Civil Unrest Expressed in Different Eras

The ultimate goal of civil unrest is to bring about change. This could be through the introduction of a law to replace an older unjust law, spreading awareness to societal issues through protest, or to an extreme extent, overthrowing the government through revolution. The two cultural artifacts I chose, the album Animals by Pink Floyd and The Dark Knight movie trilogy by Christopher Nolan, express civil unrest towards problems of their times through stories of revolution. These two pieces share many similarities in how their narratives play out as well as differences in how they choose to tell their narratives.

The first cultural artifact I’m choosing to represent our theme of civil unrest is the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals.  I will only be focusing on the 3 songs comprising the middle of the album and not the two songs that bookend the piece. Animals was written by the band’s bassist, Roger Waters, after he read the popular fable by George Orwell that depicts political figures in the Soviet Union as animals as a farm. Orwell was against Stalin, so this book acted as a critique of communist society. Waters was inspired by this concept and decided to write his own critique of British capitalism and British society in the form of an album. He divides different groups of society as animals on a farm; big business owners and workers as dogs, corrupt politicians as pigs, and blind followers as sheep. He uses these comparisons to highlight the flaws of each group all in their own respective songs. Many of these flaws Waters’ choses to highlight are also present in todays’ American society, so the criticisms are still relevant.

I’ll start with the first critical song on Animals entitled Dogs, a 17-minute monster of a song about big business workers and owners. In Dogs, Waters is nothing short of savage in how he describes these businessmen dogs. Just starting off the track, he compares businessmen to savage, heartless predators who strike easy targets without a second thought through lyrics such as “You got to be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed”. This mentality is very similar to the mentality people are raised into today. Going through school and college, teachers and adults tell kids that getting and maintaining a job and/or business is very competitive and you need to develop a sort of “kill or be killed” mentality, in the sense that just being qualified isn’t enough to score a job, you need to go above and beyond in order to succeed. In the latter half of the verse, Waters goes on to say how these dogs have to put up a façade of being a good, respectable person to both cover up their predatorial nature and to build trust from the people around you. However, building this trust is only to make it easier for you to backstab those who trust you, putting yourself ahead of others. Businesses and public figures today use resources such as a public relations team or a person to run their social media account to build a good image to the public and people around them. This is nothing short of deceptive and selfish to the people they’re trying to fool.

In the next two verses of the song, Waters goes on to describe the fate one of these dogs is in store for. He talks about how they have to keep “one eye looking over your shoulder”, to be weary of all the people the dog has deceived throughout his lifetime. The dogs live their life in fear, at the end of their career, the dogs move down south to find happiness in their retirement. However, karma catches up to them, in the form of the lyric “you’ll reap the harvest you have sown”. They get weighed down by the depression and anxiety that results from living such a toxic lifestyle. He refers to this as being “dragged down by the stone”, and this idea comes up several times throughout the whole album. The dogs suffer the fate of being dragged down by the stone, up until they’re “Just another sad old man / All alone and dying of cancer.” In the final verses of the song, Waters takes a first-person point of view as a person who was raised and taught to have the same mentality of the dogs. He talks about being conflicted and confused about living a dog-lifestyle, and because of this suffering the same fate as the dogs mentioned in the previous verse; being a “stranger” to his family, being found “dead on the phone”, which refers to being a salesman up until the point you die, and being dragged down by the weight of the stone.

This song relates to the theme of civil unrest because capitalist societies today like America still encourage the dog-like mentality Waters describes and younger generations tend to disagree with this mentality and try to do their own thing. Many people don’t resonate with the lifestyle of being an “economic man”, and try to find their own path. An example of this in the form of a popular path many younger people dream to pursue is that of a social media influencer, like a Youtuber or Instagram personality.  People are drawn to making a living by being themselves, on their own terms and not by following the path they’re taught of getting a 9-5 job with the same company until you retire. America has become more of a individual-oriented society and less of a society dictated by conformity.

In Pigs (Three Different Ones), Waters compares political leaders to pigs. Each of the three verses are dedicated to certain archetypes of political figure and their flaws. However, all these archetypes have the same things in common: they all abuse their power and oppress the people below them while under a façade of being respectable, (sounds familiar?). When describing each pig, Waters uses repetition with the line “Ha ha charade you are” to point out how all of them are laughably fake and deceptive, again, like the dogs. He describes the first pig as being a politician focused on greed and using his power for his own selfish and economic gain. This may sound familiar, as President Donald Trump was a big business owner and people feel like he uses his power as president to advance his businesses. Waters describes the second pig as a cold-hearted female politician. He doesn’t say much beyond insulting the pig and calling out how cruel they are. The third pig Waters compares to a real politician from his time, Mary Whitehouse. He calls out how Whitehouse tried to censor opinions she disagreed with in the lyric “You’re trying to keep our feelings off the street”. This again relates to Trump as he is currently trying to limit free speech by putting limitations on the first amendment. Additionally, there’s a symbolic connection between the corrupt politicians’ name being “Whitehouse”, which shares the name with the building our President operates.

