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Nov. 23rd, 2012 02:16 amSo in Miller's Crossing the point of Tom's attachment to Leo is that Leo is the leviathan Tom helped set up? Tom's Kohlberg Stage 6 in a world where no one else is, has decided Leo is the most stable strong figure, someone both willing and able to enforce contracts, and uses his insight into others' selfish desires and relative freedom from sharing them to keep Leo in charge. But corruption enters the system with the sociopath Bernie, who's loved by Verna who wins the love of Leo, who then refuses to punish Bernie for contract-breaking, thus invalidating his own contract with his subjects and returning everyone to the state of nature/war.
I'm so spun around by the plot that I can't tell if we're supposed to think the Crossing choice is a human mistake or a calculation (nor with his having sex with Verna earlier, actually). It ends up behaving as the latter with the help of God/luck/the script, so in a sense he's guilty of it either way, but presumably the film's a more meaningful experience for all of us if he changes his mind about how to be during it. He's a person who has to sacrifice much of that personhood, rather than an ethical robot, presumably, but I guess deliberate ambiguity here might help make that very contrast: one of the problems with committed rather than backseat Stage 6 ethics is that those personal betrayals that serve the greater good have to be performed whenever they're available. Bernie's contract-breaking necessitates Tom's. Which sucks for Tom and everyone else - from the Dane's perspective Tom basically IS Bernie. So the hero's realization that he has to give up everything gets ghost-primed for the audience's understanding by our discomfort at realizing we may have to give up our assumptions about movie heroism, such as that it should involve going around learning how to be better all the time, rather than relentlessly sacrificing all parts of self and others for even slightly larger numbers of other others. Tom has to become the sort of person who will never again see the Crossing choice as a choice.
The Dark Knight adds what to all this? Starting to sound like nada.
I'm so spun around by the plot that I can't tell if we're supposed to think the Crossing choice is a human mistake or a calculation (nor with his having sex with Verna earlier, actually). It ends up behaving as the latter with the help of God/luck/the script, so in a sense he's guilty of it either way, but presumably the film's a more meaningful experience for all of us if he changes his mind about how to be during it. He's a person who has to sacrifice much of that personhood, rather than an ethical robot, presumably, but I guess deliberate ambiguity here might help make that very contrast: one of the problems with committed rather than backseat Stage 6 ethics is that those personal betrayals that serve the greater good have to be performed whenever they're available. Bernie's contract-breaking necessitates Tom's. Which sucks for Tom and everyone else - from the Dane's perspective Tom basically IS Bernie. So the hero's realization that he has to give up everything gets ghost-primed for the audience's understanding by our discomfort at realizing we may have to give up our assumptions about movie heroism, such as that it should involve going around learning how to be better all the time, rather than relentlessly sacrificing all parts of self and others for even slightly larger numbers of other others. Tom has to become the sort of person who will never again see the Crossing choice as a choice.
The Dark Knight adds what to all this? Starting to sound like nada.
