Pass the Popcorn: Baron Munchausen Turns 20

July 31, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Ladners spent time this July in Prescott to escape the summer heat of Phoenix. The Raven coffee bar has been showing the films of Terry Gilliam on Monday nights, which meant that I had a chance to visit an old friend: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Released in 1988, Baron Munchausen was one of the greatest film fiascos of all time. Budgeted at $23m, it cost more than $46m. Worse still, Columbia pictures was being sold at the time of release, meaning that they only got it out onto a handful of American screens, which translated into an $8m American box-office take, $15m worldwide.

Ooops. The only equivalent brilliant move I’ve seen was Miramax releasing The Grindhouse slasher-zombie flick during the Easter season, giving them a total box office take of me going to see it twice.

Looking back at the film now, I can only wonder: how in the world did Gilliam make this movie for only $46m? It’s many times more visually interesting than several films I could name with far larger budgets and supposedly superior technology available (yes, I am looking at you George Lucas).

Fiasco though it may have been for the studio, for a viewer, the Baron is a pure delight. I’ve seen the film included on lists such as “Cool movies no one saw” and “Children’s Films That Adults Will Love.” It’s all that, and more.

I’ve always loved the film, as the main character reminded me very much of my grandfather: German, very charming, sometimes grouchy, a flirt with the ladies, full of tall tales, and always in search of adventure. Oh, and I suppose that the massive crush I had on Uma Thurman 20 years ago didn’t hurt.

The Baron, a character out of German folklore, finds himself disgruntled to be living in “The Age of Reason.” The Baron sets forth to save a city from the armies of the Grand Turk by finding his former extraordinary servants, encountering gods and monsters and literally cheating death along the way.

The movie had an all-star cast, including small parts by Robin Williams and Sting. Columbia’s loss is your gain: Netflix it now, and did I mention that Gilliam reenacted a certain famous mythological painting?

Yeah, well, the movie is better than the painting.

 

2 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Where Did You Get That Marvelous Datum?

July 31, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

NRO blogger Jim Geraghty has a good post today about Obama and school choice. But what I particularly want to point out is this, which he notes in passing:

These numbers from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics for the 2003-2004 school year put average tuition paid by private elementary school students at $5,049

It looks to me like the word “these” was supposed to have a link, but there’s no link. I wasn’t aware NCES had collected any private school tuition data since 1999. And that figure looks a whole lot like the figure NCES was reporting back in 1999. Did Geraghty find the tuition number and assume it came from the most recent iteration of the Private School Universe Survey? (Actually the PSS has just released its 2005 data, but we’ll overlook that for the moment.) Or does NCES still collect private school tuition data, and somehow I missed it?

I’m not sure which outcome to root for.

2 Comments | journalism, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Should You Redshirt Your Kindergartener?

July 31, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

“Redshirting” children (having children start school at an older age) has become a fad. Some parents have held children back from entering kindergarten with the idea that their child will benefit academically from being older and/or more mature. According to research by Sandra E. Black, Paul Devereux and Kjell G. Salvanes at Vox (an interesting hybrid between a blog and an academic journal for economists) this fad is like many previous education fads: intuitively plausible but actually worthless.

The researchers were able to isolate the impact of late school starting from those of mere age by comparing Norwegian military IQ tests of students born on December 31 to those born on January 1st :

The administrative rule in Norway is that children must start school the year they turn seven. Children born on 31 December start school a year earlier than those born on 1 January – even though they are almost exactly the same age. This provides an exogenous separation between age and school-starting age.

Result: age matters but not school-starting age. Would-be redshirt parents can relax, or more likely, seek an edge some other way.

4 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Teacher Contracts: Blame States, Too

July 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The National Council on Teacher Quality has published a new report on the sausage-factory process behind teacher contracts. (HT EIA, or as I like to call him, ALELR.)

