. In his fallen state, Man, try as he might, is not able to rid himself of Satan’s grip. He is saved only by the grace of God. “For by grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul wrote. “And this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). Still, Harvey tries to set things aright himself—first, in the warehouse where he tries to outwit the Joker by escaping, later in the hospital where he buys into the world-view of the Joker.

  • It is worth noticing before moving on that it is the Satan-figure, not the Christ-figure, who offers a sort of salvation by works. In his move against the mob, he has brought two mobsters to their knees. He breaks a pool cue in half. Cajoling them to join his team, he says he only has an opening for one of them. “So we’re gonna have try-outs,” he says, throwing each of them one part of the cue. Though the camera cuts away, we assume that the two fought to the death of one of them. This helps us understand why God avoids a works-based plan for salvation. Not only boasting, but mayhem could result—an outcome more suited for Satan and his gang of thugs.

  • The other scene in which Harvey tries to take things into his own hands is the hospital scene, which is actually set up quite early in the movie when Harvey says, “You either die young, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”—prophetic words indeed as Dent himself becomes the villain after he is visited in the hospital by the Joker. In that hospital scene, the Joker turns Dent by persuading him that the people he serves are not worthy of his sacrifice. “They need you now,” he observes, “but when they don’t, they’ll kick you out. These ‘civilized’ people will eat each other. It’s the only sensible thing to do.”

  • And so Dent accepts the Joker’s dog-eat-dog interpretation of the world and sets out to exact vengeance on Lt. Gordon, whom he blames for Rachel’s death. But let us not forget the major premise of any argument involving Satan: he is a liar and the father of lies. Thus we see that the dog-eat-dog interpretation of Man is not completely borne out in the movie. The condemned prisoners in one ferry do not pull the trigger on the uncondemned in the other ferry. Likewise, the uncondemned do not pull the trigger on the condemned. In an unexpected act of restraint, both disappoint the Joker, calling up the reflected glory of God in whose image they were created. However, unlike the passengers on the ferries, Harvey has bought the lie. In his effort to exact revenge on Lt. Gordon, whom he blames for the death of Rachel and for his own disfigurement, he kills five people, including himself. He is a dog who eats dogs: Detective Wuertz, Maroni’s driver, Maroni (in the accident that results from the death of the driver), another “cop” (perhaps Ramirez?), and himself (though I hasten to add that many speculate Two-Face will rise anew in a subsequent movie). He is, in the end, unable to effect his plan, for he has decided to depend on himself, not on a higher authority. As Paul might explain it, he has not crucified his “old self” (Romans 6:6); he decides to go it alone—and, of course, does not succeed.

  • Though Harvey Dent is the primary representative of Man in the story, other characters reveal behavior typical of the human race. One common feature of everyday life is that, if they think about him at all, people tend to minimize the power of Satan. Many do not even consider Satan as a player in the events of their lives. This sentiment was expressed in the movie The Usual Suspects in this famous line: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.” We see this idea played out in The Dark Knight in the character of the mob boss, Salvatore Maroni, or “Sali,” as he is called in the movie. Realizing that some of his gangsters have become alarmed at the Joker’s activity, Maroni minimizes the threat posed by the Joker, telling his men, “He’s a nobody.”

  • However, as the movie progresses, even the mob boss comes to realize that the success of the police in capturing the Joker is more important to him than his own conflicts with the police. Thus it is that he is willing to tell Lt. Gordon where the Joker and his men are holed up. What causes a mobster like Sali to regard the police as an ally for a change? Normally this switch in alliance is effected by a life crisis of some kind. In literature and film, the antagonist has some kind of encounter with the protagonist, in which the protagonist is shown convincingly to be superior. A playground bully, for example, is sometimes forced to back down when a “regular kid,” so to speak, finally gets the courage to stand up to him, perhaps just by sticking up for someone verbally, perhaps by a tussle in the playground after school. The result is that the bully backs down and no longer poses a threat. In the movie, Sal Maroni represents this playground bully.

