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Category Archives: Violence

Christology Class on the Resurrection Brought to a Premature End When Security Guards Escorted Theology Lecturer from University Premises

29 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by The Dunedin School in Academics, Theology, Violence

≈ 3 Comments

“Tensions have been growing at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham this week following the suspension of Dr Anthony Towey, Head of the School of Theology, Philosophy and History. Students report that Dr Towey was half way through a Christology lecture on the Resurrection when security men came to escort him out of the buillding on Monday.”
– “St Mary’s University College – why a professor was suspended”, ICN: Independent Catholic News, 19 September 2012

“The grotesque incident yesterday, when a senior member of staff was interrupted in the course of a lecture and forcibly escorted from the premises, is for me a decisive sign that things have gone badly amiss with the Christian and Catholic ethos of St Mary’s.”
– Professor Eamon Duffy, quoted in Madeleine Teahan, “Top historian criticises St Mary’s for ‘grotesque’ treatment of professor”, CatholicHerald.co.uk, 25 September 2012

“The Governors have total confidence in the Senior Management Team who have worked diligently and in accordance with our constitution, due process and our Catholic ethos in what has been a difficult time as we continue to strive to gain our university title. This is a time of great opportunity for St Mary’s and I am confident that the University College will continue to develop and move forward as a centre of excellence.”
– Bishop Richard Moth, Chair of Governors, St. Mary’s University College,”Statement by Bishop Richard Moth, St Mary’s Chair of Governors”, smuc.ac.uk

“Kraft International, especially in developing markets, should continue to realize solid growth as it leverages the Cadbury acquisition and benefits from continued Cadbury cost synergies. The company is likely to realize $300 million of revenue synergies in 2012 by distributing Kraft’s biscuit products in Cadbury outlets in Mexico (approximately 380,000 outlets), distributing Oreo and Tang products in Cadbury outlets (approximately 380,000 outlets) in India and doubling its distribution in Brazil with this acquisition (from 300,000 to 600,000 outlets).”
– Ashish Sharma, “Kraft Foods: Safe Stock with Upside Potential”, The Motley Fool Blog Network, 13 August 2012

…. but wait, there is something even weirder going on here than the story of the Catholic theology lecturer having his lecture on the resurrection brought to a violent and premature end   … you can take a course in “Christology” at a London university? Really? Do they offer Muggle Studies as well?

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Complementarians and Martial Sex: The Jared Wilson / Gospel Coalition Saga

23 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by The Dunedin School in Biblical Studies, Christianity, Feminist Theory, Fundamentalism, Gender Studies, Theology, Violence

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

50 Shades of Grey, Complementarians, Denny Burk, Douglas Wilson, Egalitarianism, Fidelity, Gospel Coalition, Hard Complementarianism, intent, Jared Wilson, man penetrates conquers colonizes plants, marital sex, martial sex, psychoanalytic criticism, rape, Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Soft Complementarianism, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, What it Means to be a One-Woman Man, woman receives surrenders accepts

The scandal started with this post by author and pastor, Jared Wilson, on The Gospel Coalition website, which features a quotation from author and pastor Douglas Wilson including the following description of what he considers is good, biblical sex: “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts”.

(The post was since grudgingly removed by Jared Wilson, after a load of complaints.)

And then, following numerous expressions of outrage, Jared Wilson posted a defence of his quote from Douglas Wilson (also since removed):

Jared Wilson is a “Complementarian”, a euphemistic term for a group of Christians who support a hierarchy between men and women which, unsurprisingly, is in favour of men. Among Christian evangelicals, there is a rigorous ongoing debate between “Complementarians” and “Egalitarians”, the latter group opposing gender hierarchy, to some extent. While the Complementarian-Egalitarian division is the basic line of opposition, there are also – as Michael Bird and others maintain – various degrees of Complementarians, ranging from “Hard Complementarians” to “Soft Complementarians”. So Bird (Soft Complementarian) opposes Wilson (Hard Complementarian) … to some extent.

I tried to make clear that I don’t think the Wilsons are malicious or deliberately trying to liken martial [sic] sex to rape. But I think these comments are incendiary, needless, hurtful, unbiblical, insensitive, and do not help the complementarian cause.
– Michael Bird, Sensitive Soft Complementarian, “Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Not TO my Wife: A Response to the Wilsons at TGC”, Euangelion, 18 July 2012

Let’s see, a man “penetrates”, “conquers”, and “colonises” a woman. I would make a guess that Douglas Wilson most probably sanctifies what many of us would refer to quite simply as “rape” as The Biblical View of Marriage. I truly believe that he is sincere in his belief; it’s just that Douglas does not begin to appreciate that his expression of divinely sanctioned sexual intercourse in fact condones and even advocates aggressive and violent sexual attacks on women. He just doesn’t see it. He undoubtedly also sincerely believes that what he describes would be what is best for women. But why stop with Douglas Wilson’s intent? Given Douglas Wilson’s use of a group of violent terms for sex (and despite his odd protests that the terms “penetrate”, “conquer”, and “colonise” can be used in really quite nice ways), it is obvious that we should read him with more than a little suspicion. For even though Douglas Wilson is speaking from ignorance, his words quite obviously do in fact liken marital sex to rape.

