First off let me split the hair between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Clearly people do conspire and that process is a conspiracy. People conspire to smuggled drugs, contraband, and people across boarders, they conspired to evade their taxation debt, they conspire to conceal evidence of guilt and all manner of things. The real difference is the scale by which real world conspiracies operate and the vast global coordination required for many popular conspiracy theories. A few conspiracy theories that serve as example to me of this deluded impossible thinking:
AIDS was a created disease to eliminate certain racial groups.
The Moon landing was faked.
The US Government has possession of alien technology.
Marxists, after their ideology was discredited, disguised it as post-modernism to infiltrate it into popular culture.
Vaccines cause Autism or mental defects.
International ‘globalist’ (and we all know what that’s code for) control world events. (That one gets tied to Marxists as well.)
9/11 was an act of the US Government.
I admonish everyone to demand proof, not conjecture, not assumption, but evidence before believing vast glob spanning causes for events.
It must have been about 1983 or early 1984 when this started. I was in the apartment of a friend and some movie was playing on HBO. From the dialogue track someone referred to a character named Mr. Devereux. Unrelated to the film playing on the television my memory pulled up a scarp of dialog from another film:
“My Name is Estan Devereux.“
In my memory I could hear the voice quite clearly but I could not visualize the scene. I could not call up the line right before or the one that followed only that fragment of a conversation.
My Name is Estan Devereux.“
For the rest of the day it haunted me. I know it was a minor character and I knew it came from some film I like but I simply could not remember the scene, the characters, or the movie.
It continued into the next day. It was definitely an old man, his voice weakened with age, a horse whisper, but I simply could not remember the movie. Not the genre, not the style, nothing but that annoying voice repeating the fragmentary line.
My Name is Estan Devereux.“
Eventually it faded from my mind and I went on with my life. But a few weeks later something triggered my memory and the line played again, still without identifying context. I struggled, trying to force the epiphany that would answer this mystery but it would not happen. This became a familiar and frustrating cycle. Something triggered the memory and I’d spend hours or even days with it echoing through my mind but unable to resolve the mystery of the movie’s title.
Some may be wondering why not go to the Internet, or Google to find the title and kill the torturous puzzle? Take a look at those date my friends, this is long before any Internet. A few years later I would have my first personal computer and my online interactions would be with early chat rooms on a local Bulletin Board System, but there was no global repository of geeky and obscure knowledge.
This played out over a decade. I did not keep a record but it feels like the line resurfaced perhaps as often as once a month, never bringing with it more information or any sort of context always leaving me frustrated and without an answer.
In the early 90s I acquired my first DVD player and slowly began building my home library of beloved movies. I never had a great collection on VHS, and had possessed a decent collection on Laserdisc, but it was the DVDs where my home collection really took off. Bit by bit I picked up discs, eagerly playing them when I got home. Then one night with a new disc, after so many years, the mystery was solved.
I wish I could say that I got there simply by looking at the title. That picking up the case in the store prompted the floor of memory unlocking the resolution but that did not happen. I got the movie home, peeled off the wrapper and stuck it into the player. As the hero is penetrating the villain’s castle, seeking to rescue a trapped, noble, and foolish hero, he releases a number of prisoners from the evil King’s dungeon. An old man begins to speak and before the words tumble out of his mouth the memory floods my thoughts and the answer is playing on my television.
My Name is Estan Devereux. I was the King’s architect.“
I give you The Sword and Sorcerer the fun, silly, cheesy fantasy film that tormented me for over a decade.
Having been a tabletop role-play gamer since 1979 I have seen my fair share of cheaters. People who produced character with fantastic statistics, math errors that always break in the players favor, and fudged die roll. One thing that seems to exist as a common trait among these varied cheaters over the decades is that the invested considerably in the game as part of their identity. Doing well at the game was not simply fun for them but a validation of their self-worth and confirmation of their superiority. Of course the fact that had to cheat to achieve these aims undercuts the effect. For everyone who was aware of the cheater the effect was quite the opposite and it is only with a heaping serving of denial and delusion can that ultimately weak faced me erected and maintained.
