The Long green mile
The Lord of the Ring
No Man´s land
The Jurassic Park
Elizabeth –the Virgin Queen
Pulp Fiction
Land and Freedom
Saving Private Ryan
The Matrix
The King of Occultainment
Stephen King has been a favourite author of two generations of readers, mainly younger ones (or those of an infantile disposition). In general, his novels have been emotionally manipulative, occult and numerous.
One of his novels deals with the events in a Louisiana prison in the middle of the thirties. The Green Mile is one of the episodes of this novel. (Its name is said to be inpired by the colour of the floor of the corridor leading from the death row of the prison). Last year we had a movie version, directed by Frank Darabont. A couple of years ago Mr Darabont got some well deserved attention by directing another Stephen King novel : The Shawshank Redemption.
In this new movie of his Tom Hanks is in charge of the of the death row guard. He tries to speak the Dixie dialect , like he tried to in Forrest Gump. On the average, the use of a southern dialect is said to prolong US movies by about 12% only. Therefore its use here could not possibly be the only reason why The Green Mile takes 3 h 10 minutes to complete - i.e. the same amount of time needed by a Kenyan to run one and a half Marathon race.
Hanks, the guard, has a wife whom he loves, sadly enough, a urinary tract infection making it impossible for him to do it with her until almost most of the movie has passed. One day the man arrives in the death row who was going to change this sad state of affairs and, at the same time, change the course of his life altogether. It was the 450 lbs /8 feet very black giant John Coffey ( by chance he seemed to have got the same initials as Jesus Christ). Like his biblical predecessor Coffey had been roving around in our world, shouldering all its sufferings. Now, therefore, he is a bit worn out. The fact that people are not always and not everywhere kind to one another seems to have been especially disturbing to him. Recently he had been spotted in a meadow, hugging two freshly raped and bestially slaughtered Dixie girls - that´s what brought him to the death row.
Whoever has seen a movie before instantly realises that not only is this man innocent like a lamb - most surely he is also a living saint, and probably Christ reincarnated as well. However, obviously the jury had never been to a movie.
During his stay at the death row Coffey is performing a series of miracles. He cures Tom Hank´s bladder infection by grabbing his testicles, he resuscitates a computer animated mouse, trampled by an unusually mean guardian (healing), he is bursting a lot of light bulbs through the force of his mind (psychokinesia), he is seeing things from afar (clairvoyance) and he can even have a look into the future (pre-cognition).
Here I shall have to explain some basics to a younger generation, induced, perhaps, to think differently from consuming all occultainment, generously provided by movies and TV:
1. It is not possible to cure cerebral tumours by sucking the tumour out of the patient´s mouth. If it still would be possible, it is very improbable that his mouth would glow like a charcoal fire during the act. And, even if all this was in fact possible - you could not blow the tumour back again via the mouth of a guardian, be it a most evil individual.
2. Without exception all healers are crooks -conscious or unconscious ones. This fact applies whether they are performing for money or for idealistic motives. You have to be particularly careful if you ever meet a healer who claims to exhale your disease out of his mouth like a swarm of flies.
3. You cannot in fact resuscitate mashed mice just by blowing on them. It is scientifically proved. Not even resuscitated mice live for more than 2 years - absolutely never for 60.
4. You cannot even burst a light bulb by means of mental force alone. And if you could - what would be the use? It is much simpler to use a stone or a broomstick!
5. Never try to cure thy neighbours' cystitis by grabbing his testicles! Your behaviour might be misunderstood!
Jesus Christ himself was content to reanimate dead people, to cure the diseased and to convert water into wine - he never practiced clairvoyance. His prophecy that Judas was to betray him may have been more of a feat of his ability to judge people than a feat of precognition. Anybody would be able to recognise how sinister that disciple really was just by regarding his face as depicted in any altar painting! Never did Jesus devote himself to black magic like Coffey did. At the end of the movie Coffey sees to that all evil personalities present in the plot are meeting with a very dim fate - to be enjoyed by the audience, which had been watching them earning it for more than 3 hours!
At the end of the movie the audience ought to have been convinced that it is wrong to execute good people, especially for deeds they never committed. Whoever thought differently before may thus have been influenced in a progressive direction, that credit should be given to it. On the other hand they ought to be equally convinced that bad people deserve all evil that might be inflicted upon them.
