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Monthly Archives: March 2010

On the lyrical genius of The Mountain Goats

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Language, Metaphor, Music, Reference, Slang, Symbol, Texts

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Indie Rock, John Darnielle, Metaphor, Music, The Mountain Goats

Recent conversations over coffee with Deane and the beginnings of a new research project (on science fiction genre convention across cultures and Christian imagery in the Japanese anime film Neon Genesis Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone) has me thinking a good deal about metaphor and other figures of speech.

This has coincided with a mild (and growing) obsession with the great indie rock band The Mountain Goats, the pen name of the singer and songwriter John Darnielle and whoever he happens to be working with.  Darnielle’s massive output has included such masterpieces as Tallahassee (a 2003 concept album about divorce), The Sunset Tree (2005), and the recent The Life Of The World To Come (2009), a fascinating slice of reception history that features 12 songs inspired by individual verses from the canonical Bible (The Mountain Goats website can be found here).

One of the things that makes The Mountain Goats such a pleasure to listen to  is the fact that, not unlike writers like the philosopher/cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the novelist Chuck Palahniuk, and the great theologian/existentialist/madman Søren Kierkegaard, Darnielle relies almost exclusively on indirect forms of communication, approaching and constructing his worlds of meaning from every conceivable angle, no matter how oblique.  For your pleasure, pondering, and perhaps confusion, a few of The Mountain Goats’ greatest (or most evocative) leaps in both language and logic.

From ‘Old College Try’ (Tallahassee), Darnielle manages to weave an oddly romantic metaphor out of a series of random images that would not be out of place in a Murakami Haruki novel:

… From the entrance to the exit/ Is longer than it looks from where we stand

I want to say I’m sorry for stuff I haven’t done yet/ Things will shortly get completely out of hand

I can feel it in the rotten air tonight/ In the tips of my fingers

In the skin on my face/ In the weak last gasp of the evening’s dying light

In the way those eyes I’ve always loved illuminate this place

Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell

Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell

I will walk down to the end with you/ If you will come all the way down with me

Again, in ‘Broom People’ (The Sunset Tree), Darnielle builds a love song out what T. S. Eliot so memorably called (in The Waste Land) ‘a heap of broken images’, though Eliot would never have used such charmingly domestic visuals:

’36 Hudson in the garage/ All sorts of junk in the unattached spare room,

Dishes in the kitchen sink/ New straw for the old broom,

Friends who don’t have a clue/ Well-meaning teachers,

But down in your arms,

In your arms, I am a wild creature.

Floor two foot high with newspapers/ White carpet thick with pet hair,

Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer/ Fresh fuel for the sodium flares,

I write down good reasons to freeze to death/ In my spiral ring notebook,

But in the long tresses of your hair

I am a babbling brook.

From Heretic Pride (2008), we have ‘Sax Rohmer #1’, which is about something lovely, though I have no idea what that might be. (any suggestions from our readers would be welcome here).  The final figure/image is a keeper, something J. G. Ballard does half as well with ten times as many words in his novel Crash:

Fog lifts from the harbour/ Dawn goes down today

An agent crests the shadows/ Of a nearby alleyway

Piles of broken bricks/ Signposts on the path

Every moment points toward/ The aftermath

Sailors straggle back/ From their nights out on the town

Hopeless urchins from the city/ Gather around

Spies from imperial China/ Wash in with the tide

Every battle heads toward/ Surrender on both sides

And I am coming home to you/ With my own blood in my mouth

And I am coming home to you/ If it’s the last thing that I do

Bells ring in the tower/ Wolves howl in the hills

Chalk marks show up/ On a few high windowsills

And a rabbit gives up somewhere/ And a dozen hawks descend

Every moment leads toward/ Its own sad end

Ships loosed from their moorings/ Capsize and then they’re gone

Sailors with no captains watch a while/ And then move on

And an agent crests the shadows/ And I head in her direction

All roads lead toward/ The same blocked intersection …

‘Up the Wolves’ (The Sunset Tree) features one of the strangest, and most oddly stirring, calls to arms I’ve ever heard:

… Were going to commandeer the local airwaves/ To tell the neighbours what’s been going on.

And they will shake their heads and wag their bony fingers/ In all the wrong directions,

And by daybreak we’ll be gone/ I’m going to get myself in fighting trim,

Scope out every angle of unfair advantage.

I’m going to bribe the officials.

I’m going to kill all the judges.

It’s going to take you people years to recover from all of the damage.

Our mother has been absent ever since we founded Rome/ But there’s going to be a party when the wolf comes home.

Go!

And finally, from the immortal ‘No Children’ (Tallahassee), simply one of the finest and most frankly brutal break-up songs in recent memory, one which uses a descriptive language that is so oddly naked that it seems to hide its meaning in plain sight:

I hope that our few remaining friends/ Give up on trying to save us

I hope we come up with a failsafe plot/ To piss off the dumb few who forgave us

I hope the fences we mended/ Fall down beneath their own weight

And I hope we hang on past the last exit/ I hope it’s already too late

And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here/ Someday burns down

And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away

And I never come back to this town …

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow/ I hope it bleeds all day long

Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises/ We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong

I hope it stays dark forever/ I hope the worst isn’t over

And I hope you blink before I do/ I hope I never get sober

And I hope when you think of me years down the line/ You can’t find one good thing to say

And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out/ You’d stay the hell out of my way

I am drowning

There is no sign of land

You are coming down with me

Hand in unlovable hand

And I hope you die/ I hope we both die …

(Thanks to the exhaustive fansite/archive themountaingoats.net for help on some of the more obscure passages).

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Cinema as Exorcism (five): Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as the Enlightenment’s Dark Magic

25 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Angels, Death, Exorcism, Film, Language, Literature, Metaphor, Reference, Religion, Texts

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Enlightenment, exorcism, Patrick Suskind, Perfume, Tom Tykwer

And that is precisely what the metropolitan denizen teaches himself to do: he lives, not in the real world, but in a shadow world projected around him at every moment by means of paper and celluloid and adroitly manipulated lights: a world in which he is insulated by glass, cellophane, pliofilm from the mortifications of living.  In short, a world of professional illusionists and their credulous victims.

Lewis Mumford [1]

Continuing on with the ongoing Cinema as Exorcism series (more here, here, here, and here), with a look at the dynamics of modernity and magic in a (very slightly) older film, Tom Tykwer’s 2006 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.  The film does not so much as exorcise as bring to the surface the dark, magical underbelly of the Enlightenment, the inadmissable but undeniable presence of enchantments in the form of forms of logic that exist underneath, behind, and all around conventional calculations of value, exchange and utility.  These enchantments, these dark magics, are represented as a profound source of threat.  Such enchantments must be understood as a potent and potential source of danger, something the sociologist Max Weber, the father of the theory of rationalisation, or as he also called it, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, recognised in his own lifetime in the volatile atmosphere of German society at the end of the First World War.

