Body Parts

What Won't Be Said In Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln"?

I look forward to seeing Steven Spielberg's new movie, Lincoln. I understand from the synopsis that it focusses on the clash between Lincoln and his cabinet in the last few months of his presidency. I'm sure it will be a great movie, given the director, his writer, Tony Kushner, and the fine leading actors.

But, knowing Spielberg's and Kushner's political sympathies, I am also confident that the film will not speak of two major aspects of Lincoln's political career and the anti-slavery movement.

First, Lincoln was a Republican, the first Republican president, of the same Republican Party that continues today; and that the major opposition to the War and to abolition and support for slavery came from the Democratic Party, the same Democratic Party that continues today.

Second, that one of the two major impulses behind the anti-slavery movement was evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, the same evangelical and fundamenalist Christianity that is so reviled and ridiculed today by liberals and the Left. (The other major impulse was the revolutionary philosophy of equality in the Declaration of Independence, which has important roots in Christianity, and also seen in the secularizing French Revolution.)

Despite these expected omissions, no adequate understanding of Lincoln's political ability to undertake emancipation can exist without understanding the importance of the radical Republicans, the extreme abolitionist wing of the Party, which was anchored in Christianity and who came to dominate Congress, without understanding either of these important facts.

"Hanna"

I watched Joe Wright's film, "Hanna", last night, having also seen it in theaters when it was released in 2011. It is not a film that merely has fairy tale elements and themes in it; it is straight-forwardly a re-telling of the fairy tale, "Snow White". In one of the opening scenes, Hanna is reading a book of fairy tales (the Grimm's?), one of the few books in her isolated world. The director is showing the viewer the script for the movie. The main character, Hanna, is Snow White. The Queen is the head of a secret US genetic breeding program. Hanna is the product of that breeding program. The Queen devotes the movie to trying to kill her through her huntsmen agents and by her own efforts. In the end, Hanna kills the queen, who dies on the iron rails of a train ride in an abandoned amusement park, much as the Queen in Grimm Brothers story of Snow White. The director's effort to signal the audience that he is retelling a famous fairy tale appears repeated. The opening sequence involves the girl "waking up" by growing up and being ready to take on her role in the story, while living secretly in exile in Finland in a white, snowy landscape. During the story, Hanna is befriended by a variety of people (I counted seven of them - the foster-father character who raised her, a family of four in northern Africa, the resident of the fairy-tale themed abandoned amusement park, and a woman who was the mother of Hanna's mother.) The movie introduces the villain queen while she is doing her morning grooming in front of a mirror. Her castle is an underground fortress with prisons and laboratories in north Africa. How many more hints does one want?

"Drive" Pays Homage to Eastwood

Last night, my wife and I viewed the Nicholas Refn film, Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. We both loved it, enjoying the Los Angeles locales, the driving scenes, and the painterly visual composition and color affectation of many scenes in the first half. She was surprised at the graphic violence in the second half and withdrew from the movie a bit in reaction. I was completely engaged and enjoyed seeing really bad people meet their deserved deaths (this is movie fiction we talking about here, remember). I would label the first half (the dramatic first half) "reverie" and the second half "reality". Though the movie is ostensibly based on a novel, the real inspiration, we both agreed, is Clint Eastwood's film, Pale Rider (1985). In Drive, Gosling plays the Eastwood character, the Preacher, in precisely the same minimalist style, taciturn, few words, few facial expressions, effectively dealing out death as punishment for evil, unable to stay with the woman who believes in him, riding (driving) toward the horizon at the end. The urban setting is visibly a familiar fallen world, where psychopaths scuttle like cockroaches, devouring social garbage in the grips of sin. The symbolism is as clear as the natural wilderness setting of Pale Rider, out of which rides the Preacher to halt evil and avenge past crimes. I thought Gosling's acting was excellent and contributed enormously to the suspense that builds through the movie. The movie is an effective Hollywood film noir interpretation of a classic Western film and its film genre.