Coffey, like his divine predecessor, is offered a way of escaping his fate. Like Jesus he declines the offer, and like him he got fried for the sins of humanity. His execution was the third one (rehearsals exclusive) we had to watch in this movie, which very generously offers all technical details of this very American popular enjoyment. At the end of the movie I almost felt capable of performing an electrocution myself, especially if the director or the producer had been in the chair.
There is a Titanic-inspired frame story. We are told that Tom Hanks and the mouse, through the intervention of Mr Coffey, both in the end gained an almost eternal life, thus prolonging the sufferings they inherited from their healer. Jesus never achieved such things, or even wished to.
Finally, let us sum up the wisdom that could be gained from this story:
1. There is a lot of Evil in the world. There is also some Good. The lives of good people are not always easy. Be advised to consider this fact before you decide to rove around making good things!
2. You should not execute - or kill thy neighbour otherwise - provided he is not evil. Who is good and who is evil will be determined, albeit sometimes in a somewhat haphazard manner, primarily by a court of law but in the final analysis by a scriptwriter in close collaboration with the movie audience.
3. If, for some reason, you still have to execute a good and innocent person, you should at least be kind to him. Above all, in order to enhance the conduction, never, NEVER forget to apply a wet sponge on the top of his head before the electrocution - if not, there will be a terrible smell, the spectators will puke, and the whole thing will become very unaesthetical.
The Green Mile was a serious candidate for some Academy Awards. It has become a success among movie audiences all over the world. Movie reviewers have held it in pretty high esteem. This state of affairs has caused me, a firm believer in rationality and the progress of mankind, more pain than, I imagine, J.C. ever experienced. It claims to be discussing serious things like the death penalty, like good and evil. In fact it does no such thing. It achieves nothing but pretentious garbage.
This three-hour's mountain gives birth to - a mouse.
Talking of mice: The abovementioned computer-animated specimen, Mr Jingles, is a very important part of the act. When the inmate Delacroix goes to meet his maker in the chair - being forced to leave his beloved domesticated mouse - soothingly the kind guardians tell him a wild story about a circus town in Florida, Mouseville, where the poor creature is said to be sent in order to enjoy his otium cum dignitate, performing tricks for a paying audience: 10 cts for adults, 2 cts for children.
This movie has the same credibility and the same moral weight as Mouseville.
On Fantasy
or
In defense of Reality
Somewhere, some time, extremely long ago the evil prince Sauron forged a golden ring. The ring enabled its bearer to rule, and made him evil, if by chance he was not evil from the beginning. One Human being, Isildür, cut Sauron´s hand in a battle and took his ring. Isildür, who originally was a noble king, of course became intoxicated by his desire for power - so he lost the ring, his gold and his life.
In the course of numerous vicissitudes the ring fell into the hands of a troglodyte, Gollum, who became so possessed by his possession that he withered into a tiny monster, sitting in his cave, patting his ring all day long. One day, several thousand years later, he lost his ring. By accident it fell into the tiny hands of Bilbo the hobbit, a peaceful homunculus with hairy feet and dirty nails. Frodo, Bilbo´s even smaller nephew, of all impossible personalities, finally got the sacred mission of bringing the ring in security. It had became necessary to do so, because by then (i.e. about the end of the 14th Century A.D?) the sauronic ring had begun to activate itself, attracting the attention of the evil prince (still going strong on his dim mountain) who had begun to mobilize his black, mounted ring-ghosts to track it in order to carry it back to its maker. If they had succeeded in doing so the ring would have enabled him eternally to rule over Middle Earth, the homeland of elves, hobbits, humans, and of all decent creatures.
Frodo is given due briefing by Gandolf, the all-knowing sorcerer. Around the tiny hobbit a brotherhood of eight is formed: a couple of exiled human kings, a fierce dwarf, an elf archer and a couple of fellow hobbits. They take off on a long quest in order to throw the ring back into the Crack of Doom from which it was originally forged, because that is the only way to destroy its evil power for good.
