Chronicles of Riddick freaked me out.
Which surprised me. A movie widely hailed as big, loud, and meaningless? Freak me out? I’m a lawyer. I write death penalty opinions now, and once upon a time, I cut my teeth on punk apocalyptic science fiction. I get the hero’s journey, whatever the moral virtues of the hero in question. Even went to law school hoping to be a hero, before I got distracted by the nice view out my window and that little bit of power my state has bribed me with. I have embraced my own moral ambiguity.
Before the critics weighed in, I thought I’d like the Chronicles of Riddick because, to my surprise, I liked Pitch Black. Horror is not my genre; most exemplars seem as deeply conservative as the fourth circuit; the rest, too cheesy to watch without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. But one day I chanced on something that looked like Aeryn Sun kicking someone. Mmm, Farscape. Hardcore science fiction and Muppets; the apotheosis of television. Enough to draw me in.
Pitch Black reminded me of a painting of Russian landscape I saw once. Scrubby trees, snow, a sled. Wolves chasing the sled. Someone leaning off the back, caught in the act of tossing a child to the wolves.
This story lurks underneath the first science fiction story that got me in the gut, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula Le Guin. About a little girl locked in a closet in her own filth until she died, unloved, nearly inhuman, unable to talk or laugh or cry. Once she died, a new little girl was picked to take her place. These girls’ misery was the price for a whole city’s joy. It’s the story Buffy the Vampire Slayer refused to tell when she wouldn’t kill her sister to save trillions. Like John Crichton said: heroes don’t do that; Kirk wouldn’t do that. It’s a subplot in one of the greatest books ever written, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where every year a child is sacrificed in a frozen lake for the greater good of a small town. And it’s lurking in Pitch Black, where a seemingly good woman tried to kill dozens of innocents to save herself, where a seemingly reasonable man decided kill a little girl to save the rest, and a seemingly brutal killer decided he was not going to have this child’s blood on his hands.
Meaning that Riddick, the redeemed antihero, just like the shiny Buffy (just like Kirk) was arguably out of step with contemporary risk management based decision making. Back to where I live, during the day. We’re rational wealth maximizers, we do toss those babies off the back of the sled. Calculate the risks and rewards of nearly any major action, some knowable number will die. I myself have worked on more opinions than I care to remember where parties have asked us to adjust the acceptable risk level one way or another. And maybe that’s just one of the costs of civilization.
All that hit me later. At the time, Pitch Black seemed like a fairly standard redemption tale. Journey of a small band into a heart of darkness, monsters picking them off one by one, constantly facing the temptation to save themselves by shoving someone else out of the sled, unsure if one of the monsters was on the sled with them. In the darkness and under the wetly flapping wings, Riddick slowly stops being the monster and becomes the hero, and it was a believable, satisfying transformation.
And there was myth, once I stopped to think about it. The reversals of the night, where the demon Set saves the sun god Ra, his ancient enemy, from the god of chaos and old night, Apophis. The comets that forebode the death of kings. 22 years, 22 cards in the major arcana . . . A solar chariot that fails them at night . . .Riddick gets his redemption and he renounces his life; a dead man hanging between two worlds awaiting rebirth or dissolution.
All without ignoring the required standard horror tropes. The brutal killer still enforces an external moral code – just instead of killing some girl who has sex in the beginning of the film, he kills the man who would kill a child. The girl who breaks the rules in the beginning of the film still dies – but dies because she decides everyone is worth saving. Very Star Trek. I’m a sucker for that stuff. Looked like the painting, looks like Omelas, looks like the archetypes on my tarot cards. Got my cathartic satisfaction, was pretty, did not weigh on my mind. Liked it. Didn’t freak me out at all.
And then . . . Chronicles of Riddick genre jumped to into pure mythic science fiction. My country. At least at night. Again, fairly standard framing story. The quest, innocent victims, a darkness where comets foredoom the death of kings. Both movies were about the appropriate scope of ethical obligations; to individuals; to small groups; to people, to life, to principle. In this case, the threatened innocent was not a person but a planet, the type of tolerant holy land then-Cardinal Ratzinger condemned as a dictatorship of pluralism. An Eden threatened by a dark crusade of zombie warriors who hate the dance of life and death and seek to engineer an Armageddon where only those who accept the mark will survive. A totalizing imperialism, lead by an antichrist who came back to plant eternal death in the womb of the living universe. The end of history. Classic science fiction. Classic heavy metal. Thinly veiled social commentary. Biblical snark. I was falling into the narcotic comfort of a beloved story, with the hope of progressive cathartic triumph up ahead. Woohoo.