"Sucker Punch" Is a Brilliant Indictment of the Immoral Perversity of Western Society

The critics, whose movie reviews I have read, have not been kind to "Sucker Punch", the movie by Zack Snyder. It has been described as boring, a plot-less, mindless video game, as incoherent porn-less porn. All leering, no fulfilment. Worse, it's been praised for the wrong reasons to anyone who is oriented to intelligent literature--visually explosive, mind-blowing, and exciting. In other words, a movie fit for ADD fourteen  year old boys. Alas, so wrong, so unappreciative. First off, let's get the basic story down. The story is, loosely, that of the classic tale of Scheherazade.  A young woman is abducted and sentenced to die. To postpone her death, every night, she tells her abductor, a king, a story. She is such a spellbinding storyteller that her death is postponed. In the classic, the king falls in love with her, marries her, and makes her his queen. The movie script pushes and pokes this story around a bit. A young woman is forced into a mental institution, where she is to be lobotomized. Her captors compel her to dance for them, as they similarly require other young women inmates to perform for them. To motivate herself and enliven her dancing, while dancing she fantasizes elaborate plots to escape the mental institution. These fantasies are cued in theme, place, and action structure to persons and events in the institution. (The movie is carefully constructed.) These fantasies relate to an actual plot she has concocted with four other girl inmates to escape their captors. By the end of the movie, only one of the girls escapes the institution, while the central figure is lobotomized, metaphorically an escape, in the movie's view, because she can no longer care about her situation. That's the plot and it is a good, strong, engaging plot, capable of carrying the story forward and producing a lot of dramatic tension.

The movie plot has a point. The point is a moral charge. It alleges that in modern, free society, old men create perversity and pornography as a world (an existential world in Heidegger's sense) in which to imprison, for their own pleasures, young women. The allegation begins the movie, provides the central subplot of the movie, and remains unresolved by the movie, in effect saying that society has not recognized, prosecuted, or ended this immoral crime against a whole sector of itself, girls and young women. At the beginning of the film, the mother of the main character, "Baby Doll", dies, leaving her daughters unprotected from sexual assault by their step-father. Baby Doll fights off her step-father and accidentally shoots her younger sister trying to protect her from the step-father. The step-father has Baby Doll committed. The step-father and other older men who are her captors in the mental institution are stand-ins for perverted moral authority that preys upon girls and young women. The mental institution for women turns out to be a front for prostitution. The girls are required to perform for johns and arouse their willingness to pay for the prostitution services by acting in pornographic theater. In other words, the girls are sex slaves. The mental institution is a metaphor for modern society at large.

The moral charge has a lot of credibility and power and been around since the earliest days of the Old Testament. Many socially conservative critics have charged, especially since the 1960s and sexual liberation of women, that Western society is sexualizing girls at a younger age. This sexualization is perpetuated by older men, who are motivated by their prurient interest to commercialize sex. In this movie, the men are visually depicted with hints they are sexually dysfunctional, leading them to require perverse sex and pornography to become sexually functional. The Baby Doll character is twenty years of age, in the film, but dressed as a twelve year old, to emphasize that, even when the victim is a beautiful young woman, only through pedophilia fantasies can these men get it up.  

Media, advertising, and products create a world of personal experience that obscures the line between violent sexual perversity and legitimate social role playing by girls and young women as consumers. At the same time, sexual abuse of minors and young women by older men is rampant. One need only to read newspapers and watch nightly TV news to be inundated by stories of gang rape of children. Regarding the recent Cleveland, Texas gang rape by over 20 men of an eleven year old girl, a defense attorney for four of the charged men stated that the sex between his defendants and the 11 year old girl was "consensual". An 11-year old girl can "consent" to gang rape? In Southern California, a father, his brother, and the father's oldest son are convicted of sexual abuse of the father's daughter, who from ages 9 through thirteen was subjected vaginal rape, sodomy, oral copulation, with the men's penises and other objects. Was this "consensual" too?

It is this world of sexual perversity that is the moral charge of "Sucker Punch". The movie tries to hit the viewer hard with this rampant immorality and criminal abuse of women, a blow to the gut, a sucker punch when we were not expecting it, when we thought we were simply going to be entertained. That so many critics have missed the obvious point of the film indicates how deeply they are embedded in this culture of exploitation of young women.  Boredom is moral blindness.