  • In one key scene, Maroni is engaged in a confrontation with the Batman on an overhang one or two storeys above ground. To prove his point, Batman lets go of Maroni, who then tumbles to the street, his fall broken by an awning. Batman’s one rule is that he will not kill anyone, and certainly he would have realized that a drop of but one storey with an awning, to boot, would not cause death. Some reviewers have wondered why it is that the protagonist (Batman) would be guilty of such an attack, but the Batman’s decision to drop Sali is not at all surprising if one recalls that the God of wrath who is depicted in the Old Testament is still a God of wrath in the New Testament. It is easy for those who know what Jesus did on the Cross to forget that God’s nature as a God of wrath has not changed toward the unbeliever. In Psalm 110, the psalmist says, “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses” (v. 6a). From Jeremiah we learn that the Lord, angered at King Zedekiah and his followers, intoned, “I will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a reproach, a byword, a taunt, and a curse in all the places where I shall drive them. And I will send sword, famine, and pestilence upon them, until they shall be utterly destroyed from the land that I gave to them and their fathers” (24:9-10). God is not a candidate for political office who kisses babies and glad-hands potential voters. He is a jealous God, full of wrath for those who devote themselves to Satan. And Batman’s attack on Sali is best understood in this way.

  • Christian author and editor Matt Kauffman may have missed the point in his commentary on the movie when, after discussing the evil acts of the Joker, he added, “And then there's Batman himself, who crosses ever more ethical lines in his drive to stop the Joker. He won't kill, but he’ll do almost anything else to achieve his goals. He throws a mobster off a ledge, purposely breaking his legs.” If the character called Batman in the movie is just a man in a souped-up costume, then, yes, it would be logical to conclude that the protagonist had placed himself in a morally precarious position. However, if one views the Batman as a symbol of the Christ, a more likely interpretation of this scene would grow out of 2 Corinthians 5:21, which says that God caused Jesus “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” [emphasis mine].

  • It is important to note here that I do not argue that the man Bruce Wayne can take on anyone else’s sin. I merely argue that, viewing the movie allegorically, we see that this scene echoes Paul’s explanation of what Jesus became for our sake. This perception is underscored by Bruce Wayne’s earlier statement, “I’ve seen what I have to become to defeat the Joker, and I can’t do that.” Does the statement, “I can’t do that” negate the symbolism of Bruce Wayne as the Christ-figure? No, because even Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane cried out to God to “remove this cup from me” (Mark 36:6).

  • Though some may turn to the Tarot cards and others to the Tao to find the answers to life’s greatest mysteries, a true understanding, one which accounts for all loose ends, is found in Scripture. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” the skeptic asks. Can something so weighed down with centuries of saccharine treatments teach us anything about pure evil, let alone crush it? The answer, it turns out, is yes. It is in the writings of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, Peter, and John—as well as in the direct teachings of Jesus—that the conflict portrayed in The Dark Knight is best understood. It is the age-old conflict between God and Satan that informs the movie and helps us to see that the red-costumed devil of the Saturday morning cartoons is not the force of evil in the cosmos. To understand that level of evil, we must view Christopher and John Nolan’s perception of evil as they wrote it and actor Heath Ledger portrayed it in The Dark Knight—unresponsive to reason, unfocused, unrelenting, and unconquerable by mere human strength.

  • Whether the Nolans intended to make a clear exposition of the gospel message in this film or not, they did so. After all, as C. S. Lewis says, a teaching that is the truest of true things in the universe will show up in all philosophies. The New Age authors may try to account for an isolated feature here and there, but to understand what is going on in this movie, one must turn to the Bible. In 152 minutes of film, those who now look through the glass darkly will be able to see the truth about good and evil that blazes from Scripture.
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Part III: The Antagonists

  • The similarities between the Christ and the Batman are one thing. To a certain extent, it might be argued, most “good guys” (including the anti-hero of the late twentieth century) are oriented toward “good” as it is defined in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But what about Satan and the antagonist? Does that analogy hold water? To answer that, let’s take a look now at Satan (the Adversary) and the Joker as the actor, Heath Ledger, played him.

  • First of all, let us examine what the Scripture says about the Adversary. Perhaps the primal characteristic of Satan was revealed by Jesus himself in a conversation with the Pharisees: "When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). To what extent was the Joker, then, "a liar and the father of lies"? Almost everything uttered by the Joker is a deception of some kind, a trait revealed in the opening scene of The Dark Knight, the bank heist. In this scene, we see that each bank robber has believed that he has a special relationship with the Joker. How important each must have felt upon receiving instructions to kill the one ahead of him. Surely this was a sign of his own security. Yet, each of the robbers has stupidly believed the lie he has been told and does not realize that he, too, is on someone’s hit list until at the end of the scene all of those who had believed have been betrayed and murdered by the one who led them to believe, who drives off alone in a school bus.