Except the story kept darting away from the standard Campellian Journey of the Hero. Dostoevsky was lurking in the genome, and David Brin’s call to outgrow our Campbellion demigods – except the story could not bear to loose the great Achilles. Synthesized in a protagonist who does not so much resist the call to be a hero, as just walk right past it, maybe all the way to the end. Unexpectedly Hamletesque, he lets us in on the joke; he knows the universe is spiraling down the drain. And, as if bitten by Hamlet’s existential nausea, he decided it was too ridiculous to fight. Which frustrated me; I want my preternatural mythic heroes to stand between the world and the abyss, not to politely step back and wave the world through.
Riddick’s asked again and again to step up, be the redeeming hero, save the universe. But the call left him cold; all his actions seem propelled by the desire – or whim -- to protect and avenge the people he took off that dark planet. Even when at last he storms the citadel, he does it without any real sign he had accepted the call or was seeking redemption. We keep slipping from myth to Ayn Rand. I loath Ayn Rand. Very unsettling.
With almost Buddhist detachment, Riddick stalked through a catalog of mythic science fiction standards. The great American myth of the Noble, but Flawed, Hero saving the Edenic Village from the Rapacious Uber-Evil. The tale of the Outsider, teetering at the edge of redemption. The older story of the hero who resists the call, accepts the call, is initiated into the mysteries of death and the other world, and returns from metaphoric death. The Metamorphosis, both Kafka and Ovid. Beowulf; the great northern hero who raises his sword knowing his fate is to die; to be eaten by the dragon and by time, and knowing that defeat is not refutation. And yet, it felt like this hero was untouched by playing these roles. Riddick himself becomes the protean child from Pitch Black on a grander scale.
Some tropes cannot be evaded, even by role playing. Like Buffy, Riddick is an American hero; thus he is required to assert himself to the bad buys by quipping. Because the bad guys were slightly British and fully seized of their own uber-ness, they respond in rolling mythic tones. Flash Gorton vs. Ming, John Crichton vs. Scorpious. Buffy vs. The Master. Good fun. But like Buffy, it kept code shifting. Riddick and Death’s other Avatar, the Lord Marshal, locked gazes with mutually unsettling recognition. Both monsters, stalking through death’s dream kingdom, seeing something familiar in the other’s eyes. Loved the code shifting between the modes.
Delphic recognition thrust Riddick into a new world, and elevated him, for an instant, from merely human antihero to new face of the ancient hero. Prophecies unfold, history is unveiled. Achilles is lurking around somewhere.
Delphic exposition also illuminated the tragic mundane truth that brutalizing conditions produce brutal people, shifting us back to the mundane reality of my job, which quite often involves reviewing psychiatric charts of people who have done very bad things. Like so many of them, Riddick was a brutalized child, left partially strangled by his own umbilical cord in a trash can by the very man whose eyes he gazes into, that he takes up arms against.
The Lord Marshal’s brutality plays out through Riddick’s life, infecting those he would protect; like it does in so many families. Despite Riddick’s intentions, but as a direct result of his actions, the child he saved from monsters is enslaved, gang raped, and condemned to a Hades that reduces all but the exceptional to shadows. Not surprisingly she abandoned her original name. It meant “god is gracious.”
Perhaps conscious of irony, the child grows up and transforms again, this time into Kyra. Kyra means sun. But Kyra is not a devotee of the sun; her life had been governed by the Moon, the mistress of change, madness, hidden forces, renewal. Her menstrual blood, mythically related to the mysteries of the moon, almost killed them all in the last story. Her blood mattered to Riddick; Johns’ suggestion that they cut her up and use her as bait in Pitch Black provoked Riddick to commit the only killing we see this supposed brutal killer do in his first chapter – almost mockingly, by making Johns bleed and thus draw the monsters to him, the way Johns would have drawn the monsters to Jack’s body. Maybe her name was a gesture of defiance at Riddick, who hated the brightness, and who seemingly abandoned her to it. Maybe it was nihilistic rejection of her own nature. Maybe she is Ra, the Sun, threatened by monsters in the darkness, saved by an ancient enemy. Maybe it was an attempt to adjust to the place she could have called home, Helios, which also means sun.