However, Sauron´s new proselyte, Sarumon the sorcerer by now is breeding a new race of evil, dark warriors - the orchs - out of the infernal swamp. With their assistance and by means of Balrog, a giant monster, some huge trolls, and innumerable ugly monsters he tries to frustrate the quest of our small peace corps.
What kind of gibberish is this?
Well, you have shared a piece of Fantasy - one of the most widely read genres of modern literature, especially by young people, or by those who were young in the fifties-sixties, preserving or reviving their childishness by playing games on their computers during the nineties. To be more exact; it is a very short summary of the first part of The Lord of the Rings by professor J R R Tolkien (dead in 1973). At the same time it resumes the contents of the first part of the 400 million dollar film trilogy, recently released by Hollywood under the skilful direction of the New Zealander Peter Jackson.
What, then, is Fantasy? Allow me to make a small excursion into philosophy and literature!
Sooner or later most of us learn that of all possible things all are not equally possible. Some things are probable but other things are simply impossible. That is, we learn that all things, reality as a whole, our own bodies and minds inclusive are dependent on laws and rules. We learn that reality differs from fantasy by its insisting on not behaving just as we would wish it to behave.
Thus, in reality, in contrast to dreams, we cannot fly, whatever efforts me make to wave our arms energetically. We will not become one thousand years old like the sorcerers in old saga books or Methusa in the Bible - even if we jog seven times a week chewing carrots until we become orange in our faces. We will never be able to lift ourselves by the hair, regardless of how much we practice body-building reading magic formulas aloud. We'll never meet our beloved dead again, except in our dreams. And we'll never make things happen by our sheer wish only.
This may still be bad news for some people. There have been cases of killing the messenger. On the other hand, taking a somewhat wider perspective, these limitations of reality are in fact but an expression of its being ruled by certain laws. To the extent that we have recognized, explored, submitted to, and exploited these laws of reality we have been capable of achieving most of the things people previously only were dreaming to achieve - and still more:
To fly by jet around the world - even going to the Moon. To prolong our average duration of life for decades. To cure the Tbc and leprosy. To rout out smallpox. To talk to people on the other side of the globe in real time. Provided we've got the money and the will.
Most people learn, in due time, to appreciate these lawful limitations of reality. They realize that it is our knowledge of these things that make it possible to master reality, to develop society, the world and us. There are no limits to what Man can achieve once he get a grasp of the limitations of reality, including his own.
Small children do not grasp these facts - if they did they would not be children. Small children are prone to magic - blaming the stone towards which they just hit their knee, believing the sun rises and sets just to please them. People of older times were as bright as we are. However, they did not possess our present knowledge of the lawful limitations of reality.
Thus, old Greek Homer probably believed in those one-eyed giants and smashing sea-maids of which he wrote. The authors of the gospels of the Bible may have believed that it was hard, but still possible, to walk on water or to resuscitate dead people although they had begun to rot - especially if you were the Son of God. As for the original creators of the old Scandinavian myths about Odin, Thor, Balder, giants, trolls, and recyclable delicious pork they certainly believed these things to exist some way or another. Innumerable sagas were compiled and transmitted exploiting these myths. These were put in writing later, in the Middle Ages, as fiction or even as part of the written history, which were hard to rout and helped to confuse later generations for centuries. In this manner the myths managed to survive the hard purges of Christianity as well as, later on, the cool and rational skepticism of Enlightment.
During Romanticism, and especially during the second half of the 19th Century, many intellectuals in the Western world revolted against the new, scientific world view, against its purported deification of technology and weak sense of history - concisely, although somewhat extremely, formulated by Mr. Henry Ford senior in the beginning of the 20th Century: "History is bullshit".
We experienced a renaissance of the folk sagas - e.g. through the Grimm brothers in Germany, by H C Andersen in Denmark etc. The versatile British socialist William Morris - like the once revolutionary opera composer Richard Wagner in Germany - among other things revived the old germanic myths in novels like Sigurd the Volsung and The Fall of the Niblung. By the 1890-ties you may consider born the modern literary genre of Fantasy.
And so was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein in the British colony of South Africa. He was a man whose literary work was to depend heavily on William Morris. More than anybody else's Tolkiens name has been associated with the genre of Fantasy. During the electronic-middle age and neo-romanticist reaction we have experienced in the West at the end of the last millennium this genre of course experienced a second bloom.
