Gypsy Scholar's Other Essays

I want to believe (to borrow a conceit from S.P. of the Metro)--I want to believe that Chris Carter hasn't run plumb out of good ideas for the X-Files. I want to believe that all the strict secrecy as to the script and imposed upon the actors was justified in the final product. I want to believe that what I saw, when I went to see this long-awaited and much-hyped sequel, was not just a glorified episode about nefarious organ collecting (and not nefarious alien abductions), having nothing to do with the larger X-Files myth. All this and more I want to believe. However, believing is one thing, seeing is another.

And what I saw in the latest X-Files movie was the ghost of the former X-Files TV program (and the earlier movie). Yes, admittedly, there were entertaining spots--Mulder's and Scully's kibitzing, the insider jokes, Mulder and Scully standing in front of pictures of Bush and Hoover in the FBI offices, a morose Scully working at "Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital"--but these choice moments didn't seem, by the end of the movie, to add up to much, nor save the plot from its utter conventionality or predictability. Left wanting to believe that there must be some good reason why this new X-Files movie played no better than a filler episode in the series (until the daring duo got back on the trail of the alien conspirators), I came up with the following.

Carter may be in the same position as his protagonist in the movie. Mulder, adrift, has left the FBI behind and sits in his little room nostalgically cutting out newspaper articles of his former glory and tortured by his inability to recapture his purpose. (Were the pencils, like darts in the ceiling, evidence of severe writer's block and too much enforced solitude?) Yes, the fulfilment (or should I say "consummation") of Mulder's and Scully's relationship has progressed the plot, but perhaps at the expense of the dramatic "intension" that gave the series its edge. Thus, like Mulder, Carter might be saying: "Well, where do I go from here?" At the behest of Scully, Mulder ends up back on a X-Files case, but is it really an "X-Files" case? Therefore, it just may be, as Mulder discovers, that Carter can never to back--it's over, and he may just have to go on alone from here, wanting to believe that the truth is out there somewhere (but, alas, for him it's no longer about the X-Files)!

Not wanting to end on a pessimistic note, I want to believe I learned a few new things from The X-Files: I Want to Believe movie: (1) that Scully is as nagging as ever to Mulder, but now she gets to do it properly--as his girlfriend; (2) that pederastic Catholic priests suffer from a pedophilia, which is an "uncontrollable urge," of unknown origins (and maybe, after all, from "God" himself); (3) that "stem-cell" research actually may have the nefarious background the Bush administration, via the Religious Right, suspects it does; (4) that gay couples have a new scientific hope: a sex change operation, can, thanks to the advances of Russian science, give one partner a new gender with a new body; (5) that blood-red tears can be made to look like black oil in a movie trailer.

In conclusion, I want to believe that Chris Carter--as much as his Father Joe--can be forgiven for buggering his would-be audience with false hopes for The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Watching the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” I had to ask myself the above question just after "The Joker’s" first appearance (which, if I remember correctly, has the insane villain using the word “anarchy” to describe what he most loved). It seems to me that director Christopher Nolan is using the big block-buster genre to get some “big ideas” across, and I think one of the main ones has to do with the archetype behind "The Joker." Again, early during the movie I turned to my friend and declared: “The Joker is chaos incarnated!” I felt compelled to investigate this further when "The Joker" himself confirmed this in a later scene.

Upon returning home, with vague clues in my head, I searched my bookshelves for literary classics. I was looking for my translation(s) of a famous German drama. In a matter of minutes I found what I had been looking for:

I am the spirit of perpetual negation;
And rightly so, for all things that exist
Deserve to perish, and would not be missed–
Much better it would be if nothing were
Brought into being. (I, p. 42)

He calls it Reason, and it only has increased
His power to be beastlier than a beast.
He is – if I may say so, sir–
A little like the long-legged grasshopper,
Which hops and flies, and sings its silly songs
And flies, and drops straight back to grass where it belongs. (I, p.10)

Why bother to go on creating?
Making, then endlessly annihilating!
'Over and past!' What's that supposed to mean?
It's no more than if it had never been,
Yet it goes bumbling round as if it were.
The Eternal Void is what I'd much prefer. ( II, p. 224)

Of course, we recognize the voice of Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust. However, reading on, this “spirit of perpetual negation” isn’t also referred to as a “joker,” but a “jester” (in my Kaufmann translation). Without this, the parallel is rather vague, so I went online to search other translations. The passage comparison is from the Prologue in heaven, the Lord speaking in lines 338-39 of my two translations:

