Subject:
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Re: Arkham Asylum - A cool set, but a bit disturbing.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 8 Jun 2007 15:12:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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8827 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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For the good/evil struggle thing to work, it is the innocent who must
suffer.
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Ah! But that’s the difference between melodrama and drama. The more
sophistimacated challenge is for the reader/viewer to be made to sympathize
with a villain rather than always rooting for the innocent victim.
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And that, my friend, may be one of those “nutshell” differences between a
liberal and a conservative. Assuming you are serious with your assertion
(sophistimacated?), I challenge your notion that the concept of sympathizing
with the villian is a more sophisticated rendition of drama. I will never
understand the left’s fascination with evil, as if it can be analyzed and
understood. Dwelling in evil doesn’t provide insight or understanding, but
it does taint and corrupt those who choose to get too close to it. You lie
down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
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First off, “sophistimacated” was just a means of letting out some air so that
I don’t start taking myself too seriously.
Let me disclaim that it in this passage I’m speaking specifically of fiction
rather than reality.
The reason it’s more sophisticated (which, in this context, implies only
complexity rather than an objectively “better” or “worse” aesthetic
sensibility) because it requires the viewer to make achieve more complicated
degree of pathos. Sympathizing with an innocent victim is sort of easy
because we’re culturally programmed to do so (“women and children first,”
etc.) In western culture, at least, it’s basically the default position. To
sympathize with the innocent victim, the viewer need do (practically) nothing
other than to watch and react. But to sympathize with a villain, the viewer
has to be drawn out of his default mode and given a reason to sympathize.
I may have portrayed it simply as a matter of choosing to sympathize with
the villain rather than the victim, but that’s not really the idea. Instead,
the drama must be framed in such a way that one’s sympathy for a villain is
justified by the circumstances.
I’m also not talking about feeling sympathy for a villain who’s being held
accountable for his villainy; I don’t feel bad for the murderer who’s
incarcerated for life, for example.
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And if I may intrude into this here, we have had some wonderful fiction on the
telly lately in which what is considered to be ‘the bad guy’ in the ‘tv show
universe’ is the person we most relate to.
Loads of examples, but starting off with ‘Captain Mal’ in ‘Firefly’--he’s a
smuggler a la Han Solo (another fine example)--they’re not villians, to be sure,
but, in their universe, they break the laws to succeed.
And yet here we are, the viewing audience--we don’t like the Alliance in Firefly
and we dont’ like ‘The Empire’ in Star Wars.
Furthermore, going with Firefly, we have the movie ‘Serenity’, in which ‘The
Operative’ *admits* he’s the monster (as, he states, is Cap. Mal) and, due to
his own ‘monsterhood’, is unable to live in the ‘sinless world’ that he’s
endeavouring to help create by his actions in silencing River. Yet, by the end
of the movie (if Joss did his job properly), we feel sympathy for both Capt.
Mal, but especially The Operative, because it was his base axioms that he
believed in (Alliance = good, sinless) that were faulty, and when he found that
out he was left with nothing.
I’m with Dave on this one--there’s more to humanity than attributing people or
events to ‘evil’ and ‘good’--this isn’t some ‘30’s movie where the guy with the
handlebar mustache ties the woman to the railroad tracks, but hte guy with the
white hat comes riding in to ‘save the day’.
Bringing it back to reality, there was a guy and his wife right here in the
province in which I live (and I’ll never mention his name on the ‘net ‘cause
I’ll never add to the ‘infamousness’ of the jackass) who took it upon themselves
to kidnap a few teenage girls, and what usually happens in these instances
happened.
We could say that this guy was ‘pure evil’--and, left up to me, if he and I
happened to find ourselves in the same room, only one of us would come out alive
(at least, that’s how I *feel*, but finding myself in that situation, would I be
able to take another life? I dunno), but this guy had a mom and dad--they knew
him as a ‘cute kid’. He had friends and family who remembered someone different
than what he became.