Readers of Jay P. Greene’s Blog will probably not need to be told that reformers have long identified teacher contracts as one of the most important root causes, if not the single most important root cause, of the system’s ills. It is because of these contracts, for example, that pay scales, quality control and disciplinary procedures in education resemble those of a factory (even a factory circa 1965) more than those of a profession.

Defenders of the system sometimes argue that teachers should recieve the deference that is due to professionals. Personally, I’d love to see that – but not until they’re compensated and held accountable like professionals.

When that day comes, teachers will be able to say, “Now we have freedom and responsibility. It’s a very groovy time!”

Until then, you can’t expect to have one without the other for very long. The universe doesn’t work that way.

Reformers have long argued that the fundamental problem is disproportionate union influence on school boards. Union members have a much stronger motive to vote in school board elections than anyone else, especially when the elections are held separately and require a special trip to the polls. Thus, at contract renewal time the union ends up “negotiating with itself.”

However, the NCTQ report’s main argument seems to be that we should be griping less about the actual bargaining process between districts and unions, and more about the laws passed by state legislatures mandating certain provisions in those contracts. The unions find it easier to extract what they want in the statehouse, NCTQ argues: “As unions have matured, their leaders have realized that it is more efficient to lobby state legislatures on particular provisions than to negotiate district by district every few years as contracts expire.”

The report collects a lot of useful information on the subject, and any contribution to knowledge on this badly understudied subject is valuable. And clearly NCTQ is right when it observes that bad state mandates ought to be deplored alongside bad district/union negotiations, and they currently aren’t.

But if I may play devil’s advocate (“When don’t you?” the unions may ask), I think NCTQ overstates its case on the importance of state mandates vis-a-vis district negotiations.

The report’s opening concedes that “the teacher contract still figures prominently on such issues as teacher pay,” but asserts that “on the most critical issues of the teaching profession, the state is the real powerhouse,” citing how teachers are evaluated, when they get tenure, their benefits, and the notorious issue of firing procedures. But are benefits really that important as an obstacle to reform, so long as compensation is structured on a factory-worker scale? And does the procedure for evaluating teachers matter as an obstacle to reform so long as evaluations play no role in compensation – again because compensation is structured on a factory-worker scale? When teachers get tenure and how hard it is to fire the bad ones are obviously important as obstacles to reform. But are they really so much more important than the factory-worker scale? Whether teachers get tenure early or late is less important than the fact that they get it. Disciplinary procedures only affect a small number of teachers. Even if we include the absence of a more widespread deterrent effect, we’re still not talking about something that affects all or even most of the profession.

I also think NCTQ is barking up the wrong tree when it argues that lobbying the state for goodies is more “efficient” than fighting for goodies district by district. As Hamilton, Madison and Jay (the “Three Founderos”) observed in the Federalist Papers, selfish interests will always find it easier to extract goodies from the public fisc in a whole bunch of little local places than in one big place. While centralization does provide one-stop shopping, it also creates more intense scrutiny and greater opporutnities for opposition.

In fact, in the case of the teachers’ unions, I’m not even sure why it would take more resources to extract goodies on a district-by-district basis. They have to “negotiate district by district” anyway. They get coerced dues payments from millions of teachers precisely to pay the costs of negotiating in every district. And conditions on the ground in those districts are more favorable than those in the statehouse.

Moreover, the old saying goes “the crime is what’s legal.” In this case, the big obstacle to reform is what the teachers don’t have to bother negotiating for: the factory-worker structure of compensation. It’s not like they have to go back and win that all over again every time the contract comes up for renewal.

Finally, it’s not clear that state-mandated and district-negotiated provisions can be separated all that clearly. For example, check out this chart from the NCTQ report, illustrating how the process for firing teachers is mandated by state law in California:

Pretty nice graphic! But check out the contents of the first box:

School district must document specific examples of ineffective performance, based on standards set by the district and the local teachers union.

And the third box:

If the school board votes to approve dismissal . . .

And the fifth box:

School board must reconvene to decide whether to proceed . . .