Or, to employ Bird’s malapropism from the quote above, what Douglas Wilson in fact advocates is “Martial Sex”. (Now there is the quintessential example of a Freudian slip!)

But Bird is not the only Complementarian stating that he disagrees with the Wilsons, while at the same time saying that we should really respect their honest intent. Here’s Denny Burk:

Egalitarians [e.g., McKnight, Held Evans, and Kirk] are out in full-force claiming that Doug Wilson, Jared Wilson, and TGC are openly supporting rape and abuse of women. If authorial intent means anything, then that is a slander. That is not what Doug Wilson meant, nor is it what Jared Wilson intended by quoting him. We can quibble over the language, but the false accusations need to stop.
– Denny Burk, Harder Complementarian, comment to “Sex is What I do WITH my Wife, Not TO my Wife: A Response to the Wilsons at TGC”, Euangelion, 18 July 2012

Denny Burk, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, also wants to let matters rest with Douglas Wilson’s intent – which is, as noted, fairly much completely ignorant that what he is advocating amounts to rape. But whatever happened to critical reading? Surely an Associate Professor of Biblical Studies is capable of reading between the lines and … oh hang on, I see: “Southern Baptist Theological Seminary”. OK, well, then, I guess because Wilson said it, Burk believes it, and that settles it.

It is worth noting that Denny Burk makes the same Freudian slip as Bird, referring not to “marital sex” to describe Douglas Wilson’s views, but to “martial sex”. Ironically, this whole scandal first erupted when Jared Wilson got hot under the collar about the portrayal of B&D in the novel 50 Shades of Grey. But why is it that the (soft and hard) complementarians are the ones banging on about “martial sex”?

Yet I guess psychoanalytic criticism isn’t at the top of the teaching menu down at the local Baptist Seminary.

Further reading:

Complementarians
Bekah Wilson, “Them’s Fightin’ Words”
Nancy Ann Wilson, “10 Reasons to be Glad When Your Husband is Slandered”
Heather Linn, “A Note for Rachel Held Evans”
Douglas Wilson, “The Politics of Outrage”
Douglas Wilson, “Probably Not! She Thundered”
Douglas Wilson, “Cloacina, Goddess of Sewers”
Michael Bird, “Jared Wilson takes down TGC Post”

Others
Ryan K. Knight, “Doug Wilson on The Gospel Coalition: How Christian Patriarchy Turns Sex into Rape and Pregnancy into Slavery”
Grace, “Conquer, colonize, enslave: On redefining words and rewriting history”
Paul Burkhart, “The Gospel Coalition & Sex as Conquest: Jared Wilson, you’re better than this {1}”
Paul Burkhart, “The Gospel Coalition & Sex as Conquest: it’s still misogyny, however unintended {2}”
Rachel Held Evans, “Thank you, Gospel Coalition and Jared Wilson”
Rachel Held Evans, “Some final thoughts on The Gospel Coalition, sex, and submission”
Rachel Held Evans, “The Gospel Coalition, sex, and subordination”
Eric Reitan, “‘Benign’ Christian Patriarchy and 50 Shades of Grey: A Response to Jared Wilson”
Eric Reitan, “The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective”
Libby Ann, “Marital Rape? Doug Wilson on Dominance and Submission in the Marriage Bed”
Dianna Anderson, “The Writer’s Burden”
Scot McKnight, “Thank you”
Scot McKnight, “Take it down”
Eric Rodes, “50 Shades Of Circling The Wagons”
Sarah Over the Moon, “Rape: A Punishment for Egalitarians?”
Chaplain Mike, “Sex, Authority/Submission, and Remarkable Insensitivity”

Two Really Scary Movies for Hallowe’en

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Alan Smithee in Capital, Feminist Theory, Film, Gender Studies, History, justice, Language, News, Politics, Rationalization, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts, Theory, Transhumanism, Violence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Hallowe'en, Horror, Margin Call, Slavoj Žižek, Sucker Punch, Take Shelter, The Changeling

In the hours leading up All Hallow’s Even, I have a few recommendations for anyone looking to curl up with a truly frightening film tomorrow night.  In no particular order, here we have two really scary recent films to keep you up all night …

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2010): What is most horrifying about this film is the what it suggests about the utter bankruptcy of a postmodern imagination rooted in reference and remix rather than in telling stories.  Zack Snyder’s slickly pretty parable about a nubile young woman, Babydoll (a hyper-sexualised Emily Browning), who creates elaborate fantasy worlds to escape the appalling conditions of the 1960s-era mental hospital in which she is imprisoned is truly chilling, though it was intended to be a story of the empowering potential of the imagination.  The film unintentionally pulls back the curtain on the hollowness of genre filmmaking uncoupled from any sense of history or any awareness of the real world of flesh-and-blood human beings.