  • But the lies do not end there. The Joker presents two completely different stories regarding the origin of his scars: one that they were given to him "by my Father" and the other that they were self-inflicted to please a scarred woman, who thanked him by considering him repulsive. Interestingly, if one considers the spiritual paradigm in the movie, there could actually be a kernel of truth in these assertions. Lucifer was certainly marked by God, his Creator, his Father, in that when he fell, he lost his capacity for light. He is marked by darkness for eternity. In Revelation 12, where we learn the details of Lucifer’s fall, we see that after he was expelled from heaven, "he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child" (Rev. 12: 13), an obvious reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

  • Though medieval Catholicism introduced teachings that Mary, like Jesus, never sinned, Scripture teaches that "all have sinned" (Romans 3:23). Therefore, Mary also has her scar, but the self-inflicted scar of Satan does not attract her; it repulses her. John writes, "But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness.…" Spurned, "the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring" (Rev. 12:14-17). But whether or not one accepts the analogy with Revelation 12, certainly the two different stories the Joker tells about his scars show that what he says can never be fully trusted.

  • This propensity to lie is shown even more dramatically in the plan he laid for the destruction of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal). When the Joker reveals the two separate places where he has bound each of these characters to barrels of oil which will ignite and send them to a fiery death, he lies about the location of each. As a result, the Batman, attempting to save Rachel, finds himself at Harvey’s location while Lt. Gordon (played by Gary Oldman), who lacks the power of Batman, arrives at Rachel’s location too late. Because the Joker lied, she dies.
  • Secondly, the Joker taunts Harvey Dent, ridiculing him for being a planner, a "schemer." Where, he asks, have all the schemes led Dent, who lies burned in the hospital? By way of contrast, the Joker seeks to cast himself as Dent’s opposite. He expresses delight in people’s responses when someone chooses to "introduce a little anarchy" into the civilized order. "I’m an engine of Chaos," he boasts. It is true that the Bible associates Chaos with Satan. James, the brother of Jesus, clearly associated disorder with Satan by writing to "the twelve tribes in the Dispersion" that they should seek wisdom from above, not from the "earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice" (James 3:13-17). Chaos and cruelty—the chief characteristics of the Joker.

  • Yet, it is true that the Joker desires Chaos, but only, it turns out, for others. For himself, he plans. His many schemes required, if they were to be successful, the split-second timing of a Master Planner. Here are a few examples:(a) the bank heist, (b) the murder of each bank robber at the hands of another, (c) the Joker’s escape from the bank in a school bus which (with split-second timing) crashes backwards into the bank to collect the Joker, (d) the careful orchestration of the kidnapping and murders of Harvey and Rachel, (e) the carefully planned murders of the judge and the police commissioner, (f) the plot to kill the mayor, (g) the telephone/trigger sewn into the belly of one of his cohorts, (h) the plot to blow up the hospital, (i) the well-laid plan to coerce the cooperation of a police officer by finding the one officer who has a relative in that hospital, (j) the planting of explosives on two separate boats, one ferrying convicts (the condemned) to their prison, the other conveying (ark-like) those who have not merited death. Therefore, though he lauds himself as the king of Chaos, he is, in fact, a planner, a schemer of destruction.

  • The ten schemes listed here once again drive home Paul’s counsel: "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil" (Eph. 6:11). Regarding all of this planning, blogger Jason Sears analyzed the Joker’s behavior in the context of Taoism, beginning with this quotation from Tao Te Ching (translated by S. Mitchell): "The [Tao] Master leads by emptying people’s minds and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition and toughening their resolve. He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know. Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place." Sears then makes this assessment of the Joker’s problem: "The Joker does not practice non-doing," he laments, "not at all. He, rather, chooses force. He forces people to choose between life and death, good and bad, heart and mind," he says, concluding, "Nothing will ever fall into place if you find yourself forcing things to happen. Tao is the key to unlocking the understanding of truth, and if the Joker realized this, he might become more beneficent than Batman himself."

