Jack Bauer has a Secret, and its Name is Batman

Fox's upcoming Gotham looks pretty interesting.

Fox released the first TV trailer for its gritty Batman prequel during Monday's premiere of 24: Live Another Day, where we saw Batman and multiple evildoers in their Muppet Baby phase. Penguin looks like a strangely skinny high schooler with a thing for umbrellas, the Riddler an up-and-coming accountant, Poison Ivy a cross between a second-grade botanist and the girl from The Ring. Bruce Wayne looks all of 10, and the future Commissioner Gordon is an idealistic rookie.

But it and the extended trailer (below) make the new fall series look like, for a Batman dweeb like me, must-see-TV.

And how appropriate that Fox would choose 24 to premiere the trailer. After all, Jack Bauer is Batman.

Well, not really. Jack eschews both capes and huge Swiss bank accounts. Batman never carries a gun and never kills, while Jack has killed around 270 people (and counting) and likely belongs to some sort of "gun of the month" club.

But they really are the same sort of hero now. Both are grim and tortured souls who work in the shadows. Both seek justice by skirting the law. Both have, at best, an uneasy relationship with the law agencies they're supposed to be working with. And at times, those relationships can become positively adversarial—even though everyone involved is fighting on the same side. Both, I suspect, have some serious issues that a good psychologist could help with—but neither have the time nor inclination. Both like their gadgets.

And both, of course, have become dark legends—their mere names striking fear in the hearts of men.

What draws us to heroes like this, I wonder? Never mind the success of Iron Man at the box office, Batman is America’s best known, most popular superhero, and has been for decades. And even though 24 never got incredibly huge ratings, Jack Bauer is perhaps the most recognizable character to come from television in the last couple of decades—capturing our imagination like few before. There’s gotta be something in their very darkness that pulls us to them, I think. They’re the toughest of the tough, but broken, too.

Perhaps they borrow from the world’s first heroic template. In Homer’s The Iliad, I’ve long felt that Hector—the doomed would-be savior of Troy—was the story’s real hero, not mighty Achaean Achilles. But perhaps both have passed on their literary genes to Jack and Batman: Hector, with his self-sacrificial willingness to give his call for his city and country. Achilles and his unmatched prowess in battle offset by his penchant to nurse deep wounds in the sanctity of his tent.

Or maybe they play on a deeper, even spiritual level, they remind us a little of us.

In God in the Streets of Gotham, I wrote this:

In most superhero stories, the line between good and evil, the gulf between light and darkness, is clearly defined. … But there’s a part of us, maybe a small, nagging, unpleasant part, that treats those stories with suspicion. We know the line is not that bright; the gulf between “us” and “them” is not that wide. We feel not just the hero inside us, but the villain . . . the darkness. Batman, a guy who doesn’t just wear a black hat, but one with pointed, horn-like ears, is a representation of our own selves, a strange, graphic allegory of the soul, with Gotham City a microcosm of the fragile, fallen world through which we struggle to make our way. Gotham itself feels bad—Old Testament bad. We can catch a glimpse of ancient Sodom or Samaria when we see its streets, and we feel its sin press on us with an almost physical presence. Batman, as we’re told in The Dark Knight, isn’t a perfect savior for the city; he’s the one it “deserves,” in all his imperfection. He walks perilously close to the line.
 And yet there’s something inside the guy that sets him apart. He may look bad, but it’s not what he looks like that matters. It’s what he does, and what he stands for, that counts.
How curiously biblical Batman is in this way. He’s not much like Superman, but he is something like Moses, David, and Peter. The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat our heroes for us or tell us they’re anything but pretty sorry, flawed folks. And yet God takes them and makes them special, even great, just as he does with us.

Maybe the same could be said for Jack Bauer, too—a guy who’s tougher and badder than we’ll ever be. And yet we see in him the darkness, and light, in us. Someone who has hurt people and who’s been hurt. Someone who makes a ton of mistakes every day. And yet someone who’s still striving to do right in spite of it all.

24: Jack Bauer, the Worst Messiah Ever

I don’t watch much television. But tonight I make an exception. Why? Because Jack Bauer wants me to.