Snyder, a visual stylist of the first order, has repeatedly shown in his adaptations of other people’s work that he can unearth the dark heart of a text but lacks either the talent or the intelligence (or both) to do anything with its subtext.  In his solid, scary, but completely unnecessary remake of George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie horror masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, Snyder evacuates the film’s setting, a suburban shopping mall, of all of its social criticism and its larger meaning.  It becomes a backdrop for the film’s action, not part of its story.  Romero made pointed criticisms of consumer capitalist culture by comparing the drooling hordes of zombies with shoppers in a mall, a sad, poignant, and utterly damning portrayal of normality as a world of the living dead.  In his adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, Synder captures all of Miller’s unfortunate fascistic tendencies but does nothing but make them live, breath, and bleed in visceral slow-motion.  With Watchmen, adapted from Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ epoch-making alternative history comic book series (1986 -1987), Snyder faithfully captures and even amplifies the profound ugliness of Moore’s New York, but, unlike Moore (who has quite rightly disavowed the film), Snyder simply maroons us in this morass of grime and neo-noir pastiche.  Moore turned the tale of ordinary people playing at superheroes into a potent and cutting critique of 1980s excess as the flipside of 1960s idealism.  Synder just lets the ugliness speak for itself.  Robbed of its context, not surprisingly, it has nothing to say.

Sucker Punch performs a similar trick, but this time it is even worse.  Synder, working from his own script for the first time, gives us an utterly self-insulated and self-referential world; when Babydoll creates a series of elaborate fantasy worlds as a way to escape the very real horror of her situation, Synder is unable to give her anything to work with outside of noise and furious action (some of it, admittedly, staged quite beautifully).  She imagines first a burlesque club as a stable first layer of fantasy and then a sequence of other, more fantastical secondary levels of disassociation, featuring giant samurai robots, zombie soldiers, dragons, and futuristic trains guarded by faceless automatons.  In other words, the worlds that Babydoll creates in the 1960s are a pastiche of films, television shows, and comic books that she cannot have seen, given that they all appear on the cultural scene considerably later.  What can we make of this?  Is Snyder saying that all fan-boy culture is the creation of disturbed minds that create elaborate alternative worlds as a way of dealing with – or not dealing with – the cruel, senseless, and violent world outside the mind?  It would be comforting to believe this, but, given that the film is itself masturbatory genre-fan pornography, a melding of the extreme sexualisation of young women in Japanese manga with the spectacle of contemporary fantasy film and the dense visual dazzle of big-budget science fiction cinema (though without any of the ideas that make films like Blade Runner, Children of Men, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Sector 9 so memorable), it is difficult to give the film this much credit.

Synder’s world, then, is just another layer of unreality, and the audience is trapped in revolving worlds of noisy, hollow fantasy, just as Babydoll is.  This is Debord’s nightmare of the spectacle taken to its horrific logical end.  Worse than this, there is a moral hole at the very centre of Sucker Punch that is truly appalling, especially given that its director and many of its cast members have painted it as a feminist work.  Most viewers do not have to escape from anything as bad as Babydoll does.  In the film’s single scariest moment, Synder takes us into a filthy room with a solitary mattress on the floor and reveals the the hospital is witness to the serial rape of its young female inmates at the hands of a slovenly orderly.  That Synder takes the silly, superficial Sucker Punch to levels of human depravity as dark and despicable as this is truly horrifying.

Margin Call (J. C. Chandor, 2011): This one is a bit unfair, I must admit, given that I am performing the lazy, reactionary critic’s move of writing about a film I’ve not actually seen (see almost any orthodox Christian critique of Martin Scorcese’s brilliant The Last Temptation of Christ for an example).  I can only ask you to cut me some slack; I live in Dunedin, where mid-level films like this arrive rather later than for most, if we get to see them at the cinema at all.  This criticism is not so much about the film, in any event, but the larger discursive structure that surrounds it.  Judging by the beautifully-cut trailer for the financial thriller Margin Call, the true horror is that, faced with another in a long line of financial crises, we are still being sold the myth that such crises are surprising, that they are the work of a few unscrupulous people working dishonestly, that they are preventable.  As the slovenly rockstar philosopher and recent al-Jazeera correspondent Slavoj Žižek writes in his incisive First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009):

The only truly surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is how easily the idea was accepted that its happening was an unpredictable surprise which hit the markets out of the blue. (p. 9)

For anyone in the know, this crisis, an inevitable result of a system that is based on exploitation and the faultiest of logic, was not a surprise.  Its collapse is not the work of a few (though many of the people in charge are indeed rather despicable), but the result of attempting to create a necessary and infinite growth in a material and human field of finite resources.  In short, the system fails because it has to, because it cannot not fail.  That this mythology (and this is myth in the formal sense of the word as well as in its more commonplace pejorative sense) is still being repackaged and foisted upon as entertainment is something that will keep me up all night.