  • Though interesting, this neo-pagan interpretation of the Joker’s character fails to take into account that the Joker is not simply a man with a problem. Viewing him as a Satan-figure, a fallen angel with a mission, if you will, reinforces the point that forcing people to do his will is the Joker’s sine qua non. Without that motivation, he has no reason to exist, as we learn when the Joker freely admits to Batman, "I need you," more of which anon.

  • The third way in which the Joker represents Satan is that, through their contempt for human beings, both at times manifest an unfocused evil. The Joker shows loyalty to no one, not even to those who decide to trust him. What’s more, he is an equal opportunity deceiver. Again and again, we see that those who follow him, perhaps representing the fallen angels who were cast out of heaven with him, include both genders and various ethnic groups: Anglos, Hispanics, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Asians. He is loyal to none of them. He seduces and destroys those who serve him. And he laughs at them, one of the chief characteristics that Ledger said he hoped to get right in his depiction of the Joker.
  • It is this lack of focus in the Joker’s evil that leads Alfred to explain that the Joker cannot be reasoned with, appeased, or reined in. He "just wants to watch the world burn." He is the incarnation of Irrational Evil against which, rational man cannot fight without a savior who is stronger than Evil, Batman himself, the Christ.

  • In Scripture, Satan is only one of the post-Fall names for Lucifer. The other is devil, which derives from the Greek word, diabolos, accuser. Thus, one name, Satan, means Adversary while the other name, Devil, means Accuser. Adversary and Accuser—these certainly are two of the chief attributes of the fallen Lucifer. Adversary to God and Man, he tempts humankind to its destruction, and once a man or woman takes the bait, the Accuser runs to God and tattles. In Revelation, we discover that at the end of time, souls in heaven exclaim, "Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God" (Rev. 12:10).

  • As it was with the fallen Lucifer, two of the chief roles of the Joker are to serve as an ever-present adversary and an unrelenting accuser. His role as the adversary of the people of Gotham City, Harvey Dent, and Batman himself goes without saying, but his role as accuser appears as well. "You let five people die, and you let Harvey take the blame. Even by my standards, that’s cold," the Joker tells the Batman. You did it. You did it. You did it. "I didn’t do it," he tells Lt. Gordon. "I was here [in lock-up]."

  • Like many false gods, Satan is also a shape-shifter. He first appears in Scripture in the guise of a serpent, a serpent whose legs have not yet withered into the vestigial state that can now be seen, the biologists say, in the dissection of a snake. And so, like Satan, the Joker, too, is a shape-shifter. The snake symbolism appears in Ledger’s decision to employ the striking tongue of the snake as a characteristic of the Joker. Additionally, he appears at various times as a police officer in the plot to kill the mayor and as a nurse in the plot to blow up the hospital. When arrested, he has nothing which the police can use to determine who he is—no identification, no name, no habitation—not even a tailor whose records could be searched.

  • But, of course, the primary appearance of the Joker resides in the joker disguise itself, an image familiar to anyone with a deck of playing cards.Why a joker? Is there any sense in which the joker of the playing cards bears any resemblance to the dark powers of the occult? Though diverse origins are ascribed to the joker of the playing cards, most writers indicate a connection to the Fool of the Tarot cards. A. E. Waite, an occultist of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) provides a telling description of the Fool, several phrases of which arouse interest. The Fool of the Tarot moves "with light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him," Waite says.

  • Similarly, those on planet earth have little power to restrain Satan, which is exactly the reason Paul writes that we must take up the armor provided by God, "for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places" (Eph. 6:12-13).

  • The Fool "pauses at the brink of a precipice," Waite says, "among the great heights of the world." Similarly, Satan in his temptation of Jesus “took him up” and from the precipice "showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him, 'To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours'" (Luke 4:5-8). The same old lie trussed up in new clothes, but Jesus is not fooled.

