The Dark Knight

A repetitive theme in the movie The Dark Knight is opposites. An example of this are the characters of Batman and the Joker. At it’s most basic level, Batman is a hero and the Joker is a villain. Batman wants to kill or capture the Joker, and the Joker wants to be famous, to be feared and to cause chaos. At one point in the movie the Joker says “you complete me”, as if he and Batman are only there to fight each other. The Joker gives Batman something to do, and the Batman gives the Joker something to do.

Another example of opposites in the movie is Harvey’s face. Harvey is captured by the Joker. Batman rescues him but the explosion blows half his face off. This is a visual representation of what happened to his mind after his girlfriend was killed by the Joker. He turns from Gotham’s “hero with a face” as Batman calls him, into an vengeful madman.

All through the movie, Harvey keeps a coin on him. Before Harvey is burnt in the explosion, the coin is a representation of how he “makes his own luck”, and makes his choices. This is because the coin has two heads. At one point in the movie he says to one of the Joker’s henchmen, “if it’s tails I’ll kill you, if it’s heads, you live”. It raises questions for the audience about what Harvey is willing to leave up to chance. That is later dispersed when Harvey shows the coin to Rachel and says “I make my own luck.”

In the explosion, one face of the coin is burnt and turns black. This is another visual representation of how Harvey’s state of mind is changed. From then on, he uses the coin to decide whether people live or die.

Although the Dark Knight is a Batman movie, the Joker really is the main character. He is insane and unpredictable and this makes him stand out as a character. Batman is an almost normal part of life in Gotham by the time the movie starts and the Joker comes in and steals the show. No-one knows what motivates him and therefore what he’s going to do next.

The Joker’s insanity is reinforced by the structure of the film and the plot. Unlike many movies of the superhero genre which follow the typical template with a build-up and climax, The Dark Knight’s structure is unique and unpredictable.

The first time I watched the Dark Knight, I didn’t know what was going to happen. So, when Rachel died and half of Harvey’s face was burnt off, I thought that the movie had reached its climax and was about to wrap up. But it simply started off a chain of new events, with the second-half of the movie being almost totally unpredictable. The movie feels as if it’s being run by the Joker, and the camera is just documenting what’s happening. This structure helped reinforce how crazy and unpredictable the Joker is. 

1984

In the novel 1984 by George Orwell, the ruling political party Ingsoc has started to invent a spin-off of the English language called Newspeak. The idea behind Newspeak is to take out many words that are critical to expressing rebellious thoughts. Newspeak restricts the vocabulary people could use to speak out against the Party. The Party believes that since we think in language, if there are no words to express a rebellious thought, then you can’t even form a rebellious thought in the first place. 

Negative terms are part of critical thinking, so the Party has taken out all negative terms, for example instead of saying “bad” you would say “ungood”. Or if you wanted to say “very bad”, you would have to say “double-plus ungood”. By making it easier to say “yes” and “good”, it becomes your natural reaction to agree. 

Rebellious thoughts come from questioning and deep thinking, so to eradicate rebellious thoughts, the Party has eradicated words that allow people to think deeply and to question things. The Party is aiming to remove as much original thought as possible so that the lower class can only express what is necessary and no more. Once people stop speaking out against ideas, they stop questioning and eventually blindly accept the Party’s ideology.

One of the main aims of the Party is that all the Proles, the lower class manual workers, will speak only Newspeak by 2050. The more educated the Proles are the more dangerous they are to the party since they make up around 80% of the population. If the Party could pull it off, this would give them the power to control what the Proles say and think. 

Over time, languages progress. So what the Party may have not considered is that their positive words will simply become the new negative words. Right now, “ungood” might be seen as not a negative phrase, but once Newspeak is established, “ungood” will simply replace “bad” as a negative word. Humans have always adapted to the circumstances. If the Proles can form a thought that they don’t have words to express, they will most likely invent a word to express that thought.

The Party controls the middle class by using tele-screens, listening devices and constantly monitoring their movements and facial expressions. The middle class are more dangerous to the Party, because they are educated and see the inner workings of the Party. But the Proles are left more to their own devices. The adoption of Newspeak amongst the Proles is the start of the Party gaining full control over the population.  

If the Party has enough control over the Proles, they may stop the Proles developing new words. Therefore the Proles may never rebel against the Party.

Chappie

The movie Chappie approaches the questions that are fast approaching us. If AI robots are as intelligent as we are, are they human and are their lives worth as much as ours? It’s a question that many humans will automatically say no to, simply because of the preconceptions we have about robots. This is certainly what I would have said before I watched Chappie, having not considered that a robot could have feelings and emotions such as ourselves. 

Chappie made me realise that humans are not made humans by our bodies. It’s our mind, the way we think and care about things and how intelligent we are, that sets us apart. Therefore a robot that was as smart as we are, if not smarter, that can develop original thoughts and opinions, and care for things as we can, is human in all but appearance. 

