On the Failure of Scientific Prophecy

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Arthur C. Clarke, Failure, Prophecy, science, science fiction, Technology, The Sentinel

Continuing an earlier discussion of the cultural and religious hopes placed on technologies, a few thoughts inspired by a recent re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1983 short-story collection The Sentinel, which contains stories written from 1946 to 1979:

Outside of the clear and simple pleasure of watching a master doing what he does best (and my criticisms here aside, Clarke was a master of hard science fiction, undoubtedly one of the all-time greats), what strikes the reader (at least this reader) about this early collection is Clarke’s persistent tendency to overestimate both the significance of new technological developments and the pace of scientific advancement.  Even the simplest developments hold the power to alter the world fundamentally, and almost always for the better.

To take but a single example, in the gripping and disquieting story ‘Rescue Party’, the development of the helicopter brings about the end of almost all the great cities, which seems laughable decades later (indeed, when faced daily with the average automobile driver’s lack of skill and discretion, the thought of the helicopter as ‘universal transportation’ is enough to cause nightmares). Since the story was written in 1946, urbanisation has continued apace and more and more rural land is dedicated to massive farming and ranching operations built on the model of heavy industry, with all of the environmental and social costs that this threatens. Far from the rural idyll that the helicopter brings to the Earth in ‘Rescue Party’, the helicopter remains of limited use and did little or nothing to curb the explosive growth of the cities which began with the Industrial Revolution and has continued with only a few and rather minor counter-trends, and these are confined largely to the Anglo-European world and the wealthier of its colonies.

Viewed from the vantage point of Clarke’s eternal post-World War II optimism, the future for scientific development is bright.  Clarke simply assumes for the sake of these stories that the exploration of space would continue and that progress towards the planets was inevitable.  It would also be accomplished by very little conflict and even less bloodshed.  The solar system was as ripe for exploration and colonisation as the New World was centuries earlier.  On this point, for all of his vision, Clarke was perpetually blinded by his British colonial ideologies, whether he was aware of them or not.  This is crystal clear in the story ‘Songs of the Distant Earth’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Breaking Strain’), which re-enacts the British encounter with the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which subtly but unmistakably reinforces the myth of history as progress.

This, it turns out, is a symptom of a larger problem with the stories in The Sentinal.  At the same time that he is making huge, counter-intuitive leaps about the effects of new technologies, Clarke’s view of culture and history is strangely anaemic.  This particular blindness, in which Clarke is by no means alone among science-fiction writers, is coupled with a curious lack of imagination in the cultural and social sphere.  For he is unable to imagine a world that is fundamentally different from our own, or at least the world as Clake saw it from the former British colony of Sri Lanka, where he spent much of his life.  The Sentinel‘s stories exist in a future that looks a good like the present.  The sense of cultural, political, and economic inertia present in these stories is stunning. Clarke imagines little political upheaval and fails to anticipate developments such as the end of the Soviet Union only two decades after the last story here was written.

Clarke’s tendency towards prophetic hyperbole is thus rooted in his failure to understand that technology is at least partially cultural. Clarke’s failure, then, beside his blind belief in the inherent value of technological development, is his inability (or his simple refusal) to understand that technology, quite removed from its scientific side, is also immersed in human culture, which influences and even determines its use and reception.  Given that the Clarke who wrote The Sentinel – and Clarke was a complex, sometimes contradictory man wrote or co-wrote literally hundreds of books and stories which do not add up to a fully coherent ideology of philosophy of history – can not imagine a world without the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, consumer capitalism, and an independent mass media, his view of technology was similarly limited.

He also imagines that governments will continue to fund science for the sake of science, though he does realise that at least some of the motivation behind the golden age of space exploration was political and military.  This prediction, which is never made explicit but is present in each and every story in the collection, has also failed to materialise, largely given the limited resources governments now give to pure science and the ever more persistent demand that science and technological development serve some kind of purpose – usually economic – rather than serving the interests of disinterested knowledge.  Clarke fails to anticipate the cultural and economic forces that have brought space exploration to a near standstill or limited it to uninspiring and wasteful projects like the International Space Station. According to the timeline Clarke imagines in 2001, and in the story ‘The Sentinel’, which provided the kernel of the larger novel, there was to be permanent bases on the moon in place by the mid 1990s.  Instead, the Apollo programme has been relegated to a footnote in Cold War history ripe for re-appropriation in popular culture texts like Michael Bay’s jingoistic, neo-fascist film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Clarke on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Given Clarke’s often dismissive attitude towards organised religion – see Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise for examples – his failure to acknowledge the failures of scientific prophecy is all the more striking. It also highlights the similarities between placing one’s hopes in the next step in scientific development and placing one’s hopes in the great coming of a saviour figure – as in Christianity, messianic Judaism, some forms of Buddhism, and countless other traditions – who will interrupt the course of history and bring about a new and better world.  Over the course of The Sentinel, Clarke simply ignores the marginal predictive value of his persistent overestimation of the power and significance of incremental scientific developments.  When one prophecy fails, he simply moves on to another tale of the partial redemption of the world by a new technology while never addressing the previous failure (it is worth noting that he did get some things – many things, in fact – right, including his invention of the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite).

By simply ignoring the failures of his prophetic imagination, Clarke reminds me irresistibly of those Christians who have been convinced that the apocalypse was just around the corner (just as the gospels claim that Jesus promised some two millennia ago), despite the fact that this prophecy has been failing over and over again for centuries.  The fact that technology has failed time and again to live up to its promises, like so many religious prophecies, that it has failed to bring about greater social and economic equity, something we were promised would happen with the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, photography, the cinema radio, television, the personal computer, and, most recently, the Internet (or Web 2.0, which was to save us – again – from the inequities of the earlier technologies), is in itself interesting.

What is more interesting, at least in the context of religious prophecy, is how immune this belief in technological salvation is to historical realities and the complexity of human culture.  This points to a persistence of belief that is structurally very similar to the continued rationalisations of failed religious prophecy.  Even if Hal Lindsey’s identification of events in the 1970s and 1980s with the events of the Book of Revelation failed to accurately predict the beginnings of the end of times, this does not stop millions of people from believing precisely the same thing about more recent world events.

This is not a coincidence, of course, given how the structures of the Christian narrative of history persist and are transformed in the narratives of modernity, particularly in secular eschatologies like those of classical Marxism, the National Socialists, and all of those people that believe that technology is going to save us.  The real question I have here is how to begin to think more rationally about the true capabilities of science and technology, especially when the potential of both is limited so clearly and so persistently by economics and politics.  If someone like Arthur C. Clarke can get things so clearly wrong, why do we persist in waiting for the next technology, the one that is going to save us? Why do we continue on as if this were an inevitable fact?  I think some of this might be because most people, like Clarke, and unable to imagine a world that is truly, fundamentally different from our own.

In practical, this-worldly terms, if we are waiting for the arrival of that magical machine that will save us from all of our follies (many of them, of course, technological, like the internal-combustion engine) without coupling this with a serious and sustained effort to change the cultures that surround this anticipation and make it bear the burden of a dark and difficult future, we would be just as well to be waiting for Jesus (or Maitreya, the Buddha of the future in many schools of Mahayana Buddhist thought), who is coming along soon.

Any day now …

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Cinema as Exorcism (six): On Soft-Selling Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

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Another Earth, Consumer Capitalism, Depression, Eschatology, Film, Hysteria, Lars von Trier, Marx, Max Weber, Melancholia, rationalisation, The Sirens of Titan, When Worlds Collide

Picking up where I left off, and continuing our exploration of cinema and/as exorcism – see also here (on Australian film), here (on District 9), here (on 2012), here (on the wretched Avatar), and here (on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) –  I want to branch out in new territory here and discuss the ways Lars von Trier’s utterly brilliant but utterly nihilistic new film Melancholia is being sold to the American public, a collective audience notorious – but not of course universal – for its dislike of moral ambiguity or philosophical complexity.

Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia

Melancholia is von Trier’s best film, and by a long chalk.  It is also the most purely entertaining science-fiction defence of a nihilistic worldview since Kurt Vonnegut’s incomparable 1959 novel, The Sirens of Titan.  While I have heard some (though not many) critics and fans pan the film for being too accessible and for lacking the blunt controversy of something like his 2009 film Antichrist, Melancholia succeeds in my book as no other von Trier film for no other reason that von Trier steps back from his usual strategy of rubbing the audience’s face in the depravity of humanity and simply allows the film to quietly and calmly make its points, letting the film’s preternatural stillness and its deliberate pacing tell the story far more effectively than the melodramatic mode of many of his previous films.  Melancholia, in the simplest terms, is the first von Trier film I have ever watched without feeling the need for a shower immediately afterwards.  The ability for a film to make the viewer feel literally, physically soiled is of course the mark of a true cinematic talent, and here von Trier, with his talent for evoking mood and tension to the point where it becomes palpable, can be counted among the ranks of such directors as Paul Schrader and John Hillcoat.  It is, however, infinitely refreshing to see someone as gifted as von Trier working in a different, less confrontational, and more formally Romantic mode.

For all its almost gentle touch, the film presents a view of the world – no, of the universe itself – that is bleaker and more final than anything in von Trier’s oeuvre.  Even films as stark and forbidding as Breaking the Waves or Antichrist are shot through with something resembling hope.  In Waves, Bess’ unshakable goodness and belief in love anchor a film suspended over an abyss, an abyss that von Trier, then a recent convert to Catholicism, chooses to ignore with his final – and in my mind, completely misguided – image attesting to the literal truth of Bess’ salvation.  Even the end of the determinedly repellent Antichrist offers a kind of redemption when the male protagonist, known only as He, leaves a metaphoric wilderness, having rejected his cold psychologist’s view of the world. (For a pdf of an intriguing scholarly article by Gitte Buch-Hansen offering a positive reading of the film from a feminist biblical studies perspective, follow this link; for two very good discussions of the film from a religious studies perspective by S. Brent Plate, see Religion Dispatches here and here.)