And the seventh box:

. . . and persons appointed by the school board . . .

And the ninth box:

If . . . the school district appeals the decision . . .

See what I mean? The larger reality of the union/school board relationship will influence the board’s behavior in discipline cases. And the standards for documenting misconduct are subject to union/board negotiations.

I don’t mean to diminish NCTQ’s important contribution here. We should absolutely be paying more attention to state teacher contract mandates. But I think NCTQ goes too far to argue that they’re more important than the dysfunctional school board system.

4 Comments | politics, research reports, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

NCLB: Less Than Meets the Eye, More Than Nothing

July 29, 2008

Given all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, one would think that NCLB was a crushing burden on the school system.

In actuality NCLB demands very little. It only requires that states wishing to receive Title I funds have to establish goals for student success, select tests for measuring progress towards those goals, and report results from those tests broken out by subgroups.

The sanctions for failing to make progress toward those goals are almost non-existent. Schools failing to make progress have to offer tutoring or allow students to transfer to better-performing public schools in the same district (if one can be found). But, as we have previously discussed on this blog and in this article, there is widespread non-compliance with even these minimal sanctions. Too often schools fail to inform parents properly of their options under NCLB or direct students into their own tutoring programs, resulting in very few students taking any resources out of their local school, let alone district. Without placing school funds in jeopardy, the only possible sanction is public embarrassment. And that plus $4 will get you a latte at Starbucks.

I do not believe that a single tenured teacher out of the more than 3 million teachers currently working in public schools has been fired, experienced a pay-cut, or otherwise been meaningfully sanctioned because of NCLB. I do not believe that a single student out of the 50 million enrolled in public schools has been held back a grade, been denied a diploma, or otherwise been meaningfully sanctioned as a result of NCLB. (Some states have retention and graduation requirements as part of their state accountability systems, but those policies are not required for NCLB.) Yes, chronically failing schools might eventually face “restructuring” but that is likely to be yet more bark and no bite. Next they’ll be put on double secret probation.

So what supports complaints about “pressure cooker NCLB testing,” or “NCLB-post traumatic stress disorder,” or other “NCLB outrages”? If NCLB has almost no real consequences for teachers or students, what is all of the fuss about? The overwrought reaction seems to have more to do with a political campaign over the future direction of education policy than the actual effects of the current policy.

The most important future policy that the higher volume of squealing is meant to influence is increasing education spending. A center-piece of the complaints about NCLB is that it is an unfunded mandate. Let’s leave aside the fact that federal spending on education has increased 41% since passage of NCLB. And let’s leave aside that NCLB is not actually a mandate, since states do not have to comply with NCLB if they do not want Title I funds (which have increased 59% since 2001).

Besides neither being unfunded nor a mandate, the argument that NCLB is an unfunded mandate is especially odd because it makes one wonder what all of the funding that schools received before NCLB was for. It’s as if the unfunded mandate crowd is saying: “The $10,000 per pupil we already get just pays for warehousing. If you actually want us to educate kids, that’ll cost ya extra.” Remember, that NCLB just asks states to establish and meet their own goals. Didn’t they have goals before NCLB?

While NCLB demands much less than the overwrought rhetoric about it suggests, it does not demand nothing. Most importantly, NCLB entrenched the idea that we should take regular measures of student achievement and report the results, including results for subgroups. Even this is a smaller thing that it may seem at first glance since 37 states had already adopted state testing and accountability systems before passage of NCLB. But NCLB brought the laggard states on-board to this growing national consensus that we ought to have some systematic measures of how our students are doing. It also made reversal of this growing testing and accountability culture more difficult by placing it in federal as well as state law.

Greg Forster has already made the case for why this shift under NCLB has been important, so I will not repeat it here. I would just emphasize that the controversy over NCLB is not really about what NCLB does, but about the broader policy shift that it represents and the extra funding that folks hope they may get as they acquiesce to that policy shift.