By the time we meet her again, she is learning to assert control over blood, like the Moon. She becomes an avatar of Kali, Black Time, dealing death with shoes designed to dance on corpses. She becomes Persephone, metaphorically escaping the death of an underground prison by a violent rebirth. Like her namesake, the Sun, escaping from the Wolf Fenir, escaping from Apophis for a little while. She is learning to fight the dragons that would eat the sun.
Kyra also means Far Sighted. Not a bad name for a woman who wanted to see the world through the eyes of the monster who had and would try again to save her. We see Riddick through her eyes as he falls into Hades. She (almost) sees through the eyes of Death’s other avatar. Because she could not see the line between light and dark, death and life, she believed her only choice was to escape the Sun into another underworld and accept the Necromonger offer to veil her eyes. When her eyes were finally clear, she saw into Riddick’s eyes, and was extinguished. Eyes open, not closed. Another unsettling reversal of expectations, like maybe the Necromongers are right; the threshold as a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Her other body parts matter. By a clever substitution for something less mentionable, the story identifies a “sweet spot” on the back that would bleed and bleed from time to time, intertwined with Kyra’s attempt to control blood, to control life. She asserts herself by holding a knife at that special spot on Riddick’s back. She is redeemed from her brief lack of vision when she stabs Death’s Avatar there. She dies from a penetration there. She performed the woman’s traditional role in these stories by dying, killed by a dead branch of a dead tree, but she left the stage like Mother Courage, unsettled and incomplete. And like the Sun and Moon, there are hints she might be reborn from darkness again, out of the Underverse. I loved that. Back to the comfort of a beloved story. Spock lives.
In my daytime world I know that “liberty” comes from a Latin word that implies a lack of restraints; while freedom comes from a Norse word that implies the possession of full kinship rights in a community. Radical autonomy vs. community. Riddick and Kyra each have a type of liberty but no freedom; no kin has their back. Without liberty we never grow up; without community we never become human.
I loved that when Riddick’s not looking, when he is not asserting himself by rejecting the call, the old stories shine through him. When Riddick’s shadow is revealed it is The Hero, The Sun, The Fool, the Bearer of Light in dark places. Dissolving effortlessly back into The Devil, Lucifer, the lightening bolt that shatters the Tower, as soon as consciousness returns. For a moment, the savior, for a moment, Apophis, the destroyer.
Riddick is an awful lot like another of my favorite characters, Neil Gaiman’s Shadow; another hero who is not always so heroic. Shadow was a mostly mortal avatar of Balder, who was tricked by the Allfather into dying on the world tree. He came back. Later, he was tricked into the guise of Beowulf one night and forced to fight another incarnation of Grendel, their mutual destruction intended to renew the power of the powerful. Shadow falls for it, and for an instant, he was every hero who ever stood between the firelight and the darkness and wiped the blood of something inhuman from his sword. And, like Shadow, Riddick does defeat the powerful. Unlike Shadow, he steps into the hole he created, making his story far more dark that the comparatively sweet ending of American Gods.
Riddick is not good people. But good person or not, Riddick is a hero because, like Beowulf, like Shadow, he stands between the firelight and the darkness and fights back the monsters. Because he saves the girl from gang rape with a teacup. Because he saves her from incineration with a leap off a cliff, like The Fool of the Tarot starting on the soul’s adventure. Because he leaps into the belly of a hellish planet to save her and returns to the gates of hell to save her again. Because I expect him to follow the goddess Inanna and the hero Orpheus into the underworld and tear his Eurydice from the belly of the underverse. Because I want him to repudiate Job. Because he is the thing the darkness fears.