And now for two recommendations for those of you interested in actual horror films …

The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980): This film, which I first saw with my older brother when I was about twelve, still scares the pants off of me.  The infinitely sad, haunting, and edge-of-your-seat tense story of a grieving widower (played by the great George C. Scott) who moves into a giant old house to try to put his life back together after the death of his family, this is one for those of you who think that the spooky séance scene cannot be scary after being done so many times.  There are images in this film (the well, the well!) that can give me the chills just sitting here typing this.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011): After their quietly devastating collaboration on Shotgun Stories (2007), director Nichols and lead Michael Shannon (so good as a disturbed evangelical Christian in Boardwalk Empire) reunite for this chilling and infinitely unsettling story of a man haunted by visions of a coming apocalyptic storm.  This one sets out to shake you and does it with infinite care and control rather than with jump-scares or people in silly masks.  This is the psychological thriller as existential horror film, an interrogation of the idea of sanity in a world that is seemingly spiralling ever closer to irrevocable madness that is on par with Lars von Trier’s Melanchlia, which asks similar questions, though in a far more global and economic context (see more on that here) than Take Shelter‘s intimate portrait of the disintegration of a single Midwestern American family.  The last fifteen seconds of Take Shelter are scarier and more deeply disquieting than any ten recent horror-classic remakes or anything in the thousands of pages of the Twilight Saga.

Sleep well, my friends …

Steve Jobs Isn’t in Heaven

24 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by Deane in Capital, Death, justice, Violence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

buddhist, Heaven, karma, steve jobs

 

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

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by Eric Repphun in Death, Eschatology, Film, History, Language, Marx, Metaphor, Religion, Symbol, Texts, Violence

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

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.

New Binding of Isaac Game: Akedah for Mac and PC

15 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by Deane in Biblical Studies, Ethics, Games, Violence

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abraham, Akedah, bekorot, Binding of Isaac, Chad Sapieha, child sacrifice, Edmund McMillen, firstborn, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Genesis 22, Globe and Mail, Indie Game, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice, Sarah, Seder Olam Rabbah

The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac: The Akedah crossed with The Legend of Zelda

As I was perusing The Globe and Mail, this game review sort of leapt out at me:

In playing The Binding of Isaac, the latest effort from Super Meat Boy mastermind Edmund McMillen, one can’t help but wonder whether the award-winning game designer wasn’t somehow using his creation to cathartically deal with some serious mommy and religion issues.

This inexpensive downloadable game, which is currently available for $5 for Macs and PCs through Steam, begins with a boy named Isaac and his mother enjoying their lives together in their home. Then the mom, a fan of “Christian broadcasts,” begins hearing the voice of God, who commands her to strip Isaac of his possessions (including his GameBoy and pants), lock him in his room, and, eventually, to kill him. Isaac discovers his mom is coming to murder him and flees through a hatch into the cellar. This is where players take control.

… The Binding of Isaac is a creepy, gory, and challenging play that’s as much an homage to games of years past as it is a distinctly modern experience. It’s also an overt indictment of mindless religious zealotry (see: the story in the Hebrew Bible from which the game takes its name) and the impact it may have on children raised by those who practice it. Indeed, poor little Isaac turns one of the most sympathetic video game characters in recent years.

It is, in short, an essential play for fans of avant-garde interactive entertainment, and perhaps the best downloadable indie game of 2011.

– Chad Sapieha, “Review: Avant-garde indie game The Binding of Isaac inspired by Zelda, the Bible”, Globe and Mail Blog, 14 October 2011

The version of the Akedah (“Binding” of Isaac) in Genesis 22, of course has Isaac’s father Abraham hearing divine voices, whereas Isaac’s mother (Sarah) doesn’t have a very prominent role. The to-be-Israelite god, Yahweh commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, which he obediently proceeds to do, until Yahweh stops him on the grounds it was just a test. Sarah has more of a role in Seder Olam Rabbah, where Satan tells her that Isaac had actually been sacrificed by Abraham, and the news of it kills her. But, Sarah doesn’t take an active part in trying to sacrifice Isaac, as in Edmund McMillen’s game version of the Akedah.

As Francesca Stavrakopoulou explores in her book, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical distortions of historical realities (2004), child sacrifice was once a regular part of the worship of Yahweh in Judah, and is still a “live issue” in the writing of the biblical texts in the Persian period. After all, if your god guarantees you will produce many children, only for the sacrifice of a single firstborn child, then it’s a good deal, right? And yet, child sacrifice gets such a bad rap.