International poster for Tom Tykwer's Perfume

Tykwer’s Perfume is based on the German-language novel of the same name by Patrick Süskind.  Süskind’s novel, his first, has been highly influential and wildly popular since its publication in 1985 and is widely considered as part of the always de facto canon of magical realism.  The film seems at first to be an absolute departure for Tykwer, who is perhaps best known for his two related fairly tales about the transcendent, even supernatural power of love, Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998) and Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior, 2000).  The brilliance of these two collaborations with the actress Franka Potenta aside, Tykwer’s best film is likely Heaven (2002), a near mystical, quasi-Christian take on the redemptive power of love, written by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz for a planned trilogy of Kieslowski-directed films, offered to Tykwer after Kieslowski’s death in 1996.  Against the studied Romanticism of his other works, Perfume is violent, confrontational, even disturbing.  It is a rich and finely textured allegory that seeks to examine from within the hidden, dark enchantments of modernity.  The narrative undermines any easy account of modern history as the triumphant march out of darkness and into the light of perennial truth.  The film is not strictly about modernity as such, it focuses its metaphoric gaze on Enlightenment rationalism, a crucial element in the development of the forms of modern self-understanding embodied in evolutionary narratives. Perfume represents nothing less than a fictional account of that which is unthought, forgotten or simply ignored by modern narratives of progress and by unilinear theories of rationalisation.

The narrative itself is deceptively simple: Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan in eighteenth-century France, gifted, like Palahniuk’s Rant Casey, with a supernaturally keen sense of smell, discovers upon reaching maturity that he has no scent of his own, which renders him unlovable and even sub-human.  After years of toil as a near slave in a leather tannery, he trains as a perfumer and learns the technological mastery of the world of scent.  Yearning to be loved as others are loved, he comes rationally, even scientifically, to a way to enchant the world into loving him.  He creates, from the scents of virgin girls he has murdered, a perfume so sublimely beautiful that it holds the power to enchant the whole world into loving him.  Upon succeeding, he discovers that his triumph is hollow and commits a strangely beatific act of suicide.  Metaphorically, Grenouille, the titular murderer, is an abominable outgrowth of the rationalising tendencies of modern thought, a monster whose dark magic reaches its full potential only when it is augmented by his technical training and the growing body of scientific knowledge that characterised the age in which he lived.  In Enlightenment France, Grenouille is seen as an abomination; indeed, the people who encounter Grenouille and his crimes simply cannot grasp his motives or come to grips with his very existence.  However, the film presents Grenouille not so much as an anomaly but as a fully explicable and natural outgrowth of rationalisation.

The film features an extensive voice-over from an anonymous and wryly amused narrator (the great John Hurt), who sets the scene of Grenouille’s birth at the heart of Europe:

In eighteenth-century France, there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and notorious personages of his time.  His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and, if his name has been forgotten today, it is for the sole reason that his entire ambition was restricted to a domain that leaves no trace in history: to the fleeting realm of scent … In the period of which we speak there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women.  Naturally, the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in Europe.  And nowhere in Paris was that stench more profoundly repugnant than in the city’s fish market.  It was here, then, on the most putrid spot in the whole kingdom that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born on the 17th of July, 1738. [2]

From his earliest days, his knowledge of this hidden world sets him apart from the other children in the foetid, overcrowded orphanage where he is raised by the coldly rational Madame Gaillard, who treats Grenouille, and all the other children, as nothing more than sources of income.  Grenouille, with his supernatural sense of smell, has access to levels of the world that other people do not.  The film casts Grenouille’s extraordinary ability in terms of language:

By the age of five, Jean-Baptiste still could not talk, but he had been born with a talent that made him unique among mankind.  It was not that the other children hated him.  They felt unnerved by him.  Increasingly, he became aware that his phenomenal sense of smell was a gift that had been given to him and him alone.  When Jean-Baptiste did finally learn to speak, he soon found that everyday language proved inadequate for all the olfactory experiences accumulating within himself.

First edition cover of Suskind's Perfume

Grenouille lives, then, outside of the world of conventional language, though he does so because of his gifts, not because of his own will.  He survives the orphanage and years as an abused tannery apprentice and grows into a gaunt, silent and scarred young man.  Confronted for the first time with the wider world of Paris (outside of the orphanage and the tannery) and the staggering wealth of scents the city has to offer, Grenouille begins his own version of the task of world mastery that is taking place at the same time in salons, laboratories and lecture halls in other, more privileged parts of the city.  Tykwer only rarely shows this world.  Grenouille serves as the primary guide within the structure of the film itself, forcing the viewer to contemplate the world largely from his perspective.  Part of this identification comes through Tykwer’s attempts to emulate the world of scent in a visual medium.  He does this with jump cuts and vivid close-up shots of the things that Grenouille is able to smell, images which both focus attention on their particularity and isolate them from their context.  As Grenouille enters Paris, the camera dissects the city into discrete, disconnected images, breaking the world down to its constituent elements – powdered wigs, cracking oysters, fabric, bread, mud, sewage, high-born women in carriages, horses.  Confronting the confusion and majesty of Paris with a growing hunger, Grenouille seeks understanding and order by breaking things apart, by removing them from the totality of smells and reifying each of these elements in the desire of possession and mastery.

This is true of people as well as inanimate objects and animals.  On this first visit to the city, when the film implicitly connects Grenouille to the emerging project of modern science and its hunger for new knowledge, Grenouille also commits his first murder.  Visually, the film depicts Grenouille’s fragmentation of the world, and by implication that of emerging modern science, as an act of violence and dismemberment.  The camera and the editing break down Grenouille’s victims long before he does, reducing them to fleeting glimpses of a naked shoulder, a vein pulsing on a slender throat, red hair flowing in the wind.  Grenouille catches the intoxicating smell of a redheaded young woman carrying plums and follows her into a dark courtyard where he, perhaps unintentionally, kills her.  Intentional or not, Grenouille doesn’t appear to care that she is dead, only that her unique smell is dissipating rapidly as her body cools.  He drinks up her scent as it fades, stripping her naked and exploring her body with his nose.  He cups his hands to hold onto her scent, but he cannot posses it and it fades, igniting within him to fierce desire to permanently possess scent.

It is telling to note one of the narrative’s harshest criticisms of modernity comes across in the fact that Grenouille must enter mainstream society to fully exploit his perverse need for world mastery, not shy away from it; Grenouille must embrace the emerging bourgeois world to fully realise his aims.  Shortly after his first murder, Grenouille insinuates himself into the laboratory of faded perfumer Giuseppe Baldini by sheer persistence and demands that Baldini teach him: ‘I have to learn how to keep smell!’  Because of his gifted nose, Grenouille’s facility with perfume is nothing short of magical.  Testing a perfume that Grenouille improvises for him, Baldini is transported to an enchanted garden, where a buxom young woman whispers, ‘I love you’ into his enraptured ear.  In the novel, Süskind explicitly makes this connection: ‘It was not a scent that made things smell better, not some sachet, not some toiletry.  It was something completely new, capable of creating a new world, a magical, rich world’. [3]

Grenouille, who is often treated as little more than human capital, comes to work as an apprentice for Baldini.  Working late in the basement laboratory, Baldini imparts a piece of perfumer’s lore to his new apprentice:

Baldini: Now, pay careful attention to what I tell you.  Just like a musical chord, a perfume chord contains four essences, notes carefully selected for their harmonic affinity.  Each perfume contains three chords: the head, the heart and the base, necessitating twelve notes in all … Mind you, the ancient Egyptians believed that one can only create a truly original perfume by adding an extra note, one final essence that will bring out and dominate the others.  Legend has it that an amphora was once found in a pharaoh’s tomb and when it was opened a perfume was released after all those thousands of years, a perfume of such subtle beauty and yet such power that for one single moment every person on Earth believed they were in paradise.  Twelve essences could be identified, but the thirteenth, the vital one, could never be determined.