Melancholia first appears to be a riff on a theme that appears from time to time in science fiction, the collision of the Earth with another planet, but I think there is more to be learned in placing it next to the history of texts – again, most of them from sci-fi, which trace the impact of the discovery of previously unknown planets.  The best-known – and simply the best – of these stories is Isaac Asimov’s classic short story ‘Nightfall’, which first appeared in a 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  In Asimov’s spare and ultimately devastating tale, the greatest scientific minds of a complex society on the planet of Lagash discover on the very eve of its destruction that its society is doomed by the eclipse of one of its suns by a  previously hidden planet, an alignment of celestial bodies that happens only once every 2049 years.  Thrown into total darkness, unknown on the planet, which is lit by no less than six suns, the people of Lagash are driven to madness and to set massive fires to provide the heat and light that they simply cannot exist without, especially given that most of the population does not know that this is a temporary situation.  In the story, an intrepid band of scientists discovers the coming of the darkness, something that has been long predicted by the Cultists, Lagash’s dominant religious tradition, but are unable to convince the population to prepare for it.  Here we find not only the classic sci-fi conception of religion as bad science and poorly remembered history, but also a potent allegory for the futility of scientific knowledge when dealing with a fearful and undereducated public.  ‘Nightfall’ ends on a fittingly bleak note as Lagash’s society again, faced with the enormity of darkness and the devastating and sudden revelation of its own ignorance – the astronomers, working only in daylight, believed that the universe contained only six suns, but the darkness reveals that there are millions, quite unseating Lagash as the centre point of the observable world, a repeat of the Copernican revolution taking place in seconds rather than centuries – sets fire to itself and all that it has built over more than two millennia.

There are other, simpler entries into this rather obscure sub-category of sci-fi, including Philp Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s classic 1932 novel When Worlds Collide, made into a space opera-style film of the same name by Rudolph Maté in 1951.  In both, the Earth encounters not one but two rogue bodies in space, one of which destroys the Earth, though a small band of intrepid scientists and travellers manage to escape destruction and take up life on one of the new worlds, Bronson Beta, which shows clear signs of previous inhabitants.  While Wylie and Balmer’s slim pot-boiler of a novel has become largely neglected, Maté’s film is better-remembered both for its Oscar-winning special effects – including a still-stunning vision of the flooding of New York City – and for its wildly uneven tone, veering from melodrama to cheesy whimsy from one scene to the next with little rhyme or reason.  This is probably most obvious in the closing scene, played to rapturous, triumphant music and with blissful happiness from our intrepid astronauts, who are overcome with an uncomplicated joy when safely landed on the Technicolor wonder of Beta, despite the fact that billions of people have been obliterated and they are the only human survivors (this being the 1950s, they are apple-cheeked, white, healthy, and Christian survivors).  The final image says it all, really.

Interestingly enough, there is another film this year, Another Earth, which grapples with the existential questions raised by the discovery of an unknown world, this time an exact duplicate of Earth which may or may not have duplicate versions of each every person living, though this need not detain us here for long.  Where Another Earth ends on a New Age-tinged moment of self-realisation, and thus a note of hope, though not one so strident as that which concludes When Worlds Collide, von Trier’s Melancholia ends on an even bleaker note than Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’.  In ‘Nightfall’, at least, the reader is free to assume that the people of Lagash will rebuild, though this is tinged with the near-certainly that all of that newly built world will turn to ashes on that fateful night some 2000 years in the future.  Melancholia ends with the irrevocable and inescapable end of the Earth, smashed into rubble by the far larger planet Melancholia.

What is most interesting – in this reporter’s opinion, at least – is how thorough, and ultimately how brutal, Melancholia‘s social critique really is.  The film is essentially a character study of two sisters, the melancholic Justine (very nicely played by Kirsten Dunst) and the resolutely ordinary Claire (a surprising turn from Antichrist‘s Her, Charlotte Gainsbourg).  Each of the sisters gets a half of the film named after her, though, really, this is Justine’s story, and her perspective is the one the film champions in the end.  After a stunning Prologue of ultra-slow-motion images that comprise a series of vignettes of the end of the world, set very appropriately to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, the film’s narrative begins with the lavish and increasingly uncomfortable spectacle of Justine’s wedding reception, celebrating her marriage to the increasingly baffled Michael.  Von Trier stages this sequence, much of which is riotously if uncomfortably funny, as a piece of social-realist cinema, not unlike many of his other films.  Shot on an isolated but extremely luxurious golf resort in Sweden but set in an unidentified Anglo-American no-place, the first half of the film shows us Justine’s increasingly futile attempts to play the part of the happy bride that everyone around her (with the exception of the sisters’ acidic mother) expects her to play.  Justine commits the unpardonable sin of failing to pretend to be happy and satisfied and instead ends up rejecting not only Michael but her family and her smarmy boss, who has come to the wedding to offer her a promotion.

Claire’s section of the film is set months later as she struggles to care for the borderline catatonic Justine, who has come to live with her at the resort, and to prepare for the arrival of the rogue planet Melancholia, which experts tell everyone will miss the Earth and cause minimal damage.  As it becomes ever clearer that the planets will collide and that everyone and everything on Earth is doomed to a violent death, Justine emerges as the sanest of the characters.  Her reaction to the news of the destruction of the Earth is as much indifference as it is anything else.  While Claire fears for her son Leo and begins to fall apart psychologically, Justine has the one truly rational reaction in the film, that of resignation.  For Justine, the end of a world which is facile, inauthentic and meaningless is nothing to mourn.

Michael, Justine, and Claire in Melancholia

That the film takes Justine’s side is, of course, debatable, but I will lay out my case here: Justine works in advertising and is thus implicated in selling the world of wealth and privilege that she despises to a public that cannot afford it.  In this role, she becomes a representative of a consumer society that defines itself through a lie that it does not ultimately believe is possible.  Justine is the only one the film (again, aside from her mother) who is not buying what she herself is selling.  Everyone at the wedding is clearly invested in the mythos of comfort and happiness that such events of conspicuous consumption both celebrate and make normative, but Justine, try as she might, is unable to invest herself in the role that she and others have laid out for her.  Claire’s husband, John, the owner of the resort, is angry and bitterly disappointed in Justine, not because she is in genuine distress, but because she is a failed consumer, because she does not participate in the wedding passively, but questions its meaning at every turn, perverting the gathering with her unpredictability and her lateness, profaning such familiar ritual elements as the cutting of the cake and the reception dinner.

Ultimately, Justine is the film’s voice of reason and, oddly enough, its conscience.  Her rejection of the trappings of bourgeois respectability – and what is more bourgeois that golf? – is the film’s rejection of these trappings, especially the ever-more-pervasive discourse on ‘happiness’.  Indeed, the film is a coherent argument on the futility of the dream of happiness as an ineffective and ultimately hopeless strategy for keeping the problems of the world at bay.  In von Trier’s nihilistic universe, Justine’s choice to simply reject her role in a system of value and morality is the most rational choice and would be the most ethical one if the film had any real interest in right or wrong.  It is Justine who understands the world and the place of people within it and her heroism lies in the simple, honest, straightforward rejection of all of it.

As the film draws to its inevitable conclusion (the Prologue leaves no doubt as to what is going to happen), Justine is also the only one to show any true selflessness, distracting and comforting Leo with the task of finding and carving a set of ‘magic’ tree branches that she says will protect them from Melancholia.  Claire, who has bought into the fantasies that Justine makes her living selling, struggles against her fate and rails against the absolute meaninglessness that it reveals.  She is also unable to offer any comfort to her son and thus abdicates her final responsibility to the sister she has been unable to convince of the value of the life of luxury which she has built and in which she is has invested so much of herself.

In the end, then, given the utter finality of its situation, Melancholia is as damning a critique of contemporary Anglo-American-European values as can be imagined and as thorough a skewering of the consumer mythos of a never-defined ‘happiness’ lying just around the corner as has been committed to celluloid for years.  It is an articulate, clear-eyed, historically and culturally astute fable for a world and a closed system of value that is in the process of perhaps inevitable and irreversible decay.  A world as hollow and as lacking in conviction as this, the film intimates, is better destroyed, echoing again von Trier’s fondness for Nietzsche, to whom Antichrist is also deeply indebted.  To this world, literally nothing is preferable.

Melancholia‘s marketing, on the other hand, does everything it can to soft-sell the film, to exorcise it of its very real demons.  The marketing scheme chosen for the film is ingenious, consistent, and systematic.  In short, it runs something like this: Melancholia is a metaphorical film about depression.  Though this is a perfectly defensible interpretation, this is also the safest and most palatable way possible to read the film and its allegorical structure.  In the press kit issued for the film, both the studio’s voice and that of von Trier emphasise that Justine has the measure of the world only in a state of crisis, something the film nullifies by setting the first half of the film at a time when much of the world is unaware of the coming of Melancholia.  In a short promotional video released via the Apple Trailers site, Dunst underlines this, saying: ‘Justine is a very sensitive, creative human being that felt things maybe sometimes more than other people.  To me, her relationship with the planet turns into almost her being a representation of the planet’.

This gesture, to dull the edge of genuine (and almost always systematic) social criticisms by accusing the critic of insanity, is, of course, a common strategy in the mainstream media when dealing with acts of violence – often labelled selectively as ‘terrorism’, though rarely when such acts are committed by anyone other than a Muslim – whose political or economic subtext is uncomfortable.

While it is easy enough to understand why the film’s distributors would be interested in reading the film’s allegorical construction in the narrowest, most private, and thus least threatening manner, we, as viewers and critics, need not feel the same compulsion, given that we have no financial stake in the film itself.

