Last week, Film Club looked at They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which presents a world so exploitative that the only meaningful gesture of resistance is to refuse existence itself by engaging in violent self-destruction. Choosing death by a bullet certainly holds no shortage of dramatic force, but we here at Film Club wondered whether the movies didn't have some other, better strategy to offer in response to a hostile world.

With that question in mind, we turn to The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), which tells the story of Colin, played memorably by Tom Courtenay:

Colin is a working-class adolescent, and has some sense that the world is not really prepared to offer him what we'll call a rewarding life. This understanding, as we see it in Colin, is inchoate—it manifests itself more as ennui than as critique. He's bright enough to have an intuitive sense that the future looks like a dead end, but not bright enough to avoid making bad decisions. As such, he resembles the kids from La Haine (Film Club 4), or (especially) Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows (1959). Like Antoine, he's likable without really being good.

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And a final note: no aspect of this film has given me much insight into why the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, would have compared himself to Colin in the middle of his political meltdown (link contains a spoiler, btw). Colin may be likeable, but he's also stubborn, impulsive, and (arguably) nihilistic—he is also unambiguously guilty of the crime he is jailed for committing.

And now a few words about the necrophile community.

If you look closely at any group of people who appear, at first glance, to be unified by creed, interest, or fetish, you will inevitably learn that there is some issue or point of order that divides members of that community. And, indeed, so it is with necrophiles. According to a necrophile FAQ that's circulating around out there, the issue that divides necrophiles above all others is the question of how, er, "recent" the remains should be, with some necrophiles preferring freshly deceased remains, and others preferring older, more skeletal remains. Apparently, the rift between these two groups is severe enough that it's devolved into name-calling, with members of the first group referring to members of the second group as "dust-fuckers."

This was all brought to my attention by angela_la_la, who claimed that she was going to start using "dust-fuckers" as her new favorite put-down, because she could think of no phrase more pejorative than the one a necrophile would use to describe an even worse necrophile.

So how does all this relate to this week's Film Club pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962)? Well, as we've been going through our tour of cinematic sociopaths these past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about how filmmakers build audience sympathy with twisted characters. Lolita, as you probably know, tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who spends nearly the entire film pursuing (and eventually consummating) a sexual relationship with Dolores "Lolita" Haze, a 14-year old girl (she's 12 in the novel). Pedophiles are probably even lower than serial killers in the big catalog of American Enemies, so how do you get the audience to swallow their distaste and accept one as the protagonist of a two-and-a-half-hour-long film?

By using the Dust-Fucker Principle, of course, and squaring him off against an even worse pedophile.

In the case of Lolita, that Even Worse Pedophile is Clare Quilty, played memorably by the great Peter Sellers.

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Those of you who weren't / aren't gamer geeks may not be aware of a funny little merit of the Dungeons and Dragons character-generation system, which is that one of the attributes you set for yourself is your "alignment," a value that stands in, essentially, for your morality.

I've always liked the way that the alignment system works in Dungeons and Dragons because it's a two-axis system: there's the basic good-to-evil axis that you'd expect, but there's also an axis ranging from "lawful" to "chaotic," which describes your degree of attraction to order. If you were to draw this out as a scatterplot, it would define four major areas, which, in Dungeons and Dragons parlance, are Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil.

Last night I saw the new Batman movie (OK, OK, The Dark Knight) and one of the things that I noticed about it is that its major characters align to these four areas. To wit:

Chaotic Good: Batman

Lawful Good: Harvey Dent

Lawful Evil: Two-Face

Chaotic Evil: The Joker

This is not that interesting, in and of itself, to anyone except former gamer geeks like myself, except that it highlights the film's interest in these polarities, in the way that good defines itself against evil, and in the way that order defines itself against chaos. Especially interesting in both Dungeons and Dragons and The Dark Knight is their refusal to conflate good with order and chaos with evil. These pairings can be, and are, often found together (and Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker is nothing if not a memorable embodiment of Chaotic Evil in its most prime manifestation), but they also can be, and are, often decoupled. A recognition of that allows for a more complicated and rich moral universe, and The Dark Knight's exploration of these different configurations is, to my mind, the film's greatest strength.

[A sad closing note: the Wikipedia article on alignment informs me that the new Fourth Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons rules has gone the simpler route, eliminating both Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good. Bloody dualists!]

For our film club this week, we decided to stick with the Spike Lee trajectory begun last week, and so we watched his terrific, uncompromising biopic Malcolm X (1992), which I'd not seen before.

On one level, the film is an extended examination of persuasion: specifically, it looks at the difference between persuasion and coercion.

Persuasion can be powerful, but when power itself is the means of persuasion we cross a line into coercion. The film is very interested in how people and institutions weild power, as it announces baldly in its opening juxtaposition:

The Rodney King tape is, of course, among some of the most iconic coercive footage ever shot, but the early portion of the film has no shortage of additional examples. For instance, here's someone making a point to Malcolm's mother:
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