Crossing between reality and fiction, I’ve never been able to reconcile this--I
saw Star Wars when I was 10. Darth was tall, black and evil--he kills people by
crushing their necks and he blows up planets. And then in ‘Return of the Jedi’,
I’m suppose to feel sympathy for him ‘cause he saves his kid and, in the process
dies himself? Futhermore, what are we to think of regarding ‘cute little
Anakin’ in Episode 1 of Star Wars? Here he’s all cute and worried about mommy
and the like, when we, the viewers, *know* he’s going to grow up and become
Darth Vader--killer of people and planets.
And then this brings up the wonderful time travel morality question that we’ve
all heard--if you could go back to 1900 and found little adolph playing in the
street... He hasn’t done anything yet!
Which I think then brings it back to Dave’s point--in this LEGO set, the ‘bad
guy’ is strapped on a table--he can’t *do* anything--he’s rendered
incapacitated. Do not our ‘moral’ intentions then have to turn to protecting
those who *cannot* protect themselves? Protect the guy from torture??
I think we’ve talked about this before, and I’ll remember that I’m mostly
speaking to a crowd that loves to misinterpret the 2nd ammendment--every so
often we’ll see the news in which ‘home owner shoots and kills robbers’. Some
cases, as previously discussed, the robbers were either incapacitated in some
way or were ‘fleeing the premesis’--no threat of harm to the home owner or
others, yet the shot is still fired and the guy is still dead.
Here I don’t have a problem with where the evil is. Was a crime committed?
yes--the robbers shouldn’t have been there in the first place. However, that
does not make the crooks ‘pure evil’ nor does it justify ‘death by shooting’ if
they are incapacitated or in the process of fleeing the scene. The owner,
taking that shot, has now become the guy standing before the criminal strapped
to the table.
I think that the world is full of ‘grey’--there is no black and white. It
really is one of the fundamental tennants I learned from the Christian
University I attended a long time ago (which I’ve adapted for my personal
use)--*if* the world is sinful, *then* everything and everyone is--there’s no
getting around it. If one says we live in a fallen world, then we’re all
fallen--there are no ‘perfectly good’ people and no ‘perfectly evil’ people.
Even what’s-his-name from Ontario could speak a good line--he managed to
convince someone to marry him and he was a pretty good talker. And, as stated,
he did have friends and family who wondered what became of that ‘cute kid’ they
remembered.
Yes there are degrees and yes people should be held accountable for their
actions. In the process of holding people accountable, we must be careful to
not become that which we’re fighting against. I think Neitzche said something
like that.
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In the final attempts to analyze evil, where does it get one? At best,
genuine sympathy for the evildoer, and what good can come from that?
Tolerance? Great. Let’s learn to tolerate evildoers. My suspicion is that
the purpose of such endeavors is to discover how stinky someone else’s
laundry is, so as to feel good about the fetor of their own. Good old
relative moralism!
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I prefer the term “moral relativism,” if you please!
It should be reiterated that I don’t believe in “evil” as an actual, absolute
thing, so the most I can say is that, when possible, it improves one’s
understanding to study those behaviors in others that are so abhorrent to me
that I would characterize them as “evil,” but I don’t thereby presume to have
any ability to diagnose “evil” in an absolute sense.
And the value of studying such a person is that I might gain an understanding
of what drives him to act as he does. That’s more complicated than
speechifying and sloganizing about the “axis of evil” and “evildoers who want
to kill life” and so on, but ultimately I think that it would be more useful
in fostering peace than would firebombing a city full of civilians, for
example.
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IMO once the guy is strapped
down (or otherwise rendered harmless) then his jailer has no business or
right to inflict further harm upon him. We’ve had this discussion before,
of course, and I’m sure we’ll have it again and again. But in brief, it’s
not a question of “innocence” in any absolute sense; the torturer is the
villian and the recipient of the torture is the victim who deserves our
protection.
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What would you say is the reason the victim deserves our protection?
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Why would he not? That is, why would he deserve torture? By what absolute
measure can we say “his evil act justifies these electrodes placed on his
genitals,” I wonder?
Dave!
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