Of all the spirits of that negate
The knavish jester gives me least to do
(Kaufmann)

(Of all the spirits of negation
The rogue has been least onerous to my mind.
(Arndt)

Searching further, I found this,

Of all the spirits that deny
The mischief-maker weighs upon me least.
(Jarrell)

and, finally, I found the following:

Of all the spirits of denial
The joker is the last that I eschew.
(MacNeice)

While all the translators I came across refer to Mephistopheles as the spirit of negation or denial, the basic meaning of the passage seems to be the same in each translation, whether the images are of “devil,” “jester,” “rogue,” or “joker.” I can only assume that the differences between one English translation and another may be more a matter of style than of meaning.

I found two more tantalizing passages of literary commentary on Mephistopheles, which validated my intuition:

“Goethe’s Mephistopheles, the son of chaos, the knavish jester, is the opposite of what is good and right for mankind. He is the negation of the natural order, a liar and a corruptor, yet we love him. He appeals to us because he is the universe’s jester …. Mephistopheles appeals to us because he can get out of awkward situations which we would be unable to escape from…. He continues to joke and kid with the other characters throughout the story, telling Faust to “Relax! It’s fun – a little play,” when Faust is startled by magic. This playful attitude is how he approaches almost everything that occurs …. The Devil does not change, but continues to be a joker, and because of that, he can get away with anything, and we love him for it. Mephistopheles tantalizes us by showing us various forms of excess that we ourselves are too conservative, or too wise, to indulge in…. Mephistopheles is one of the greatest characters ever written. He is the perfect knave, the perfect criminal, because he gets away with it… He loves chaos, and he thrives on the unordinary. We love him because this strangeness appeals to us, to an extent, and we enjoy being able to indulge in it, without paying the consequences, and still being able to return to our normal lives at the end of our jaunt with surreality. Mephistopheles makes us love him by doing the things we dare not, and getting away with them.”
--Heidi C. Lange, “The Knavish Jester” (2003)

“He is, one might say, a post-Enlightenment Devil: the Spirit of denial, as he introduces himself to Faust: 'Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!' (l. 1338). His is a consciousness of unrelieved negativity, which sees life as worthless and aspiration as vain, and expresses that vision in a voice of irresistible dry, ironic mockery, of unamused amusement at the state of unfulfilment and self-deception which is human life. Again and again, Mephistopheles pinpoints with deadly precision what is inflated or self-deceiving in Faust's intuitions of transcendence.”

Therefore, I think it wouldn’t be too much to say that Batman’s “The Joker” is the comic-book incarnation of Faust’s Mephistopheles (and are not comic book characters, especially heroes, readily assimilable into archetypes, since they are in a minimalist popular form?) Indeed, my research was fulfilled when I found a movie critic, none other than Roger Ebert, actually making the connection:

"And the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies."

Moral dilemmas? Big ideas? Yes, there are the conventional battles between good and evil, but there’s also the philosophical/moral battle, one in which Nolan puts a extra twist, blurring the hard-and-fast dichotomy of good/hero and evil/villain. There seemed to be a way in which Batman and The Joker are secretly connected—as if “The Joker” is a dark reflection of the “Dark Knight.” But the thing about the crazy villain (an archetype of the “trickster”) is that he’s the wild card in the deck of life, and sometimes he can transmit deeper truths than the reasonable can. Here, I’m reminded of the something psychologically crazy described by C. G. Jung—the phenomenon of the “coincidence of (polar) opposites.” The irony is that it was the wiser man—“The Joker”—who suggested to Batman that they had more in common than the avenger of Gotham City dared admit. I don’t know, maybe this kind of mad truth can’t be held by the plot of the movie (and certainly not the moral fundamentalism of the comic book), but may nevertheless escape the movie and tease us, trickster/joker-fashion, where we live.

Thus, I would like to suggest that “The Joker” poses a moral dilemma for the audience too. (And I’m thinking here in the context of the movie’s analogies of our political situation, such as Nolan’s careful use of 9/11 visual tropes.) Talking about the analogies with our post-9/11 world and indicating (as one critic put it) “a post-9/11 ethic,” the question that logically follows my original question (as to the identity of the villain) is this: How to integrate “The Joker” in us into our psychological wholeness and not keep projecting it outward to those “evildoers”?

7/25/8