All in all, Pigs (Three Different Ones) calls out how corrupt politicians create a fake image of themselves, make false promises to gain the trust of the people, and try to censor dissent.

Politicians putting up a façade to be liked by the people is nothing new, but it’s deceptive all the same. They make big promises and appear relatable to get people to trust them and vote for them, but once they win and have the power they desired, they throw their promises out the window and follow their own personal agenda, thus breaking the trust of the people. This happened during the 2016 election, where Trump put out the image that he was just like an everyday worker and was fighting for and made promises to help the working-class people. He put up a façade to make people believe he was all for Making America Great Again, but as we’re two years into his presidency more and more people are beginning to see that he too is abusing his power for his own personal interests and not following up on many of the promises he made. And people are very vocal about their disagreements with Trump, with even himself saying he thought he was the most hated president.

In the third song Sheep, Waters compares blind followers to sheep in a herd, just following the crowd. He describes these people as just living their lives as their told and being ignorant to the danger that surrounds them, (i.e. the Pigs and Dogs). He uses the lyric “Meek and obedient you follow the leader / Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel”, which is a metaphor for saying the people are compliantly following their leaders to their slaughter. These sheep trust the dogs and pigs of society, unaware that they are a façade and are betraying their trust. If the sheep ever come to realize this façade and become aware of the true nature of the people they thought they could trust, it’s too late as their already on the way to their slaughter.

The final verse of the song paints a scenario where the sheep start a revolution against the corrupt dogs and pigs. The lyric “Wave upon wave of demented avengers / March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream” describes how the sheep fight the corrupt powers that be to achieve a just society, their “dream”. The verse takes a turn for the worse with the final lines of the song, “Have you heard the news? / The dogs are dead! / You better stay home / And do as you’re told / Get out of the road if you want to grow old”. The people who fought to overthrow the old powers, the revolutionaries, are now in a position of power themselves, however instead of living up to the dream they fought for, they abuse their newfound power and become the new dogs and pigs and oppress the people below them. This brings the album back full circle, with no real advancement or reform achieved in the end.

The cycle the final lines of the album alludes to paints a grim reality of civil unrest. Everything the album criticizes about society has a chance to correct themselves when the people rebel, but instead they fall back into the same methods and mentalities held previously by the corrupt dogs and pigs. My next cultural artifact, The Dark Knight Trilogy, takes similarities in addressing civil unrest of it’s time and the idea of revolution.

The Dark Knight Trilogy, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, is comprised of 3 movies, but I will only be addressing The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, which were released in 2008 and 2012 respectively. During the time when The Dark Knight was released, terrorism was still a big deal in American society. 9/11 happened only 7 years before the movie came out, and people were still dealing with the effects that tragic event left behind. Christopher Nolan was aware of this and wrote the Joker, the main antagonist, as an embodiment of terrorism and all it stands for. Throughout the movie, the Joker constantly disrupts the norms of society and creates chaos for the sake of chaos itself. This is reflective of how terrorist groups act to create chaos and destroy the flow of society for reasons regarding their religious beliefs. The Joker fights for his belief in chaos as terrorist groups fight for their own beliefs. While the Joker is the embodiment of evil, Batman, on the other hand, acts as a symbol of hope against crime for the people of Gotham. Even though he is a vigilante, the people of Gotham trust Batman to do what’s right. He works alongside the commissioner of the police force, and together they’re the protagonists of the movies. Because they’re the good guys fighting against the evil force of terrorism, they represent the United States government in their efforts to thwart terrorism. However, similarly to our government, Batman pushes the boundaries of “what’s right” and abuses the people’s trust in his pursuit to defeat the Joker.