26 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Broader, Bolder — Bigger Budget

July 28, 2008

Check out Ken DeRosa’s critique of Broader, Bolder (the union backed plan to improve the struggling education system by doubling-down the bet and expanding the responsibilities of those struggling schools to include health care and other social services). 

Here’s my favorite bit of his post:

“Let’s take Ravitch’s defense first:

I care as much about academic achievement as Checker or anyone else in the world, but I don’t see any contradiction between caring about academic achievement and caring about children’s health and well-being.

The issue isn’t about who cares about children’s health and well-being. The issue is whether public schools, who are by and large failing at their primary task of education, should take on the additional responsibilities of caring about children’s health and well-being. You could care very much about the health and well-being of children and NOT think it’s a good idea to hand these services over to our public schools.

The argument seems to be that since children attend school every day (cough, cough) that social services could be easily provided at school. Then why not hand over these responsibilities to the post office. After all, they make house calls six days a week regardless of the rain, snow, heat, or gloom of night. They could give the kids a quick vision screen and drop off any drug prescriptions.”

4 Comments | myth of helplessness | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Popcorn: City of the Dark Knight (Issue #1)

July 28, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Well, it’s not as good the second time you see it. It’s better!

See here for the premiere installment of the PTP: City of the Dark Knight series. Oh, and: Spoiler alert (duh).

This time I caught a lot more of the “moral hypocrisy” theme being set up earlier in the movie. It’s not as clear when you don’t know yet how significant it’s going to be later. But they’re clearly telegraphing that the restoration of moral order in Gotham is requiring some compromises of the rules – for example, this flew by me the first time, but Dent brings that mass prosecution of criminals knowing full well that he can’t make most of the charges stick. He argues to the mayor that they should go forward with prosecution anyway, because most of the bad guys won’t be able to make bail (Batman, Gordon and Dent having taken away most of their money) and thus will have to sit in the slammer while the cases grind through the system. “Think what you could do with eighteen months of clean streets,” Dent tells the mayor. Wrong? Not necessarily. Politics is the art of the possible. But it’s bending the spirit of the law.

Also, notice that Gordon tells his people to lie to the media about Dent’s disappearance. I did notice this the first time, and I thought about it for all of five seconds or so, and then I had to keep up with the movie. The second time, it stands out more as part of the hypocrisy theme.

Perhaps the most important thing I caught this time around is why Dent blames Gordon and Batman for what happens to Rachel. It’s because Gordon built his Major Crimes Unit by including officers who were under a cloud of suspicion. This is another “moral compromise” narrative. Confronted about it at the beginning of the movie, Gordon first insinuates that when Dent was at Internal Affairs he had been bringing bogus corruption cases against clean cops in order to build his career. (At first I thought this might be a signal from Chris Nolan that the movie is right-wing, because prosecuting innocent people to build a career was always the right’s complaint about Eliot Spitzer. But then I remembered that Rudy Giuliani did the same thing.) However, Gordon seems to concede pretty quickly that his MCU does contain some shady characters. He says something like, “I have to do the best with what I have to work with.”

I also caught that they’re telegraphing from early on that Dent is not all he appears to be, morally speaking. The first time I saw the movie I wanted them to do more to establish Dent’s fall – he seems to go over to the dark side pretty quickly. But now I see that he was never really that good to begin with. That, plus it occurred to me that the “Two Face” Dent is still fighting for justice in his twisted way. He’s hunting down the people he blames for Rachel, subjecting each of them one by one to the judgment of the coin.

And now for something completely different: I noticed this time that the guy on the prisoners’ boat who throws the detonator out the window has a damaged right eye (his right, our left). I got really excited by this. I thought, where else in this movie did we see a black criminal have somthing happen to his eye? That’s right: “I’m going to make this pencil disappear!” So I thought: the Joker’s goal is to corrupt everybody. But what if one of his victims found himself forced to reexamine his life while sitting in the prison hospital, and he became good because of the Joker’s actions – and that same person’s goodness was the reason the Joker’s ferry experiment failed? Layers within layers within layers!