Christian Terrorism, Dominion Theology, Theonomy, Reconstruction Theology, and Tea Parties

17 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Fundamentalism, Politics, Violence

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

A Time to Kill, abortion clinic bombers, Chip Berlet, Christan terrorism, Cornelius Van Til, Crosswinds, Dominion Theology, End Times, Gary North, Greg Bahnsen, Hutaree militia, Jerry Falwell, Mark Jurgensmeyer, Michael Bray, Pat Robertson, Paul Hill, Reconstruction Theology, Rousas John Rushdoony, Tea Party, theonomy

The Return of Christian Terrorism
Mark Jurgensmeyer
15 April 2010

“… terrorism has returned to America with a vengeance… When members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan and Ohio recently were arrested with plans to kill a random policeman and then plant Improvised Explosive Devices in the area where the funeral would be held to kill hundreds more, this was a terrorist plot of the sort that would impress Shi’ite militia and al Qaeda activists in Iraq. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by Morris Dees, which has closely watched the rise of right-wing extremism in this country for many decades, declares that threats and incidents of right-wing violence have risen 200% in this past year—unfortunately coinciding with the tenure of the first African-American president in US history…”

“… In 1994, [Rev Paul] Hill, a Presbyterian pastor at the extreme fringe of the anti-abortion activist movement, came armed to a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. He aimed at Dr. John Britton, who was entering the clinic along with his bodyguard, James Barrett. The shots killed both men and wounded Barrett’s wife, Joan. Hill immediately put down his weapon and was arrested; presenting an image of someone who knew that he would be arrested, convicted, and executed by the State of Florida for his actions, which he was in 2003. This would make Hill something of a Christian suicide attacker… Hill framed his actions as those of a Christian warrior engaged in sacred battle. “My eyes were opened to the enormous impact” such an event would have, he wrote, adding that “the effect would be incalculable.” Hill said that he opened his Bible and found sustenance in Psalms 91: “You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day.” Hill interpreted this as an affirmation that his act was biblically approved.

“One of the supporters that Paul Hill had written these words to was Rev. Michael Bray, a Lutheran pastor in Bowie, Maryland, who had served prison time for his conviction of fire-bombing abortion-related clinics on the Eastern seaboard. … [H]e provided a theological defense of this kind of violence from two different Christian perspectives…

“The more significant Christian position that Bray and Hill advanced is related to the End-Time theology of the Rapture as thought to be envisaged by the New Testament book of Revelation. These are ideas related, in turn, to Dominion Theology, the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society. This point of view, articulated by such right-wing Protestant spokespersons as Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, have been part of the ideology of the Christian Right since at least the 1980s and 1990s….

“The Christian anti-abortion movement is permeated with ideas from Dominion Theology. Randall Terry (founder of the militant anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue and a writer for the Dominion magazine Crosswinds) signed the magazine’s “Manifesto for the Christian Church,” which asserted that America should “function as a Christian nation.” The Manifesto said that America should therefore oppose “social moral evils” of secular society such as “abortion on demand, fornication, homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental rights and God-given liberties, statist-collectivist theft from citizens through devaluation of their money and redistribution of their wealth, and evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in the public schools.”

“At the extreme right wing of Dominion Theology is a relatively obscure theological movement that Mike Bray found particularly appealing: Reconstruction Theology, whose exponents long to create a Christian theocratic state. Bray had studied their writings extensively and possessed a shelf of books written by Reconstruction authors. The convicted anti-abortion killer Paul Hill cited Reconstruction theologians in his own writings and once studied with a founder of the movement, Greg Bahnsen, at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.

“Leaders of the Reconstruction movement trace their ideas, which they sometimes called “theonomy,” to Cornelius Van Til, a twentieth-century Presbyterian professor of theology at Princeton Seminary who took seriously the sixteenth-century ideas of the Reformation theologian John Calvin regarding the necessity for presupposing the authority of God in all worldly matters. Followers of Van Til (including his former students Bahnsen and Rousas John Rushdoony, and Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North) adopted this “presuppositionalism” as a doctrine, with all its implications for the role of religion in political life.

“Reconstruction writers regard the history of Protestant politics since the early years of the Reformation as having taken a bad turn, and they are especially unhappy with the Enlightenment formulation of church-state separation. They feel it necessary to “reconstruct” Christian society by turning to the Bible as the basis for a nation’s law and social order. To propagate these views, the Reconstructionists established the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas, and the Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California. They have published a journal and a steady stream of books and booklets on the theological justification for interjecting Christian ideas into economic, legal, and political life.

“According to the most prolific Reconstruction writer, Gary North, it is “the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every institution for Jesus Christ.” He feels this to be especially so in the United States, where secular law as construed by the Supreme Court and defended by liberal politicians is moving in what Rushdoony and others regard as a decidedly un-Christian direction; particularly in matters regarding abortion and homosexuality. What the Reconstructionists ultimately want, however, is more than the rejection of secularism. Like other theologians who utilize the biblical concept of “dominion,” they reason that Christians, as the new chosen people of God, are destined to dominate the world.

“Not all Reconstruction thinkers have endorsed the  use of violence, especially the kind that Bray and Hill have justified. As Reconstruction author Gary North admitted, “there is a division in the theonomic camp” over violence, especially with regard to anti-abortion activities. Some months before Paul Hill killed Dr. Britton and his escort, Hill (apparently hoping for Gary North’s approval in advance) sent a letter to North along with a draft of an essay he had written justifying the possibility of such killings in part on theonomic grounds. North ultimately responded, but only after the murders had been committed. North regretted that he was too late to deter Hill from his “terrible direction” and chastised Hill in an open letter, published as a booklet, denouncing Hill’s views as “vigilante theology.” According to North, biblical law provides exceptions to the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” (Ex 20:13), but in terms similar to just-war doctrine: when one is authorized to do so by “a covenantal agent” in wartime, to defend one’s household, to execute a convicted criminal, to avenge the death of one’s kin, to save an entire nation, or to stop moral transgressors from bringing bloodguilt on an entire community.