  • According to Waite, the Fool "surveys the blue distance before him—its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below." In much the same way, Satan focuses on his role as "Prince of the Power of the Air" and considers not the height from which he has been cast out of heaven and will be thrown down into the lake of fire. For the Fool, Waite writes, "The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height." The Fool believes that angels will hold him up. Certainly Satan relied on the host of fallen angels who threw in their lot with him, but perhaps he, too, is a fool to believe they will hold him up. They seem not to have a good record of loyalty.
    But there is one more aspect of Waite’s description of the Fool that should not go unnoticed: Waite expresses some qualities of the Fool in the subjunctive: "…as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height" [emphasis mine]. Those who have read to the end of the biblical story know there is no if about what happens. Satan will not leap; he will be cast there. "[A]nd the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire…." the apostle writes [emphasis mine] (Rev. 20:10). But, then, calling a push a leap is just one more example of the deception being played out on a grand scale. Just as he was once cast down to earth, he will at the end of time be cast down into hell. Though New Age thinkers may equate the light step of the fair-haired boy with a sunny self-confidence, Paul and John have dug much deeper to see in the Fool’s behavior the pathetic braggadocio of the devil.

  • Postmodern commentator on the Tarot cards Andy Pollett has written, "[W]ith very few exceptions, Joker and Fool cards alone are worth nothing, their paradox power emerging only in the case of a challenge with another card." And, thus it is that the Joker surprises us when he confesses to the Batman, as indicated above, "Kill you? I don’t want to kill you. What would I do without you? You complete me. I need you." He has no power except in the challenge to the Batman. This sentiment directly corresponds to Satan’s mission on earth. He does not wish to kill Jesus, whom, of course, he cannot kill. He simply wishes to remain a menace, tempting, accusing, and murdering. As the Joker would put it, "I just want my phone call." Yet, the two do struggle on that rooftop, the Joker seeming to have the upper hand with Batman, who is bent back over the railing on the edge of the precipice. One last time, the Joker throws out his favorite question, "Do you know how I got these scars?" But this time, he is not addressing a sucker. This time the answer is not what he expects, as the Batman says, "No, but I know how you got these!" upon which he immediately releases the power he has kept in reserve until now, propelling blades into the neck and face of the Joker, causing him to "leap" (translation: fall) from the height. But there are no angels to catch him. It is the Batman who pulls him back up. "I think, my friend," the Joker intones, "we are destined to do this for eternity."

  • Another aspect of the name Joker that identifies the Joker with evil is the issue of laughter. A joker of any kind…jokes. A joke is intended to cause laughter. But there’s the catch. There is more than one kind of laughter. The kind of laughter all people enjoy is the laughter of the joyous spirit. Ecclesiastes 3:4, for example, allows that "there is a time to laugh." This sentiment is behind the popular maxim, "Laughter is good medicine," which echoes the message in Proverbs, "A joyful heart is good medicine" (17:22). But Satan twists God’s teaching to make it his own. Thus, in the chase scene in The Dark Knight, the Joker and his men show up in a circus-themed 18-wheeler which originally had the maxim "Laughter is the best medicine" emblazoned on its side. The Joker has customized this in his usual imitative fashion, having spray painted the letter S in front of the word laughter so that the maxim now reads, "Slaughter is the best medicine."

  • British illustrator and fantasy author Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) once wrote, "There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humor. It is naked noise and naked malice." This well describes the essence of the laugh Heath Ledger mastered when he locked himself away for a month trying to find "a somewhat iconic voice and laugh….more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts"—laughter with the seed of Satan in it, as Peake put it.
  • The concept of the Joker as a laugher leads, then, to the very heart of the story as it is expressed in the Joker’s resounding question, "Why so serious?" The mouth scars of the Joker form a clown’s smile, extending on both sides to the center of the cheeks. They are the distinguishing mark of the Joker in terms of both physical and spiritual character. He explains in one of the tales about the origin of his scars that his father, after attacking his mother with a knife, took a knife to the son, mocking him with what has become the Joker’s primary mantra, "Why so serious! Why so serious!" And then the father carved up his son’s face. Nothing funny. Even the Joker isn’t laughing. But all these years later, the Joker has turned against seriousness. He mocks it. He avenges it.