History has taught us that discriminating by appearance has not worked out well in past years. The truth is robots lives are worth as much as ours if they think like humans. If we pretend differently we are no better than slave owners pretending their slaves lives are worth less than theirs. If we treat robots like slaves now, then in 100 years, we will be judged by future generations of both humans and robots.

I found it interesting that Chappie got fairly bad reviews from the majority of movie critics. Much of this was because they claimed the movie was “too unbelievable”. They didn’t like the fact the movie was set a year after it was released, or the cliched gangster characters. In contrast, the movie had very good reviews from the public. Movie critics can often focus in too closely on small aspects of the film without actually stepping back and watching the film as a whole. The public tend to judge the movie on the overall effect. Personally, I loved Chappie because although it’s a really violent “action” movie, it also conveys humour and some very sad scenes. 

Immortal Technique

Felipe Andres Corone aka Immortal Technique grew up in Harlem US. After getting out of prison he attended part-time political science classes. He is extremely intelligent and wanted to teach the black community about political racism and history. He saw as rap as a way to teach listeners his ideas and facts about corruption in America. They would listen to his music and like it, and at the same time, gain knowledge out of it. 

In an interview, he said “I was like, how can I get out what I know and what I have inside of me to people everywhere without sounding boring, well maybe if I rapped it to people they would understand.” He did a lot of rap battles, hard-core dark rapping, and combined it with his knowledge of politics and corruption. His songs are dark and give deep insights into racism and inequality in America.

Harlem Streets

Harlem Streets is one of my favorite Immortal Technique songs. It’s a factual song about corruption and the way the whole system is designed to benefit the rich and disadvantage the poor. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks, with lines like “Corrupt cops false testimony at your arraignment” and “The sound of conservative politicians on television People in the hood are blind so they tell us to listen They vote for us to go to war instantly But none of their kids serving the infantry”.

As he says in the lyrics the point of the song is to “educate my fam about who we should trust”. Basically he tells them who not to trust.

Dance With The Devil 

I have listened to many songs over the years but very few bring out as much emotion in me as Dance With The Devil. The song starts out with a chilling piano line that would not be out of place in the opening of a old school horror movie and then the lyrics come in “I once knew a ni**a whose real name was William His primary concern, was making a million”

The song follows the life of an African American kid growing up in a rough neighborhood wanting to be tough, rich and famous like his idols gangsters and thugs. The song is about ambition and shows how easily someone can do dark things without being evil.

The song is about how growing up poor and always wanting more can slowly turn a person evil. He did whatever he had to to achieve his goal but the fact that his victim was his mother made what he had done real to him. In that moment all his ambition was stripped away and all that was left was him as a good person looking at what he had done with no excuses.

In that moment I believe William regretted all the bad things he had done in his life and realised what his ambition had made him do. The line says “And right then he knew what it was to be empty and cold, And so he jumped off the roof and died with no soul.” By saying he jumped off the roof and died with no soul, Immortal Technique is implying that because William he done such a terrible thing that night, his soul never had a chance of going to heaven. It died in his chest well before he hit the ground. Tech also references this in earlier lines “and crying out to the sky because he was lonely and scared, But only the devil responded because God wasn’t there.” In this song the devil is also a metaphor for evil.

I believe Felipe Andres Corone wrote this story to show how much our environment influences who we become, and the negative impacts of poverty. This is shown in this lyric “The product of a ghetto bred capitalistic mental.”

Breath by Tim Winton

Breath by Tim Winton is a surfing book based in small saw-milling town in Australia. It explores the boundaries of risk and how much the mind can overcome its natural instinct to shy away from risky things. 

Every person measures risk differently. For the majority of people, small everyday amounts of risk are enough. But as Breath shows, for the people who are willing to push themselves, that’s simply not enough excitement. They are willing to risk injury, and at some point death, to feel alive.

At the start of the book, the main character Pikelet is simply doing things with a very low level of risk such as holding his breath under the river. Pikelet is 13, and he’s bored with his town and his family. Its around this time when he first meets Loonie another local kid and befriends him. Lonnie is a little crazy and Pikelet describes being around him as like being around an electric current.

Pikelet has always been fascinated by the sea but his dad has never let him go because if Pikelet got into trouble he could not swim well enough to save him. With Loonie edging him on they biked out to the sea and watched some surfers “dance across the bay”. They were both instantly enthralled, Pikelet because for all his life things were done for a reason and for him to see grown men doing something simply for the fun of it was something completely new and to him it was like art.

Pikelet and Loonie start surfing, and eventually they meet Sando, an older and more experienced surfer who they only see out on the biggest of days. They instantly look up to him. Pikelet sees his own father as boring and dull, compared to Sando who seems fearless and all-knowing. Sando leads them further and further into riskier situations that they probably would have never attempted alone. They feel safe with him, because he’s so experienced.

