Wayne and Paglia Part II: The Saga Continues

Please read the first entry to get the full context of this.

Earlier I gave a brief synopsis about Batman’s pagan roots. Here I want to give two more illustrations. I do this not to bash Batman, it was a great movie, but as a commentary on society. I believe by analyzing culture we can see what the pervading thoughts and emotions of it are, and as such know what we are up against, what we are being sold, and the extent to which it has permeated our thought.

As already said, I am pulling some of this critique from a line of thought expressed by Camile Paglia in Sexual Persona. And will continue in this vein, mainly because I think her observations are valid, though her conclusions may be flawed. One of the observations she has noted in the forth chapter of the book is that in pagan literature there is always a return to the chthonian, the Dionysian. We came from chaos in the pagan world view, and try to put order to it. Eventually, though, that order is itself usurped by itself, and chaos is produced. We can se this in art. The very romanticized forms of Greece are Apollonian in design. They are solid, chiseled, hard. They are not round and soft. They point towards and ideal, rather than capturing real people. This is Apollonian. Identifying, quantifying, idealizing. But what happens? This ideal leads to all sorts of sexual debauchery. The ideal gives rise to chaos. Her modern equivalent is Pornography. It, like Greek art, is idyllic (I am not attaching value to this word here). It sells fantasy. The images are not reality. They only exist as Apollonian ideals. But what have they given rise to? Certainly not more organization and rational. They give rise to debauchery and lust, which by their very nature are Dionysian. They are chaotic, emotional, irrational. What begins as Apollonian becomes chthonian.

This is the pagan saga. We begin in chaos, find some order, and chaos again arises, albeit a different type of chaos. And the chaos is a direct consequence of the order. It only has life because the Apollonian changes the system so that the new chaos could exist. This is also Batman. The Joker can only exist because there is this new order. He says as much. Before there was disorder. Crime was the rule. Corruption king. And then Batman, our Apollonian hero, enters the stage. He systematically creates order. He fights the chaos. He destroys the Dionysian. The old chaos is no more. People feel hope, renewed trust in the system, in society. The old criminals see their time coming to a close. And there is no Joker yet. There wasn’t one before. There couldn’t have been. Chaos was already king, though not his brand.

Once Batman creates order though, once the Apollonian has conquered, the new chthonian can be birthed. What couldn’t exist in the old system can now find life in the new (or rather demise of it). The old Dionysian was defeated by the New Apollonian, and as such, only a New Dionysian can defeat it. The Joker can only exist because Batman does. This is in itself not fully Pagan (evil can only exist along side good in Christianity as well). But Batman couldn’t have existed without disorder before (this is pagan, where in Christianity good can exist by itself and apart from any one). He owes his existence, not to the Joker, but to the same principle that birthed the newest antihero. Had Gotham been working, had the Dionysian never taken control, Batman and his new Apollonian way would have no raison d’etre.

This is pagan mythology, pagan history, pagan psychology

One other quick observation. The Apollonian, as already stated is rational. It is also linear. What I mean by that is that it is not fluid. Look again at Greek art. It is masculine. There are defined muscles. There is geometry and shape. And it doesn’t change. The Dionysian is not this. It is fluid. It is malleable. It defies form. Dionysus changed sex as needed. He showed up in many different guised. Loki too takes many forms. The Dionysian is feminine. It is curvy. It is soft. It is watery.

I don’t know if there is a parallel in Christianity to this. God is male. He is called Father, and has male characteristics. But in imagery I can’t immediately find in it the lines that there are in Pagan art. I think this is a very pagan concept. And it is found throughout the Dark Night.

Batman himself is a masterpiece of Apollonian imagery. He is iconic looking. We know when we have seen him. His image does not change. When it is Batman’s silhouette we know it. This is part of what gives him his power. Criminals can see the Bat in the sky, and they know that Order is coming to Gotham. Just the sight of him makes chaos flee. His car is hard. His suit is hard. His image is hard. The body armor is well defined. It looks like Greek man. He has a perfect chest, abs, and arms. His image is the idealized man. His wings too tell the same story. They are not like a birds wing that is mutable and flowing. They have a shape, and they hold it. The shadow of them form a solid image to the spectators below. They know where he ends and the world begins. His ears are sharp and pointed. There is no curve in him at all. All edges are linear, defined, sharp, Apollonian.

His Bat Cave is just the same. It is no longer an actual cave, in fact he seals the cave up. The chaos that bore him must be controlled an subdued. His new headquarters is an underground Apollonian monument. It is rigid and boxlike. The lights themselves are rows of symmetric squares. There is no softness. His video screen, again rows of rectangles. These create the closest thing to round in his life, but this is only an illusion. They are boxes. Everything neat and ordered. Apollonian majesty.