What does this have to do with Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
People invest more than just games with a sense of their identity. People do it with spectator sports, it’s part of why rioting occurs both for victories and defeats, they do it with religion, they do it with their artistic creations. And of course people take popular culture and make it part of their identity.
Several years a national news story centered on a woman who had arrived for her Jury duty wearing a starfleet costume from the Star Trek franchise. She insisted it was not a costume but a uniform and that it represented the high ideals and morality of the United Federation of Planets. She had taken the themes of Star Trek and incorporated them into her identity, binding them so tightly to her sense of self that she simply could not envision performing her civic duty in any other mode than the one she had adopted from the fictional Star Trek setting. Star Wars too has themes and ideals that it presents as a moral good, all fiction does this, and there are fans that take those ideal and meld them into their identity.
Let’s return to gaming for a moment. A strange thing often occurs when you confront someone who has been cheating, they get angry, really really angry. They’ll wail that it has been themselves who have been wronged, they’ll try to divert attention to the misdeeds of others, they’ll lash out at their accusers and not at all uncommon they’ll make it impossible for the game to continue, destroying the enjoyment for everyone. Attacks on the cheating are in effect attacks on their identity and this provokes powerful overreactions. It is far easier to displace that anger than to confront the awful truth of why it mattered so much to the cheater.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
It’s clear to me that there are a sizable number of Star Wars fans that have built a significant amount of the self-identity from the fantasy franchise. It’s perfectly okay to dislike a movie, to me disappointed in a franchise, Alien 3, and Star Trek V both leap to mind, but this sort of anger, vitriol, and poison indicates an unhealthy attachment to the fictional characters. There is something about the character Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo that strikes these fans right at their cores and is irreconcilable with their self-image.
If you were political knowledgeable during the 1980s you may know what it meant when an environmental activist group was called a watermelon. This charge implied that while the group may have appeared Green from the outside inside with was Red, as in Communist. Usually this charge was hurled with circumstantial evidence that Soviet Intelligence, the KGB and the like, either created the group or had seriously penetrated it, turning it into another arm of the Soviet’s attack on the West. During the Cold War this was a charge had to prove but once the Soviet Union collapsed and secrets spilled out many of the charges were substantiated.
Any good intelligence officer will tell you that you cannot create division in a nation or culture but you can exploit naturally occurring ones. The general members of these environmental and anti-nuclear groups were not the Kremlin’s puppets. These people sincerely believed in their cause, they were concerned about environmental degradation, nuclear waste, and the terrorized by the concept of nuclear war. Their fears and concern were hijacked by a hostile foreign power that did not share their concerns but rather used them as a tool to advance selfish self-interests and authoritarian rule around the globe. The fall of the Wall and the ending of the Cold War consigned calling a group a ‘watermelon’ to the ash heap of history.
America’s culture wars, xenophobia, and sharp political partisanship have created fresh societal fractures for the Kremlin, now under the control of oligarchs instead of communists, to use to divide and weaken the West. Master of human based intelligence the Kremlin’s agents moved against the western democracies and from Brexit to the 2016 American Presidential election they scored hits, wounding, us, their global adversaries. The full extent of their political interference in the US elections is still unknown, the investigations are ongoing though domestic political actors, knowingly or unknowingly, aid the Kremlin’s objective with obstruction, returning us to the 80s where activist political organizations, with resources and aid from our geo-political rivals, undercut our democracy and threaten freedom around the globe. China, even as it retreats further in despotism, is rising, launching ambitious projects for global economic dominance with the decade, Russia invades her neighbors and drives wedges between NATO’s member and her allies, never this century has American leadership been more vital and more absent.
Russia pours money and resources into America sharpening our divisions, turning us on each other and today the political ‘watermelons’ are Facebook groups and memes, partisanship over patriotism, and the destructive pursuit of power absent principles. This may very well be an infliction point in history and what we do and how we do it will shape the future.
One of the great mistakes people make when taking advice or information is the make the assumption expertise in one field confers some sort of basic level of competence in another. Because someone is a talent astronomer does not mean that understand the dynamic of nuclear war, because someone is a gifted businessperson does not mean that understand the complexities of governance, and yet this sort of transference of expertise happens again and again.