But Riddick stays too ambiguous for me to feel satisfied. He passes through the archetypes like they are merely roles he’s playing. He is Death, whom no locks can bar. He is the Fool, three times leaping off a cliff. (What I tell you three times is true, quoth the Bellman and Robert Heinlein.) He is the Hermit, sealing himself in a type of dream state with a barely seen Spirit Guide beckoning from the edge of a graveyard. He is the Devil, the enemy, the adversary, the tempted and the tempter. He is the Chariot; who stands against the monster that would eat the Sun. He is The Tower, self ignorance shattered by oracular lightening. He is The Star, leading the way out of the underworld. He is the Hanged Man, offered dominion over the world by Lucifer, but rejecting it in favor of bondage and metaphoric death to pay his ethical debts. He is the Hanged Man who, like Shadow, steps off the tree and accepts dominion.
And I really loved that he managed to save the girl again and again without reducing her to a Perils of Pauline caricature, without annoying me the way John Carter’s repeated salvation of the princess of Mars annoyed me. Kyra would have been a damned good warrior queen, heir or consort, if only, if only. But the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. And maybe this story will sound in horror, not mythic science fiction, and she will stay dead forever.
Death, the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, is inexorably linked to The Emperor, the fourth, by the commonality of fours. The power to take life is an essential attribute of sovereignty. As if conscious of this, the Lord Marshal, Riddick’s father substitute, is both Death and The Emperor. And in the most chilling moment in his story, Riddick becomes the Emperor too.
He’s not the only one who reverberates through the archetypes. The holy man who calls him is the Hierophant. The Hierophant channels between the sacred and the profane for those who are at the first level of understanding, who takes us to the threshold of exile. The Hierophant is connected to Temperance, the messenger who guides the soul from Death to the Devil. By calling Riddick back to Helios, the holy man does exactly that. Takes him from the frozen moment of suspension to his introduction with the Lord Marshal, his personal devil, to temptation and destruction and mastery of powers within. And the Devil is related The Lovers. That longing for the other that drives us out of our childhood Eden.
Though I’m not even sure the Lord Marshal is a bad man. Maybe that’s the Rudyard Kipling in me; I too am a daughter of the empire. The Lord Marshal obeyed a vision that promised immortality and inclusion, no matter where you came from. He seemed to take no pleasure in killing, in inflicting pain. He offers a powerful gift. And Riddick has the capacity to be truly evil.
The holy man has a structural kinship with the Necromonger’s Purifier, a dark side of the Hierophant. Traditionally, the dark side of the Hierophant is Procrustos; the ancient demon who would offer travelers a bed, then cut them or stretch them to fit it. The Purifier did incredible things in the name of a faith that was never his own; reshaping living flesh to fit the needs of a religion. His speeches got me in the gut; articulating my own angst about my strange position in the hierarchy. He is akin to Death, and the Purifier, the dark side of Temperance, takes souls from the Threshold of Death to the acceptance of the Devil’s mark.
Like the holy man, the Purifier inserts himself into Riddick’s life. If he had done nothing, Riddick simply would have died in the light of a firestorm inexorably sweeping the planet. But he pulls Riddick back into a cave and offers him a choice of devils. Finally reject the call, or go back and face the Lord Marshal.
Riddick needs a lot of guides. The final one, Shirah, stands, like, The High Priestess, between the realm of the spirit and the profane. She channels the power of another realm into this one, through Riddick, who is utterly subsumed by it. This High Priestess is driven by the perceived justness of her cause, by understandable anger at genocide. Her Justice is vengeance; wanting Riddick to be a sword in the hand of the dead.
Dame Vaaka plays at being The Hermit, the Guide, for both Riddick and her husband, but that’s just a mask. Scaled like a snake, she is The Deceiver, The Destroyer. Her ambitions help topple her kingdom. Like the Purifier, she is a master manipulator. Though I do believe, like Lady Macbeth, she truly loves her husband.
Tragic Lord Vaaka! He would be the Hero. He would be the faithful Knight of Swords, Defender of the Faith. But his wife wants to be the Empress; the Queen of Heaven, the Great Goddess. She wants the power of death over life. To do this in her world, it seems she must elevate her husband to Emperor, done fastest if over the body of the lawful King. But Vaaka can’t jump to that spot in the Major Arcana. He’s just a knight. Not ready for his apotheosis. He can’t see, with clear eyes, through death’s dream kingdom. Riddick, who easily wears such deliberate disguises (rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staffs in a field), masters vision in a single fight. Vision is on his side. A vision Vaaka has fruitlessly studied for a life time.