My Merry Christmas Video To Family, Friends, and, Yes, You

Ten minutes long. Made in 2009.

 

Reaction to "The Fourth Kind"

A lot of European philosophy is summarized in the long journey from Renan, The Life of Jesus, to Heidegger's Being and Time, the journey from positivism to phenomenology. In Renan, we felt the firm ground of fact under our feet, while our heads were dizzy because long cherished truths were challenged. In Heidegger, our heads are steady while our feet shift and stumble on the shaking earth. It is difficult to see how The Fourth Kind, starring Milla Jovovich, could have been written and filmed without Heidegger. It is easy to explain the alien abductions, that are at the core of the movie, in psychoanalytic terms as recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, but Freud looks like positivism compared to the inter-threaded movie illusions in The Fourth Kind. In the end, only Heidegger has the key to the puzzle. Experience is and can be only interpreted in terms of other (previous) experience. Aliens are always manifested to our minds in terms of familiar objects and beings, even if as wild composites, as in ancient Egyptian and Greek mythologies, because that is all our mind has available to experience what is presented to it. We cannot "experience" aliens, or alien abduction, indeed, or God, because there is no personal or cultural experience of aliens, alien abductions, and God in and of themselves. Their being is always cloaked. Consequently, no ground of positive fact is available to the mind on which to build objective truth. All empirical truth is, as Heidegger explains, circularly grounded in experience which both shapes and confirms it, and is credible as it is urgent. The movie is not a philosophical tract, but it is a lesson in existential phenomenology. And yes, I liked the movie. I was involved, enthralled, and fascinated by the movie as a subjective experience as a viewer and, more distantly, as a critic watching the threading of the multiple story levels and filmic elements. Kudos to the writer and director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, for his crafting of the intricate plotting, and to Jovovich, for her careful performance resisting histrionics.

Why Don't Movie Zombies Run?

Just wondering. Can't they run? Or do they choose not to run? But supposedly they cannot think or choose, so stumbling, staggering walking must be a condition. But why would it be a condition? If an undead person could walk, why couldn't they run, too? Does running imply intelligence and decision, whereas staggering doesn't? Maybe slow pursuit is just to provide dramatic suspense, providing more time for victims to worry about their fate.

"Let Me In": A Tale Of Menstrual Blood

I went to an afternoon matinee to see the riveting and fascinating vampire movie, "Let Me In" (released 2010, directed by Matt Reeves, based on the 2008 Swedish movie, "Let the Right One In", itself based on the novel, "Let The Right One In" by John Lindqvist).

According to the movie reviews, the movie is the story of a bullied twelve-year old boy ("Owen") who is befriended and saved by a twelve-year old girl ("Abby"), who turns out to be a vampire. But the story of the movie presented, as self-interpretation, in the film is that of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In an early scene when the two meet, Abby sees and inquires about Owen's copy of Romeo and Juliet, a school reading assignment. A pre-adolescent boy and girl, from incompatible worlds, manage to meet and overcome the opposition of adults-in-charge to become friends and agree to a "go steady" dating relationship. But this romance is Romeo and Juliet with a horror twist. Juliet is a vampire, as Owen slowly realizes, who cannot age, has no defined gender, and will never develop sexually into a woman. Their relationship will always be chaste. And, as the movie ends, we realize the two will be together as long as both live. (Vampires can die, as the movie reminds, by exposure to direct sunlight and, apparently, bright light bulbs. Of course, Owen as a mortal human will someday die.) She needs fresh blood to live; he needs to be protected. We know at the end of the movie, he will be her keeper and she will be his protector.

There are odd references in the movie, as if the script writer and director were not sure what to make of Abby the vampire. Owen's mother is a devout Christian and a famous portrait of Jesus appears in one scene. In another scene, Owen telephones his father (alienated from his mother with divorce impending) and asks if people could be evil. So Abby might be interpreted as, in Christian fiction, say that of Milton, a protective angel? Or perhaps as a fallen angel, that is, one of the Devil's angels? (You sell your soul for something. In Owen's case, presumably, for protection from the bullies of the world.) The tipoff is that angels have no gender. One early poster advertising the film pictures Abby lying in the snow making angel wings, as if the director thought this might be what the movie was about.

