of hamatzav, “The Situation.” No wonder that, in recent years, this same desire for an alternate reality has become part of Israel’s national psyche: dealing with “The Situation” generates an atmosphere of anxiety, a deep sense of claustrophobia, a retreat into the relative safety of the indoors. Though an Israeli writer need not directly address the political atmosphere that surrounds him, these concerns seep in, quietly and evocatively. The properly ideological function of this retreat is thus clear—its underlying message is: “we are just ordinary people who want only peace and normal life.” A similar attitude forms part of the mythology of the IDF: the Israeli media love to dwell on the imperfections and psychic traumas of Israeli soldiers, presenting them not as perfect military machines, but as ordinary people who, caught into the vicissitudes of history and warfare, are just as likely as anyone else to make mistakes or lose their way.
This ideological operation accounts for the success of two recent Israeli films about the 1982 Lebanon war: Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir and Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon. Lebanon draws on Maoz’s own memories as a young soldier, rendering the war’s fear and claustrophobia by shooting most of the action from inside a tank. The movie follows four inexperienced soldiers dispatched in the tank to “mop up” enemies in a Lebanese town that has already been bombarded by the Israeli Air Force. Interviewed at the 2009 Venice festival, Yoav Donat, the actor who plays the director as a soldier a quarter of a century ago, said: “This is not a movie that makes you think ‘I’ve just been to a movie’. This is a movie that makes you feel like you’ve been to war.” In a similar way, Waltz with Bashir renders the horrors of the 1982 conflict from the point of view of Israeli soldiers. Maoz said his film is not a condemnation of Israel’s policies, but a personal account of what he went through: “The mistake I made is to call the film ‘Lebanon’ because the Lebanon war is no different in its essence from any other war and for me any attempt to be political would have flattened the film.”3 This is ideology at its purest: the focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience enables us to obliterate the entire ethico-political background of the conflict, involving questions such as what was the Israeli army doing deep in Lebanon? (In Lebanon, the spatial limitation to the inside of a tank quite literally enacts such an erasure.) Such a “humanization” thus serves to obfuscate the key question: the need for the ruthless political analysis of what is being done in terms of political-military activity. Our politico-military struggles are precisely not an opaque History which brutally disrupts our intimate lives—they are a field in which we are always already engaged, even if it is in a mode of ignorance.
Should we be surprised to find the same ideological mechanism in Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde police procedurals set in today’s Havana? On a first approach, these novels provide such a critical view of the Cuban situation (poverty, corruption, cynical disbelief.) that one cannot but be shocked to learn not only that Padura lives in Havana, but that he is an establishment figure who has received major state prizes. His heroes—although disappointed, depressed, seeking refuge in alcohol and dreams of alternate historical realities, mourning their missed chances, and, of course, depoliticized, completely ignoring the official socialist ideology—nonetheless fundamentally accept their situation. The novels’ underlying message is thus that one should heroically accept the situation the way it is, rather than attempt to escape to the false paradise of Miami. This acceptance forms the backdrop to all the critical remarks and dark descriptions: although totally disillusioned, the characters are from here and are here to stay, this misery is their world, and they struggle to find a meaningful life within its framework rather than resisting it in any radical way. Back in the Cold War era, Leftist critics often pointed out the ambiguity of John le Carré’s stance towards his own society: his critical portrayal of opportunist cynicism, ruthless maneuvering and moral betrayal nonetheless presupposes a basically positive stance—the very moral complexity of secret service life is proof that one lives in an “open” society which allows the expression of such complexities. Mutatis mutandis, does not exactly the same hold also for Padura? The very fact that he is able to write the way he does within Cuban society only contributes to its legitimization.
There is a very thin line separating this “humanization” from a resigned coming to terms with lying as a social principle: what matters in such a “humanized” universe is authentic intimate experience, not the truth. At the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a film which also “humanizes” its superhero, presenting him as full of doubts and weaknesses, the new DA Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante against mob rule who became corrupted and committed a number of murders, dies. Batman and his police friend Gordon recognize the loss of morale the city would suffer if Dent’s crimes became known. So Batman persuades Gordon to preserve Dent’s image by holding Batman responsible for the murders; Gordon destroys the Bat-Signal and a manhunt for Batman ensues. This need to perpetuate a lie in order to sustain public morale is the film’s final message: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder that, paradoxically, the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain.4 The aim of his terrorist attacks on Gotham City is made clear: the attacks will stop only when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and thus protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman—another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon stages his own (fake) death—yet another lie.
The logic of Batman’s (or Superman’s or Spiderman’s) mask is given a comical twist in The Mask with Jim Carrey: it is the Mask itself which changes the ordinary guy into a superhero. The link between the Mask and sexuality is rendered clear in the second Superman movie: making love to a woman is incompatible with the power of the Mask, that is, the price Superman has to pay for his consummated love is to become a normal mortal human. The Mask is thus the asexual “partial object” which allows the subject to remain in (or regress to) the pre-Oedipal anal-oral universe where there is no death or guilt, just endless fun and fighting—no wonder the Jim Carrey character in The Mask is obsessed with cartoons: the universe of cartoons is an undead universe of infinite plasticity in which every time a character is destroyed it magically recomposes itself and the struggle recommences.
What, then, does the Joker, who wants to disclose the truth beneath the Mask, convinced that this disclosure will destroy the social order, represent? He is not a man without a mask, but, on the contrary, a man fully identified with his mask, a man who is his mask—there is nothing, no “ordinary guy,” beneath it.5 This is why the Joker has no back-story and lacks any clear motivation: he tells different people different stories about his scars, mocking the idea that some deep-rooted trauma drives him.6 How, then, do Batman and the Joker relate? Is the Joker Batman’s own death-drive embodied? Is Batman the Joker’s destructivity put in the service of society?
A further parallel can be drawn between The Dark Knight and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” In the secluded castle in which the mighty retire to survive the plague (“Red Death”) ravaging the country, Prince Prospero organizes a lavish masked ball. At midnight, Prospero notices a figure in a blood-spattered, dark robe resembling a funeral shroud, with a skull-like mask depicting a victim of the Red Death. Gravely insulted, Prospero demands to know the identity of the mysterious guest; when the figure turns to face him, the Prince falls dead at a glance. The enraged bystanders corner the stranger and remove his mask, only to find the costume empty—the figure is revealed as the personification of the Red Death itself which goes on to destroy all life in the castle. Like the Joker and all revolutionaries, the Red Death also wants the masks to be torn off and the truth to be disclosed to the public—one could thus also suggest that, in Russia in 1917, the Red Death penetrated the Romanov castle and caused its downfall.7
Does The Dark Knight’s extraordinary popularity not then point towards the fact that it touches a nerve in our ideologico-political constellation: the undesirability of truth? In this sense, the film is effectively a new version of the two classic John Ford westerns (Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) which demonstrate how, in order to civilize the Wild West, the lie had to be elevated into truth—in short, how our civilization is grounded