Now this wouldn’t necessarily be pagan, except in its roots. Remember order is birthed out of Chaos. This is why it is pagan. From Natures chaos, attacks form bats, fear, raw emotion, we have the birth of a super rational, ordered, emotionless god. This is what makes his order pagan. It is a reaction to the disorder, to nature. Christian order comes first. It is the action, and nature the reaction. Not so in Batman, or any pagan drama. The chthonian must always come first. The hero is the hero because he conquers it.

Let’s turn our attention to the Joker. I said he is the antithesis of Batman. He is the Dionysian to Batman’s Apollonian. How does the Joker look. He is disheveled. His makeup isn’t where it is supposed to go. He allows it to melt form one place to the next. We see lipstick that goes half way up his face, eye shadow that tracks to his cheek. He doesn’t respect the borders of even himself. As the movie goes on, the makeup itself changes. He allows it to drip and run. Where once there was while, now there is skin. Where once there was black, now there is white. And this doesn’t bother him. And it doesn’t bother the viewer. It adds to his persona. He is chaos. He is the Dionysian. He can’t even be conformed to his own image. Even more than this, he regularly throws off his image to maintain it. When beneficial to him, he wears no makeup at all, or a clown mask. At one time he is dressed in a purple tux, and another he is in a nurse’s dress. He is as the situation calls. He is fluid. The very fact that he shows up in drag further proves the point that he is Dionysius, he is Loki. He is the god of chaos and disorder. The eternal prankster, the primordial chthonian. He has no identity except for mutability. He is Batman’s antithesis once again.

Batman is only who he is because of how he looks. The Joker is who he is in spite of how he looks. Batman always looks the same. The Joker never does.

The Joker uses what is around him. He adapts. At one moment all his goons wear clown masks to identify them, at another, only hostages wear them. The Joker even mocks the Apollonian city itself. He forces people to evacuate, not by bridge or tunnel (Apollonian attempts to create order), but by boat, forcing people to submit to the Dionysian demands of the sea. Nature is always part of the Dionysian, and water all the more. It is fluid. It is mutable. It has no form of its own, but assumes the form of its surroundings.

This is the pagan fight between Apollonian and Dionysian. It is the struggle that captures humanity in a pagan world view. In Christianity the chthonian is a byproduct. In the pagan it is the first. It is equal with the Apollonian. They are at odds with each other, but also need each other. They try to kill each other, but also birth each other. They are inseparable. Batman could not exist with out the chaos of both Gotham and his fear of bats, and the Joker could not have existed without the order and rules that Batman brings. The Apollonian gives birth to the Dionysian, the Dionysian to the Apollonian. The serpent is always eating its tail. The cycle continues. Pagan to the core.

Christianity stands in stark contrast to this. The chthonian is an invader. It is a parasite. It is a derivative. It has no life on its own. It can only live because God lets it. Good stands by itself, evil stands only in relation to good. Righteousness exists apart from sin, but sin exists only as the ruiner of righteousness. The serpent was not created in the garden with Man, he entered after creation. He is not coequal. His disorder only exists in relation to God’s order, but God’s order stands alone. More than this, God uses the very disorder that the serpent tries to destroy order with, to bring order once again. In the cross God brings ultimate order for apparent ultimate disorder.

The very “unplan” that evil has to undo creation, is the very plan God has to save it. In this act he takes disorder and banishes it once and for all. It is not a coequal. In Batman, The Joker is able to use disorder to undo good. He turns Two Face bad through chaos. The Dionysian takes over the Apollonian. This stands as anti-Christian. God does just the opposite. He takes chaos’s plan to create disorder and produced the ultimate order. He crushes chaos with itself, and us such ultimately crushes it. Chaos is shown to be order under God. It is not a force at all. It is a tool that God will eventually use to save humanity. Order and Chaos are not on equal footing. The Apollonian does not give rise to the Dionysian and the Dionysian to the Apollonian ad infitatum. They are not sides of the same coin. Chaos is decidedly other. It is not the rule, but the exception. Order, plan, control. These are the rule. They exist outside of creation, the chthonian only as an invader to it.

This then may be the fruit of post-modernity; revived paganism. We may see more universes that have a duality, and Apollonian and Dionysian, as coequals. Paglia would say as much. If cinema is the thermometer of culture then we surely are entering the most pagan time in history. TH gods and goddesses of Olympus will b exchanged for Super Heroes on the one hand, and the Actors that play them on the other. The cult of personality will grow and feed. We will see more Batmen, both on film and in real life. And I think we can safely say this is happening. Stars are notorious for super egos. They are given by far less harsh sentences for breaking society laws or norms- and if they are to be our gods, it must be so. Like Batman, they need the right to operate outside our conventions- and we are seemingly more than ready to give it to them. We have elevated them past star to hero and god.

We watch shows about heroes, like the show by the same name, or 24, or dozens like them. We read comics or at least see the movies based on them, about heroes. We cast the old gods in new forms, calling them superman, instead of Zeus, Joker instead of Loki, etc. Expect more Gotham universes, more gods to worship, more Apollonian and Dionysian struggles.