For, lurking not far outside of this metaphorical reading of the film is a far more radical critique of contemporary Western societies.  As the film draws to its conclusion, it becomes apparent that it is not only the ludicrously elaborate and costly wedding reception that is hollow and ultimately empty; it is the whole of Claire’s bourgeois world.  When Claire invites Justine to wait out the end on the patio overlooking the golf course with a glass of good wine and some classical music, Justine’s refusal of this idea as ‘shit’ is more than a simple symptom of her state of mind, it is rather something more, an admission of the futility of Claire’s entire life and the entire world of privilege and taste that it represents.

Claire’s husband John, a stock von Trier character, the resolutely rational man who is utterly unable to make any sort of the sense of the world around him, which makes him something of a personification of Max Weber’s ‘iron cage of rationalisation’, takes the only route that his character could possibly take: he commits a sad and sordid suicide in the stables, even robbing his wife and child of the painless poison that Claire was relying on as a last resort.

John, Melancholia‘s Weberian Fool

In the end, all that Claire, Justine, and Leo are left with are the sort of simple, intuitive magical lies that people tell their children.  In the indelible final image, as Melancholia looms ever larger in the background and begins to quite literally devour the Earth, we are left with the image of three lonely people sheltering under a tripod of dead tree branches, helpless in the face of the meaningless destruction of a meaningless existence.

It is in this final moment – and in the diegetic world of Melancholia, this is an absolutely final moment, the end of life in the universe – that von Trier makes his kindest gesture to date, that he allows the three last people on Earth to hold hands, to face the end together, even if it means less than nothing for them to do so.

The Nimble Apes: Unofficial Christchurch

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Christchurch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Monkeys, Unofficial Record

Continuing an ongoing series of images (see here, here, and here) of the haunted, unofficial language of the modern, rationalised city, inspired to some extent by the work French philosopher Michel de Certeau, we have here a Polaroid image (taken with an early 1960s Poloroid Land Camera) from Christchurch, New Zealand’s second-largest city, snapped some time in 2008:

Original Polaroid photograph copyright Eric Repphun, 2008.

On the lyrical genius of The Mountain Goats

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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).

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

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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 17^th 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: 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.

The Wisdom of Squirrels and Dwarves

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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!’

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

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Apple, Barack Obaom, George Orwell, IPad, Nineteen Eighty-Four

First British edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

In his visionary 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the science fiction pioneer George Orwell lays out a vision of a terrifying dystopian future where everything, even thought, ispoliced and monitored by Big Brother, an oppressive and virtually omniscient government.  The diegetic world of the novel is dominated by Newspeak, a new propaganda language in which everything has at least two meanings and which uses language to obscure rather that communicate meaning and truth.  Living in a world increasingly dominated by meaningless Managmentspeak – ‘going forward’, ‘learning outcomes’, ‘consultation’, etc., etc. – and by an equally meaningless and equally damaging antinomian Therapyspeak – ‘bipolar disorder’, ‘happiness’, ‘ Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, ‘life goals’, etc., etc. – it is very difficult to escape the impression that Orwell’s future is closer to the reality that we are facing than most people would like to believe.

A few examples of very real Newspeak from contemporary history: 1) An American president dedicated to continuing the aggressive, imperialistic campaigns against the Middle East launched by his much-hated predecessor is given the world’s highest honour for peace.

2) A new piece of technology that is simply a new way of doing the same old tasks is marketed and received as both a magical and a revolutionary device – the image below is from the official Apple website.  The special irony (and equating pure functionality with enchantment is indeed a fine irony) here is that Apple made a famed advertisement that aired in 1984 which claimed that arrival of the personal computer would be the reason that ‘1984 won’t be like Nineteen eighty-Four‘ (the ad is available here).  Anyone who says that the world is fully disenchanted world has obviously never really looked at contemporary advertising practices, which enchant the world for the mercenary aim of profit.

I’d be happy to have any other examples of Newspeak from out there if you know of any …

War is Peace

Functionality is Magic, or Consumption is Rebellion

The Shoah, Rationalisation and the Haunting of Modernity

Tags

Omer Bartov, rationalisation, Reenchantment, Shoah, Siegfried Krakauer

A Poster for Resnais' Classic Documentary

While doing some research for a lecture on Holocaust films (which included a minor Holocaust film festival at my house, including Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, without a doubt one of the toughest 31 minutes in the history of cinema), I’ve been pondering the question as to why people still insist that the Holocaust is so impossible to understand, when on so many levels, it is a fully explicable episode in the history of modern Europe, a history that remains haunted by it past and by the irrationality and brutality that all our talk of progress has failed to eliminate from the cultural landscape.

Omer Bartov, in his excellent study Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), gets to the heart of the reasons for this disconnect, when he argues, if implicitly, that we are still beholden to the myth of progress, still blinded by the view of history that insists on seeing an ongoing process of growth and development (both moral and scientific) rather than embracing the chaos that is the hallmark of all authentic human history.  What Bartov argues so clearly here that the Holocaust was a part and parcel of rationalisation and modernity, not an anomalous eruption of the irrational, bur a simple surfacing of fact that modernisation and rationalisation have no necessary moral value, either good or evil.  A few excerpts:

War, slaughter, and genocide, are of course as old as human civilization itself.  Industrial killing, however, is a much newer phenomenon, not only in that its main precondition was the industrialization of human society, but also in the sense that this process of industrialization came to be associated with progress and improvement, hope and optimism, liberty and democracy, science and the rule of law.  Industrial killing was not the dark side of modernity, some aberration of a generally salutary process, rather it was and is inherent to it, a perpetual potential of precisely the same energies and ideas, technologies and ideologies, that have brought about the ‘great transformation’ of humanity.  But precisely because modernity means to many of us progress and improvement, we cannot easily come to terms with the idea that it also means mass annihilation.  We see genocide as a throwback to another, premodern, barbarous past, a perversion, an error, an accident.  All evidence to the contrary, we repeatedly believe that this time, in this war, it will finally be stamped out and eradicated, never to reappear again. (p. 4)

It would seem that our main difficulty in confronting the Holocaust is due not only to the immense scale of the killing, nor even the manner in which it was carried out, but also to the way in which it combined the most primitive human brutality, hatred, and prejudice, with the most modern achievements in science, technology, organization, and administration.  It is not the brutal SS man with his truncheon whom we cannot comprehend; we have seen likes throughout history.  It is the commander of a killing squad with a Ph.D. in law from a distinguished university in charge of organizing mass shootings of naked women and children whose figure frightens us.  It is not the disease and famine in the ghettos, reminiscent perhaps of ancient sieges, but the systematic transportation, selection, dispossession, killing, and distribution of requisitioned personal effects that leaves us uncomprehending, not of the facts but their implications for our own society and for human psychology.  Not only the ‘scientific’ killing and its bureaucratic administration; not only the sadism; but rather that incredible mixture of detachment and brutality, distance and cruelty, pleasure and indifference.  Hence the genocide of the Jews, its causes, and its context, must be seen as part and parcel of a phase in European civilization that blended modernity and premodernity into an often dangerously explosive mixture (though, of course, also a highly creative one, not only in the science of murder) (p. 67).

The Holocaust can therefore be seen as the culmination (but neither the beginning nor the end) of a process begun the late eighteenth century and still continuing, whose first paroxysm of violence was the Great War, and whose subsequent repercussions can be seen among the millions of victims of the post-1945 era.  It is characterized by the missile-wielding religious fanatic, or the cool-headed scientist directing a slave colony of rocket builders, the brutal guard with a given quota of bodies to be disposed of on a daily basis, and the official busy with his schedule of trains bringing anonymous masses of passengers to destinations from which they never return.  It is also characterized by two types of professionals essential to the fabric of modernity – the physician and the lawyer (67).

Oddly enough, Bartov makes a point similar to one I’ve made elsewhere about the ways in which we react to suicide bombing in the contemporary world – not that suicide bombings are on any level equivalent to the Holocaust.  It is not too much to suggest that the horror that people feel when faced with modern violence is perhaps largely due to a simple and sustained failure to grasp the fact that modernity is not morally on the side of the angels (at least not necessarily).  Additionally, like so many before him, Bartov makes the failures of representing the Holocaust into a moral issue:

Western representations of the Holocaust fail to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation.  In other words, we can note a powerful reluctance to admit that industrial killing is very much a product of modernity … while the Holocaust belongs both its past and its future – our present – and can therefore not be marginalized as an aberration representative only of itself, at the same time, it must not be contextualised to the extent that it becomes part of a general history of progress or degeneration, heroism or atrocity.  The centrality of the Holocaust for the human experience of modernity has been recognized even by those who seek to deny that it had ever happened … There may perhaps not be any lessons to be learned from the genocide of the Jews; but, all the same, we must know that killing goes on, and even if we are safe from it today, we may become its victims tomorrow.  This is not a memory, not even a history, for the murder is in our midst and our passivity will be our nemesis (pp. 9-11).

Others have made a similar point, though too many of them insist that the proper response to the Holocaust is a reverential silence.  Siegfried Krakauer, in his classic book The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), argues that the cinema, whose relationship to reality he perceives is more chemical than interpretive – something that many critics Bazin among them, have long insisted – is a mirror for the realities of human history:

The mirror reflections of horror are an end in themselves.  As such, they beckon the spectator to take them in and thus incorporate into his memory the real face of things too dreadful to be beheld in reality.  In experiencing the … litter of tortured human bodies in the film made of the Nazi concentration camps, we redeem horror from its invisibility behind the veils of panic and imagination.  And this experience is liberating in as much as it removes a most powerful taboo.  Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield.  And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster? (p. 206)

So what does all of this mean?  It remains an open question, though we must not neglect the fact that so many of the things that shock us about the modern, rationalised world should not be, in the end, all that surprising.

Cinema as Exorcism (three): 2012 and the Persistence of the Apocalyptic Imagination

Tags

2012, Apocalypse, Catholicism, Frank Kermode, Michel Foucault, Roland Emmerich

It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.