Recently I came across a YouTube video explaining that Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian Academic with advanced degrees in psychology did not understand Nazism. Watching the video, which utilized clips from Peterson 2017 lecture series Maps of Meaning, specifically, lecture 11The Flood and The Tower, I suspected that the clips had been taken out of context. The sheer level of error in the statements by Dr. Peterson seemed beyond belief for a person with a university education.
They were not out of context.
Here is the section of the lecture, just over five minutes, where Peterson diverts from the subject of the lecture to speak about Nazi Germany.
Here are my major objections to Peterson’s opinions.
1) ‘Hitler should have enslaved…’
The Nazis most certainly enslaved their ‘undesirable’ (Jews, Homosexuals, Roma, etc.) Even knowledge gleaned from popular culture such as Schindler’s List should be enough to make this basic knowledge. For those with just a little more understanding of history there is also the famous legend above the gate to history’s most infamous of death camps, Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Sets You Free.’ The Nazis worked to death the people in the camps and those that could not work they murdered. The V2 factories in addition to raining death on London and other allied cities also boasted one of the most lethal areas in the concentration camp system. It is shocking that a university professor is ignorant to all of this.
2) ‘… Win the war and then…’
Peterson’s argument that the Nazi’s should have won the war and then turn to murder ignores several critical factors. First and foremost is that the Nazi’s anti-Semitism was centered to their political and cultural worldview. The elimination of all Jewish people and influence from German culture, German Life, and German lands had been a stated goal for some time. Quite simply for the Nazis murdering of the Jewish population was a victory condition. It has also been argued and with some validity I think that the Nazi accelerated the mass murder as a way to keep the German’s population food rations higher. The lesson of the First World War where Germany was effectively starved into submission was one ruthless applied to the Second World War.
3) ‘… Significant military resources…’
The military resources diverted to the Nazis campaign of mass murder had no material effect on the war’s outcome. German intelligence seriously underestimated Soviet military strength and with the manufacturing base moved east beyond the war’s destruction, coupled with American entry into the war, doomed German to defeat.
4) ‘ … Fascistic societies are Fascistic at every level…’
Peterson referred to Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary German and the Holocaust. I have not read this book but there are a number of good reviews and takes on this work. What is clear is that Goldhagen’s thesis is that Germany held a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism that primed the German population to be turned easily murderous. That’s an interesting and not undisputed hypothesis but it is not the same things as declaring a society, much less the German society, as Fascistic at every level.
As a political philosophy Fascism was founded in1915 and I am not sure how you replace an entire culture in just a dew short decades. I think it’s much more reasonable to think the Peterson is misrepresenting Godlhagen’s work. The poison of Anti-Semitism is far older than either Fascists or Nazis and it was merely a tool, a lever, by which the Nazi managed their murders and they found more than enough willing help far beyond Germany’s borders.
5) ‘ … Why do we assume that? …’
Perhaps the most stunning assertion in the entire digression is that possibility that Hitler never planned to win the war and that he actual aim, whether he was aware of it himself or not, was chaos and mass destruction. Certainly, in some case, on individual actions it may be best to determine actual motive from repeated outcomes, but applying this framework to single outcome events such as winning or losing a war strikes me as quite a stretch.
I do not think it was the Kaiser’s intent to destroy the German Empire but that was the outcome of World War I.
I do not think it was the intent of the Japanese government to subject their home islands to destruction and occupations but that was the outcome of World War II when they brought America into the conflict.
I do not think it was the intent of the rebellious Confederacy to end slavery but that was the outcome when they started the American Civil War.
I do not think it was Gorbachev’s intent to dissolve the Soviet Union but that was the outcome of his Glasnost policies.
It’s perfectly reasonable to accept that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to win the war and carry their murderous prejudices across all of Europe and beyond.
Expertise is not transferable and when someone moves beyond their field of training and specialization it is wise to subject their opinions and ‘facts’ to scrutiny.
Marvel Studios continues proving that their juggernaut of interlocking franchises as an unstoppable cinematic force with this weekend’s release of Ant-Man and The Wasp. Returning a lighter tone after the dark themes of overpopulation and scare resources presented in Avengers: Infinity War, AMTW deals the personal fall-out for Scott Lang, and his family, along with Dr Hank Pym and his family from Scott’s adventures with Captain America in Captain America: Civil War.