Grenouille: Why not?

Baldini: Why not?  What do you mean, why not?  Because it’s a legend, numbskull.

Grenouille: What’s a legend?

Baldini: Never mind.

It says a great deal about the film’s take on modernity and positivistic science that Grenouille confuses this legend with historical fact and later turns to this story for a model when he begins his murderous final act of creation.  It likewise says a good deal that it is this mistake that allows him to be so successful when creating his masterpiece, a perfume containing the scents of thirteen virgins.  Grenouille is either not aware of or simply ignores the implicit distinction in Baldini’s story between the technical accuracy of the perfumer’s art and the Egyptian story, which is clearly not to be taken as the same level of truth.  Grenouille has no need for modern epistemological distinction.  Nonetheless, with this syncretism of scientific and mythological ways of knowing, Grenouille is able to replicate the story of the legend, even though it was probably never true in the first place.  If we are to pause here briefly to consider Grenouille’s metaphoric role in European modernity, it is worth suggesting that he is not unlike the alchemist in his application of rational methods for supernatural aims.  Alchemy perhaps played a greater role in the history of modern science than the subtraction stories are willing to admit, as Louis Dupré notes:

Too often the cosmology of the early modern age continues to be viewed as a prehistory of the scientific revolution, as if there had been nothing between the Aristotelian picture and the mechanistic one.  Such a view overlooks a prolonged attempt to understand the universe through chemistry rather than through the laws of mechanics.  Until the end of the seventeenth century alchemy developed side by side with mechanical physics as an alternative science. [4]

To continue the metaphor, in much the same way that Grenouille is a forgotten product of rationalisation, alchemy is part of the unthought and often ignored inheritances in positivist science.  For Baldini, Grenouille’s abilities are uncanny, even worrisome, something he is willing to overlook with the floods of money coming into his shop as customers arrive in droves to buy Grenouille’s creations.  For Baldini, his new apprentice’s strangeness is defused somewhat when Grenouille learns the techniques and the operational language of perfuming, bringing his knowledge and his skill under the comforting umbrella of known registers of utilitarian language.  Süskind notes this connection explicitly in the novel: ‘The more Grenouille mastered the tricks and tools of the trade, the better he was able to express himself in conventional language of perfumery – and the less his master feared and suspected him’. [5] If Baldini feels more at ease the more that Grenouille learns, he is being greatly deceived.  Grenouille, under the respectable language of the perfumer, is growing ever more powerful, ever closer to the realisation of his dream to capture scent.  In an intriguing parallel with the novels of Chuck Palahniuk  operational language becomes a shield for Grenouille’s uncanny abilities and his unsettling aims.

Trading the formulas for one hundred new perfumes for his freedom, Grenouille departs for a journeyman’s post in the Provençal town of Grasse, which Baldini calls ‘the Rome of scents, the promised land of perfume’.  On the way, he is distracted for no less than seven years, living a base, animalistic existence hidden away in a cave in the mountains, revelling in the cold, clean, scentless air but equally horrified to discover that he has no scent of his own, that he is, as others have long suspected, something less than fully human.  The narrator tells of the new desire this opens up within Grenouille’s heart:

For the first time in his life, Grenouille realized that he had no smell of his own.  He realized that all his life, he’d been a nobody to everyone.  What he now felt was the fear of his own oblivion.  It was as though he did not exist.  By the first light of next morning, Grenouille had a new plan; he must continue his journey to Grasse.  There he would teach the world not only that he existed, that he was someone, but that he was exceptional.

Arriving finally in Grasse, Grenouille takes a post as a journeyman perfumer and expands his repertoire beyond what Baldini was able to teach him.  He also continues his experiments in his free time, first trying to capture the scent of a reluctant living prostitute then resorting to simply killing women so he will have bodies to experiment with.  Grenouille’s experimentation is relentless, passionless and rigorously scientific.  After several failed attempts, he finally strikes upon a complex method involving cold enfleurage, digestion, lavage, and distillation that renders the scent of the woman into a single tiny flask.  Having robbed these women forcibly of their essence, Grenouille leaves a series of corpses, stripped naked and shorn, for the people and authorities of Grasse to find.  In Grenouille’s reign of terror, undertaken in the interests of world mastery and in the selfish needs of Grenouille to perfect himself, the narrative finds its metaphorical centre.

Grenouille’s application of the scientific method in the interests of possessing ‘all the smells in the world’ is what allows his magic, and his perversion, to fully flower.  Without the equipment and techniques of the perfumer, Grenouille would be condemned to the fleeting sensations of the scent of the living, accessible to him only via his gifts.  Wendy Faris underlines Grenouille’s conjunction of magic and science, which, as we have seen, also manifests itself in the discourses of reenchantment: ‘Grenouille’s perfuming abilities resemble those of an experimental chemist of genius, so that in addition to the magical powers of its narrative mode, the novel also takes on a quasi-scientific aura, intimately connected to the concrete worlds of natural and constructed chemical compounds’. [6] Grenouille’s perfuming skills bring the reification of the individual inherent in disenchantment and the rise of modern capitalism sharply into focus; the women Grenouille harvests are human capital, literally liquid assets in his quest to manufacture an identity for himself and in his relentless pursuit of the sublime beauty of his thirteen-note masterpiece.  In an extended sequence, Tykwer underlines this connection visually.  Tykwer intercuts sensuous images of Grenouille’s flasks, bottles, and experimentation with blackly comical images of the discovery of the bodies of the murdered women, drawing an explicit visual parallel between the act of manufacture and the act of destruction.

In Grasse, Grenouille meets his only formidable opponent, the wealthy merchant Antoine Richis, whose sublimely beautiful daughter, Laura, Grenouille needs as the thirteenth and crowning note of his perfume.  Richis is a deeply rational and practical man, like Grenouille a child of the Enlightenment.  The two are opposites and antagonists; however, they also represent the two sides of the dialectic of enchantment and Enlightenment.  When the town council meets to try to decide what to do about the murders, Richis calls for a rational approach to the seemingly irrational horror in their midst:

We have to put ourselves inside the mind of this man.  Each of his victims had an especial beauty.  We know he doesn’t want their virginity so it seems to me it’s their beauty itself that he wants, almost as if he’s trying to gather something.  His ambitions are those of a collector … Whatever it is, I fear he won’t stop killing until his collection is complete.