But, alas, I was barking up the wrong tree. Somebody has posted the pencil scene on YouTube, and it’s clearly not the same actor. Oh, well.

One more thing: I found an easy way to remember the mobster’s name, the one I couldn’t remember in my previous post. It’s Moroni – the same name as the angel who allegedly revealed the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith. How’d that happen? Was the entire Warner Brothers marketing department asleep?

Let me close with a bleg: At the end, Gordon says that Dent’s rampage produced “five people dead, two of them cops.” I count Moroni’s driver, Moroni himself (assuming he died in the car crash), the first of the two crooked cops, and Dent himself. But the other cop won the toss and just got knocked unconscious. So that’s four people, one of them a cop. Whom am I missing? Are we supposed to assume Dent found a way to finish off the second cop despite the toss, just like he found a way with Moroni (assuming that’s what happened)? Is this a goof? Or what?

7 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

When “Sorry” Means “J’Accuse”

July 28, 2008

The letter "J'accuse"

The following column about a letter appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Wednesday, July 23.  The letter is in the form of an apology, but it is actually a series of accusations about testing and accountability.  Like another front page letter of accusation, this one has all of Emile Zola’s moral outrage but has none of Zola’s justification.

I’ve reprinted it here with my comments in blue italics.

Students pass state test, but at what cost to their education?

by Regina Brett

The school report cards came out in June.

Rocky River Middle School passed the 2008 Ohio Achievement Tests, earned an Excellent rating from the state and met the requirements for Annual Yearly Progress.

For all of those accomplishments, Principal David Root has only one thing to say to the students, staff and citizens of Rocky River:

He’s sorry.

Root wants to issue an apology. He sent it to me typed out in two pages, single spaced.

He’s sorry that he spent thousands of tax dollars on test materials, practice tests, postage and costs for test administration.

Actually, he did not spend the money.  The taxpayers did when they decided through their elected representatives to adopt a testing and accountability system.  They then hired David Root to implement this policy in his capacity as principal at a public school.

Sorry that his teachers spent less time teaching American history because most of the social studies test questions are about foreign countries.

I guess the people of Ohio thought it was important for students to learn about foreign countries when they, through their elected representatives and hired agents, devised the state curriculum and test.  Besides, if students learned more about foreign countries they might know who Emile Zola was.

Sorry that he didn’t suspend a student for assaulting another because that student would have missed valuable test days.

Sounds pretty irresponsible.  Would he have made a different decision if the student would have missed valuable instructional days?  If so, whose fault is that?  Oh yes, I forgot that this is an accusation, not an apology.

Sorry he didn’t strictly enforce attendance because all absences count against the school on the State Report Card.

So, is David Root saying that he cheated on the state accountability system?  Isn’t this like lying to your boss about your job performance?  Will he be fired, sanctioned, or resign to make amends for his infraction?

He’s sorry for pulling children away from art, music and gym, classes they love, so they could take test-taking strategies.

Why didn’t he just follow the state curriculum and let the scores show what students knew? The decision to take time away for “test-taking strategies”  was completely unnecessary given that more than 90% of Rocky River students have been scoring above the proficient level in reading, math, and writing.  It sounds like they would have done just fine on the state test without working on test-taking strategies and having spent more time on art, music, and gym.

Sorry that he has to give a test where he can’t clarify any questions, make any comments to help in understanding or share the results so students can actually learn from their mistakes.

How reliable would the results be if principals could clarify questions, help in understanding, or share secure test items that would be re-used on future tests?  Does every assessment have to be a formative assessment?

Sorry that he kept students in school who became sick during the test because if they couldn’t finish the test due to illness, the student automatically fails it.

This sounds like a difficult decision.  Football coaches similarly have to think about whether to take injured players out of the game versus having the players tough it out.  We pay leaders to make these difficult decisions, balancing competing interests wisely.