Frank Kermode

And now for the next instalment of the ongoing if irregular series on cinema and/as exorcism (and further proof that I am incapable of writing anything of reasonable length, even on a weblog) …

A Promotional Image from the film 2012

Roland Emmerich’s newest disaster film 2012, is many things.  Taken as a simple story, it tells the tale of what might happen if the disaster of 2012, the one predicted by the Mayan calendar, brings about the end of the world, an end that comes through the massive shifting of the earth’s crust, which is somehow related to the alignment of the planets.  As a piece of storytelling, it is monumentally stupid and filled to the brim with plot holes large enough to sail an ark through (if you don’t believe me, re-read that last sentence).  It is also lazily written, bafflingly paced, and at least half an hour too long.  It is a dramatic and narrative sinkhole where a number of decent actors – Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton (here saddled with a naff, unconvincing American accent) – go to die for more than two hours in dark rooms all over the world.  There is also no denying that it is a visual feast, a thrilling compilation of some of the very best large-scale CGI ever rendered.  As a spectacular piece of moderately entertaining cinema, it goes one more step towards proving Guy Debord’s theory that spectacle is becoming all, that the spectacle will soon be, if it is not already, the sole remaining element in contemporary culture.  It also offered this viewer the guilty pleasure of watching Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the worst cities on earth, crumble to dust.

An International Poster for 2012

All aesthetic matters aside, as a cultural document and as a virtual catalogue of Orientalist stereotypes, the film is almost perversely fascinating.  We get the wise old Tibetan lama telling his student that the end of things is not all that bad, and then he surprises us all by producing the keys to an old pickup so the apprentice can escape.  Good ol’ lama!  So clever he is, just like those Mayans, who had it all figured out way before we, with all our fancy science, ever did!  We see the devout – and vaguely feminine – but still stridently technological modern Indian man who dies with a crushing dignity with his family in his arms, his saviours from America having failed to pick him up on their way to the secret giant arcs built in the Chinese hinterlands.  At the very end of the film, we are left with the image of the earth’s survivors – mostly wealthy, white, powerful Europeans, of course – sailing in giant arks towards Africa, where, given how profoundly dull all of these people are, will probably build strip malls and Red Lobster franchises.  Due to the massive geological upheavals, there is a new mountain range in the south of the African continent, to which our heroes are heading.  In a final Orientalist master-stroke, this mountain range, before any of the Europeans ever see it, has already been given a European name.

One of the reasons 2012 is so fascinating, and ultimately so worrying, is that how we imagine our end is an important element of who we are as a culture, as the literary theorist Frank Kermode reminds us in his classic study, The Sense of an Ending (1967). Kermode argues compellingly that every human culture needs visions of the end of things and that they are a necessary element in how we seek to find and maintain narratives that make the world coherent and thus liveable.  Kermode writes,

[C]risis, however facile the conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavours towards making sense of the world.  It seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one’s own time to stand in an extraordinary relationship to it.  The time in not free, it is the slave of a mythical end.  We think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, more interesting than other crises.[1]

We in the twenty-first century have a number of crises to choose from, from climate change to overpopulation to the very real possibility of a global conflict over dwindling resources, a number of which are poised to, perhaps inevitably, lead to the end of life as we know it.  The seemingly endless cinematic drive to show us just how these ends might be met is in itself very interesting, as is the fact that such representations appear more frequently as the threat of real-world destruction grows more prominent.  No wonder we have Emmerich, who threatens us with the end of the world not only in 2012 but also in Independence Day (1996), his dismal New York-set English-language remake of Godzilla (1998), and The Day after Tomorrow (2004), to serenade us as we march towards the end that people for all time have thought lies just around the next corner.

On top of all this, in important ways, 2012 offers a fascinating case study of the depths in which modern, even ostensibly secular cultures remain indebted to the Bible, and to its vision of the end of days.  One of the biblical traditions’ greatest legacies, still readily accessible through such works as 2012, is that it has solidified and given form to that apocalyptic imagination that we still seems to haunt us.  Literature, in the form of the modern novel, from which the narrative feature film is a direct descendant, has taken over from the biblical imagination to some degree, but many if not all of the images of the end that we see today (at least in the European and American contexts) are deeply rooted in the Bible’s vision of apocalypse.  There is even an interesting and even necessary historical linkage between the two.  Kermode notes that there is a crucial point of historical contact between the decline of Christianity’s earthly authority in modernity and the rise of the novel: ‘It is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority’.[2] Fiction, then, is crucial to our own self-understanding as modern people living in modern cultures.  Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, his maddening account of the rise of the modern subject, in fact establishes the absolute importance of literary language for modernity:

It may be said in a sense that ‘literature’, as it was constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age, manifests, at a time when it was least expected, the reappearance of the living being of language … literature achieved autonomous existence, and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of ‘counter-discourse’, and by finding its way back from the representative or signifying function of language to this raw being that had been forgotten since the sixteenth century … Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture – and at its centre – for it is what has been most foreign to that culture since the sixteenth century; but it has also, since this same century, been at the very centre of what Western culture has overlain.  This is why literature is appearing more and more as that which much be thought; but equally, and for the same reason, as that which can never, in any circumstance, be thought in accordance with a theory of signification.[3]

Literary fiction then becomes an important site for examining the complexities of the relationship between modernity and the religious, the ways in which modernity both receives and mutates the different elements of its religious inheritance.  However, precisely describing any relationship between the religious and the literary is a difficult task, as Franco Moretti acknowledges:

Virtually all book historians agree that the publication of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of devotion.  This said, one major question must still be answered:  did the novel replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular form – or because it was a religion under a new guise?  If the former, we have a genuine opposition, and the novel opens a truly new phase of European culture; if the latter, we have a case of historical transformism, where the novel supports the long duration of symbolic conventions.[4]

An International Poster for 2012

To a scholar of religion, two sequences in 2012 are of particular interest: in one, we see on television a mass of people being crushed by a massive stone statue of Jesus as Rio de Jeneiro’s O Cristo Redentor tumbles to the ground, broken from its hillside eyrie by an earthquake; in the second, we get to see St Peter’s Basilica – which for some reason is given the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – collapse and crush thousands of people gathered in the Vatican City for desperate prayer.  In a nice, subtle touch (and this in a film where subtlety is the enemy), the first cracks in the dome of St Peter’s separate God’s finger from Adam’s, pointing to depths that this film doesn’t even begin to address.

Even in this deadly, apocalyptic mayhem – in which the audience is treated with almost perverse regularity to the sight of thousands upon thousands of little digital people falling into massive rents in the Earth’s crust, being crushed by falling cars and buildings, drowned, impaled, etc., etc. – not one of the characters, not even Lama Profundity, stops to ask any of the questions that I imagine most people would be asking in such a situation: What is humanity?  What is civilisation?  Can people make sense of a world in which they are separated from their traditions and their hopes, as the crack in Michelangelo’s fresco seems to imply?  Do we in some sense deserve this sort of treatment?  Can there be any meaning in any of this?

In 2012, do the people either in front of the camera or behind it ever wonder about any of these things?  No, they do not.  What is perhaps the most singular disturbing thing about 2012 is just how banal and superficial it makes the literal end of the world.  It offers no existential or religious insights, and does not even consider the idea that such events could lead to a real crisis of meaning.  It doesn’t even seem to give the people who survive it any pause for thought.  The world ends because it ends, because it is necessary to the spectacle of the thing.  Despite its lame, ultimately callow conclusions – that humanity must work together to survive, that the home is love, not location – 2012 is perhaps the single most nihilistic film in recent memory.  It is enough to make one nostalgic for the cinematic world of even a decade ago, when in October 1999 David Fincher was able to offer an honest, challenging look at nihilism in his visionary take on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.  In this sense, the quiet, gradual end of things that appears in Douglas Coupland’s new novel Generation A is far more chilling and far more plausible than the one so vividly visualised by Emmerich and his cohorts.

2012 does nothing to exorcise the demons of the apocalypse that seem to still posses us all.  Its vision of the end of things is both utterly implausible and repellently appropriate for the times.  The world may indeed come to an end someday, it tells us, but it really won’t matter all that much.  By stripping the end of the world of its weight and by refusing to consider its meaning, the film (and so many others like it) give us new spectres to fear in the long moments when we’re alone and afraid in the dark.  What is gives us most of all is the fear that indifference is the new fall-back response, even to our own ignominious finale.

When this world ends, the film suggests (though I am sure it doesn’t intend to), no one in their right mind is going to miss it.

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[1] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 94.

[2] Kermode, Ending, 67.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, translator unknown (London: Routledge Classics, 1966), 48-49.

[4] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London:Verso, 1998),  169, note 30.

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A Modest Plea for a Historically Responsible Atheism

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Atheism and Agnosticism, Christopher Hitchens, History, John Milbank, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, The Monstrosity of Christ, Theism

The Monstrosity of Christ, by Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, and Creston Davis

Some half-formed thoughts on the contemporary debate about atheism, sparked in large part by a recent reading of Slavoj Žižek’s and John Milbank’s new book, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009 [a review copy courtesy of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies]):

The Monstrosity of Christ documents a debate between Milbank (a highly influential Catholic theologian and a founding member of the Radical Orthodoxy movement) and Žižek (a philosopher, intellectual celebrity and professional madman) about the nature of Christianity, or at least about Hegel’s interpretation of the nature of Christianity, largely as mediated through the central figure of Jesus as Incarnation.  There is a good deal of interest in the book and both authors make some pointed criticisms of the other – Milbank accuses Žižek of being little more than a heterodox Christian, while Žižek claims that ‘it is Milbank who is guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank’ (248 – all page numbers in this post refer to Monstrosity).  If for nothing more than watching two brilliant if equally flawed minds at work against one another, Monstrosity makes for very good, very fun reading.