One of these situations is the first time Pikelet and Sando went out to surf Old Smoky together. Loonie had a broken arm and was bitterly disappointed that he couldn’t come. When they get out there, Pikelet freaks out and Sando knows how to calm him down by diving down under the sea. Once he calms down, he rides two waves and the rush was bigger than anything he’d ever had before. “I felt immortal.” But even as he felt those sensations, he wanted more. This is the point that the book explores, that every risk you take makes you want more, right up until the point that you fall.

And Pikelet learns this on the very next wave, when he’s so over-confident after his first two victories that he paddles into “something the size of the Angelus town hall”. He falls down the face of the wave and it breaks on him and holds him under, ripping off his shorts and his leg-rope. It makes him realise that a small lapse in concentration, no matter how many waves you’ve caught, can end in disaster.

Pikelet reaches his limit when he, Sando and Loonie go out to surf Nautilus, a new wave that has never been surfed. It’s a huge ugly wave that breaks over a shallow or dry reef depending on the swell. Pikelet had never been that keen to surf it, but once he got out there in a storm swell and saw the wave, he decided there was no way he would surf it. He had reached his limit of risk vs reward and in his mind the risk outweighed the reward. Sando and Loonie were able to push themselves over their fear, and although Loonie fell and got smashed on the reef, he still conquered the wave because he conquered his own fear.

 This was a turning point in the book because Pikelet felt like he was not part of the crew any more. The sense of pride he felt in being attached to such a good surfer as Sando was gone, which left him feeling lost and empty. One day while Sando and Loonie were attempting to surf Nautilus again, Pikelet takes the Sando’s big wave surfing board and carries it all the way to Old Smoky on his own. He paddles a mile out to sea and surfs it by himself. He falls on a huge wave, loses his board and has to swim all the way back to shore, barely making it. 

The book is all about how addictive risk is and how far people can push themselves through fear to achieve 5 seconds of pure joy. What Pikelet did between the ages of 14 and 16, overshadows the rest of his life. Without the fear and adrenaline he had keeping him going at that age, the rest of his life seems dull and boring. It’s only when he gets a job as a paramedic that he starts getting a bit of adrenalin back and enjoying his life again. For many people, fear and adrenaline is an important and positive part of their life. He’s like a drug addict who went clean, but then found a new way to channel that love for fear and adrenaline through helping people.   

To build a fire – Jack London

The short story “To build a fire” by Jack London is a simple story told in a simple way but it conveys many deeper messages. The narrator of the story pays close attention to small details that are often overlooked, like trees and snow. He pays less attention to more impactful events such as the death of the main character. Unlike many narrators, this narrator tells the story from an unemotional point of view. The reader has to form their own emotional response to the text. This makes their response stronger because they haven’t been influenced by the emotional response of the narrator. The way that the narrator doesn’t care about the man dying makes you care more. 

One example of the narrator being unmoved by the events in the story is when the narrator is describing the snow putting out the man’s fire. This fact carries a lot of weight because his fire going out means the man is likely to “lose some toes” or even die. The narrator describes this event as “The snow fell without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was dead. Where it had burned was a pile of fresh snow”. This description states the facts and doesn’t give any indication of the life-threatening danger of what has happened.

The author picks out random details and focuses in on them really intensely. He paints a great picture of the landscape through detailed description but you need to paint your own emotional picture. The narrator is much like the narrator from The Book Thief, death, in that they both focus on seemingly insignificant details and form unemotional responses to what’s happening to the humans in the story. 

Throughout the story, the narrator simply calls the man, “the man’ and the dog, “the dog”. By not giving the dog and the man names, the author is showing how lives don’t matter to the narrator. The man doesn’t need to have a name, because the narrator doesn’t see him as important. The way he describes a tree is very detailed, but the way he describes the main character as “the man” is unsophisticated, showing that to the narrator here is little difference between things with consciousness and things without. When you don’t name something, you take away from its importance, so the author makes the man seem insignificant compared to the vast wilderness of Alaska.

The whole point of the story is to show that man is nothing against nature. Being naive and over-confident, as the man was, will kill you in a place like Alaska. Simply because he underestimated the temperature and didn’t bring someone else to travel with, the man died. He knew the facts of the danger, but he still underestimated it until it was too late.

The author is almost trying to trick the reader into thinking the story is simpler than it is. The narrator says “there was no real bond between the dog and the man. The one was the slave of the other.” From this statement many would assume that the dog is slave to the man. But when you look deeper, I believe the author is referring to the man as the slave. 

The dog only follows the man because of its need for survival. The man feeds the dog and keeps the dog warm with fire. As soon as the man can’t do that for the dog any more, the dog will leave him, as we see at the end of the story. After the dog realises the man has died, it cries but then “turned and ran along the trail toward the camp it knew, where there were the other food providers and fire providers.” The dog shows that he was only with the man because the man was able to care for him. For a dog, survival is everything and they are unmoved by the ambition which encourages humans to do dangerous things. The one thing that could corrupt a dog’s instincts is the bond between itself and a human, but since this dog never had that close relationship with the man, it’s mind-set was simply survival.