As a tool to stop the government, Batman secretly uses all of the cell phones in Gotham City as sonar devices to see everything everywhere. He doesn’t ask permission from the people and does it without the public knowing. This is very similar to the Patriot Act signed post-9/11 and the Freedom Act currently in effect. The United States were fresh off an attack from terrorists and used this as an opportunity to sign a bill into law that allows them to invade our privacy legally. The government gained the ability to go through anybody’s phones, emails, etc. of who they deem “suspicious” as being a terrorist, which is very broad. We the people can only trust the government sticks to their word, i.e. to do what’s right, and don’t abuse their power when they’re fully capable of doing so. And if they were abusing this power, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing. However, there has been leaked evidence of the government abusing their power, i.e. Edward Snowden’s leaks from the NSA, and this is why many people are against the Patriot and Freedom Acta today and protest it’s legality.

Another occurrence Batman abusing the trust of the people came with the death of Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face. In the beginning of The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent is seen as a hero of Gotham, just like Batman. He locked up most of the cities’ mobs and organized crime, though unlike Batman he did it legally, as a lawyer through court. However, the Joker breaks Harvey Dent by killing his lover in an explosion and wounding Dent in a similar explosion. In a scene where Harvey is still recovering in the hospital, the Joker visits him and gives him a speech about chaos, essentially an attempt to get Dent on his side. These two events were enough to break the former hero of Gotham and turn him into a murderous villain, just like the Joker. He kills a few people and was in the process of holding Commissioner Gordon’s family at gun point when the Batman stopped him and killed him in the process. In order to preserve the good reputation Dent still had with the public, Batman agrees to take the blame for the 5 people Dent killed, and him and Gordon kept Dent’s transformation into Two-Face a secret. In the wake of Dent’s death, the Dent Act was passed into law which made punishments for organized crime substantially stricter, while also denying parole to those convicted of those crimes. This essentially cleaned the streets of Gotham, but it was all based on a lie of a false idol. All in all, the Joker came out victorious over Batman and the city of Gotham, as he corrupted their star-child Harvey Dent and made Batman break his rule of no killing. And while the public doesn’t know about this at first, it’s brought to their attention in the next movie.

In The Dark Knight Rises, the antagonist Bane broadcasts a speech where he announces the truth behind what Harvey Dent did as Two-Face, the lie behind the Dent Act that kept over 500 people in prison, and how these lies were told by Commissioner Gordon and the police force. He uses this opportunity as a “resignation” of all the police officers whom he saw as corrupt, and thus started a revolution. He encourages people to go to the prisons where the people locked up from the Dent Act and break them out, and also to cast out the rich people who were stepping on them their entire lives. It’s mainly Bane’s army of goons that does all this revolting while many people looked on in fear, though he still succeeds and successfully overthrows the corrupt government and big businessmen. Bane’s form of government isn’t any less corrupt, as it’s more of a dictatorship comprised of criminals for their own benefit than a government for the people.

This is where Animals and The Dark Knight Trilogy show their similarities to how they address the theme of civil unrest and revolution. They both tell a tale of a revolution against the powers they see as corrupt, only for the revolutionaries to follow the same corrupt path of those that came before them. They’re both stories of underdogs becoming the big dogs who’re just as corrupt as the guys they overthrew, essentially transforming the protagonists into the antagonists. However, while these two pieces share many similarities, they also differ in how their narrative is delivered and concludes

In The Dark Knight Trilogy, the revolution is commenced by an antagonist, Bane, and maintained through Bane and his henchmen, who are considered the bad guys. Eventually, Batman and the police, the good guys, team up and fight to overthrow the government led by the bad guys. They beat the bad guys and re-establish the way things used to be, this time without Batman, as it’s assumed he died saving the city. This is considered a happy ending where the good guys win and the government becomes less corrupt than it was previously, which overall is a good thing.

On the other hand, in Animals, the dogs and pigs are portrayed as the antagonists, and the sheep are painted as the victims, i.e. the underdogs. When the last verse of the song Sheep begins, the instrumental picks up and the singing becomes up-beat. You hear that the sheep overthrew the corrupt dogs and pigs, and all of this makes the sheep out to be the protagonists of this “story”. However, the message is then twisted when the revolutionary sheep immediately begin to oppress the other sheep by threatening them to do as their told if they want to live. This shows a cycle of corrupt government led by corrupt leaders, as whoever gains power chooses to abuse it. This is a depressing ending, highlighting the futility of revolting and the unachievable dream of a non-corrupt government.

In conclusion, Animals and The Dark Knight Trilogy comment on civil issues of their times and through this tells stories of revolutions. Both artifacts express tragic outcomes of revolutions by people oppressed by the system. While their narratives are similar, The Dark Knight Trilogy builds off Animals by introducing a happy ending to it’s revolution. Despite of this, both works effectively show how the system can fail it’s people leading to revolution.