However, what stuck me as the most intriguing point of all of this was Žižek’s simultaneous defence of an essentially materialist (and thus atheistic) view of the world and his continuing interest in Christian intellectual history.  In doing these two things at the same time, which might seem to be wildly counterintuitive, Žižek makes some tentative first steps towards establishing a viable and historically responsible contemporary atheism.  He by no means settles the matter and by no means even thinks out his own argument through to the end (always a problem for Žižek), but what he does do is present a potential means of arguing for an atheistic worldview that properly acknowledges that such a stance occurs against a deeply-rooted religious milieu dominated by Abrahamic understandings of God.  In Žižek’s view – and here I am extrapolating on his work here – atheism in traditionally theistic cultures is always already a matter of religion, but atheism is in itself not necessarily a religious position (though in some cases it must be).

Žižek here pushes us towards a different and more substantive version of atheism than that being offered in the populist work of Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.  Regardless of what one thinks of these arguments from a philosophical or logical standpoint, the overarching point of much of this work, that religion in all of its forms – though they all, as a rule, focus on theistic traditions – is illogical, destructive, and misguided and should, therefore be discarded, or at least ignored, is eminently impractical.  Firstly, people are rarely swayed by rational arguments in such matters.  It is very difficult to imagine a new-earth creationist being swayed by Dawkins’ recent book defending evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth, particularly in a cultural climate where the teaching of evolution has again – and bafflingly – become a matter of controversy, in American schools at least.  In such a highly emotional and frankly juvenile sphere of debate, Dawkins is going to be dismissed before his arguments are ever even voiced.  Given this, such attempts at the reasonable assertion of atheism are preaching largely to the choir. If modernity has taught us anything, it should be that people will persist in all manner of irrational and illogical behaviour, no matter how rational our picture of the world may be.  Secondly, and ever more so since the late 1960s,  many froms of religion have shown that they can co-exist quite happily with the modern.  Religion in its many guises is not going anywhere – though it will very certainly mutate into new and at times surprising forms – and to argue that it should (no matter how valid the reasons for making such a suggestion might be) is to argue in essence nothing at all, at least nothing with any social utility whatsoever.

An incidental point should be made here as well: if we are to discard anything that is illogical, irrational, or responsible for violence and oppression, what would we be left with?  To carry this logic through to the end, if we are to begin by discarding those religions that do not hold up under logical scrutiny, we must continue by discarding the mythology of the nation-state and finally rid the world of any and all financial systems based on illusory, artificial conceptions such as ‘money’.  Any system that has the requisite complexity to exist in a modern society is going to be, to at least some extent, rooted in the selective application of reason and truth.  To put this another way: are the central tenets of the Christian Trinity (to take a notorious example of convoluted religious nonsense) really any more nonsensical than Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ or the belief that it is possible to have a financial system that requires infinite growth in a system of finite resources, two ideas upon which the contemporary world balances ever more precariously?  If there is going to be a revolution of the rational, it will have to be total.

Creston Davis, the facilitator and editor of the debate in The Monstrosity of Christ, like so many scholars of religion (myself included), is almost entirely dismissive of the philosophical weight of the theism vs. atheism debate as it appears in the Alister McGrath vs. Richard Dawkins title card:

But for all the pomp and circumstance of this ‘debate’, in the end, it only manages to recapitulate the same premises with which each side begins.  Consequently, the debate over the truth of either stance can never be resolved through the arbitration of speculative reason – and this because each side appears to be different, but, on a deeper level, they share the exact same version of that which underlies their very thinking, viz. secular reason.  Reason functions in this atheistic/theistic debate in a very limited, even reductionist way as it becomes the final arbiter of all truth forced into propositional form and thus sundered from everyday life … In short, although this Dawkins/McGrath debate looks genuine, and is certainly successful in terms of selling a great many books, it nevertheless is only a limited and not very intellectually significant debate.  It is more an exercise in ideological (mis)interpretation of the same premises than a real debate, because is fails to risk forgoing the very existence of what both sides presuppose. (8-10)

What Žižek argues for in Monstrosity is something else from the dismissive and reductionist arguments for atheism that are taking up so much space bookshelf space these days.  What he argues for here seems on the surface to be counterintuitive or simply nonsensical: he is making an atheistic plea for the absolute singularity and necessity of the monstrous figure of Jesus – though Žižek regularly uses the theological title of ‘Christ’, his argument is still thoroughly materialistic in a Hegelian sense and thus at least formally atheistic.  He makes this point in no uncertain terms, something which in itself isa rarity in Žižek’s work:

It is only in this monstrosity of Christ that human freedom is grounded; and, at its most fundamental, it is neither as payment for our sins nor as legalistic ransom, but by enacting this openness that Christ’s sacrifice sets us free … This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting him, we become aware of our own freedom.  The ultimate question is thus: in what kind of universe is freedom possible?  What ontology does freedom imply? (82)

All praise to Žižek aside for the moment, there is in all of this an unresolved and very troubling tension between Žižek’s evident hopes for liberation from the excesses of contemporary capitalism and what appears to be – and this is not putting it too strongly – a refigured Christian universalism.  In all of this, when he uses the word ‘religion’, what Žižek is talking about is Christianity, the only religion he really considers in these essays.  Even when he addresses Judaism, he does so obliquely and only as it pertains to Christianity.  In doing this, Žižek is (oddly enough, given his track record) repeating a mistake made by a great many theologians, one arguably rooted in a long history of anti-Semitism in European intellectual history, and in Christian theology in particular.  There is something odd, even disturbing, in Žižek’s reaffirmation of Christian universalism in an atheist guise, though such an idea does have a fairly long history, reaching its apex in the ‘death of God’ movement in theology, which briefly caught the public imagination in the 1960s to such an extent that it made the cover of Time magazine.

Time magazine, 8 April 1966

Is this really a step away from the harm that such universalism has wrought in history, or merely a restatement of this central tenet of European superiority?  Though he makes a compelling argument later in the book that seems to address this precise point head-on, one can’t help be beset by lingering doubts at taking such a tack in a work that purports to be advocating a new and less violent world order based on a new kind of balance between the secular (whatever that might mean) and the religious (whatever that might mean).

In this book, there is a closer agreement between Milbank and Žižek than might be expected, and one of the things that they agree on is that that naïve, de-historicised atheism is of little value.  Bringing us back to my unease with Žižek’s restatement of Christian universalism, this is a position that is fiercely relevant to the contemporary study of religion, but one that no one – at least in this reporter’s opinion – has managed to convincingly lay out the reasons for, until now:

The incompleteness of reality also provides an answer to the question I am often asked by materialists: is it even worth spending time on religion, flogging a dead horse?  Why this eternal replaying of the death of God?  Why not simply start from the positive materialist premise and develop it?  The only appropriate answer to this is the Hegelian one – but not in the sense of the cheap ‘dialectics’ according to which a thesis can deploy itself only through overcoming its opposite.  The necessity of religion is an inner one – again not in the sense of a kind of Kantian ‘transcendental illusion’, an eternal temptation of the human mind, but more radically.  A truly logical materialism accepts the basic insights of religion, its premise that our commonsense reality is not the true one: what it rejects is the conclusion that, therefore, there must be another, ‘higher’, suprasensible reality.  Commonsense realism, positive religion, and materialism thus form a Hegelian triad. (240)

Žižek argues that our position is thus a precarious one that our religious inheritance can help us to understand, regardless of whether or not we are willing or able to make the leap to theistic belief: ‘we created our world, but it overwhelms us, we cannot grasp and control it.  This position is like that of God when he confronts Job toward the end of the book of Job: a God who is himself overwhelmed by his own creation.  This is what dialectics is about: what eludes the subject’s grasp is not the complexity of transcendent reality, but the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed into reality’ (244). He repeats this all-important gesture a few pages later in answering the slightly different question ‘but why God at all?’: ‘The true formula of atheism is not “I don’t believe”, but “I no longer have to rely on a big Other who believes for me” – the true formula of atheism is, “there is no big Other”’ (297).

We cannot ignore Christianity as a whole and the problematic of the Incarnation in particular, Žižek claims, because these things from an essential part of the intellectual world of modernity.  Here he also offers at least a partial answer to my own charge of universalism, despite the fact that he never bothers to articulate this explicitly.  Christianity achieves its unique position in history because it is an essential element of modernity itself, an essential piece of the dominant logic of a globalising capitalist modernity.  Given this, Žižek is quite correct when he argues that he is moving into new territory with this particular argument: ‘A new field is emerging to which the well-known designations “poststructuralism”, “postmodernism”, or “deconstuctionism” no longer apply; even more radically, this field renders problematic the very feature shared by Derrida and his great opponent, Habermas: that of respect for Otherness’ (254).  This is a hybrid (or, to use Hegelian language, synthesis) of modern and postmodern (to use two very loaded, very inadequate terms) territory that many others – Terry Eagleton, for one, in his After Theory (2003) – are also trying with varying degrees of success to define and understand.

What Žižek does here is to make atheism respectable again, after the onslaught of what Eagleton quite rightly calls ‘school-yard’ atheists, reactionaries like Hitchens and Harris as well as (slightly) better-informed critics of religion like Dawkins.  In Žižek’s arguments, we find the deeper meaning to Milbank’s assertion that ‘the supposition of naive atheists that the West can leave behind either Christology or ecclesiology is worthy to be greeting only with ironic laughter’ (181).  One cannot blithely ignore the centuries of theological thinking that lies at the back of any assertion of atheism, philosophically justifiable as any such an assertion may be, at least not if there is to be actual, productive debate – not just people shouting at each other or simply restating their own presuppositions over and over again – about all of this.

This might not be an argument that will ever be resolved, and The Monstrosity of Christ, may not document a proper argument in the strictest sense of the word – Žižek and Milbank might, as Dawkins and McGrath seem to, be simply talking past or at rather than to each other.  However, Žižek, in dialogue with Milbank, gives us a way to argue – or to at least to begin to argue – for an intellectually respectable and historically responsible atheism that both avoids the abuses of an overly prescriptive ‘secular’ rationalism that seeks to discard the past and transcends this ironic laughter by searching to explicate the present though a respectful and critical re-examination of the past.  For what has modernity taught us about history?  The past haunts the present and there can be no exorcising the spirits of History.