For Richis, who suspects early on that Laura is a necessary part of Grenouille’s collection, Grenouille’s threat is greater than mere murder; the killings are inexplicable, unreasonable even in the deranged logic of murder.  Grenouille attacks conventional structures of knowledge and value by not sexually violating his victims and by following an inexplicable but undeniable logic of his very own.  His violation of his victims is symbolic at the same time it is literal, an act of extreme violence, especially considering Baldini’s assertion, which Grenouille takes to heart, that ‘the soul of beings is their scent’.  Richis is blinded by his understanding of modernity, which only allows him to understand Grenouille by one standard of truth and logic.  The town council refuses to listen to Richis’ sobering and rational call, opting instead to fall back on the divine language of the Catholic Church, which Richis, as an Enlightened man, is visibly sceptical of.  Tykwer stages here a very brief debate between science and religion:

Judge: This man is a demon, a phantom who cannot be fought by human means.  Now, I insist that we call upon our bishop to excommunicate him.

Richis:  What good would that do?

Judge: Have you no faith at all in the power our Holy Mother Church?

Richis: This is not a matter of faith.  There’s a murderer out there and we must catch him by using our God-given wits.

Judge: I say until we submit to Mother Church, these killings will not cease.

Tykwer plays the following scenes as a perverse comedy and a mockery of both the council and the Church to even slow Grenouille down.  The bishop stands up in his cathedral in front of the town and declares Grenouille’s excommunication with all the vigour the corpulent churchman can muster.  The scene is intercut with Grenouille, not in the least bothered by his communication, if he is even aware of it, deliberately mixing his perfume from his twelve tiny flasks of oil, awaiting its crowning thirteenth note in the scent of Laura Richis, which he soon has, despite Richis’ best efforts to thwart him using clever ruses that are no match for Grenouille’s supernatural abilities.  Grenouille is caught the next morning as he finishes his perfume over an open flame and is taken back to Grasse for interrogation and execution.  As Grenouille is tortured, Richis strives in vain to understand his reasoning.  Their meeting is a clash of different epistemologies in which there is no exchange or dialogue between sides.  The Janus face of Enlightenment rationalism is here brought into sharp focus as is becomes clear that both men are equally rational, equally methodical.  The divide between the two remains nonetheless absolute, their positions utterly irreconcilable by any common discourse, what Jean-François Lyotard calls a differend:

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?  Why?

Grenouille: I needed her.

Richis: Why did you kill my daughter?

Grenouille: I just needed her.

Grenouille is sentenced to a horrific death in the public square.  Dressed in blue velvet finery, Grenouille is led to his punishment in front of the entire town.  He, through his dark magic, retains the position of power.  During the scenes on the platform, Tykwer accentuates the strange and monstrous aspect of Grenouille by placing him dead centre in the frame.  A rare composition in contemporary cinema, such an image has an intensely alienating effect (see Figure 1).  With a light application of his perfume, Grenouille faces the crowds with equanimity and a wry smile.  The executioner is the first to fall under the spell of Grenouille’s perfume, shouting, ‘This man is innocent!’ Spreading the scent with a wave of his handkerchief, the crowd takes up this call.  The bishop falls to his knees, declaring, enraptured, ‘This is no man, this is an angel’.  Even Richis, the last to fall under the spell, lays down his sword and asks for Grenouille’s forgiveness as the crowd degenerates into a massive and undifferentiated orgy.  Soon everyone is naked, or near to it.  The coupling is indiscriminate, men with women, women with women, old with young, bishops with prostitutes.  Grenouille has brought about with his technique and his magic a perverse flowering of communitas.  In his final appearances he possesses a power and an authority, however artificially generated, to control the desires and actions of all those around him.  The ambivalent relationship of modernity to enchantment is embodied in these simple narrative and visual moments; unable to stop Grenouille’s killing spree nor understand his motives, the secular and ecclesiastic authorities of the day end their relationship with Grenouille by falling under his spell, by embracing against their will everything they claim to be against.

Figure 1:

Figure 1: Grenouille on the platform in Grasse.

As Grenouille stands on the scaffolding, all of the forces of early modern French society are unable to do anything but fall under the enchantment of his mastery, born half from his inexplicable sense of smell and half from rational techniques.  What Grenouille represents is the forgotten magic that underlies modernity, the hidden agency of ancient, animalistic elements buried within the structure of European modernity, forgotten but always present.  Grenouille, however, feels no satisfaction as he stands above the crowd, a master of the world.  Grenouille is, if anything, both disgusted and regretful.  In one of the few moments in which Tykwer allows Grenouille some remorse, some ordinary humanity (something Süskind never does in the novel), watching the sea of naked townspeople, Grenouille has flashbacks to his first killing, the girl with the basket of plums.  As the whole of the city writhes naked at his feet, caught up in his manufactured reenchantment, the film re-enacts the scene of the murder but shows the plum girl reacting to Grenouille very differently as he approaches her openly.  She welcomes him, embraces him, kisses him, returns his singular affection.  Grenouille imagines the scene as it could have gone if he were fully human.  Grenouille weeps at the thought of her dead, at the thought of the lost opportunity for a living exchange with a living woman rather than his one-sided violation.

Instead of facing up to Grenouille and what he represents, the people of Grasse look away and arrest another man, Grenouille’s former employer, who is hanged for Grenouille’s crimes, thus balancing the scales of justice and the demand for an exchange for the murdered girls in terms that they are able to understand.  The march of order and history has been restored and Grenouille, forgotten in the emerging triumphalist narratives of modernity, is left out of the history books:

The people of Grasse awoke to a terrible hangover.  For many of them, the experience was so ghastly, so completely inexplicable and incompatible with their morals that they literally erased it from their memories.  The town council was in session by the afternoon and an order was passed to the police lieutenant to immediately begin fresh investigations into the murders.  The following day, Dominique Druer was arrested, since it was in his backyard that the clothes and hair of all the victims had been found.  After fourteen hours of torture, Druer confessed to everything.  With that, the case was closed.

That Grenouille is forgotten only further underlines his historical power, in that he works in a threatening symbolic register and cannot be captured in language. His regret, and the ever-present narrator, follow him back to Paris:

By then, Grenouille was already halfway back to Paris.  He still had enough perfume left to enslave the whole world if he so chose.  He could walk to Versailles and have the king kiss his feet.  He could write the Pope a perfumed letter and reveal himself as the new messiah.  He could do all this and more if he wanted to.  He possessed a power stronger than the power of money, or terror, or death; the invincible power to command the love of mankind.  There was only one thing the perfume could not do.  It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else.  So, to hell with it, he thought.  To hell with the world, with the perfume, with himself.  On the twenty-fifth of June, 1766, around eleven o’clock at night, Grenouille entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans and like a sleepwalker, his olfactory memories drew him back to the place where he was born.

Grenouille, still dressed in his finery, sees a group of ragged, dirty people huddled around a fire.  He upends the bottle of perfume on his head, drawing the attention of the gathered crowd as he is suffused with a warm glowing light.  Two women approach him and cry, ‘An angel’ and, ‘I love you’.  The crowd falls upon him and literally devours him.  There is nothing but a pile of clothes left, and these are stolen by a group of poor children.  Jean-Baptiste Grenouille fades into the mists of history, the dark side of Enlightenment and modern science forgotten save for the fragments of finery he briefly wore as the master of the world.  Reenchantment is necessarily, as we have argued in conceptual terms, a fleeting, ephemeral, if forever renewed phenomenon not unlike Grenouille and the scraps of his enchantment he leaves behind after his death.