Aeryon is of the air; the suit of Air is the suit of swords. Cutting, calculating, healing, swirling. Of course she’d want to draw in Riddick. She also wants Riddick to be a blade in her hands, a tool to bring a new balance to the universe.
Riddick himself is out of balance; we all are. He’s almost all air; almost defined by the blade in his hand, the blade at his back. Son of the air, just like Lucifer, continuing his strange association with the light he has turned his back on. He’s frustrated in his ambition to be air and darkness by the one person he’s drawn to, and her ironic choice of name; sun; seer; throne. They are both chthonic heroes; in the belly of the earth waiting to be born. But Kyra’s blood and tears are nearly the only water. Riddick even turns a cup, the sign of water, into a blade, the sign of air.
I lie; there was other water in there. Riddick is drenched at least three times, baptized by water, baptized by blood like a devotee of Mithras, the Sun, baptized by water again. And I love the implication that Riddick had a mother who died trying to save him; that he is the child of a hero, her blood providing the first baptism before a demon tried to cut him from the air with the very umbilical cord that kept him alive.
While brutality wins again and again, at least one, and maybe two, women did love Riddick with their dying breathes. Except here, when Kyra dies, Riddick’s redemption seemingly fails. He sinks back into the throne of the people who made him an orphan, becomes the darkness. Wonderful.
And yet, the whole thing was terribly frustrating. I longed for an ending where Riddick stopped passing through. Where he wakes up and follows Buffy down the path of the sunlit hero, to be a fireman when the floods roll back. I longed for Riddick to do what Shadow did – figure out the trick, stop playing rigged games; make peace with the monster and together shred the institutional forces that created the brutalizing conditions. (Yeah, yeah, the promise and treachery of the Holy Grail. “Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being oppressed!”). There was a moment when the beasts were released through the labyrinth where there was a gesture towards such a rapprochement; a new end to story of the imperfect hero Theseus, who seduced and abandoned and kidnapped and was a bit of a monster himself, and the Minotaur, who was just being what he was born to be. There was a moment when he leaps into the throne room where he might have come to be the hero, have figured a way out of the trick, out of the rigged game. But he didn’t. The story ended a tragedy.
Maybe I’m wrong; maybe he did get his redemption, and just like the critics, I can’t grok it because it wasn’t telegraphed. Maybe the redemptive moment came when he decided not to simply sweep up the girl and flee, but instead leapt into the throne room fully intending to kill the king. Or maybe that was merely hubris; the moment when his reach finally exceeded his grasp. But what ever his intentions at that moment, the story didn’t give me the progressive cathartic triumph I craved. I wanted him to save the day; save the pluralistic progressive society we see raped and destroyed by a totalizing faith; I wanted him to start singing Bob Dylan songs.
denying me my catharsis probably made it a better story. It made me think about it rather than go to bed satisfied. Riddick stays a yet-unnamed archetypal warrior, imperfect nihilism with mirrored eyes. A thing of darkness, a blade at the throat of the universe, taking power through the death of a little girl who chose to leap into the wolf pack for him.
But as creepy as it was, I loved him at that moment. I loved him collapsing in grief onto the throne, the hordes of hell gracefully and inexorably kneeling before him. A throne like the thrones of Justice and the High Priestess (both faces of his most intimate spirit guide) and The Hierophant (the dead holy man who tried to awake him to his moral obligations to the mundane universe), sitting between two pillars. Power and Mercy; Life and Death, Revealed and Unrevealed. Unlike the archetypical pillars, these pillars spiral up and down; one down the drain, dealing death and destruction; one up the Tree, giving life. A tipping point, if Aereon can figure out how to use it. Sitting with the body of the girl he loved at his feet, where of the symbols of dominion, the slain king or captive princess should be. Her name also means throne; I can’t get over how well she chose. One half of his body already accepting the feel of the throne; the other resisting. With the words of his predecessor on his lips.
Absolutely chilling that every person Riddick felt bound to is dead, except, maybe, a five year old child. If Kyra is irredeemable from the underworld, the dawn may be very far away.
