Civil war between heroes? Anger is just below the surface in many new movies
The critically derided “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” has not been singled out for praise in many departments, its writing least of all. But there is one scene in which Zack Snyder’s movie appears to be on to something. Sensing the anger that has driven Bruce Wayne to act with increasing recklessness, his faithful servant and closest friend, Alfred, offers a few words of caution: “That’s how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men … cruel.”
It’s a statement that could apply to any number of seething, conflicted characters that have stormed across our movie screens of late, from the Avengers who see their alliance torn apart in “Captain America: Civil War,” to the Americans who vent their blood lust by committing legally sanctioned murder in “The Purge: Election Year.” And whether intentionally or not, those words can’t help but reach beyond the screen and echo with the often blind rage that seems to have convulsed our present historical moment.
From Orlando, Fla., and Baton Rouge, La., to Falcon Heights, Minn., and Dallas, the last several weeks in the U.S. will be remembered for their horrific eruptions of gun violence — variously driven by fear, hatred, madness, misunderstanding and a misplaced sense of justice, and at once exacerbated and trivialized by a dispiriting (and remarkably hero-free) election season. For sheer horror, drama and absurdity, this spectacle of real-world turmoil has no real fictional equivalent on the big screen, and we may strain ourselves looking for movies that allow us the sort of visceral, need-to-scream outlet that, say, Howard Beale did in “Network.”
Which is not to suggest that there isn’t an abundance of sociopolitical and retaliatory violence in the movies. Genre films, particularly in the realms of horror, fantasy and speculative fiction, have always excelled at expressing a culture’s deepest anxieties at the level of subtext. And even if most of this season’s examples feel like thin, commercially opportunistic facsimiles of the real thing, they nonetheless illuminate the potential uses and abuses of anger in a world that gives us no shortage of reasons to get mad.
On the surface, “Batman v Superman” seems the most disposable of the bunch — a series of Olympian temper tantrums cooked up for no other reason than to fulfill a movie studio’s dream of cross-brand synergy. Batman, enraged by the lives lost during Superman’s latest careless demolition, is not the most relatable of angry-man protagonists. The vast majority of us, rather than arming ourselves with Kryptonite-enhanced weapons or brooding away in our high-tech subterranean caverns, are forced to vent our spleens in more responsible fashion (like on Facebook, or the freeway).
Still, beneath its generic trappings, “Batman v Superman” tries to get at something sincere about how even righteous anger can easily lose sight of its target and abandon the moral high ground. One of the movie’s insights is that people convinced of their own goodness have a way of creating, and misunderstanding, their own adversaries. The more they lash out in the name of good, the more they hasten their own undoing — never mind that, as seen in the movie’s hilarious climax, all it takes is a simple five-minute conversation to clear things up.
In our intemperate current climate, there is something chastening about the film’s warning against judging our enemies too harshly. It’s also refreshing that the anger here arises from the issue of collateral damage — which is to say, the human stakes of the situation. The same holds true of “Captain America: Civil War,” the most ambitious of the Marvel comic-book movies so far, and one that attempts to correct some of the callous excesses of the modern blockbuster. Rather than reducing yet another city to so much digitally shattered glass and flaming rubble, it seeks to humanize the faceless masses that routinely perish in such displays of cinematic shock and awe.
The central clash between Iron Man and Captain America — predicated on the question of whether the Avengers should submit to the governing authority of the United Nations — is little more than a flimsy pretext for the comic-book equivalent of a game of dodge ball. Ant-Man versus Spider-Man! Black Widow versus Scarlet Witch! But just as the fun seems to be winding down, the philosophical conflict laid out early on suddenly turns personal. As in “Batman v Superman,” nothing causes a superhero to lose his temper — or, for that matter, keeps a franchise in motion — quite like the memory of their murdered parents.
An even more brutal and psychologically formative family massacre sets the stage for “The Purge: Election Year,” the third and darkest episode in a dystopian action franchise that elevates angry, score-settling mass murder to a new American pastime. As its title suggests, James DeMonaco’s thriller holds up a broken mirror to our politically polarized culture, riven by ideological warfare and class disparity. And it accomplishes this not by posing any obvious narrative parallels, but rather by conjuring an atmosphere of free-flowing menace, where an annual night of legally sanctioned criminality has allowed human rage to fester and spill out in thoroughly unpredictable directions.
Watch the trailer for “The Purge: Election Year.”
The movie’s most provocative thread concerns a group of armed activists who oppose the Purge, but who are plotting to use it to their advantage and eliminate their enemies for good. It is not meant to escape our notice that many of these insurrectionists are young, fed-up black men, rising up against the fascism of a wealthy white majority. Even as it ultimately lands on the side of restraint and mercy, this is a movie that observes the controlled, organized mobilization of black forces as a study in controlled, intensely purposeful rage, in stark contrast with the gloating, ghoulish hysteria of their oppressors.
To characterize “The Purge: Election Year” as a stealth allegory of the Black Lives Matter movement would be reductive but not completely inaccurate. A film that earns the designation more fully is Nate Parker’s forthcoming historical drama, “The Birth of a Nation,” which charts the steady transformation of Virginia-born Baptist preacher Nat Turner into the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion. It’s a picture that won’t open in theaters until October and yet could scarcely feel more of the moment; its images of black brothers and sisters coming together, allowing Turner (played by Parker himself) to direct their rage, offer the most unsettling kind of catharsis.
There will be much more to say about “The Birth of a Nation” in the months to come, and one measure of its worth will be the ferocity of the discussion it ignites. For here at last is the rare movie that, whatever you think of it, doesn’t just exploit its characters’ anger but respects it — and manages, in the process, to awaken your own.
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