These final images are deeply ambiguous, if not deeply perverse.  The narrator finishes his tale in a matter of fact manner: ‘Within no time, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had disappeared from the face of the Earth.  When they had finished, they felt a virginal glow of happiness.  For the first time in their lives, they believed they done something purely out of love’.  It is possible to read this final scene in a number of ways.  That Grenouille is identified on at least two occasions as an angel, as a figure from traditional Christian cosmology, is highly significant if we return our attention to the concept of religious modernity.  In this context, it is possible to interpret the deeply ambivalent ending of Perfume in a different way.  What Grenouille, as an angel, represents is the destructive, monstrous aspects of the religious productions of modernity, a murderous hybrid of the religious, the magical and the scientific.  This fusion of differing epistemologies can take violent forms, exemplified today in various forms of religious fundamentalism.  Similarly, as Faris notes:

In magical realist texts irruptions of magic sometimes constitute the surfacing of buried religious traditions, which speak independently of particular themes and styles.  In Perfume, for example, the magical quality of Grenouille’s perfuming abilities transmits a trace of pre-Enlightenment belief in magical powers of enchantment, which operates within the satiric narrative that condemns the beginnings of the scientific age and its culmination in Nazi experimental atrocities, and yet it is not entirely defined by it. [7]

It is more than this, however.  Grenouille is not a trace or a survival, he is a production of modernity and the processes of rationalisation.  Jean-Baptiste’s Christian name implicates him both as a significant religious figure and also the one who comes before something greater, in this case both the French Revolution and modernity as a whole.  In Perfume, it is a magically endowed, coldly rational and utterly vicious killer of virgins who prepares the way for the modern era, which, the story suggests, is forever haunted by the dark enchantments that lie forgotten in its history by those things it produces and then seeks to forget.


[1] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961), 546.

[2] Perfume, DVD. All quotations and screen captures are the work of the author.

[3] Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, trans. by J. E. Woods (New York: Penguin, 1987), 90.

[4] Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 52.

[5] Süskind, Perfume, 96.

[6] Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, AB: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 74.

[7] Faris, Ordinary, 70.

Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics Going Cheap – $99.99

24 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Theology

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth

Karl Barth - author of Church Dogmatics

Now, this is a real discount. Karl Barth’s monumental Twentieth Century systematic theology, Church Dogmatics, is available at a pre-order price of $99.99 – down 90% from the recommended retail price of $995.00. That’s in hardback, too.

This is the old T&T Clark English translation, edited by T. F. Torrance and G.W. Bromiley. And the release date is 1 November 2010.

Most of the 9,233 pages and over 6,000,000 words of Karl Barth’s ponderous prose should of course be ignored. But buried amongst the detritus of theological obtuseness is a short and surprisingly sensible mini-commentary on the Book of Job – surrounded as it is by some vacuous and atavistic comments about humanity. Do you think that little “vignette” could win me a free copy?

And I wonder if it’s about to go out of copyright? Maybe somebody from Hendrickson could let me know. Update: Nope – Hendrickson say that is not the case. They just have a deal with T&T Clark to reprint the older 14-volume set, now that Continuum/T&T Clark is selling a 31-volume “study edition” set. And they’re doing it for $99.99. Isn’t that nice of them? Hat-tip: Jim West.

The Wisdom of Squirrels and Dwarves

23 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Dunedin School, Language, Metaphor, Religion, Rhetoric, Slang, Texts, Worship

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Penguin Sex, Pesky Squirrels, Religious Jokes

To celebrate James Crossley’s kind inclusion of The Dunedin School among those few weblogs that exhibit a ‘far higher level of political sophistication and learned interaction with a wider array of scholarship in the humanities than other blogs’, I wish to continue our exemplary critical work by providing our fine readers with two sophisticated, tasteful religious jokes (sadly, I didn’t write these – we all know that most academics do not have a sense of humour):

What happens when you type 'squirrel pope' into a search engine

1) Adapted from a joke by Adam McFarlane in Esquire magazine (June 2007, page 44)

There are four country churches in a small Scottish town … a Presbyterian church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, and a Catholic church.  Each church is overrun with pesky squirrels.

One day, the Presbyterian church calls a meeting to decide what to do about the squirrels, who are, as has been noted, pesky.  After much prayer and consideration (and the employment of some well-loved if  dubious logic), the leaders of the church determine that the squirrels are predestined to be there and they shouldn’t interfere with God’s divine will (especially given that it favours them – the clergy, not the squirrels).

In the Baptist church the squirrels take up habitation in the baptistery.  The deacons meet and decide to put a cover on the baptistery and drown the squirrels in it.  The squirrels escape somehow and the next week, there are twice as many of them.

The Methodists get together and decide that they are simply not in a position to harm any of God’s creations, even if they are rodents.  At least they are not papists, they reason.  So they humanely trap the squirrels (who are, as has been noted, pesky) and set them free a few miles outside of town.  Alas, three days later, the squirrels come back, as do many pesky things at the end of three days.

But the Catholic priests come up with a most effective solution.  They baptise the squirrels and register them as members of the church.  Now they only see them at Christmas and Easter.

2) From Mark Z. Danielewski’s visionary novel House of Leaves

What happens when you type 'penguin pope' into a search engine

The seven dwarves went to the Vatican and when the Pope answered the door, Dopey stepped forward: ‘Your Excellency’, he said, ‘I wonder if you could tell me if there are any dwarf nuns in Rome?’

‘No, Dopey, there aren’t’, the Pope replied.

Behind Dopey, the six dwarves started to titter.

‘Well, are there any dwarf nuns in Italy?’ Dopey persisted.

‘No, none in Italy’, the Pope answered a little more sternly.

A few of the dwarves now began to laugh more openly.

Well, are there any dwarf nuns in Europe?’

This time the Pope was much more firm.  ‘Dopey, there are no dwarf nuns in Europe’.

By this point, all the dwarves were laughing aloud and rolling around on the ground.

‘Pope’, Dopey demanded, ‘Are there any dwarf nuns in the whole world?’

‘No, Dopey’, the Pope snapped, ‘there are no dwarf nuns anywhere in the world’.

Whereupon the six dwarves started jumping up and down and chanting, ‘Dopey fucked a penguin!  Dopey fucked a penguin!’


The Dunedin School mentioned in Academic Article

23 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Dunedin School

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self-promotion

The Dunedin School has been mentioned in an academic article published in the world’s leading journal on the Bible and critical theory, The Bible and Critical Theory. James Crossley (University of Sheffield), a sometime commenter on this blog, writes:

“Unlike the mass media, biblioblogging is not directly dependent on corporate financial backing and so more and more figures from overtly different perspectives would be able to follow Wrong’s lead and open up different ways of thinking about the politics of biblioblogging from within the world of biblioblogging, perhaps even donning the mask. There are now also occasional exceptions, such as Roland Boer’s blog, Stalin’s Moustache, and the collective, Dunedin School, which also have a far higher level of political sophistication and learned interaction with a wider array of scholarship in the humanities than other blogs.”

(James Crossley, “N.T. Wrong and the Bibliobloggers.” Bible and Critical Theory 6.1 (March 2010): 03.11.)