I loved the return to another of the great stories. Riddick killed the Avatar of Death and took his throne, inserting himself into yet another hierarchy over the body of the one thing that made him human, the one thing that might have made his violence redemptive. In the end, the monster accepted the call to fight monsters. He wins, but his victory restores no one, redeems no one, brings no gift back to the world. Instead, now he has the choice of being an avatar of the Grand Inquisitor, of serving life, serving death, or being Id boy.
Riddick could almost be a different iteration of the story underneath Hamlet, whose very name, in some far off land, meant “Fool.” The original Hamlet killed the man who killed his father, and by that killing claimed the throne of Denmark. Hamlet killed that man with his own sword and took that throne. Under Freud and Fraiser’s inexorable logic, we must kill our fathers or their substitutes to become master, after all. You keep what you kill. And there is the ear thing, death pouring through the portals of our ears.
Most of us get the luxury of sublimination when it comes to killing our fathersBut the Lord Marshal killed Riddick’s mother, probably killed his father, definitely killed the two people Riddick saved from darkness; took everything he knew. In some far of field, in some attenuated way, the archetypal dark father became Riddick’s father. Riddick, like Orestes, avenges the death of one parent on the body of another. Unlike Orestes, there is no kindly goddess standing in the wings to create a new justice system to spare him the agony of the old. It was bleak and agonizing and beautiful and made for a damn fine movie. I loved it. I love it more the more I think about it.
But I’m not terribly surprised it wasn’t a smashing box office success. It was too Brechtian, too Titus Andronicus, too Stepford. This was a movie for people struggling with whether to leap off the Fool’s cliff or turn their backs on the abyss. But it seemed targeted towards teenage boys who largely hadn’t done the background reading.
It hinted at horrific darkness not shown. That works for horror, less for mythic science fiction. It’s thinly veiled social commentary had to leave many audiences unsettled by the echoes of our current crusade into the holy land, by the bad guys who spoke words that sound like our sacred texts. It was rooted firmly in ethical obligations. We want to forget that in our race to privatize, to dominate. It evoked the same tropes that the great gateway to science fiction, Star Trek, struggled with; when do the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many; when do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one? How do we live in the shadow of our fathers’ religion that asserts itself as the only path to the sacred, once we meet the righteous pagans, once have stopped being merely being poor Arjuna, a blade in the hand of the Preserver, Lord Krishna, cracked the atom and become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds? At the risk of offending the ghost of Auden, it suggests that he and LBJ were right; that we must make a world in which all children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other or we must die. If we love one another, we may still die. I loved that, but I’m that kind of girl.
And then there’s the race thing. Blue eyed devils and chains and backs of busses and victory by any means necessary . . .
More subtly, both Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick had an underlying ethic that was transgressive. I don’t think audiences like transgressions to be subtle. Plato suggests most people never grow up, and have to be lied too to make them bearable to live with. The Noble Lie – that some are destined to rule; some are destined to carry spears. Profs. Lawrence Kohlberg and Carole Gilligan suggested people grow morally along predictable patterns of moral growth, topping out, they assert, at either a manly allegiance to principle or a feminine ethic of care for others. (The essentialism of that makes me uncomfortable, but that’s my lookout). At every stage, surviving societies have mechanisms to ensure the moral choice is good for the survival of the society. Under this schema, Riddick is morally feminized; he refuses to embrace higher principles but is at his ethical best when he’s driven by his ethical obligations to others. Thinking of Riddick this way does slightly appease my frustrated longing for Riddick to wake up and embrace his higher ethical obligations, but I’ve always had a soft spot for all species of bisexuality.