Having run afoul of the global empowered individual legislation The Sokovia Accords, Scott Lang is sweating out the final days of his house arrest while Doctor Pym and his daughter Hope, estranged from Scott, are fugitives refusing to abide by the accords. The Pyms discover that Scott holds the key to rescuing a long lost member of their family launching them into a desperate race against international arms dealers and a mysterious empowered villain.
Payton Reed returns as director and the short version of this review is if you enjoyed Ant-manthen you are likely to enjoy Ant-Man and The Wasp. Paul Rudd continue to bring is easy likable style to Scott Lang providing both an empathic character and a voice for the audience. Marvel’s special effects wizards again demonstrate mastery at their ability to digitally ‘de-age’ an actor in younger versions of themselves. I do find it curious that Marvel can create digital make-up and faced that transcend the uncanny valley and Lucasfilm’s attempt fell short rendering a Tarkin and Lea that were less than convincing.
This film does not deal with heavy themes and that is not a detriment. While I love movies like Captain America: Civil War it is good to occasionally go to a movie and simply have a good time, something that this movie delivered.
There are a lot of flavors of horror films, and that’s not even getting in a classic versus modern sensibility. Thee are monster movies, slasher movies, psychological horror movies, young people in peril movies, torture porn movies, devil movies, nut after viewing Hereditary I had to come up with what I thought of as a new sub-genre, emotional horror movies. Hereditary does not move by gross out or violence, it is not a film with a central unstoppable threat moving through the plot leaving a wake of corpses, but rather the film forces the audience to confront raw, tragic emotional power.
The focuses on a family grieving after the death of their grandmother, a complex woman who left behind a tangled web of secrets and emotional damage to everyone she touched. Her daughter, Annie is played by Toni Collette, is an artist specializing in realistic miniature dioramas, dioramas taken from her real life and a metaphor for Annie’s desperate need to control her life. With her mother’s influencing her family well after the grandmother’s death, Hereditary at first appears to be following in the tradition of horror literature such as The Turning of the Screw where events may or may not represent the character’s distorted point of view but by the middle of the second act a darker and more mysterious malignancy motivates the movie. This film has one of the most shocking act one to act two transitions I have witnessed and all of it down with off-screen violence and terror that plays out on the actor’s faces and their anguished screams. Truly for several minutes I expected the sequence to be a nightmare but eventually the film forced to me to confront it had really gone where it went.
Drawing on paranoia such as in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and supernatural suburban invasion such as in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and the inescapable fate of a Greek tragedy. Hereditary is a dark unrelenting film that eschews audience comfort and optimism for its artist vision.
This is by far not a film for everyone. Whenever there is a sharp divergence between the critics’ and general audience scores on aggregate sites such as Rotten Tomatoes such as with The Witch and with Hereditary, it often suggests that a film is more challenging than the usual fare and that is the case here. This is not a horror film for people in search of action, thrills, or escapism. (Not that those are bad things, I enjoy all three but it would be a poorer world if that was all there was to enjoying film.) With only a touch of snark I tweeted that Hereditary is a movie for people who find Black Mirror too optimistic.
I want to give a special shout out to the production design and the fantastic cinematography. This is one of the rare films where I noticed the color palette because it so perfectly fit the tone of the piece. Also director/screenwriter Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski creative and visually stunning mishmash of scale where the miniature looked massive and the massive looked miniature not only made for beautiful compositions but perfectly symbolized tone, theme, while keeping the audience off balance, critical
Entropy drags the universe relentless towards chaos and debts always come due. This is a truth for politics as it is for anything else and no matter of hand-waving, wishful thinking, and verbal evasion can indefinitely forestall the bill.
It was many years ago when I started constructing a fiction setting where the USA had become a third rate power, trapped by its political passions and blindness into an interstellar power barely worthy of that title and here in 2018, though the reasons have changed the prospect has only grown.