“Political sophistication and learned interaction.” Yeah, baby!

The Dunedin School understands that description as applying especially to us, rather than Roland Boer’s Stalin’s Moustache. For Roland just goes on about sex, penises, testicles, and prairie oysters – and with some decidedly spurious etymologies. He’s the veritable Roger Lambert of biblical studies.

Media Reception of a Recent Book on U2: _U2: The Name of Love_ by Andrea Morandi

22 Monday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Music

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Andrea Morandi, Gaetano Vallini, L'Osservatore Romano, secularization thesis, The Guardian, U2, U2: The Name Of Love

U2: The Name of Love by Andrea Morandi

A recently released Italian book provides a song-by-song commentary on the lyrics to U2 songs from all twelve studio albums. What I want to have a quick look at, here, is the interesting media reception which U2: The Name Of Love (Rome: Arcana, 2009) provoked – a reception that illustrates the role of the reader and listener in observing and construing biblical allusions.

In his introduction to the book, journalist-author Andrea Morandi explains that his commentary will attempt to identify the literary and historical influences of each song, as well as place them within a biography of the band’s development over the last 30 years or so:

“This book attempts to tell the story of U2 sequentially by putting together the pieces of a mosaic: 137 songs, one after another, combined to produce the final design. The structure is like that of a film script that begins in 1974, in a cemetery in Dublin and ends in 2009 in Beirut. In between there are twelve chapters on twelve records, involving America and the Bible, Karl Popper and Johnny Cash, New York and Berlin, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher, El Salvador and the British miners, the supermodel and the IRA. A hundred and thirty tales, in which we follow the evolution of Paul Hewson, a boy who begins by writing lyrics in the first person as in a journal and who, album after album, becomes increasingly aware of his literary power, learning lessons from Bob Dylan and John Lennon, joining together fragments from anywhere: popular and high culture, ancient and modern, the Psalms of David and Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and advertising slogans, the book of Habakkuk and Wim Wenders, but also the world and its changes, the fall of the Wall to September 11.”

The introduction stresses the great diversity of influences on U2’s lyrics, and this variety of literary and historical factors is documented more fully throughout the 664-page book. As you see, there is no special emphasis on biblical influences, but rather, these are integrated into the book along with relevant literary and historical influences. 

So how did the media receive it?

First: the Vatican daily newspaper. An article published in the 4-5 January 2010 edition of L’Osservatore Romano included a number of comments on Andrea Morandi’s book. The article, by journalist Gaetano Vallini focuses, somewhat unsurprisingly, on the biblical allusions in U2 songs. The article notes, quite correctly, that U2’s 1981 album, October stands out as especially significant for its biblical and Christian allusions, but that such allusions can be detected throughout U2’s subsequent albums. While the Vatican’s newspaper is understandably slanted towards this particular aspect of Morandi’s book, and this aspect of U2’s music, it does not misrepresent the content of the book.

But now consider an article which was published by UK newspaper The Guardian, on its music blog (6 January 2010). Laura Barnett’s article reported both on Morandi’s book and its review in the Vatican’s newspaper. The Guardian‘s article is headlined as follows:

U2: Rock’n’roll’s answer to the Book of Common Prayer?

Is Bono really a true crusader for Christianity? Two Italian journalists have examined his lyrics and discovered Biblical allusions in almost every song

_

The remaining content of the Guardian article is typical of the UK media’s inability to understand religion, a failure that frequently boils over into outright animosity, as it does here. Barnett’s article continues by incorrectly reporting that the Vatican’s newspaper article constitutes “the official endorsement of the Vatican” on U2. (It’s not – it’s some Vatican journalist’s piece.) Her article then describes the Vatican article  as “mak[ing] the case that Bono is a true crusader for Christianity”, and reports that his lyrics are “a veritable treasure trove of Biblical references and allusions.” She follows this up by claiming that, in his book, “Andrea Morandi laboriously extracts Biblical allusions from almost every U2 lyric.” This is patently untrue, and suggests both a misreading of the Vatican article (which only claims such a comprehensive degree of biblical allusions on the album October) and a complete failure to read Morandi’s own book. As the quotation from U2: The Name Of Love shows above, Morandi’s book contains a great diversity of literary and historical sources for Bono’s lyrics, of which biblical allusions form a regular but not all-pervasive presence.

What is particularly amusing about Barnett’s hatchet-job is that, in the one case where Barnett concludes there is no biblical allusion, she gets that wrong as well. Barnett objects when L’Osservatore Romano finds a  biblical allusion in the song “Magnificent” to Mary’s magnificat in Luke 1. She comments that this “feels like an extrapolation too far.” What is interesting here, for me, is that the words to “Magnificent” can be interpreted as secular by someone without any great biblical literacy. Whereas, the case can be just the opposite if you have the words of the magnificat in your “intertextual encyclopedia” – as Bono confesses he himself did, when he wrote the song. Not that I’d proffer the songwriter’s own comments as in any way decisive on the issue.

What is also fascinating about this largely religiously illiterate Guardian reviewer is that she clearly feels that she has been “taken in” by U2. At the conclusion to her article, she wonders if listeners should steer clear of U2 for fear of “religious conversion by stealth” (my emphasis). She doesn’t quite understand the biblical allusions in U2’s music, but now she knows that they’re there. And if she can’t determine where they are exactly, they could be bloody anywhere! Despite a career in musical journalism, which should have afforded her with some degree of acquaintance with bands like U2, it seems that U2’s regularly biblical allusions and Christian themes have largely passed over her head. And on this point, she might have got something right. U2’s lyrics have always been able to speak in different ways to different audiences, depending on the community to which they belong and that community’s particular goals, interests, and knowledge.

See also: some (more timely) comments on the issue from Beth Maynard and an interview between Scott Calhoun and Andrea Morandi.

Make Your Own Snapshot of Mainstream Culture!

22 Monday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in History, Internet, Language, Pornography, Reference, Religion, Texts, Theory

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Google, Internet, Job, Pornography

An experiment for all our fair readers, though not one to be conducted at work: turn off all the ‘Safe Search’ options on your browser and do an image search for ‘Job’.  At least on Google, this yields a fascinating slice of the mainstream culture – at least that part of it that is online – in the English-speaking world.  I’ve done this a few times after stumbling upon it looking for a painting by Marc Chagall last year and the results, though always shifting, are always about the same.

Well over half the images involve employment or ‘jobs’ in some way:

The other half are split more or less equally between illustrations from the Hebrew Bible book of Job and various pornographic categories – ‘hand job’, ‘foot job’, ‘boob job’, ‘blow job’, and the like (in the interests of propriety – I am an American citizen, and America owes a good deal to Puritan morality even today when so many other element of Puritan culture has passed into the mists of memory – I will leave the illustration of this final category to your imagination, which is filthier than anything I could find anyway, I reckon):

An illustration from Job by WIlliam Blake

There is something about this juxtaposition of the religious, the economic, and the pornographic that seems to perfectly capture our present cultural moment and its inherent contradictions.

It will be fascinating to do this on occasions over the coming months and even years to see if shifts in the larger culture alter the mix I found this morning (these two were taken from the first two pages of a Google image search results), or alter the proportions in which these three things appear.

