Do you feel in charge?

Power, privilege, paper, rock

The hazard of weighing in once on subway violence discourse: you get responses, which in turn prompt a whole other essay’s worth of thoughts. For instance:

For people who want to simultaneously dismiss the threat of antisocial behavior on public transit while insisting on the right to be maximally threatened by awkwardness in the workplace, this is a common rhetorical comparison: the powerful man in the corporate office versus the powerless, homeless subway screamer. I understand why some people find it compelling. It’s also, I think, an annoyingly abstract — and somewhat effete — way to talk about real-world tragedies in which an encounter with one of these allegedly powerless parties may cost you the use of your legs.

There’s a scene in The Dark Knight Rises (one of the few truly good ones in an otherwise disappointing film) where Bane, a villainous mercenary, is summoned by Roland Daggett, the man who hired him. Daggett is gearing up to give Bane the scolding of a lifetime, but in the middle of his tirade, Bane interrupts, and tells Daggett’s assistant to leave.

Daggett bristles, and scoffs.

“No, you stay here. I'm in charge!”

Here, something amazing happens. Something shifts. Bane very gently lays the back of his open hand on Daggett’s shoulder — so gently, soft as a butterfly alighting on a blade of grass— and coos: “Do you feel in charge?”

Bane also snaps Daggett’s neck after this, but no matter; it’s an afterthought and doesn’t even happen onscreen. This moment, right here, is the climax: the promise of unspeakable violence in that open palm, and the way Daggett’s features shift and quiver as he turns to see it on his shoulder. This is the face of a man who has realized all at once and much too late that being in charge — in the business card, boardroom, signing-the-checks sort of sense— only takes you so far, and only protects you so much. Because in that capacity, a.k.a. the one favored by Twitter commentators the world over, Daggett is indeed in charge: the man is cisheterosexual white male privilege personified, not to mention Bane’s employer. If institutional privilege equals power, then he’s holding all the cards— especially when Bane is what these same terminally-online types would call “marginalized”. (Dude checks a lot of boxes: ex-con, working class background, severely disabled, thoroughly insane.)

Except: that sort of power is not just abstract, but based on a fragile consensus. Daggett needs the deranged mercenary in the mask, the one whose trapezius muscles come all the way up to his ears, to agree that he is indeed powerless compared to a small rich man in a suit. The whole thing is like a game of rock-paper-scissors. If one guy has a rock, and the other guy has a piece of paper that says “Mister Vice President in Charge”, and they both subscribe to the manufactured construct whereby paper beats rock, then the man with the paper wins. If not… well. What we have here is a confrontation between one man armed with a piece of paper, and another armed with an object that can cave in a human skull. And does the man with the paper feel in charge?

Would you?

I’m not saying that the people inveighing against the reasonableness of feeling threatened by a screaming stranger on the subway need to touch grass, but it might do them some good to pick up a rock. To feel the real, tangible weight of it. To remind themselves that there is the kind of power that is granted by institutions, and then there is the kind of power that punctures skin and breaks bones, and if you’re going to encounter one of these during your morning commute, you pray it’s not the latter.