 

Caprica, Douglas Coupland, and the Problem of Immortality

Tags

Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Peter Berger

The rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the finest serial narratives in the history of the medium (though the Baltimore-set crime drama The Wire, which ran at pretty much the same time, is arguably just as good). It is science fiction, certainly, but as an allegory, the whole series can be read as a long, eliptical meditation about religion and its role in contemporary society.  Battlestar told the story of the conflict between a far-flung human civilisation called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and a race of genocidal, fundamentalist robots known as ‘Cylons’.  The Cylons, originally created by Colonial scientists to serve as slave labour in the Colonies, eventually launch a devastating war of rebellion and revenge on the Colonies.  The series follows a handful of human survivors as they flee across the galaxy, pursued by the beings that their parents had created.  Though Battlestar ended its run early this year, a new series, Caprica (the name of one of a Colonial homeworld), which will begin its run in 2010, explores the human world of the Colonies at the time of the creation of the original Cylons.  While it toys with familiar science-fiction and horror themes about the creation of life and the terrible responsibility that this act brings with it, there is something that is even more intriguing about the excellent feature-length pilot episode that was released recently on DVD.  While Battlestar Galactica had a good deal to say about religion, and particularly about the ways in which we in the West view Islam, Caprica adds an interesting dimension to the series’ commentary on religion.

Caprica: Alessandra Torresani as Zoe

In the Caprica pilot, we learn that the fundamental motivation for the development of the original Cylons was a fear of death and the refusal to accept the death of a loved one.  Daniel Graystone, the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylon technology, is driven by a disquieting mixture of greed, ambition, and grief.  Graystone is, in grand Battlestar tradition, is a deeply flawed and compellingly human character.  There is an interesting and troubling parallel between the way Graystone approaches his research and the way that he treats his human daughter that speaks volumes about the ambivalent place that science occupies in the universe of Battlestar and Caprica.  Early in the pilot, Graystone’s precocious teenage daughter Zoe is killed in a human bombing executed by a member of an underground monotheistic sect (the Colonists are polytheists).  Zoe, a secret member of the same sect, has created an effective and sentient virtual copy of herself that Graystone discovers only after her death.  He forcefully appropriates the virtual Zoe and uses her as the basis for the first working Cylon model.  The pilot ends with a truly chilling image of a hulking metal Cylon Centurion, developed for military use, pleading for help in a halting, adolescent girl’s voice.  Though there are real questions as to Graystone’s ultimate motives, it is obvious that he is deeply affected by Zoe’s death and his initial trials with the virtual Zoe and the Cylon bodies are motivated by a desire to undo her death, to deny the basic fact of mortality.  Graystone is suspect in that he is overly ambitious and unscrupulous, but also because he is a deeply rational man unable to face this one troubling aspect of reality.  His attempts to counter death with technology will end, we know before he begins, is the Cylon-led genocide that almost wipes out the human race only a few decades later.

Though this requires a good deal more study before it is anything more than simple conjecture, it seems that the fear of immortality is an increasingly common theme in contemporary genre fiction.  To cite a not insignificant example, in the Harry Potter books, the main villain, Lord Voldemort, is driven largely by a quest for immortality, or by a fear of death.  Likewise, in the lamentable Star Wars prequels, we learn that the motivation driving Anakin Skywalker, who eventually is transformed into über-villain Darth Vader, is again both the fear of death and the refusal to accept that everything must die.  There is something interesting here for the study of religion in that there are deep connections between ideas of mortality and life after death and the Judeo-Christian religious milieu that these texts have grown out of.  If we are to believe Peter Berger’s classic 1969 study, The Sacred Canopy, religion, at least as he conceived it from a largely Eurocentric and Christian-centred perspective, is tied fundamentally to the spectre of death.  Berger writes of the importance of death in religion, which he sees as a social phenomenon which creates a sort of ‘canopy’ of explanations and motivations that helps people make sense of their world:

Its legitimating power, however, has another important dimension – the integration into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations in which the reality of everyday life is put in question …The confrontation with death (be it actually witnessing the death of other or anticipating one’s own death in the imagination) constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation.  Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality – of the world, of others, and of self.  Death radically puts into question the taken-for-granted, ‘business as usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life … Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society.  The importance of religion in such legitimations is obvious.  Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality.[1]

He concludes, a few pages later:

The world of sacred order, by virtue of being an ongoing human production, is ongoingly confronted with the disordering forces of human existence in time.  The precariousness of every such world is revealed each time men forget or doubt the reality-denying dreams of ‘madness’, and most importantly, each time they consciously encounter death.  Every human society is, in the last resort, man banded together in the face of death.  The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.[2]

Though many scholars have challenged Berger’s ideas (including Berger himself, who came in later decades to disagree with many of his own conclusions), The Sacred Canopy is deservedly a classic in the field.  We have reasons to take him and these ideas seriously.  Though we may be suspect of how reductive his thesis is, there can be little denying that religion and death are in many ways intertwined, especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms.

What does this emerging fear not of mortality but of immortality tell us about the state of religion in the Western world?  It seems odd in an environment that is undergoing something of a religious revival (to use a horribly loose and loaded phrase) that the drive for immortality plays such a destructive role in a number of prominent texts.  If there is indeed a growing suspicion with those who strive for immortality, would this mean that there is also a growing suspicion of a certain kind of religious thought and practice – perhaps reflecting the fact that the writings of some militants from various traditions have given immortality (and its dozens of willing virgin girls or its empty planets to inhabit with one’s innumerable wives) have given the afterlife a bad name?  Or would this mean that contemporary religion is becoming more and more oriented towards this world rather than any other.  Though both of these possibilities likely get to the truth of the matter in different ways, it is the latter suggestion that seems to be more compelling, because there is something profoundly this-worldly about much of modern Western religious practice and its sacralisation (perhaps even divinisation) of the self.  The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter.  This is an interesting development in that it represents something of a return to the prehistoric religious world that early sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber described (or, depending on how sympathetic we are to their work, created), which was largely focused on mundane, this-worldly concerns.

This also raises a further question: if this is truly is what is happening out there in world beyond the ivory tower where we in the Dunedin School find ourselves working (though it is in reality not a tower of any sort but a clapped-out two-story house built in the 1920s and later converted into offices with little care or subtlety), what might be driving this change?  Turning again to fictional narrative to approach this question, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his brilliant 1993 novel, Life After God, speculates on the reasons that his characters are unable or unwilling to think about another world:

Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.  Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.  Life was charmed but without politics or religion.  It was the life of the children of the children of pioneers – life after God – a life of earthy salvation on the edge of heaven.  Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.  I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched.  And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.  But then I remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?  It is something I think about every day.  Sometimes I think it is the only thing worth thinking about.^[3]

In line with the tendency observable in Caprica, Coupland tells us elsewhere that embracing mortality is one of the crucial steps in developing a deeper understanding of the world.  In his Polaroids from the Dead, a collection of essays and journalistic writings, Coupland tells a parabolic story about an ‘enchanted city,’ a city charmed but without rain, and a visit paid to it by a skeleton.  The story is a scathing condemnation of contemporary culture, and particularly its ignorance of the possibility of an afterlife and a purpose to the enigmatic figure of death.  Here Coupland compares the enchanted city, which is in reality a highly disenchanted place, with the genuine enchantment that the interloping skeleton, as both a metaphor for the hidden and as the literal presence of the dead, brings with him.  The skeleton tells the city’s people, who plead for help in making it rain:

‘It is simple … While you live in mortal splendour – with glass elevators and grapes in December – the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven – the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife.  You pray for rain, but you also are praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife … I am the skeleton that lies deep within each and every one of you.  I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh – the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind’.^[4]

Quite contrary to Berger’s concept of the ‘sacred canopy’, in which religion plays a role in protecting people from death, Caprica, along with the work of Coupland (and doubtless many others),  suggests that embracing mortality and the spectre of death may in fact be a characteristic religious gesture of our times.

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[1] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Press,1969): 42-44.

[2] Berger, Canopy, 51.

[3] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994): 273-274.

[4] Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996): 59-60.  It is worth noting that the vision of the dancing skeleton reappears in somewhat modified from in Coupland’s 2004 novel, Eleanor Rigby (London: Fourth Estate) in the form of a visionary story about a forsaken community of farmers on a vast prairie who face conflicting information from above. Images of bones and intimations of mortality play an important part in the slowly unfolding story of the farmers. See Coupland, Eleanor, 91-92, 98-99, 102, 159-166, and 248.

Cinema as Exorcism (two): District 9 as Postcolonial Science Fiction

Tags

allegory, apartheid, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, science fiction, South Africa

Lest we allow this to become totally dominated by Deane’s prolific nature, now for something completely different …

Continuing on with the occasional ‘Cinema as Exorcism’ series, we will be delving into the murky waters of the postcolonial world with a trip to District 9, the very fine debut film from South African director Neill Blomkamp, produced by local boy made good Peter Jackson.  The film is an allegorical exploration of the ongoing costs of European colonialism for Africa and its peoples.  Though in a very different sense, this is the film as exorcism, a visceral grappling with the ghosts of the past, particularly that of South African apartheid, though some of the film’s message is more universal.

District 9 is set on an alternative timeline in the city of Johannesburg.  In a twist on the classic science fiction story of alien invasion – the sight of the giant saucer hanging over the city evokes texts as diverse as the film Independence Day and the old television series V – the alien visitors arrive on Earth not as conquerors but as starving, demoralised and leaderless refugees.  Their massive spacecraft, which has a far more functional look than those we are used to seeing, is a derelict wreck, stopped over the city not for strategic reasons, but because that’s where it happened to break down.  The South African government, at first pleased that the aliens had chosen their country, soon finds itself with more than a million alien visitors, who they herd into the titular District 9.  The narrative of the film opens as the private company in charge of alien affairs – the sinister and all too believable Multinational United (MNU) – sets out to evict all of the aliens and move them to District 10, a tent city hundreds of kilometres outside Johannesburg that is, even in MNU’s estimates, nothing less than a concentration camp.  Though on the surface, the film is thrilling and intriguing enough to be getting on with, it would be a great disservice to read it literally.  On one level, it certainly is a story about aliens living in South Africa, but on another level, it is about something altogether more serious and something far more unsettling.