But its other subtle transgressions were unsettling even to me, an attorney, an atheist, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, and a life long lover of the genre. It invited us to identify with remorseless, brutal killers, even when they aren’t fighting monsters. We want to forget our obligation to such brutality. It invited us to care about Lord Vaaka’s Macbethian conflict between fidelity and desire. We want to forget how this conflict shapes our shared reality. It asked us to celebrate a man who walks into a firestorm rather than resolve the contradiction of who he is and what he does. A deeply unsettling answer to the cognitive dissonance every honest person I know feels. It invited us to gaze at a man’s body in the shower, the predator himself, instead of some nubile victim. As a Buffy fan I appreciate the reversal, but I feel peculiar about participating in Kyra’s gaze. We’re invited to be titillated by necrophilia; by the sexualized violence between the evil power couple. In a world of culture shift, that is unsettling. It even evoked Romeo and Juliet, time’s irony and the hero’s seeming death leading the heroine to seek oblivion. I’m a big girl; I don’t want to like that story, I loath romance. And it was deeply, deeply unsettling to see the hero take his throne in a room designed by Leni Riefenstahl.
Maybe we weren’t invited to see these things, and I’m just self-indulgently seeing meaning because I want to justify finding the movie enchanting. But usually, the more I think about movies, the less I like them. See Star Wars. Loved the movies as a child, but with Enlightenment eyes, I’ve seen that what lurks beneath Star Wars is more profoundly disturbing than any evil Riddick represents; a call to serve our natural betters. Viscerally, I want the Once and Future King to come back, intellectually I know that watery tarts hurling scimitars is no way to select a supreme executive.
Which leads me to the overwhelming question I have circled warily for several days now: why do I care about this story enough to try to read it deeply? There are starving puppies out there, and a vast right wing conspiracy – with agents down the hall here at the Temple -- to forestall. Even now, there is a stack of legal briefs I brought home and should be analyzing that I neglect in favor of writing this. I read the great books of the canon all the time, very seldom do I feel compelled to sit down and write pages about them.
Gentle reader, it hit me with a wave of existential nausea. Because Riddick slipped through an unguarded portal and, for a prolonged instant, annihilated the carefully constructed virtual reality that veils me from the abyss. My version of the Noble Lie lost its grace. I am an iconoclast who serves the power; who ghostwrites the words of the State and participates deliberately in the creation of official reality. But I look at Riddick, and am at a loss to know what moral claim civilization has to regulate his conduct. Why is he the monster chained hand and foot, rather than the rapist prison guards or the genocidal military officers? I’ve read Judge Bazelon; I have no moral answer to the moral claim that a rotten social background robs society of moral jurisdiction. I have no answer for the little girl locked in Le Guin’s closet.
Maybe there is nothing there but survival. But that’s not a foundational myth for a civilization. Like David Brin says, I Am A Member Of A Civilization. I believe in the myth.
But every lawyer knows how thin our foundational myths are; that the protection of in the institution of slavery shaped the very form of government, that the institutions we serve perpetuate much evil with some good. Understanding is not the problem; we have the power to change it today if we wanted. We are the priests of the temple. It’s the weight of history, and all the benefit we get from the bad. And it’s probably inevitable whatever the structure. Like Harold Bloom said, something is rotten in every state, and if your sensibility is like Hamlet’s, then finally you will not tolerate it. But then what? And why is Riddick making me hurt about this again, seven years after taking the oath of an attorney, seven years after I became a judicial factotum, eleven years after learning that every attorney knows the great lie at the bottom?
Like Lenny Bruce said, I am part of everything I indict. I’ve written words knowing they will send men to their deaths. I’ve written words that keep the powerful powerful. I’ve written words I do not want to explain.
I live with it. I love my job. It’s intoxicating to matter. But my job creeps me out. I am profoundly unsettled by my own part in the institutionalized violence that is both a sword to protect and a sword to destroy; a tool of progress and a shackle to a dark history.
I know this. And I’ve shrugged off Hamlet-esque paralysis. The state bought off my rebellion with a name on a door and a special pen. But I cannot bear to stare directly into that underlying chasm of legitimacy for too long, and don’t want to give up my claim to influence. I can’t resolve that contradiction, so I usually ignore it. Some movie I watched with beer and popcorn and expectation of a narcotic, transitory thrill wasn’t supposed to forcibly remind me of my own complicity with the Grand Inquisitor. Vin Diesel is not supposed to be the face of the abyss looking back at me.
I will live with this. I will live with this. My burden is not so heavy. I am largely in accord with the values I am asked to enforce upon the world.