So - what is Fantasy then?
Like Science Fiction, Fantasy differs from realistic prose, e.g. the historical novel, in depicting events in constructed worlds of fantasy. It differs from SF-literature to the extent that these worlds are allocated back into a distant history, not into the future. They lack modern values, modern science, and advanced technology. Instead they often practice magic and sorcery. Finally it differs from the folk sagas and genuine myths in that it has been created by modern men, (hopefully) not believing themselves in the myths they have made up for readers who (hopefully) do not believe what they are reading. Fantasy has preserved the form of the saga, throwing away that which the old sagas and myths originally were supposed to provide - i.e. a believable worldview and a useful morality. To that extent Fantasy is an unusually "pure" literature.
Well, perhaps not quite pure after all. Even using his pen as a lever, it is as hard for a writer to lift himself up above the age, society and class to which he belongs, as it is to lift himself up by the hair. In one way or another these things will come through, with or without his wish.
This applies even to Tolkien´s main work, The Lord of the Rings. This 1000-page novel he began to sketch already as a young student at the time of WW I. Its first edition came in the middle of the fifties. It was revised at several subsequent editions during the fifties-sixties.
So - as such things cannot be avoided even in Fantasy- what is the message of the Lord or the Rings?
Evidently that is not an easy question, as various, conflicting interpretations have been made.
In Sweden a learned, bright, but not very meticulous, extremely rightist scholar, Mr Ohlmarks, translated Tolkien´s novel back in 1959. His prefaced interpretation, which was by no ways unique in our part of the world, paradoxically enough has been very influential even among progressive people here: The Lord of the Rings is said to be an allegory of the struggle between the West and the East, between good capitalism and evil communism. Anyone could interpret the name of the evil prince Sau-ron as Sta-lin. Ohlmarks later even implied that Tolkien was a nazi - maybe a very refined way of embellishing an ideology not completely foreign to the preface-writer himself. Tolkien took care to order the editorial house to remove Mr Ohlmarks preface in subsequent editions. Probably rightly so.
Surely Tolkien was a rightist and a son of the white racist ruling masters of South Africa. Surely he got his education in Oxford, England during the post-victorian prime of the British Empire, i.e. at a time when it was considered immoral for ladies to straddle a bicycle or to engage in politics - and a moral duty to hang petty thieves and to whip or mutilate natives in the colonies. Surely good characters in his book have a bright complexion whereas the evil ones generally are darkish. In the movie we can even watch the good people drinking afternoon tea, vintage wine or jugs of ale.
Still a simple "cold war" interpretation of Tolkien´s work may not hold. Just like many upper-class rightists in Germany never reconciled to the vulgar ex-proletarian Hitler, Tolkien probably was too aristocratic, too catholic, and too historically conscious to become an active agitator for the cause of vulgar capitalism. Above all the main part of the novel was in fact written long before the initiation of the cold war at the end of the forties. To the extent that his novel had a conscious political aim, when it was written, it may rather have been to mobilize people in England and its colonies in the struggle against Nazi Germany and its allies. However, that issue was not on the order of the day for our preface-writer back in 1959 - it had probably never been.
Why not, instead, listen to the interpretation given by the author himself? Although the impact of a literary work is not always identical to that intended by the author, at least Tolkien´s authority may be good as anybody´s in this matter:
"'The Lord of the Rings' is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out practically all references to anything like 'religion,' to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and symbolism."
(From at letter to Robert Murray 1953)
A united Divine Reign for all races and nations on Earth - seated in Rome rather than London/Washington - that is the Christian catholic vision. Secular power (the Ring) always corrupts; in the end it always becomes the rule of the Devil. The earthly powers have to yield to the divine one - they cannot, as claimed by protestant Christians (cf. Luther: "All authority is God-given") exist as a vicarious divine rule.
Thus, behind Tolkien´s Fantasy myths there are religious aims, as weakly rooted in reality as the former ones. Still, it is not very probable that any great number of those 50 million people who have so far bought the book have converted to Catholicism after having read it. Each generation of people will read and interpret Tolkien according to their own conditions - for most people knowledge of Catholic theology does not belong to these conditions any more.