I had, however, a more psychological reading of the movie as it unfolded. My reading is that the movie is about, to speak in thematic terms, the fantasy of the pre-adolescent girl, who at twelve years of age, is on the verge of adolescence but has not had her first menses. Her fantasy is a working out of fears about menstrual blood. I would not say subconscious fears as such, but subconscious fears of the sort that can be lurched into awareness by sudden events, then, as the horror of the events subside, the fear buried again.

The fear of the girl concerns her menstrual blood. Where does it come from? How is it replaced? There are several scenes, carefully framed by the camera and set up by the script, in which Abby approaches Owen with blood smeared on her mouth and face. She obtained this blood in vampire feastings, of course. So the pre-adolescent childish nightmare is that her menstrual blood is replaced by ingesting someone else's blood.  Symbolically, much more is going on. The blood is dripping from her oral orifice, a symbolic transplantation of menstrual blood dripping from the vaginal orifice. In one scene, after a vampirish feast, before the boy knows she is a vampire, she flies to his room. She instructs him not to look at her, then she disrobes and lies down, nude, beside him, her face dark with blood (all discreetly filmed). If she could grow up to enter adolescence, we would say that this scene prefigures a love scene in which she would present herself to him for deflowering. The blood on her mouth is, in this scene, symbolically her virgin's blood. In another scene, after feasting on a policeman (out of camera view), she walks down a hall to Owen. By this time, he knows she is a vampire. His knowledge of her, in Biblical reference, is sexual "knowledge" of her. Her face is especially bloody, her mouth wet with fresh blood and smeared blood beginning to cake on her cheeks. Surely this is a presentiment of her adult menstrual orifice. It's a fantasy, of course, of the girl, because she can't, in this story, grow up.

So the movie presents a pre-adolescent girl's nightmare fantasy, from fear of first menses, terror nightmares about how her menstrual blood is to be replaced, to wonderment about someday having sexual relations, as a sexually mature girl, with her young Romeo. Alas, this fantasy is too horrifying for the girl, who, furthering her fantasy, rejects growing up at all (by becoming a vampire), and schemes how, in this situation, to be forever with her chaste lover, when, as he grows up, he would want a sexually mature woman that she cannot be. Might he try to leave her someday for a real woman capable of real sex? The movie ends with her solution to this problem. Romeo and Juliet don't die, but they won't have much of a life, either.

I Apologize, George Clooney

Old nonsense. I thought you were just a pretty face promoted from the little television screen to big silver screen. I didn't think you could do anything on the theatrical screen. So I wouldn't even go see your movies. I walked out of the theater to escape several of your movies. Only by desire to be with my wife who insisted on seeing some of them and by accident, ironically, on the little screen in our TV room, did I see any of your movies. I have now, however, seen "Michael Clayton", "Up In The Air", and "The American". You are really an fine actor--great, in fact. "Michael Clayton" and "Up In The Air" were superb scripts for you. I apologize. My compliments to you.

Yup, revised.

Oliver Stone: A Near Perfect Portrait of the Radical Leftist as Moron

In a recent interview, film-maker Oliver Stone provides, through his comments, a near perfect portrait of the radical Leftist: authoritarian, supporter of revolutionary socialism that suppresses capitalism and freedom, conspiracy theorist, advocate of moral relativism, apologist for Hitler and Stalin, anti-semitic. What separates him from Mel Gibson? Well, Mel Gibson, whose use of racial and anti-semitic epithets have isolated him in Hollywood, expresses only personal psychological disorder and advocates in his films a profound opposition to authority; whereas Stone's anti-semitism and authoritarianism express a social pathology, a desire for the extinction of freedom and imposition of mass oppression. Gibson is not dangerous. Stone is. Will the media call out Stone, as it has Gibson? Of course not. Gibson is conservative. Stone is a Leftist, a flocculent mass excreted from its proper location by the colonic terminus of Communism. How could the Liberal media object to that?