You don’t mess with Jack. Made famous by Kiefer Sutherland on Fox’s long-running show 24, Jack Bauer makes Chuck Norris look like a tofu-eating yuppie. In eight full seasons, the guy has killed his boss, cut the hand off his partner and threatened someone with a towel—all to save the world repeatedly from terrorists and duplicitous politicians and dirty bombs. I’m sure he could do something about climate change if he had more bullets. He makes even baking cupcakes look tough:

And now, after a four-year hiatus, Jack is back with 24: Live Another Day. I admit it: I’m a little giddy.

I’ve watched 24 from the beginning, every action-packed, sometimes ridiculous minute of it. When I worked at The Gazette (the daily paper here in Colorado Springs), me and a clutch of 24-loving editors and reporters would rehash the whole show the following morning: The shockers, the one-liners, the narrow escapes from rampaging cougars. Talking about 24 was almost as much fun as watching it. And when I moved to Plugged In and reviewed the thing from a Christian perspective (and given all 24’s torture and stuff, it’s not really the sort of program Plugged In can give a hearty thumbs up to), I had to smile when some 24-loving readers skewered me for not “getting” the show at all.

I got it, I think. Or, at least, I appreciated it. Each season—each episode, really—was predicated on one thing: Just how far would Jack go this time?

The answer always surprised us. And over the arc of the 24’s run, we not only watched Jack do some terrible things, but suffer as well. He buried his wife and alienated his daughter. He lost nearly everyone he was ever close to. Every season, Jack’s job consumed a little of his soul.

"In the early years of 24, after the 9/11 attacks, the common take was that the appeal of Jack Bauer lay in his strength," writes Time's James Poniewozik. "He was tough, decisive, and effective, offering the fantasy of security in an insecure time. But in the long run, I don’t think Bauer’s most important function was to fight our battles; it was to feel our pain. Season after season, he would suffer physically and spiritually, he would lose friends and lovers (and sleep), he would save the country and get run out of town. He was like a psychic pincushion, a sponge soaking up all the toxic emotion of the era, committing our sins and swallowing the guilt until he seemed 100 years old."

He is television’s ultimate suffering savior, I suppose, as tortured as anyone he takes a towel to. He’d do anything to save the world, it seems, including sacrifice his own life.

But a Christ-like figure, he’s not. He knows it as well as anyone. While a blameless Jesus carried our sins, Jack (in Poniewozik’s words) commits them. He is a doomed hero, a savior in a world without grace or mercy or forgiveness. Jack might call himself a necessary evil, and Bauer apologists would agree. The theory goes that sometimes to take out the bad guys, you need someone willing to get his hands dirty.

But a necessary evil is still an evil. Jack may be a savior of sorts for a purely physical world. Maybe he saves our skins. But when it comes to souls, he can’t even save his own. For that you need grace and forgiveness and the healing power of God.

No, Jack’s not a Messiah. He’s just a guy like us—a flawed sinner who tries to do what he can to make the world a better place in his own brutal way.

Hey, I’m thrilled Jack’s back. I’m rooting for him to be thanked for all his hard work and get a medal or something. After saving so many people, it’d be nice for him to find some salvation himself.

But I’m not counting on it. For that, the powers that be would not just have to acknowledge Jack’s sacrifices, but forgive his crimes. And 24 is not a very forgiving show.

Noah: Snakes, Tubal-cain and the Slithery Nature of Evil

Of all the things most hotly debated in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, perhaps nothing’s stirred more controversy than all the snakes.  

They’re significant, for sure. We say a black snake slither out of a green one in the Garden of Eden—Satan out to give Adam and Eve a rough time. Thousands of snakes slither into the ark shortly before the Flood. Evil stowaway Tubal-cain chows down on a snake while hiding aboard the ark. And then, of course, you’ve got the snakeskin used as a magical talisman by Noah’s extended family—a glowing symbol passed down from generation to generation.

Aronofsky’s snakeskin has encouraged some Christians to believe that Noah’s “Creator” isn’t God at all, but the devil. By holding onto an aged snakeskin from the Garden of Eden, Noah and his family were following Lucifer’s pipe.