Civilization grows from the bottom up. Billionaires, political leaders, and other elites rarely think of trail blaze radical new systems or methods. That which unsettles the status quo is that which endangers the current top of the pyramid and so the revolutionary change comes, most often, from those with great gains ahead of them and not from those with great losses on their minds.
To grow in ways that benefits society and not destroy or hinder it requires that the gains come from a desire to expand our horizons and not from a place of fear, rage, or hate. If you construct a system to traps people, robs them of hope, leaves them with only burning resentment and no hope for themselves or their children, then you reap a whirlwind of destruction when the system can no longer contain their passions.
If you leave people with only bad choices do not be shocked when the choices they selected are the ones that cause you the most pain, the most suffering, the one that fulfill rage.
You can protect your own, you can steal the food and the medicine, and the wealth, but eventually the bill comes due. Unless people feel that they have a fair chance they will eventually lash out and when that time arrives it will be too late to salvage society.
Part of my usual unwind just before bed is to watch either short videos, such as on YouTube or to watch a feature film in sections. Trilogy of Terror is perfect for this, while it runs an hour and a half; the trilogy section of its title comes from that fact that it is comprised of three short films. Trilogy of Terror was a made-for-TV movie broadcast in 1975 and starring Karen Black in all three stories. If you were old enough, as I am, to have watched the original broadcast you undoubtedly remember one aspect of this program, the Zuni fetish Doll. The story of Amelia chased about her apartment by the murderous puppet seared itself into popular culture and more than twenty years later when Joss Whedon scripted the episode Hush of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, he was hoping to craft the shock and terror that the Zuni fetish doll created. Truly the Zuni fetish doll is an exciting and generally scary bit of filmmaking. Lacking the budget for any sort of animation the production masterfully made do with fast editing, in a time before one could edit on a computer, strong point of view camera work, and, an aspect I think that gets overlooked for just how much it added to the film, Walker Edmiston’s fantastic, and un-credited, vocal work as the inarticulate raging voice of the doll.
But what about the other two short film that make up the trilogy?
While I remembered the Zuni warrior chasing Karen Black around her apartment, as will anyone else who has seen Trilogy of Terror, the other stories are literally forgettable. One deals with a mousy professor and her student that becomes obsessed with her, drugging her and forcing her into a sexual relationship until the inevitable plot twist. While the second story is about two sisters, locked in a terrible cycle of hate and revenge that also ends with a twist that was telegraphed from over the horizon and surprised no one who had seen these sorts of stories before.
If it had not been for the Zuni fetish doll this made for TV movie would have disappeared from out collection consciousness along with the made for TV remake of Double Indemnity or the series Casablanca.
Art is never finished, only abandoned. -Leonardo da Vinci
Anyone who has hung around writers or artists is familiar with the concept of WIP, the Work In Progress and da Vinci’s quote when coupled with the idea of the WIP leads us to the conclusion that all art is a WIP until it is abandoned.
While an artist is crafting their piece they may go through a number of drafts, revisions, and alterations as they search for the right expression of the motivating ideas. A work in progress has flaws, expression that in conflict with the ideals of the piece, sometimes you have to wave your hands around the troubles, sometimes you have to cut them out entirely, and sometimes you have to incorporate them, turning defects into admirable qualities. The artist must struggle to maintain a clear vision of their art, neither refusing to be dragged into despair by the faults nor allowing the beauty to blind them to the required work and corrections.
The United States of America is a social and political work of art and like all art it remains a work in progress. More importantly America is a collaborative work, all of use, left and right, majority and minority, are the artists working together crafting this monumental, lasting, and inspiring project. We suffer the same pitfalls of any artist as work. It is easy to see only the flaws in our history the terrible crimes committed by the artists before us and feel the temptation to burn the canvas in defeat and despair. It is also easy to see only the shining moments of greatness, to see only the ideals and be blind to real and continue pain falling short of those ideals inflict upon others. Both views are necessary and seeing the work in only one aspect leads to walking away, either because you hate the flaws or because you refuse to see the work that lies ahead, but the work waits for us. It is up to us to continue the craft of this amazing piece, this inspiring project, and to pass on to another generation of artists the vision of what is the United States of America,
Let us not abandon this art.