From Neill Blomkamp's District 9

The analogy between the aliens and the South African segregationist policy of apartheid, which officially was ended only in 1994, is highly specific: District 9 is a teeming, improvised ghetto that bears a distinct resemblance to South African townships; the aliens speak in a language that includes clicking noises that recall many native South African languages; the aliens are given ‘slave names’ by the government; the official policy is of segregation and containment, all perpetuated under the guise of maintaining order and working for the greater good.  The film focuses on one Wikis Van De Merwe, the MNU office drone who is given the unenviable task of handing out millions of eviction notices to prepare for the forced exodus to District 10.  Wikus (an astonishingly accomplished performance by Sharlto Copley in his first acting role), sporting an Afrikaans accent and a bureaucratic moustache, heads blindly into District 9 armed with a clipboard, a small army of MNU mercenaries, and his own blithe confidence that the aliens are inferior creatures that must be treated with a firm hand.  As the most important human character, Wikus is our guide to a truly alien world, and is it through his experiences that the narrative mirrors not only apartheid but also the open-ended process of reconciliation.  When Wikus turns on his employer and begins to fight alongside the one alien – given the name Christopher Johnson – that attempts to engineer an escape, he does so initially more out of self-interest than in the interests of social justice, asking implicit questions about the driving force behind the end of legal segregation in real-world South Africa.

One of the things that make Wikus both compelling and chilling is that his casual racism towards the aliens is convincing, an uncomfortable mirror of apartheid specifically but one that reflects racism more generally.  Wikus, like many of the people in his world, call the aliens ‘prawns’ for the simple reason that they do resemble actually resemble bipedal shellfish.  This is not merely a descriptive but is also a distancing, dehumanising (using that term very broadly) technique that speaks volumes of the ways in which the aliens are treated by the government, by MNU, and by South Africans of all colours.  The film is clearly intended as a critique of apartheid and it gives us ample reason to pity the aliens and to deplore the way they are treated.  Things are more complicated than this, however, and it needs a good deal more analysis that I can offer here (On a more personal note, throughout the film, I found myself wondering just how much of the film’s allegorical subtlety I was missing, having experienced apartheid South Africa from afar while growing up in the United States).  The film also toys with contemporary racial stereotypes, particularly in its depiction of the only humans who have significant contact with the aliens; a gang of Nigerian criminals who reap the profits of selling the aliens raw meat or trading their advanced weapons for cat food, a favourite alien delicacy.  The Nigerians are portrayed as savage and coldblooded as well as superstitious, almost begging the question as to why the film chooses these as its most significant black characters.

The film’s critique of the treatment of the aliens, impoverished and trapped in a country where they are both feared and hated, extends allegory to its real-world context, where memories of the townships are still very fresh.  The film is about apartheid, but it is also, again allegorically, about what has happened afterwards.  In one of the film’s most striking images, in a long shot, we see Wikus arriving home after a gruelling day of serving eviction notices, the alien mothership hanging over his comfortable middle class home with a massive unacknowledged, almost unconscious weight.  There are, the film suggests, truly horrifying things hanging over the world of men like Wikus, who perform(ed) utterly irrational acts of prejudice and injustice in the name of safety and rationality, even after apartheid as an official policy has ended.

One name for another, a part for the whole: the historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as  a metonymy.  In its past as well as in its present.  By diverse paths (condensation, displacement, expression, or representation), one can always decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world.  At once part, casue, effect, example, what is happening here translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and whererever one looks, closest to home.  Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994): xv.

This is the first major African-made (though Blomkamp spent much of his life in Canada) science fiction film and it to the makers’ credit that this is a story that could be told only in Africa.  It is also a story that could only be told as science fiction.  In its almost unrelentingly dark vision of humanity, District 9 is a deeply subversive film.  The distancing effect of the fantastic elements of science fiction – faster than light travel, interstellar civilisations, etc. – allows science fiction to tell such difficult stories and ask difficult questions in ways that more classically realist genres of storytelling cannot.  Science fiction is, as Peter Nicholls notes, both ‘the great modern literature of metaphor’ and ‘pre-eminently the modern literature not of physics, but of metaphysics’.[1] To expand on this topic a bit further, we need only to look at the stunning ‘re-boot’ of the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), another contemporary science fiction text that uses a carefully created allegory to deconstruct the postcolonial situation and to ask unsettling questions about the colonial powers, in the case the United States.  Given this, as Brian Ott notes, it is ‘a profound mistake’ to interpret the genre ‘literally’.  Writing of Battlestar Galactica’s robotic antagonists, the Cylons, he argues, ‘The issue is not what Cylons are, but what they represent’.[2] The same is true of the aliens in District 9, which, like Battlestar Galactica, is told in a visual language that mixes the fantastic with a gritty, handheld, quasi-documentary realism.  As we have seen, what the aliens in District 9 represent remains an open question, but the first step to answering this question is to recognize the allegorical nature of the narrative itself.

Though we always be careful to attribute too much to authorial intention, it is worth noting that the new Battlestar Galactica is self-consciously allegorical, as executive producer David Eick told the Calgary Herald:

To me, the old sci-fi novels – the [Robert] Heinleins, the [Isaac] Asimovs, the [Ray] Bradburys, the [Philip K.] Dicks and so forth – were all about allegorical sociopolitical commentary.  So it really wasn’t so much about coming up with a new idea.  It was going back to an old one, which is, ‘Let’s use science fiction as the prism or as the smokescreen – as it was sort of invented to be – to discuss and investigate the issues of the day’.[3]

This is true on a more general level as well, as the great American Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson notes of serious science fiction (no space opera allowed):

I would [base] the necessity of ideological analysis on the very nature of SF itself: for me it is only incidentally about science or technology, and even more incidentally about unusual psychic states.  It seems to me that SF is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself, comparable in its emergence as a new genre to the birth of the historical novel around the time of the French Revolution … If this is the case, then, surely we have as readers not been equal to the capacity of the form itself until we have resituated SF into that vision of the relationship of man to social and political and economic forces which is its historical element.[4]

Barry M. Malzberg argues that there is something deeply challenging about the tendency towards allegory in science fiction, which, he argues, explains why it has never been a particularly popular or critically respected genre (though this has arguably changed since he wrote in the 1980s):

It is my assumption that it never will be [popular].  Science fiction is too threatening.  At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature.  It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance … We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up – this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now.[5]

District 9, like Battlestar Galactica, is just such a dangerous, symbolic meditation on history and both are in many ways exemplary science fiction.  In a formal sense, they correspond to Darko Suvin’s classic definition of science fiction as ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’.[6] Science fiction thus hinges on the collision between what is known and what is unknown, what is and what might be.  Battlestar Galactica’s ‘naturalistic science fiction’ – the phrase showrunner Ronald D. Moore coined to describe the show’s style – and District 9’s mix of documentary technique and the fantastic are a perfect visual complement to Suvin’s meditations on literature.  It is interesting to note also that both of these texts give credence to Suvin’s argument that science-fiction is a literature for times of uncertainty: ‘SF, which focuses on the variable and future-bearing elements from the empirical environment, is found predominantly in the great whirlpool periods of history’[7] and to John Rieder’s claim, in Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction, that science fiction emerges particularly in once-powerful societies that have begun to feel threatened, though this is more the case with Battlestar Galactica than with Blomkamp’s film.

There is perhaps a further argument to be made, at least tentatively: science fiction is genre most suited for telling postcolonial stories.  Though on first glance it might seem that this is true only of telling stories about the victors in the colonial struggle, given that it is the victors who have the greatest access to the technological apparatus so crucial to science fiction; however, Blomkamp, and to a lesser extent Moore and Eick, are showing that there are ways to give voice to those silenced in colonial contexts by using the same genre conventions.  This is, it must be noted, not an entirely original conceit.  Rieder, in fact, argues, ‘The thesis that colonialism is a significant historical context for early science fiction is not an extravagant one’.[8] Expanding on this, he writes:

science fiction exposes something that colonialism imposes.  However … colonialism is not simply the reality that science fiction mystifies.  I am not trying to argue that colonialism is science fiction’s hidden truth.  I want to show that it is part of the genre’s texture, a persistent, important component of its displaced references to history, its engagement in ideological production, and its construction of the possible and the imaginable.[9]

Thus science fiction is in some senses dependent upon European colonialism for its meaning and for its very existence.  There can be little doubt that science fiction as we know it emerged – and I will go out on a limb here and argue that Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is the first work of proper science fiction – during a period of rapid European expansion.  In an important sense, it also emerged as a reaction to, and at times a reaction against the same technological innovations that made colonial expansion and administration possible in the first place.  Magali Rennes writes of Battlestar Galactica from a postcolonial perspective, and much of what she argues here could also be said about District 9 and its deliberately ambiguous and deeply complex meditation on the legacy of colonialism:

Battlestar Galactica invites us, as viewers, to examine how we occupy ambivalent positions within the legacy of our own colonial family romance.  The series gives us all petty satisfaction to call Cylons ‘toasters’.  And yet it compels us to look in our mental kitchens to see whose face peers out of our toaster’s mirrored side.  It titillates us with the sexual tension between one of us and one of ‘them’ – the exoticized Cylon.  And yet it asks us to prick our own skin and see how our blood is difference from any other human being’s.  It thrills us with the chase of the enemy Cylons.  And yet it begs us to consider what fundamental lack lies within us to continue racist traditions towards our own social ‘enemies.  Will we pass on the legacy of the colonial family romance to our children or will we, as children, disown our European heritage for new parents … and shape the things to come?  In this ‘one nation’, ‘indivisible’, who is the ‘we’ in ‘so say we all?’[10]

Both Battlestar Galactica and District 9 are indeed dangerous fictions, and as we struggle to exorcise the horrors of the long, destructive, and ultimately failed project of European colonialism, we are the better for having them.