Not so, says Noah co-writer Ari Handel in Relevant Magazine:

When Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, it says God gave them a garment of skin—sort of a parting gift from God to mankind as we leave Eden and go out into the world. So we wondered what that was—and as we looked at commentaries about it, one of the common ones was that it was the skin of the snake. We wondered why that would be, and it occurred to us that God made the snake. The snake was good, at first. But then, the Tempter arose through it. In our version, we have the snake shed that skin, and the shed skin is the shell of original goodness that the snake left behind when it became the Tempter. It’s a symbol of the Eden that we left behind. It’s a garment to clothe you spiritually.

That’s pretty much how I interpreted the whole snakeskin thing when I watched the movie. And the symbolism of Aronofsky’s serpent echoes throughout the movie.

As Handel says, the snakeskin that Noah makes such a big deal about is the shell of God’s beautiful creation. Evil, somehow, slithered out of that creation and infected the world.

That’s in keeping with what Augustine taught the early church. Satan can’t create anything on his own. Evil isn’t a thing in itself as much as it’s a perversion of the good. It’s God’s creation twisted in ways that God never intended. Sex is great—unless it manifests itself in adultery or porn or whatever else falls outside of God’s design. Lies are, by definition, a twisting of the truth. To kill is to rebel against creation itself. Evil has to come out of something good: It has no other option.

Satan slithering out of God’s green snake fits with Augustine’s thoughts on the matter. But, of course, evil crawls out of more than just legless reptiles. It comes out of us, too.

In a critical turning point in Noah, our titular character comes to a realization that evil is not just in prime villain Tubal-cain and his crew. It’s in Noah, too. In fact, that evil’s buried in his whole family. There’s a snake inside all of us—an inescapable corruption that a flood won’t be able to completely cleanse. It’s a big revelation for Noah, and he begins to believe that to get rid of Satan’s serpentine influence forever, Noah’ll have to get rid of (directly or indirectly) anything that has a hint of evil inside.

But even though both Noah and Tubal-cain have some badness inside, Aronofsky—in my interpretation, at least—makes a critical distinction between the two of them. See,

Tubal-cain is in a state of rebellion.

Noah, whatever his faults may be in the movie, tries to do as he believes his Creator wills. Tubal-cain has no such goal in mind. While Noah wants to be a tool in God’s hands, Tubal-cain wants to hop out of God’s toolbox, run away and do whatever tools would otherwise do. More simply: Noah lives for God. Tubal-cain lives for himself. “Damned if I don’t do what it takes,” Tubal-cain says. “Damned if I don’t take what I want.” And so takes God’s creation, perverting it and twisting it for his own ends.

And then, curiously, he wonders why God has been out of touch. “I am a man, made in Your image,” he prays bitterly at one point. “Why will you not converse with me?”

When Noah feels like he failed God (which he doesn’t), it’s not out of rebellion, but weakness. He wasn’t strong enough to carry out what he believed to be the Creator’s terrible will. But Tubal-cain never wanted to follow God anywhere—not if God’s goals differed from his own. Just like Satan, really. It's interesting that, when you look at Tubal-cain's armor above, it looks a little ... scaly.

It’s telling that, when Tubal-cain smuggles himself aboard the ark, he kills an animal and eats it to regain his strength (a no-no in Aronofsky’s environmental fable). What animal? A snake, of course: He bites off its head and swallows it. Just as the rebel Satan came out of a snake, so the rebel Tubal-cain consumes one. He destroys a unique bit of God’s creation in rebellion. And so doing, he metaphorically takes a bit of Satan inside himself … the deed itself, not the snake, poisons the meal.

Noah: Lots of Baggage, But It Floats Somewhere Special

I just received a letter from a reader who, very politely, said my Plugged In review of Noah “missed the mark.”

“This film is a mocking, blasphemous, butchering, occultic, science fiction affront to the God of Genesis on every conceivable level,” the writer said. “This movie should have received the lowest recommendation possible. Seeing this movie will not benefit ANYONE.”

And you thought the Flood was bad.