Sorry that the integrity of his teachers is publicly tied to one test.

Actually, the state accountability system — let alone “the integrity of his teachers” —  is not based on one test.  The overall rating of Rocky River Middle School is based on several test results (in Reading, Math, Writing, Social Studies, and Science), the progress students have made in those subjects, and (as we already heard about) the possibly fraudulent attendance rate.

He apologized for losing eight days of instruction due to testing activities.

I thought Root didn’t want one test, so it takes time to administer several.  While testing takes place on eight days it does not (or at least does not have to) consume the entirety of those days.  My understanding is that the average student only spent two mornings being tested, as testing occurred in different grades and subjects for different students across eight days.

For making decisions on assemblies, field trips and musical performances based on how that time away from reading, math, social studies and writing will impact state test results.

I would hope that the principal would think about how assemblies, field trips, and musical performances impact instructional time for other academic subjects regardless of whether those subjects are part of a state accountability system.

For arranging for some students to be labeled “at risk” in front of their peers and put in small groups so the school would have a better chance of passing tests.

Again, if smaller group instruction would help certain students, the principal should arrange for that regardless of the state accountability system.  And the principal would have to think of a way to provide that necessary assistance without stigmatizing the students who need it.

For making his focus as a principal no longer helping his staff teach students but helping them teach test indicators.

Why didn’t he just help his staff teach the subjects with confidence that the test indicators would show what they had learned?  This is especially puzzling given how likely it is that students at Rocky River would pass the state test without paying any special attention to test-taking strategies.

Root isn’t anti-tests. He’s all for tests that measure progress and help set teaching goals. But in his eyes, state achievement tests are designed for the media to show how schools rank against each other.

Seems like the state accountability system does measure progress and help set teaching goals.  What’s wrong with it also informing the public and policymakers (via the media) about how their schools are doing?

He’s been a principal for 24 years, half of them at Rocky River Middle School, the rest in Hudson, Alliance and Zanesville. He loves working with 6th, 7th and 8th graders.

“I have a strong compassion for the puberty stricken,” he joked.

His students, who are 11, 12, 13 and 14, worry that teachers they love will be let go based on how well they perform.

One asked him, “If I don’t do well, will you fire my teacher?”

He cringed when he heard one say, “I really want to do well, but I’m not that smart.”

Has a single tenured teacher in Ohio (or in the United States) been let go based on performance on state accountability tests?  Maybe he should reassure the students that their concern is misplaced.

He wants students to learn how to think, not take tests.

Can’t they do both?

“We don’t teach kids anymore,” he said. “We teach test-taking skills. We all teach to the test. I long for the days when we used to teach kids.”

Why not just return to those days and let the test results show what kids have learned?

Unless we get back to those days, principals and teachers all over Ohio will continue to spend your tax dollars to help students become the best test takers they can be.

The people of Ohio decided to adopt an accountability system because the schools weren’t doing an adequate job teaching kids to think without it.  The “just trust us to do a good job” approach wasn’t working.

(edited to add color)

7 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pass the Popcorn: City of The Dark Knight (Issue #0)

July 25, 2008

New PTP Mini-Series, Issue #0 – Rare Collector’s Item!

Have you been regressing endogenous variables again?

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

It’s too much.

I mean, too much for one blog post. Last Friday I lightheartedly left a comment on Matt’s PTP entry promising to have my Batman post up by Monday. Surely, I thought, I’d be so juiced after the movie that I’d run straight back to my computer and blog until my fingers bled.

But no, this was a very dense movie. Chris Nolan is ambitious, and the movie vindicates his ambition triumphantly. After the movie, I was unable to talk much about it – because there was too much to digest. And by the time I was ready, I had already forgotten half the thoughts I’d had during and right after the movie. Clearly this is a work that’s going to repay a lot of repeat viewing – a hypothesis I intend to test vigorously, hopefully with plenty of checks for the robustness of the finding (e.g. does the movie repay repeat viewing if the repeat views are in a drive-in? In IMAX? With co-workers? In the afternoon? Does it make a difference if I order a soda with my popcorn? How about what kind of soda I order? I’d better try watching it once with each kind, just to be sure).