“Hill, joined by Bray, responded to North’s letter. They argued that many of those conditions applied to the abortion situation in the United States. Writing from his prison cell in Starke, Florida, Paul Hill said that the biblical commandment against murder also “requires using the means necessary to defend against murder—including lethal force.” He went on to say that he regarded “the cutting edge of Satan’s current attack” to be “the abortionist’s knife,” and therefore his actions had ultimate theological significance.

“Bray, in his book, A Time to Kill, spoke to North’s concern about the authorization of violence by a legitimate authority or “a covenental agent,” as North put it. Bray raised the possibility of a “righteous rebellion.” Just as liberation theologians justify the use of unauthorized force for the sake of their vision of a moral order, Bray saw the legitimacy of using violence not only to resist what he regarded as murder—abortion—but also to help bring about the Christian political order envisioned by the radical dominion theology thinkers. In Bray’s mind, a little violence was a small price to pay for the possibility of fulfilling God’s law and establishing His kingdom on earth.”

‘Christian Warriors’: Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?
Chip Berlet
31 March 2010

“On Monday, the nine members of the Hutaree Militia were charged with, among other things, ‘seditious conspiracy’… The incident has raised concerns over domestic terrorism and left many confused about Christian apocalyptic belief, which requires some basic history to sort out.  The Hutaree [hoo-TAR-ee]—which means “Christian warrior” in the group’s secret language—were preparing “for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.” They believed that “one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Antichrist. All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded.” And they obliged by forming a citizens’ militia underground cell and arming themselves. Their plans, according federal officials, began in August 2008.

“… Some 20-40 percent of the population of the United States tell pollsters that the biblical prophecies about an End Times battle between Godly Christians and the evil forces of Satan predict actual future history. About 10-15 percent of our neighbors say they hope to see the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in their lifetime… Brenda E. Brasher notes that apocalypticism can be constructive or destructive, pointing to the sustaining “role of apocalyptic Christianity among African slaves brought to the United States,” and in the “anti-slavery abolition movements and the Civil Rights movement.” However, if the scapegoated “other” is “constructed as wholly evil, then the ramifications are really horrendous,” warns Brasher. “This is not a disagreement, but a struggle with evil incarnate, so there is no structure for a peaceful reconciliation” in which “people are cast in their roles as either enemy or friend and there is no such thing as middle ground,” Brasher explains, “In the battle with evil, can you really say you are neutral?”…

“I have a shelf of books published in the past 20 years in which right-wing fundamentalists warn of an impending apocalyptic battle pitting Godly Christians against sinful secular elites, those in favor of government social welfare programs, Muslims, New World Order internationalists seeking global cooperation, people working for peace, abortion providers, sinful homosexuals, and many more named scapegoats…

“Why are there so many angry people? The Tea Parties are part of a broad Patriot Movement in the United States cobbled together from several preexisting formations on the political right:

  • Economic libertarians who worry about big government collectivist tyranny.
  • Christian Right Conservatives who oppose liberal government social policies
  • Right-wing apocalyptic Christians who fear a Satanic New World Order
  • Nebulous conspiracy theorists who fear a secular New World Order
  • Nationalistic ultra-patriots concerned that US sovereignty is eroding.
  • Xenophobic anti-immigrant white nationalists who worry about preserving the “real” America.

“These grievances are interacting in a global economy often eager to accommodate corporate interests. And now we add in the fact that an economic downturn that has left millions unemployed or underemployed leaving the largely white, middle-class, Republican Tea Party activists scared that they may be kicked down the socioeconomic ladder next; the election of a “mixed-race” self-identified black man as president at a time when the demographics of the country reflect a growing percentage of people of color, all in the context of the unfinished conversation about race in America; and the disquiet among social conservatives who see abortion and gay rights through the lens of sin and immorality and anguish over the future of the family and traditional gender roles sometimes seen as mandated by God…”

Arrest the Pope!

13 Tuesday Apr 2010

Posted by Luke Johns in Violence

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Cardinal John Henry Newman, Christopher Hitchens, Joseph Ratzinger, little boys, Pope, Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have finally said something with which we can all agree: the Pope (alias: Joseph Ratzinger) should be arrested and put on trial!

Dawkins and Hitchens are pursuing a legal opinion that Ratzinger should be arrested and put on trial when he visits England later this year. So, if you’re an English bobby, here’s your big chance to make amends. When he arrives: Take him down!

Prominent atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens … argue that Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September and put on trial for his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Last week a letter emerged from 1985 in which the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger urged that a paedophilic priest in America not be defrocked for the “good of the universal church”.