  • If the Joker is against seriousness, then, we must look for Scripture to see how this element of his character is an affront to God. The phrase sober-minded appears in Scripture seven times. Paul lists it as an important trait of an elder in the church: "sober-minded, self-controlled," and so on (I Tim. 3:2). Even the elder’s wife is to be sober-minded (3:11), and at the end of the epistle, Paul reminds Timothy, a young man, "always to be sober-minded" as he pursues his ministry (4:5). But it is Peter that discusses sober-mindedness in the context of Man’s struggle with Satan: "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (I Pet. 5:8). Why so serious? If, as Peter said, sober-mindedness is paramount to one’s watchfulness against Satan, who then can be surprised that the Joker makes it his mission to demolish seriousness by carving the smile of the Fool, the Clown, the Accuser, the Adversary into the face of Man, the destruction of whom is his only goal?
  • Continued in "Part IV: Man"
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Part II: The Protagonists

  • In what sense can it be said, though, that The Dark Knight is a sort of allegory portraying the struggle between the great protagonist, Jesus Christ, and his ancient antagonist, the fallen angel, Lucifer-cum-Satan? Let’s begin by looking at the ways Bruce Wayne, the Batman (played by Christian Bale), can be called a Christ-figure. For starters, Batman’s followers message him with a powerful searchlight in the sky, a battlefield associated with Christ and Satan in the sense that, on the one hand, heaven is skyward, but, on the other hand, Satan tainted the sky as he fell earthward from heaven, thus earning himself the title “Prince of the Power of the Air” (Eph. 2:2).

  • For another thing, Bruce Wayne reveals his identity as the Batman to only a few close followers, including three men and one woman, a gender mix as in Scripture. Batman's true identity as Bruce Wayne is known by Lt. Gordon, Lucius Fox, and Rachel Dawes; the resurrection of Jesus is known by Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of Jesus, who not only know but take the news of the resurrection to the men (Luke 24:10).

  • Thirdly, Batman has a habit of vanishing from sight just when a confidante is warming to a topic (“He does that,” Lieutenant Gordon explains to Harvey Dent). This, too, Jesus did, as we learn in Luke 24:31 (“…and He vanished from their sight”).

  • Another of their shared characteristics is that neither the Batman nor the Christ is limited by time or space. In the movie, the corrupt Chinese businessman, Lau (played by Chin Han), escapes to his homeland, causing the authorities to lament that the law of Gotham City does not run as far as Hong Kong. But this is no problem for the Batman, who, the Joker points out, has no limits to his jurisdiction. Just as Batman, the Christ-figure, is not limited to Gotham City, Jesus himself is not limited by time and space to first-century Palestine, a fact he makes clear to his followers just before his ascension into heaven (Matthew 28:16-20).

  • Another similarity between the two is that both the Batman and the Christ have imitators. Jesus prophesied, “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many” (Matt. 24:4-5). Quite early on in the movie, we see that false Batmen run all about in Gotham City in imitative—but not-quite-so-cool—costumes. “What’s the difference between you and me?” asks one fake Batman, to which comes Batman’s droll reply, “I’m not wearing hockey pads.”

  • Now, it is hard to say whether Jesus ever used sarcasm to get a point across, but this line is entirely appropriate to a Postmodern audience that thrives on verbal bile. Some have called the line a cheap joke, but it does make the point: the other guy is not the real deal. He is thrown together with whatever he had lying about, hockey pads, in this case, while—like Christ—Bruce Wayne, and only Bruce Wayne, is powerfully and authentically equipped.

  • In addition, we see that the internal qualities of the movie’s hero parallel those of Christ. The first and foremost of these is respect for life. God said, “I have set before you life and death…. Therefore, choose life….” (Deut. 30:19). Similarly, Bruce Wayne chooses to respect life, vowing that his one rule is that he will not kill. Even near the end of the movie when the Joker stands in the middle of the street taunting the Batman to mow him down, Wayne swerves at the last second to avoid what most would deem a justifiable homicide if ever there was one.

  • Next, each of the protagonists is betrayed by someone close to him. In The Dark Knight, Coleman Reese (played by Joshua Harto) asks for $10 million a year to keep quiet his knowledge of Batman’s identity. Though this gets him nowhere, he gets his fifteen minutes of fame by going on the local TV news to expose Batman’s identity to all of Gotham City. This, of course, parallels the story of Judas, the disciple who sold Jesus out to the Sanhedrin for thirty pieces of silver.