At this point I just know that any blogging I do is going to be no more than a pale shadow of what I really thought and felt during the movie. So, to assuage my conscience (and save myself from spending all day working on this post, fretting about what I’m forgetting to include) I’m hereby inagurating a special Pass the Popcorn Mini-Series. I’m posting some of my thoughts now, in anticipation of revisiting the subject later. (Don’t worry, not too often. But we are going to have to find something to write about on Fridays after the summer movie season dies down, and this will help fill the gap.)

Oh, before I forget:

(HT xkcd)

There are already some haters out there, like John Podhoretz in the Weekly Standard, who are offended – nay, outraged – that a comic book movie is getting the kind of praise The Dark Knight is getting. Well, OK, it ain’t Shakespeare, but that’s apples and oranges. Let’s take a similar example – say, a mob movie. Podhoretz never misses an opportunity to share his opinion that The Godfather is the best movie ever made. And I agree that The Godfather deserves to be taken seriously as a great work of art. But it is a mob movie. If The Godfather can be great, why not this?

Unforgivably, Podhoretz works out his anger by spoiling as much of the moive as he can get away with. So don’t read it until after you’ve seen the movie. (Reading the spoilers in this blog entry is of course an entirely different matter.)

It’s readily apparent from Podhoretz’s review what’s really eating him: he loves the old, wild and carefree tradition of superheroes from the Silver Age, recently resurrected so dazzlingly in Iron Man. That tradition got killed off in the 1980s, in large part due to Frank Miller’s amazing work in reinventing Batman, and Podhoretz resents that this type of superhero has crowded his preferences out of the market.

(As an aside, Frank Miller looks to have come way down in the world, artistically speaking; to judge by the preview they ran in front of Dark Knight, Miller’s newest project is to take Will Eisner’s treasure The Spirit and turn it into a porno movie. But all will be forgiven if Holy Terror, Batman! ever actually sees the light of day.)

I sympathize with Podhoretz. One of the best comics ever drawn is Scott McCloud’s ZOT!, which came out when the Dark and Serious school was at its height, as an attempt to rescucitate the wild and carefree hero. (According to McCloud’s introduction, it was especially a reaction against the literally murderous nihilism of Watchmen, which, alas, now looks like it’s finally going to get the movie they’ve been threatening to make of it for decades. Yes, there was a lot of real storytelling genius in Watchmen. That’s what makes it so horrible – to see such genius used to glorify cynicism and murder.)

But while most of the Dark and Serious stuff was crud, let’s face it, most of the Wild and Carefree stuff that preceded it was also crud. ZOT! and the new Iron Man are jewels, but jewels in the rough. So was Miller’s original Dark Knight Returns, and so is the new Dark Knight.

And then there’s the politics. There’s a handy precis of the issues, with links, here if you’re interested. My take: The Dark Knight probably isn’t directly about the war on terror. It’s about things that are universal. (Ever since Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Batman has periodically been used to explore these issues – meaning we don’t need to bring in the war on terror to explain why these issues are present in a Batman movie.) But of course if these things are universal then they’re as present in the war on terror as everywhere else, so the application of the movie’s subject matter to the war on terror in the viewer’s mind is perfectly valid. 

Having unburdened myself of these reactions to the reactions to the movie, do I have time left today to say anything about the actual movie? Just briefly.

Warning: Believe with Caution

The Dark Knight seems to be primarily about moral hypocrisy. People are not “basically good.” All human beings are both good and evil. However, it’s not in our nature to admit this about ourselves; we have to pretend that we’re good. And the same hypocrisy manifests at the social level – society, being made up of human beings, is not “basically good” but is both good and evil. However, in order to keep from becoming aware of our own evil, lest we should have to admit the truth about ourselves, we also have to sheild ourselves from other people’s evil. If we admitted that everyone else was not “basically good,” it would be really hard to avoid raising the question about ourselves. And so we have to pretend that everybody is “basically good.”

