Mask vs. Bad Guys = Funny Bad vs. Serious Bad ?

Jacques Ranciere describes ethical turn as not a ″re-turn″ to the norm of morality but as a turn / change in which the morals are absolutized definitely by the suppression of the division morals used to imply. To examplify, saying lie is not moral, but if a woman who gained weight due to her pregnancy asks her husband if she looks fat, her husband’s answer ″no honey, of course you don’t″, which is a courtesy lie, can be considered ethical due to having another morality intrinsically, not to hurt his wife’s feelings. So in general, in this fact the formed consensus is that the act of man is not against morality. However, ethical interpretations should be made according to the facts, making a generalization, asserting such an idea that as long as it is for the sake of not hurting his wife’s feelings, man’s telling lie is ethical, may end up with a total liar and people around him not accusing him of being a liar because he is not hurting his wife’s feelings! So, defining what is ethical according to few experiences causes such a consensus that deciding what is good and what is bad becomes blurred.

We may find examples of what Ranciere desribes in the fantasy-crime-comedy The Mask (1994). In the film, the protagonist Stanley Ipkiss is an inoffensive bank clerk who remains unresponsive to the people who often bullies him such as his boss, his landlady, his car mechanics etc. One day he finds a mask which has the power to unleash one’s inner-self, repressed desires and give superhuman abilities in strength, invulnerability, speed etc. As Stanley uses this mask he reciprocates the ones whom once bullied him and serves them out: He deranges his landlady, attacks car mechanist’s store and answers people’s bully acts in harsh ways: street gangs annoy him, he mocks and opens fire to them; a man sounds the horn impolitely, he breaks the windows of his car by using loud noise etc. in order to enter the nightclub Coco Bongo where he has not let in before, he interrupts the robery of the bank, where he works, by ″bad guys″, but robs it himself. He runs away from police arrest by amusing them, through singing and dancing with the song Cuban Pete etc.

His actions throughout the time wearing mask are not morally correct but reciprocating to ″bad guys″, legitimizes morally incorrect behaviours of The Mask and makes them less evil.

Observing examples of the ethical turn in a fantasy-crime movie is funny, but in real world approaching facts losing the sense of just, injust, legitimizing every unmoral act by consensus with the supporting ideas of the ″only violence helps where violence reigns″, ″evil repays evil″, the only way to overcome the ones who acts unmoral is acting with unmorality in return and settling this idea appropriate in ethics causes the ethical turn that Ranciere describes where the perception of good and bad dissappears but only evil and less evil remains. In order to prevent such perception Ranciere offers: ″Breaking with today’s ethical configuration, ...entails rejecting the fantasy of their purity, giving back to these inventions their status as cuts that are always ambiguous, precarious, litigious.″ (p.132)

Lastly, it can be offered what if Mask did not throw the mask at last, would not he become one of these ″bad guys″ (although –being less bad than them) whom he was against?

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Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_%28film%29

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110475/

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