  • But despite their greedy ambition, the schemes of Judas—and Coleman Reese—do not end well. Reese has to run for his life when the Joker vows to blow up a hospital if he (Reese) is not killed within the next sixty minutes; Judas hangs himself. One popular topic in Christian discussion circles has long been whether or not Judas could have received forgiveness had he not committed suicide. After all, Jesus did forgive Peter, who had denied knowing him. Apparently, Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who wrote The Dark Knight, would weigh in with a resounding yes, as they show that Bruce Wayne, without the protection of his Batman gear or vehicle, deliberately crashes his Lamborghini into oncoming traffic in order to save the life of the weasel Coleman Reese.

  • Last, both the Batman and the Christ are omnipotent. In the Old Testament, God is often referred to as the Lord God Almighty, a cognomen that appears first in Genesis 17:1 where God introduces himself to Abram. The same title is applied to Christ in Revelation 11:17, which says, “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign” [emphasis mine]. Similarly, in a conversation between Bruce Wayne and Alfred (played by Michael Caine), Wayne reminds a worried Alfred not to fear because “Batman has no limits.” Interestingly, it is just before that line of dialogue that a shirtless Wayne appears with his back to the camera, showing the scars on his back, reminiscent of the “stripes” that Jesus received in his scourging before the crucifixion (Isaiah 53:5; Matt. 27:26). Jesus had no limits. The scourging couldn’t cow him; the grave couldn’t hold him.

  • Closely related to the omnipotence of the Christ is his all-sufficiency. Paul explained to the Corinthians that he suffered from some earthly malady that he described simply as “a thorn in the flesh.” He said he had prayed to be relieved of this chronic ailment. “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me,” Paul wrote. “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:8-9). This all-sufficiency of the Christ appears in The Dark Knight as well. Realizing Harvey Dent (played by Aaron Eckhart) will need funds for his campaign against the Joker, Bruce Wayne decides to throw a fund-raiser for him, promising, “One fundraiser with my pals—you’ll never need another one.” So there it is—the all-sufficiency of the Christ-figure.

  • Continued in "Part III: The Antagonists"
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Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Part I: What Hath Ledger Wrought?

  • On November 28, 2007, an entertainment feature appeared on Yahoo! UK & Ireland stating that, in order to prepare for his role as the Joker in the forthcoming blockbuster movie, The Dark Knight, Australian actor Heath Ledger had “locked himself away for a month while he perfected the maniac laugh,” a key feature of the villain of the Batman legend. The article went on to say that Ledger had “gone all out” in his preparation for the character: He told Empire magazine, "It’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it.

  • "I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts.

  • "He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris (Nolan - the director) has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker [sic] would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke."

  • The bit then concluded with what seemed just two months later to be an ominous clincher: “We can't wait,” the author said, “to see (and hear) the finished results”—ominous because on January 22, 2008, Heath Ledger died as the result of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills that he had taken to drive out the nightmares and anxiety which had plagued him in the weeks following the making of The Dark Knight.

  • Had the writer of the November 2007 article known what was going to happen, he or she might not have entitled the piece, “Ledger Went Bat Crazy Preparing for Joker Role”—funny in 2007, disrespectful now.

  • When I first heard of Ledger’s suicide, like most Americans I pressed my lips together and shook my head, saddened by the news of another young and (apparently) talented young person who had gone wrong in Tinsel Town. But then I heard a comment I had not heard before in stories of this kind: Folks-in-the-know were saying that perhaps Ledger had been pushed over the brink of sanity as a result of the dark world he inhabited as he prepared for and acted out the role of the Joker.

  • This aroused my curiosity because usually the entertainment industry works hard to downplay the effect their often violent and lurid productions have on people. “It’s just a movie,” they normally say, but this time it seemed much more serious (remember that word--serious).

  • When the movie came to town in July, the talk amongst my students on Facebook was that Ledger’s performance had been fantastic, that it was the centerpiece of the movie, that it should earn Ledger a posthumous academy award, and on and on. But it was my thirty-something son who first tipped me off to the underlying Christian theme in the movie. After hearing all these comments, I decided that this was one Batman movie I just had to see.