The Vatican has already suggested the pope is immune from prosecution because he is a head of state. But Dawkins and Hitchens believe that because he is not the head of a state with full United Nations membership, he does not hold immunity and could be arrested when he steps on to British soil. This is the advice they have been given by their lawyers – solicitor Mark Stephens and human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC. “I’m convinced we can get over the threshold of immunity,” said Stephens. “The Vatican is not recognised as a state in international law. People assume that it has existed for time immemorial but it was a construct of Mussolini, and when the Vatican first applied to become a member of the UN, the US said no. So as a sop they were given the status of permanent observers rather than full members.” But the Holy See insists it is a state like any other. Earlier this month, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, Vatican tribunal chief, said: “The pope is certainly a head of state and he has the same legal status as all heads of state.”

Stephens said there are three lines of approach to put the pope in the dock. “One is that we apply for a warrant to the international criminal court. Alternatively, criminal proceedings could be brought here, either a public prosecution brought by the Crown Prosecution Service or a private prosecution. That would require at least one victim to come forward who is either from this jurisdiction or was abused here. The third option is for individuals to lodge civil claims,” said Stephens. He said he had recently been approached by seven wealthy individuals who donated money to the Catholic church and were dismayed their money had not only been used to fund abuse but also buy the silence of victims. These people could potentially sue the pope, Stephens suggested.

Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, Dawkins described Ratzinger as a “leering old villain in a frock … whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.” Without admitting that he had consulted lawyers he added: “This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil – not ecclesiastical – court. That’s what should happen. Sadly, we all know our faith-befuddled governments will be too craven to do it.”

Pope Benedict will be in Britain from 16-19 September where he will beatify the theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman.

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

18 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Violence

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

Yesterday, the three men were acquitted on all charges!

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

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

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

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

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

Waihopai spy station deflated

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

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by Deane in Fundamentalism, News, Violence

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 Friday Mar 2010

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cinema as Exorcism (One): The Case of (White) Australia [Repost]

18 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by Eric Repphun in Film, History, Language, Politics, Reference, Religion, Texts, Violence

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Australia, Balibo, Film, Spectrality, Van Diemen's Land

Frame capture from The Proposition (2006)
Frame capture from The Proposition (2006)

In honour of the wide New Zealand release of the excellent Australian film Balibo this week, I am going to re-publish the following piece, which originally ran in August of last year, at the end of Dunedin’s International Film Festival.  This is also the first episode in the ongoing (and marginally popular) series ‘Cinema as Exorcism’, more of which can be found here, here, and here).  Balibo tells the story of a number of Australian (and one kiwi) journalists who get caught up in Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1979 and tells that story with a keen eye for both detailed realism and for the ways in which the most important lessons about national identity are often learned far away from home.  If you want to support the existence of tightly-crafted,  t0ugh-minded, politically and socially relevant cinema, go and see Balibo, even if its portrait of journalism as relevant social action, sadly, appears badly dated.

Inspired by two very good Australian films that screened down here at the International Film Festival, this is the first of what will (hopefully) be a series of posts dealing with film and various aspects of spectrality (and thanks to Deane for this last word).

These two very different films hammer home something that has been increasingly clear in the past few years: Australia, as a nation, is attempting through the cinema to shed the shackles of its national ghosts, or at least bring these spectres into the full, harsh light of day.  This is more than simple katharsis, it seems, bridging over into some more elemental; expiation maybe, even exorcism.  Australia – or at least Australian art, as the Australian government seems to be committed to continuing its long history of criminal behaviour – is engaged in a collective exorcism.  This is true, I suppose, of only those people who make these films or the people who choose to see them instead of Transformers. Perhaps this needs a further clarification, as this exorcism is largely confined to the ghosts of Australia’s European past.  The long plight of the Aboriginal peoples is still largely consigned to the darkness, or is subject to well-meaning but ultimately hollow official attempts at apology.  Something like Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence, for all its striving nobility, simply doesn’t pack the emotional punch and the raw sense of wrongness that characterises the film-as-exorcism.

Jonathan auf der Heide’s remarkable debut Van Diemen’s Land recounts the story – such as it is – of eight convicts who escaped from the brutal penal colony at Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania in 1822.  Of these eight men, only one, an Irish thief named Alexander Pearce, would be found a number of weeks later, claiming to have killed and eaten a number of his fellow prisoners to survive.  The authorities were loath to believe Pearce, choosing to believe instead that Pearce was covering for his friends still at large.  It muddied the water considerably when Pearce escaped again a few years later and was found with human flesh in his pockets, despite the fact that he still had other things to eat.  He was hanged.  Almost two hundred years later, the filmmakers take Pearce at his word, taking us with the group as they are slowly whittled down by hunger, by malice, and by the sheer fact that they were all city-dwellers in the wilds of an unforgiving, uncaring island.  Eschewing the temptation to hammer the scant source material into a standard narrative form, the film instead evokes something of the experience of the men involved: the days bleed into another endlessly; the men themselves remain largely indistinguishable; the world is reduced eventually to an endless tract of damp forest; the bursts of violence are sudden, messy, and uncomfortably brutal.  It is an unsettling vision of the world, made all the more alien by Pearce’s Gaelic voiceover.  This is harsh, essential humanity at its very worst, the long, sad plight of imperfect men placed into an inhuman situation by circumstance and by the ambitions of others.  This is, the film makes very explicit, what made Australia, and by extension the whole of the British Empire; it was built on the suffering of untold hundreds of men like Pearce, sent to the ends of the Earth for the heinous crime of stealing six pairs of shoes.  Pearce is neither villain nor hero.  In the film, he simply is, and the film confronts the audience with his image, his voice, and his ghost, perhaps hoping that it will simply fade away now that its eternal bloodlust has been dramatised and made clear for all to see.