Except sometimes when my job (though I love it) becomes unbearable. When my own part in the violence inherent in the system creeps me out, tips me into one of my regular self indulgent ontological meltdowns. I have to look away from what I do, who I am becoming, and mythic science fiction is where I tend to look. To the place where mythic heroes and enlightenment values meet. Away from Lloyd Garrison’s echoing bellows that by swearing to uphold the constitution, I have sworn to uphold a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Away from the fact I have written words knowing they will send men to their deaths. Away from the blood on my hands.
So this is it. The two major stories of my life collapsed in Riddick. I am privileged and cursed to be part of the institutionalized violence that Riddick violently resists, and some days I can’t tell if I serve the highest ideals of FDR and the Nuremberg Tribunals, insuring that every one, even the worst of us, receives Due Process and Equal Protection of the Law, or if I serve Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the military industrial complex. Like Hamlet, Riddick looks at the rot and feels no institutional loyalty to muddle through. I look at him and my own compromises with power, to have power, seem assailable.
I expect it when I get drunk with my constitutional law professor. I don’t expect a big budget movie to trigger waves of existential angst in me. Damn it, I am part of the machinery of death. I’m supposed to be beyond this sort of reaction.
When I poured my heart out to my constitutional law professor about this, my latest ontological dislocation, he gently reminded me that all societies are predicated on myths, on lies, and it is only by the grace of guile that we make it through the night. It is foretold that at Ragnarok, the winning side will be Chaos and Unreason but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation. We can’t face that it’s all swirling down the drain all the time.
Except as a faithful daughter of the Enlightenment, sworn to uphold the constitution, hoping -- working -- for the redemption of a progressive history, I don’t want to believe it’s spiraling down. As much as I’m drawn to these classic myths of redemption, transcendence, reconciliation and initiation, I’ve taken an oath to the Enlightenment. I just keep circling. Myth to hegemonic history to politics to my own inquisitional role in the perpetuation of power, swirling back around. Riddick, this re-imagining of the hero who has read his Underground Man with Byronic amusement and become the Dionysus hero Nietzsche probably wanted to be, has spun my head around, and the implications are seriously creeping me out.
Maybe I’m wrong about Riddick. Maybe Riddick is just what he says he is, another version of the hero on the Chariot, just passing throughMaybe he’s just a new face of The Devil, the Trickster, Hamlet feigning madness to keep the world from seeing his true face. Maybe, in Tolkienesque terms, he’s a warrior in the Twilight of the Gods the assertion of the individual freedom against all the terrors and temptations of the world. Absolute resistance, perfect and without hope, doomed to die. Maybe he’s the avatar of The Tower burst asunder by lightening, driving us out of paradise, limbo, prison, the labyrinth. Maybe he hasn’t become who he is yet; and he will or would ripen in time to a classic hero or antihero. Maybe he’s just a new face of the implacable goddess Nemesis, the patroness of the new American Empire. Maybe he is the natural consequence of Ayn Randian autonomy. God I hate Ayn Rand.
Maybe what I saw wasn’t the movie intended; I know what I saw seemed to bear no relation to what the critics saw. Maybe it was just a bricolage of random pieces, and I’m picking up only on those monads splattered against the back wall of the cave I was always already wrestling with. Maybe this is just the left hand of the work I do manifesting itself, repressed self loathing suddenly incarnate.
But trying to step back from my own eyes and my own self indulgent traumas, I think the movie told a brilliant story of the ancient hero, always new, stalking through the ancient tropes and spinning them off into new patterns on the screen. Another dark avatar of the solar hero. He forced to me remember that on a visceral level, I believe the ancient lies; that Arthur will return, that the Wolf will eat the Sun; that Zeus will be killed by Metis’s second child; that Buffy saved the world a lot. I believe everything. But I know these myths also do too good a job of reconciling us to our own domination. Riddick reminds me that some of our noble lies, and my own compromises, aren’t working so well for me any more. His refusal to give me my progressive cathartic release, or to be the redeeming hero I am used to watching, to loving, to finding satisfaction through was darkly disillusioning. Darkly disillusioning at a moment I had anticipated slipping back into the myths that would reconcile me to the work I have chosen, with all its banality, glory, and pain. But despite his refusal to be the hero I wanted him to be, despite my suspicion that, like him, I am of the dark and will never find illumination or redemption, I found him absolutely enchanting.