John Barclay gives Open Lectures this month

20 Saturday Mar 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Conferences & Seminars, Paul

≈ 4 Comments

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gift, John Barclay, Paul

John Barclay

Professor John Barclay, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University (United Kingdom), famed New Testament scholar, and occasional Dunedin resident, will give (if you will pardon the pun) two lectures in the De Carle Open Lecture series, on Tuesday 30 March and Wednesday 31 March:

1. Paul and the Subversive Power of the Unconditional Gift
Tuesday 30 March, 5:10pm
Archway 1 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago

Working from the anthropology of gift, and the practice of gifts in Paul’s first-century context, a critical question emerges concerning who is qualified or worthy to receive the gift; answers on the gift’s proper distribution reveal foundational social norms. Paul’s mission to non-Jews broke Jewish ethnic and legal norms, and was the social corollary of his conviction that a divine gift (of Christ) had been given and distributed without qualificatory conditions. This conviction represents a highly unsettling perception of the world, at odds with the normal categories of hierarchy, quality and significance, and capable of creating irregular, socially creative communities. Paul emerges as one of the most subversive thinkers of the ancient world.

2. Paul, Reciprocity and the Modern Myth of the Pure Gift
Wednesday 31 March, 5:10pm
Archway 1 Lecture Theatre, University of Otago

The modern ideology of the pure, unilateral and utterly disinterested gift is the product of social and economic developments in Western history, strengthened by Protestant polemics and modern individualism. In Paul’s context, as in most traditional societies, gifts create obligations, are bilateral in exchange, and are a key mechanism for social integration. Paul’s ideology of gift-reciprocity in a community bound together by gift and need indicates that he is not a modern – and all the better for that! Special features of Paul’s notion of community-construction will be explored, with suggestions concerning their relevance to contemporary social and economic problematics.

All Welcome
And it’s free!

Derrida receives a crap Christmas present and contemplates his obligation to give one back.

Milbank: The Church as Poo

19 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Jesus

≈ 5 Comments

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John Milbank, poo

In a recent interview, the unradical and tediously orthodox John Milbank recently described the Church in this way:

“the Church is … the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ.”

While I am no expert on the human digestive system, I am quite sure that the ultimate “continued event” of an “ingestion” is a poo.

But Milbank’s scatotheology does not end there. For something must emerge even from the poo (that is, theology itself):

“All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church [the poo], which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man”

So theology is a poo’s poo; the shit of shit. And it doesn’t stop there, because theology mediates a further presence. Applying Milbank’s logic, the God-Man is a poo’s poo’s poo all of this shit originates with the God-Man. And at the origin of all this shit, according to Milbank, is the God-Man.

Even though Milbank and Žižek seem to have argued almost entirely at cross purposes in their recent co-written book (The Monstrosity of Christ), here in his conception of the Church and Christ Milbank finally approximates Žižek’s own view:

“Protestantism … [conceives] Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely identified himself with his own shit, with the excremental Real which is man … ”

(Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006): 187)

As a further complication, Milbank has also attempted to expel Adam Kotsko from his excremental body. See “Because I am lukewarm…”.

Swords into Ploughshares: Attacks on U.S. Military Bases are Legal in New Zealand!

18 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Violence

≈ 36 Comments

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Adrian Leason, Afghanistan, David Lange, Father Peter Murnane, Iraq, Jeff Simmonds, John Minto, justice, Nicky Hager, ploughshares, Sam Land, Terrorism, U.S. Army, Waihopai

The Waihopai Three, with a banner alluding to Isaiah 2.4: "...they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Two years ago, three men broke into the U.S. Army’s spy base in Waihopai, New Zealand, slashing one of the plastic domes with sickles, causing over $1 million damage, and rendering it disfunctional for a short period. The three men – Adrian Leason, Father Peter Murnane and Sam Land – were pacifists, and chose a means of protest which destroyed the plastic dome, without causing damage or undue risk to human life. Whereas, when the spy dome is in operation, it participates in U.S. attempts to kill and torture Iraqi and Afghan citizens. Writing in a Foreward to Nicky Hager‘s book Secret Power (2006), Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange claimed he previously had no idea about the role of the Waihopai spy base in U.S. torture and killings: “…it was not until I read this book that I had any idea that we had been committed to an international integrated electronic network.” The Waihopai spy base was commissioned and built while David Lange was Prime Minister.

Yesterday, the three men were acquitted on all charges!

“Our actions in disabling the spy base and stopping the flow of information helped save lives in Iraq”, said Adrian Leason.

“We damaged property at the spy base in order to save victims of war and torture. It’s all about Jesus’ command for us to treat all people as our brothers and sisters”, said Father Peter.

The acquittal of the three protestors has sent the song “Let’s Shut Down Waihopai!” by Jeff Simmonds to Number One on the New Zealand Activist charts:

Justice – which must necessarily interrupt the systems of justice that create a hegemonic or absolute injustice – has been done. So let’s keep up the momentum. Why should the Waihopai spy base continue to carry out terrorist operations in this country?

“[Corporal Apiata, who won the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan for rescuing a wounded comrade under enemy fire] was no hero compared to Sam, Adrian and Peter… They are real heroes because what they did goes against the mainstream of New Zealand public opinion and was a truly brave, inspiring and courageous action. Unfortunately Apiata is involved in a very dirty war on behalf of America and the people of Afghanistan don’t want him there. I don’t see him as a hero because people have to take personal responsibility for their actions and I am not sure he realises the real reason why he is there in Afghanistan.”
– John Minto

Waihopai spy station deflated

News From Outside The Empire’s Circle Jerk – 16 March 2010

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Fundamentalism, News, Violence

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bastard offspring of the Market, nonhuman animals, Obama, Repent Amarillo

Members of Repent Amarillo, the Grisham family, standing in front of a giant wooden cross on their front porch.

In a fine opinion piece, Chris Floyd points out that war is not a natural act. And he quotes some guy from the first century CE: All who draw the sword will die by the sword. – Yeshua Ha-Notsri, Palestinian dissident, c. 33 CE.

For over a year, a small group of fundamentalist Christian militants calling themselves Repent Amarillo have terrorized Amarillo’s gay bars, swingers, liberal churches, and the Wildcat Bluff Nature Center (the latter believed by Repent Amarillo to be “a Mecca for witches and pagans”), in violent and disruptive protests.

John Minto reckons that the privatization of  that “bastard offspring of the market”, Telecom, has “cannibalised the profitable parts of the economy and left us heavily in debt.” Meanwhile, in another dimension, the Obama State Department tells Venezuela that it must return to free market capitalism.

In “The Lure of The Animal: The Theoretical Question of the Nonhuman Animal” Critical Education 1.2 (2010), Abraham Paul DeLeon challenges the human/nonhuman binary.

And Noam Chomski speaks about Obama’s warmongering and the importance of dissent. Towards the end of the interview, he comes up with this wee gem: “When Obama is praised for opposing the war in Iraq because he thought it was a mistake, we should recognize that to be on a par with Nazi generals after Stalingrad who thought that the two-front war was a mistake. The issue isn’t was it a mistake; it’s whether it’s fundamentally wrong and immoral.”