The other film that leads me in this direction is Robert Connolly’s Balibo, based again on historical incident and on the lives of real people.  The film tells of six Australian journalists (one of whom was a New Zealander) on the ground during the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor.  The film is structured almost as a mystery, following the journey of Roger East, played as both a lion in winter and as a faded revolutionary by a superb Anthony LaPaglia, as he follows the trail of five younger colleagues, who witnessed the early days of the invasion.  In stunningly recreated period detail, we see these hapless young men struggle to capture evidence that would prove to the world that Indonesia was ramping up an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation that had only recently gained its freedom from Portugal.  They paid for this dream with their lives, and the film spares us very little of their terror and the ignominy of their final moments in a deserted cinder-block house.  The film is as much about Australia turning a blind eye to the invasion (in which as many as 183,000 people were killed) as it is about the invasion itself. At the end of Balibo, East is captured when the invasion begins in earnest.  He chants a desperate mantra – ‘I’m an Australian, I’m an Australian’ – trying to save himself from execution.  He fails and is gunned down unceremoniously.  He fails also to convince the audience that his nationality can (and should) save him, and Connolly leaves little doubt that some of the responsibility for the invasion should be laid at the feet of Australia and its opportunistic foreign policy.  The final images, triumphant archival footage from East Timor’s eventual independence from Indonesia in 1999, do little to erase the feeling that this film, like Van Diemen’s Land, is grappling with the ghosts of colonial guilt and with Australia’s uneasy relationship with its past.  The film opens with a title card that is rare in that it is so unequivocal: ‘This is a true story’.  Not ‘Based on true events’ or ‘Inspired by actual events’, but a blunt assertion of historical truth, making this even more of a punch to the gut, even purer an act of exorcism.

Tracing this trend a few years into the past, John Hillcoat’s painfully brilliant Aussie Western The Proposition, released in 2006, is perhaps the paradigmatic case of this kind of filmmaking.  Less an Unforgiven-like deconstruction of the tropes of the genre, Hillcoat’s film is more of an evisceration of every shred of dignity from the frontier.  With a script by Bad Seed singer Nick Cave (who provides the score along with Warren Ellis, the violinist from Dirty Three), the film mines an almost biblical vein of filth and violence on the borderlands of nineteenth century British civility.  The film closes on an image of two bearded, filthy Irish immigrants sitting in the sands just outside a displaced, genteel English house at the edge of the Outback, staring out into the future.  The psychotic Arthur Burns (played with a sociopathic refinement by Danny Huston) is dying slowly, facing the endless nothingness.  Arthur asks his younger brother Charlie (played by a gauntly intense Guy Pearce) the question that has plagued every modern person since Hamlet: ‘What are you going to do now?’  Charlie, having killed Arthur in a futile bid to save the life of their angelic younger brother, is left to face the future forever trapped between savagery and civilisation.  That the brothers end the film staring away from the English house and into the wilds speaks of a profound emptiness and a deep unease at the core of Australia’s sense of its own European history.   Incidentally, walking out of the theatre after seeing The Proposition, I overheard the best impromptu film review ever: a young woman behind me turned to her friend and said in a shaky voice, ‘I thought I was going to vomit the whole time that was playing’.  This is elemental, haunted, and resonant filmmaking.  This is expiation.

Australia’s spiritual and geographic neighbour New Zealand really hasn’t delved into its own past in quite this fashion – save for a few brilliant exceptions like Geoff Murphy’s Utu (1983) – and I suspect New Zealand’s puritan underbelly and its continued reverence for both the British Empire and for its own (small) part in that Empire will prevent this from happening.  While there are kiwi films that are willing to admit that New Zealand society is underpinned by an almost impenetrable darkness – see Brad McGann’s 2004 In My Father’s Den for an outstanding example of this – and even films that dramatise and make visible this dark core – see Robert Sarkies’ 2006 Out of the Blue, arguably the best film ever made in this country – there is little evidence that the wholesale historical exorcism that we see in Australian film is anywhere close to the surface.

This is a shame; we need to do this, and soon.

The only thing perhaps that we can change is the past and we do it all the time.

Ninian Smart

George Orwell Was (Mostly) Right: Newspeak Today

05 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by Alan Smithee in Ethics, Language, Literature, Living, Metaphor, Politics, Reference, Rhetoric, Texts, Violence

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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

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