The storm around Darren Aronofsky's film has been pretty crazy. I don't think I've ever reviewed a movie so polarizing. And I get the Christian backlash against the film. The source story is, after all, quite literally sacred. So when Aronofsky turned the story into a Tolkienesque fantasy epic for his own storytelling ends, well, many folks were bound to be upset. I think they have the right to be.

But I’d disagree with my critic saying that the movie won’t benefit anyone. I actually found the movie pretty interesting—sometimes even inspiring. And I think perhaps where Aronofsky went most “wrong” is where the movie is at its most intriguing. An example: The issue of discerning God’s will.

In the Bible, of course, Noah had pretty direct marching orders from God. Our old sailor was not only told to build the ark, but how big to build it and out of what. Sure, Noah’s neighbors may have thought it was a crazy thing to do, but Noah trusted God. And I think most of us, if we heard a booming voice from on high a la Bill Cosby, we’d be inclined to listen and trust, too.

But in Aronofsky’s vision, God does not communicate so clearly. The Creator (as God is called here) speaks to Noah through dreams and visions, and rarely even those. And for everyone else, the Creator is silent. Even the Watchers—semi-fallen angels—are left to wonder what God would have them do.

Tubal-cain (who I hope to write about more fully later on this week) is the movie’s clear antagonist. But for all his bluster, the villain is surprisingly complex: Tubal-cain would tell you that it’s not that he’s turned his back on God, but that God has turned away from him.

“No one’s heard from the Creator since He marked Cain,” Tubal-cain says. “We are orphan children.” At one point, he even seems to beg for God to speak to him. And so he feels like, if God’s not going to take care of them, it’s up to these “orphans” to take care of themselves.

(Of course, Tubal-cain ignores the fact that God, clearly, is talking with someone. Noah. Why else would the villain be so sure the rains were going to come, and why he made such an effort to build an army to take over the ark?)

But even for Noah, God’s wishes are not always clear. And once the floods hit, Noah’s interpretation of the Creator’s will takes center stage. He comes to believe that all men have evil in them. As such, humanity does not and should not have a place in the new world God’s preparing. He believes that God wants them all to die—if not in the flood, then afterward. And the Creator chose Noah because he was the only one with the strength to see this terrible task through.

Now this, of course, is horrifically unlike the Noah we read about in the Bible, and if the guy had managed to live a few millennia longer, he’d have a heckuva libel case.

But narratively, this controversial choice works for me because it illustrates a frustrating problem we modern-day believers struggle with all the time. What does God want us to do?

We hear this question in news stories every day. Would Jesus bake a wedding cake for a gay couple? Would He go see Noah? These questions are predicated on a deep uncertainty that many people of faith deal with every day. We pray and talk and parse Bible verses in the hopes of getting some insight on what’s the “right” thing to do. But sometimes, even when we search most fervently and pray most sincerely, we come to different conclusions.

And sometimes the folks who are most convinced they’re in the right are the ones that, in my eyes, seem to be the most wrong. The late Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church never seemed to have any doubt about what he was doing.

I’m not suggesting that certainty is necessarily wrong or bad. But knowing God’s will can be tricky. Moses’ wife, Naameh, and daughter-in-law, Ila, also felt that they knew what God would want. They pointed to certain signs. They pointed to what they knew of God’s character. Noah would not be swayed, barreling forward in his single-minded understanding. He had no Bible at the time to guide his actions, no kindly pastors to talk with. He was alone. And the Creator, unlike God in Genesis, did not choose to speak so definitively.

In the end, Noah makes the right decision—even though, in the moment, he feels as though it’s wrong. He looks at his own progeny and finds that he has nothing but love for them. Sure, he knows that they still have evil inside, that they might make another wreck of creation. And yet he loves them and saves them.

He kicked himself mightily for that lack of “obedience.” And yet, knowing what we do of God’s loving character through Jesus, Noah was being deeply obedient. For God sees us the same way. He sees our sins. He sees our imperfections. He sees the evil inside us all and knows that we can mess up His creation mightily. And yet, he looks down on us with love. He saves us.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength,” we read in 1 Corinthians 1:25. Never is that foolishness more obvious, or beautiful, than in His reckless love for us.