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[1] Peter Nicholls, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, in P. Nicholls (ed.), Explorations of the Marvelous (London: Fontana, 1978: pp. 170-196): 180, 183.

[2] Brian L. Ott, ‘(Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11 World’, in T. Potter and C. W. Marshall (eds.) Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (London: Continuum, 2008: 13-26): 19.

[3] ‘Battlestar Expands Horizons: Sci-fi references to Middle East impress critics’, Calgary Herald, 7 October 2006: D4.

[4] Jameson, F. (with M. Reynolds and F. Rottensteiner), ‘Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?’, Science Fiction Studies 1, 4 (1974): 275-276.

[5] Barry N. Malzberg, ‘The Number of the Beast’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2005: 37-57): 40.

[6] Darko Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, INC, 2005: 23-36): 25.

[7] Suvin, ‘Estrangement’, 26.

[8] John Rieder, Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008): 2.

[9] Rieder, Colonialism, 15.

[10] Magali Rennes, ‘Kiss Me, Now Die!’, in J. Steiff and T. D. Tamplin (eds.) Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? (Chicago: Open Court, 2008: 63-76): 75-76.

The Vampire and/as Modernity: Let the Right One In and the Rationalised City

Cover of the First Edition

Like that other great creation of modern horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster – who appears in a new guise every few years, recently and memorably in the revamped Battlestar Galactica – the vampire is an enduring and ever-flexible framework on which to hang any number of metaphors.  In the most popular iteration of the contemporary boom in vampire film and fiction, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series brings this metaphoric structure back to the psychological/sexual terrain first explored by Bram Stoker in the original 1897 novel Dracula.   For Meyer, the vampire legend is a template with which to draw a clunky, simplistic allegory about sexual abstinence, one which draws heavily if implicitly on Meyer’s Mormonism.  Why the Twilight books are so popular is a mystery to me – and I suspect to anyone who is not a teenaged girl (though I must admit to only having read the first novel; I did try to read the second novel – for professional, academic reasons, of course – but stopped dead after the very first scene, caught on the simple fact that the two lead characters are completely unlikable).  Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the novels capture something that strikes a chord for many readers, though again they are mostly teenaged girls.

This is supported by the fact that the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer covered very similar territory with considerably more depth and subtlety almost a decade before Meyer began her saga.  Both series turn on a romance between a vampire and a young human girl, toying with images of the monstrous and with conventional notions of the perverse.  In the end, however, both are rather tame in light of a superior example of the vampire/human romance, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2004 Swedish novel Låt Den Rätte Komma In (translated into English variably as Let the Right One In or Let Me In).  While there is a good deal that could be said about the borderline-sexual friendship between Oscar, a young outcast, and Eli, a vampire who moves in next to Oscar in a block of council flats in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg, Lindquist’s novel is perhaps even more interesting in its employment of the vampire mythos to deconstruct and challenge contemporary suburban living.  In this, he turns the vampire story into an interrogation of modern alienation, coming out the other side with a pointed social criticism that is far more subversive and far more convincing than anything Twilight has to offer.

While there are any number of texts that seek to expose the dark underbelly of the respectable surface of suburbia – and here we need only think of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet or Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road – Lindqvist’s novel suggests something rather different, something rather more disturbing: that the rationalised post-War suburb is itself a manifestation of evil (or the metaphysical Other), or is at least a willing participant in it.  The novel is a catalogue of suburban problems, from drug abuse to broken families, from individual alienation to the kind of quiet, almost casual violence that occasionally erupts at places like Columbine High School (and Littleton, Colorado bears no small resemblance to Blackeberg).  When Eli, among the most tragic figures in the long history of fictional vampires, moves to Blackeberg, she finds the perfect place to live the sort of closed-off, impermanent life that her vampirism forces her to live.  In Oscar, a sad, quiet boy who is mercilessly bullied at school, she finds a perfect companion, one who is perfectly and disturbingly willing to commit violence.  While Tomas Alfredson’s remarkable 2008 film adaptation of Låt Den Rätte Komma In, which was shot largely on location in Blackeberg (indeed, it opens with a stunning night-time image of the suburb’s only subway station), captures some of this, the novel brings this theme to the forefront.  The novel – and to be fair, the film – has a remarkable sense of place, capturing something of the inherent disconnect of people living in new, purpose-built, rationalised cities.  The novel opens with a telling section titled ‘The Location’ in which the omniscient third-person narrator tells the reader about the short history of Blackeberg, which was built as a whole in the 1950s:

It was not a place that developed organically, of course.  Here everything was carefully planned from the outset.  And people moved into what had been built for them.  Earth-coloured concrete buildings, scattered about the green fields …

It is big.  It is new.  It is modern.

But that wasn’t the way it was.

They came on the subway.  Or in cars, moving vans.  One by one.  Filtered into the finished apartments with their things.  Sorted their possession into measured cubbies and shelves, placed the furniture in formation on the cork floor.  Bought new things to fill the gaps …

A good place.  That’s what people said to each other over the kitchen table a month or so after they had moved in.

‘It’s a good place we’ve come to’.

Only one thing was missing.  A past …

You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn’t even a church.  Nine thousand inhabitants and no church.

That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality.  It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror.

It explains in part how unprepared they were.[1]

For Lindqvist, place is defined by history and by those who have passed through it.  This comes across clearly in a passage when Oscar, walking out in the forest towards a sledding hill one night, passes by a deserted and much older house:  ‘He reached the place where the path started to bear down strongly towards Kvarnviken Bay, and climbed onto his Snow racer.  The ghost house was a black wall next to the hill, a reprimand: You are not allowed to be here in the dark.  This is our place now.  If you want to play here, you’ll have to play with us’.[2] The whole of Blackeberg is, in a sense, a ghost house, a place empty of its own history but still in the grip of the past and its shadows.  In the 1980s, when the story is set, Blackeberg has seen only a few decades of human habitation and thus has very little memory; however, this doesn’t shield the suburb and its residents from what has come before.  The paired remarks, ‘But that wasn’t the way it was’ and ‘It explains in part how unprepared they were’, are both foreshadows of the dark story to come.  These interlocutions can also be read as a deliberate challenge to what it means to be big, new, and modern.  Into this modern place, which has no regard for the metaphysical, Lindqvist invites the tragic figure of Eli, who undermines all of this, suggesting that there is no way of escaping the legacy of the past, that modernity, despite its pretences to having done away with the superstitions and unreason, is in fact infected with metaphysical, unexplainable evil.  Eli embodies this unreason, the unthought (to borrow a word from Michel Foucault) of the modern city as Oscar gradually comes to realise that there is something profoundly different about his new friend.  He thinks: ‘She was scary … there was something in her, something that was … Pure Horror.  Everything you were supposed to watch out for.  Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes.  Everything his mum tried so hard to keep him safe from’.[3] Lindqvist’s modernity offers Oscar no refuge for these things.  That very few people in the novel can ever bring themselves to believe that Eli is a figure of mythical, supernatural violence merely underlines this.  That Oscar, a product of the modern family structure and a resident of the modern city, is at least as disturbing a character as Eli further hammers this home; the rationalised city, and by extension modernity itself, will never be free of the dark shadows of history.  In fact, the well-lit rooms and public spaces of Blackeberg might just need these shadows.

A conversation between two of the town’s drunks, heartbreakingly realised figures of both despair and ragged humanity who become major players in the story, adds another dimension to this critique.  Lacke tells his friend:

I don’t want to be here anymore …

Here, the whole shebang.  Blackeberg.  Everything.  These buildings, the walking paths, the spaces, people, everything is just … like a single big damn sickness, see?  Something went wrong.  They thought all this out, planned it to be … perfect, you know. And in some damn wrinkle it went wrong, instead.  Some shit.

Like … I can’t explain it … like they had some idea about the angles, or fucking whatever, the angles of the buildings, in their relation to each other, you know.  So it would be harmonious or something.  And then they made a mistake in their measurements, their triangulation, whatever the hell they call it, so that it was all a little off from the start and it went downhill from there.  So you walk here with all these buildings and you just feel that … no.  No, no, no.  You shouldn’t be here.  This place is all wrong, you know?

Except it isn’t the angles, it’s something else, something that just … like a disease that’s in the … walls and I … don’t want any part of it any more.[4]

Blackeberg, Sweden

For Lacke, the evil that Eli brings (she kills two of Lacke’s closest friends) is a function of the place itself, not an incidental or outside force.  He assigns to urban planning an agency to create mood, atmosphere, and event that is perhaps exceeds even what the most altruistic of urban planners imagine is possible.  Indeed, in beginning with a description of the suburb, the novel offers us a sense that Eli is drawn to the place, called somehow by its wrongness.

This speaks to the inevitable dark side of Michel de Certeau’s comment (see The Unofficial City), that haunted places are the only places where people can live.  If places aren’t haunted by their own history, then they produce or attract their own kinds of haunting.  Låt Den Rätte Komma In tells us that Eli will always live next door and suggests that we as moderns are perfectly willing to open the off-white security doors of our flats and invite her inside.

Maybe this isn’t even a choice; maybe she’s here already.

Lina Leandersson as Eli in Låt Den Rätte Komma In (2008)

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[1] John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt Den Rätte Komma In, trans. Ebba Segerberg (London: Quercus, 2007): 1-2.

[2] Lindqvist, Komma In, 243.  Emphasis in original.

[3] Lindqvist, Komma In, 242.

[4] Lindqvist, Komma In, 363.  Emphasis and ellipses in original.