Logorama: An Amusingly Bleak View of a World of Commodities

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Cartoons, Cults, Ethics, Film, Language, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Symbol, Texts

≈ 1 Comment

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Academy Awards, commodification, Francois Alaux, Herve de Crece, Logorama, Slavoj Žižek

There is something deeply disturbing – if wildly entertaining – about the 2010 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Short Film, Logorama, by Francois Alaux and Herve de Crece (the whole thing is available in a number of places [legally, I hope], including over at TwitchFilm, an excellent source for news of film projects from outside of the United States mainstream).  The official site for the film can be found here.

An image from Logorama

The film is a short, sweet little action adventure that takes place in a fictional(?) Los Angeles where everything, the people included, are corporate logos.  There are a number of ways to look at this slice of visual genius; we can view this as nothing more than a laugh, but there is more to the film’s central conceit than this; there is something chillingly plausible about this world, which looks more than a little like some parts of the United States today. In a world where so many people are willing to shell out extra money to buy a T-shirt with a corporate logo on it, and a world where kids on the other side of the world dress and act as if they were in an American hip-hop video (all the time talking about how they are ‘keeping it real,’ of course), this degree of commodification seems just around the corner, even as the financial edifice that such a commodification has helped to build crumbles around us.  This leads to a question that may seem to be defeatist, but which is worth taking seriously: is this  ever more dominant aspect of the world entirely immune to criticism?

‘At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism”: we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful … This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of ’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters’.[1]

That the companies whose logos are put to use here have not blocked the release of the film is surprising, or perhaps  merely an indication of how comfortable they all are with the current state of things, and how frustratingly little such small acts of protest really are.  I am reminded here of Starbucks’ cooperation in allowing their products to feature in the early scenes of David Fincher’s visionary Fight Club, as scathing a critique of contemporary consumer culture as Hollywood has produced in the decade since its first release.

‘The pressure “to do something” here is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence.  Are not our acts often such gestures?  The old saying “Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the most stupid things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense’.[2]

Logorama is strong, subversive stuff, or at least it should be.  That it may be prevented by the structure and the ubiquity of that which it critiques from being received as anything other than its glossy surface and its pitch-perfect homage to Pulp Fiction is  a deeply troubling thought.


[1] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009): 52-54.

[2] Žižek, Tragedy, 11.


Brainwashed into believing in a Moral Dictator called ‘God’: Caprica

12 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by The Dunedin School in Cults, Death, Greek, Islam, Television, Transhumanism, Violence

≈ 5 Comments

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artificial intelligence, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, globalization, monotheism, Zoë Graystone

The Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica, really started to hit its straps at about Episode 4: ‘Gravedancing’ (for more on BSG-related topics from Tyrone and Eric, visit here, here, and here).

Caprica is set on the planet of the same name, a planet possessing technology a decade or so more advanced than ours, and on the brink of developing artificial intelligence. The planet Caprica is controlled by global business and a world government, exercising effective political control over the other eleven of the twelve colonies, and wielding a  powerful law enforcement and intelligence service called the Global Defense Department (G.D.D.). The parallels to our own political situation (in descending order of power: global business, the U.S. government, and the F.B.I.) are obvious.

The only apparent threat to established power is posed by the terrorist group, Soldiers of The One, whose monorail bomb explosion in the first, pilot episode killed Zoë Graystone, daughter of artificial intelligence entrepreneur, Daniel Graystone. The dominant religious belief within the twelve colonies is polytheism, one more or less based on the ancient Greek pantheon. This polytheistic religion is practiced more nominally and with less literalism on Caprica than it is on other planets, such as the more fundamentalist Gemenon and Tauron. By contrast, the religious innovation of the Soldiers of The One (S.T.O) is monotheism, belief in one God, a belief that sets them against the secularizing and nominally polytheistic Caprican government.

This clash in worldviews – and again the parallels with life on Earth in 2010 are obvious – produces some fiery religious dialogue, punctuated with the usual half-truths, ignorance, fear, and prejudice. When the G.D.D. confronts Amanda Graystone (Zoë Graystone’s mother) and proceeds to force a search of Zoë’s possessions for evidence of her links with the S.T.O., the confrontation produces one of the best lines of the season to this point:

Amanda Graystone (Zoë’s mother): What do you think you’re going to find here?
Jordan (GDD Agent): I really don’t know. Maybe who she met with. Who brainwashed her into believing in a moral dictator called ‘God’…

The GDD agent then delivers a line which nicely captures the inevitable conflict which arises when a political power and a rival religious power each claim absolute authority – and the resulting systemic violence from the political hegemony, defended as though it were benignly protecting the existing order from unaccountable violence:

Jordan (GDD Agent): I’m sorry if we have to take your daughter’s life apart in order to put other terrorists behind bars. But if we have to, then so be it.

After Zoë’s involvement with the S.T.O. is made public, the Graystones are invited on a comedian’s talk show –  the media form in which most Caprican young people receive their news. The theme of religious conflict is further developed on the show. Amanda Graystone is asked why she didn’t report her daughter as a terrorist, and replies that she never knew:

Amanda Graystone: When was I supposed to call the cops?
Baxter Sarno: Well, I don’t know, maybe when she started worshiping the big Destructo-God-In-The-Sky, maybe?
Daniel Graystone (Zoë’s father): We didn’t know, there weren’t any signs.
Baxter Sarno: You said she was ‘troubled’.
Daniel Graystone: See… she was angry. That’s a better word. My wife’s right.
Baxter Sarno: Well, ok, ‘angry’, but I would also like to add – “morally blank”. Because the virtual world is a poor teacher and doesn’t provide boundaries…
Daniel Graystone: You know who would completely agree with that – that is Zoe. And that’s exactly how the S.T.O. [Soldiers of The One] got to her… She saw things in the virtual world – ritual sacrifices, games like New Cap City, and she felt the absence of moral guidelines, just like you do, like a lot of folks do. And into that absence steps the S.T.O., offering this marvelous ultimate moral arbiter. It’s quite appealing – for a teenage girl especially.

This exchange captures something Bruce Lincoln notes in Holy Terrors. The typical response of the U.S. to Muslim terrorism was to deny that the terrorists operated from religious motivations; to instead paint them as amoral agents acting merely for political – or even selfish – purposes. Such a slant is completely contradicted by the nature of the instructions which each of the 9/11 bombers were issued and followed before the attack – which stressed the religious rationale for their actions at almost every step of the way, and which was couched in language which emphasized their overall goals of holiness, cleansing, and purity. If any religious element was mentioned in official U.S. media reports, it was painted as a variety opposed to “true Islam” – as though the religion the 9/11 bombers practised was somehow not a valid form of religion. But while it is certainly not a valid form of Islam for the vast majority of Muslims, it does constitute “genuine” Islam for some.

Before her death, Zoë created a virtual copy of herself, the program for which becomes the prototype for artificial intelligence and the creation of the Cylons.

As the Mother of an entirely new species, her name, Zoë, takes on a special significance. It means “Life” in Greek, for which the corresponding Hebrew name is חוה (Ḥavvah): “Eve”.

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