  • As we entered the theater, one of my students, Jack K., a high school freshman, told me a critic had complained that the movie was twenty minutes too long (I later found the quote on a blog by Darren Barefoot). As I viewed the movie, I kept wondering what it was that a critic wanted taken out—and why. Too many computer-generated crashes? Too much inane dialogue? A slow scene or two that interrupted the constant action of today’s “gotcha-now-don’t-I?” generation of script writers? But it wasn’t till the last twenty minutes of the movie that I actually saw what some might want removed: the approximately twenty-minute dénouement of The Dark Knight is a presentation (intended or not) of the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

  • On the one hand, one might conclude that the month Heath Ledger spent alone in that hotel in London had paid off in the sense that he did, indeed, master his character. On the other hand, it can be argued that in order to achieve the mastery he sought, the actor had to open his mind up to the most “sociopathic” figure in all of literature or history: Lucifer, son of Dawn, portrayed hauntingly in Gustave Dore’s famous illustration for John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, which anticipates the Batman costume by about a hundred years. The story of Lucifer’s rebellion against God is recorded in Isaiah 14:12:

  • How you are fallen from heaven,
O Day Star, son of Dawn!
How you are cut down to the ground,
you who laid the nations low!
You said in your heart,
'I will ascend to heaven;above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.'
But you are brought down to Sheol,
to the far reaches of the pit.

  • (Remember those words: ascend, brought down). More of Lucifer’s story appears in Revelation 12:7-17. Here we learn that Lucifer now has a different name. His original name (or, more appropriately, our translation of his original name) was based on luce, the Latin word for light, but in verse 9 we see his fallen and less glorious name: Satan (based on the Herbrew word ha-Satan, the Adversary).

  • Having been expelled from the realm of light, he no longer can be associated with light. Still, he tries to sell his message as the offering of light. His motive is revealed in verse 12: “…[W]oe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

  • Milton’s great poem embellishes the story in what classical schools would explain as an expanded narrative of the Biblical profile of Satan. In an act of revenge, as Milton tells it, Satan struck back at God by corrupting the most beloved of God’s creation, Man and Mother (Adam and Eve). In his spiel to Eve, we see him employ the tactic of the Light-Bringer he could have been, but like the theater audience who knows that Brutus smiles in Caesar’s face while hiding the dagger in his toga, we look on enraptured as the former Light-Bringer, now cloaked in darkness, works his spell on innocence incarnate.

  • He tries to “shed light” on Eve’s situation, as we would say in our idiom. He seduces the newly created man and woman with his invitation for them to follow his lead, to become like God by eating the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17), saying with the sarcastic tone that Ledger mastered in the London hotel, “You will not surely die!” (Gen. 3:4) And so the thing is done.

  • But there are consequences: there is, it turns out, sin and death in the wake of the act, evils that will not be defeated until the time of the Nazarene, who will not be born until the reign of Caesar Augustus while Quirinius is governor of Syria (Luke 2:1-2), whose birth will be heralded by the light of a star that beckons and guides the Magi in the East. His name will be called Jesus, the One who saves, the true Bright Morning Star (Matt. 2:2; Rev. 22:16).

  • (Continued in "Part II: The Protagonists")
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Monday, October 13, 2008

Is There an Antidote to Advocacy Journalism?

With the presidential election campaign in full swing, I have realized that not only readers of history, but also readers of the news need to seek out primary sources to verify the truth of what a candidate says. In recent years, various news media outlets have tried to assist us in this research with what have been called “reality checks” on various statements of the candidates. I’ve always found these useful, but now comes news that often the “reality checks” themselves are skewed by political bias. In terms of time available for research, it is virtually impossible for people to track down the facts for every statement that is made in a political campaign, and I realize that under the spotlights and the pressure of presidential and vice-presidential debates, no candidate could be blamed for making a slip here or there. Such slips alone would not disqualify a person for public office, in the opinion of most reasonable voters. But when there is a pattern of deception (or ignorance) with the apparent collusion of the media on whom we rely to do some of the “leg-work” for us, I think we find ourselves in the same situation as dear old Dorothy when she said: “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” John R. Lott, Jr., has written a piece on Fox.news documenting this problem, which can be found at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,433314,00.html . It does a good job of showing us very real consequences of “advocacy journalism,” which has been the direction schools of journalism have been taking in American universities since the 1980s. I am hopeful that with a heightened awareness of this trend we can amend the advice of our teachers and parents not to believe everything we read in the newspapers to say: “Don’t believe everything you find in the papers or on TV or online.” Intellectual vigilance is the order of the day.
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