The Joker is out to expose our hypocrisy. His ultimate goal isn’t to kill, it’s to corrupt. He would say that he isn’t out to corrupt us, but to make us admit to the corruption that’s already there in our hearts. But to “admit” to the courrption in the Joker’s sense is really to surrender to it – to become “corrupt” on a whole different level.

This, incidentally, is why it was such a good decision to give the Joker no backstory (and not just by omission but by the Joker’s deliberate obfuscation about his own past). As Chris Nolan has said (I’m paraphrasing), this Joker isn’t a person, he’s a primal force. My hypothesis: the reason this Joker has to be a primal force and not a person is because he has to stand outside of our hypocrisy. The Joker’s place in the narrative requires him to be, not both good and bad, but all bad. And while the Joker is right that all people are bad, it’s also true that all people are good – therefore the Joker, being all bad, can’t be a person.

On the individual level, the Joker’s mission is manifested in the “one rule” dynamic between Batman and the Joker. As all real Batman fans know, Batman’s one rule is that he doesn’t kill people. The Joker’s goal for the Batman is to induce him to break his one rule – thereby proving that his rule is really a construction of self-righteous hypocrisy.

Here the influence of Miller’s Dark Knight Returns is obvious, although Miller’s Joker is primarily motivated by a desire for mass murder and cares about Batman’s one rule only secondarily:

Late Nite Talk Show Host “Dave”: You’re said to have only killed about six hundred people, Joker. Now don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you’ve been holding out on us.

Pansy Liberal Psychologist: This is a sensitive human being here, Dave. I won’t let you harrass-

Joker: I don’t keep count . . . I’m going to kill everyone in this room.

Dave: Now that’s darn rude.

At the social level, the Joker is out to stop Gotham City’s resurgent belief in justice, embodied (in different ways) by Batman and Harvey Dent. I wish there had been an opportunity to establish more tangibly the positive impact that Dent’s mob cleanup was having on the city; it would have made us feel more urgently the real stakes that the Joker was playing for.

What the heck is this guy’s name again? They said it, like, five times in the movie. You would think I’d remember.

And that leads to the big twist at the end – maybe the best twist I’ve ever seen in a movie: the good guys have to defend hypocrisy. Of course it would be great if society could admit the truth about its own corruption and still strive to uphold justice anyway. But fallen human nature doesn’t work that way.

All my life, I’ve hated those cheesy TV shows where they decide to cover something up because “people need heroes.” Even the Simpsons, when they set out to parody this, couldn’t quite bring themselves to pull the trigger. It’s not done as a parody when Lisa decides not to reveal that Jebediah Springfield was actually a notorious pirate; they play it straight.

But The Dark Knight makes it work. People really do need their heroes, and their heroes really are fallen people. Ergo, people really do need hypocrisy. The reason I buy this in The Dark Knight when I’ve rejected it in all previous incarnations is because The Dark Knight doesn’t try to make it out to be a good thing. It’s wrong that people need hypocrisy – that people need to have heroes before they’ll agree to uphold justice and do good and so forth. It’s ugly and stupid and evil. As Dr. Surridge says in the original V for Vendetta comic (not the dreadful movie version), “There’s something wrong with us.”

Yes, it’s wrong that people need hypocrisy – but since they do need it, it’s not necessarily wrong to supply it.

Hold that thought. More to come. Stay tuned!

5 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

USA Today: Parental Choice Popular in Sweden

July 25, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Sweden, of all places, went for government funding of private school attendance in 1992. The quasi-market system has proven very popular, so much so that even the teacher unions don’t complain about it.

Perhaps next they will go really crazy and outsource their bus services, to the delight of Greg and Andy.

1 Comment | competitive effects | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

« Previous Entries