And what about the movie, somebody may ask?
Well, to people, especially to those between 10 and 15 years of age, who like things like these, this movie surely is a thing to be liked. You do not have to use your own imagination, as you would probably have to in reading the book. For three hours you may just sit down chewing popcorn, leaving all imagination to the skill of clever computer animators, cutters, and actors.
There may be others who prefer realities, real history, and heroes who use their heads for other things than butting each other around. People who may like to fantasize on their own but are too old or too dull to become enthralled by groovy movie sorcerers, by elves, monsters or hobbits. People who are not impressed by moralities in black and white, even if these are beautifully colored. To such people watching the movie version of The Lord of the Rings (part I) may be a real purgatory. Especially as they are aware of the fact that there are another six hours of that shit to be marketed.
Who laid the mine?
Serbs, Croats and the Bosniaks have three separate languages. When they speak, however, they understand each other perfectly, as their three languages are identical.
Danis Tanovic
History, I´m afraid, will be as harsh against international actors as it will be against local forces and actors in the region of Balkan.
Carl Bildt, (former conservative Swedish Prime and EU mediator during the Bosnia war)
You are aware of the fact that making war is one of the silliest among human activities, aren’t you? Of course you are! But let’s be fair – lovemaking, which is often proposed as an alternative activity, does not always appear so smart either. Especially not so if regarded from outside at its physical height by an independent observer who is unaware of the background and the aim of the act.
“No man’s land” (Nikorgarsnja zemlja), the film made by Danis Tanovic, which recently was awarded an Oscar by Hollywood as “best foreign language movie”, is depicting the Bosnia war summer 1993 in a similar way – i.e. on its physical height without presenting its background and aims. As Mr Tanovic himself is a Bosniak, making his film primarily for an audience, well aware of the course of the war, has indeed the privilege to focus on the tragic and awkward aspects of the war. He may even in this way consider himself stressing one of his main points – the absurdity of fratricide, the passivity of the international (i.e. Western) community and the hyena-like behaviour of mass media.
For us who have not been in the trenches down there and who may even, according to our ability, harbour the ambition of creating a future world without war, the issue may be different. Because...
Absurd or not – wars happen. Each war – it may be triggered through bad ruling by a soccer umpire or by the bullet holes made in an arch-duke – has its concrete underlying causes. That applies to the Bosnia war as well.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Balkan nations by nature are more belligerent than others. Still, through history many wars have been fought on the Balkan Peninsula. The creation of Yugoslavia on the ruins of a couple of collapsed imperia in 1919 did not permit its people to live in peace. Two million citizens were slaughtered by the German fascists during WW II. The creation of Yugoslavia as a federation of republics where Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Hungarians, Albanians, Montenegrins and Macedonians could keep peace among themselves for 70 years was still an act of genius. No doubt the geopolitical situation for a long period after WW II helped a lot. What had often before shown disastrous for the Balkan nations – their situation in the middle between, and squeezed by, rivalling big power blocs – turned into an advantage during the Cold War. No great power of influence seemed to desire the dissolution of Yugoslavia as a state, at least not until the 80-ies.
The internal conditions for the re-balkanization of Yugoslavia were created by its accelerating economic crisis during the 70-80-ies. Like other former socialist states it slipped into the claws of the IMF, and was forced to follow its recipes –by now notorious – for creating new exploiting strata by means of factitious unemployment and poverty. Socialistic remnants in the economy of the Yugoslav republics were annihilated as a result of a fruitful collaboration between the creditors in the West and the new, local predator capitalists. Old ideologies, like national chauvinism, separatism and racism became instrumental for the strivings of the latter to substitute socialism for another social glue, more compatible with the directives of the IMF. And – last but not least – the collapse of the Soviet Union drastically diminished the interest among Western powers to maintain the integrity of the Yugoslav federation as the renewed national separatism created new opportunities to incorporate the Balkan into their sphere of interest.
Germany, freshly reunited and ambitious as ever, was first on the spot, followed by Austria and the Vatican. Germany exerted a lot of pressure on the EU in order to enforce recognition of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, fully aware of the consequences, i.e. for large groups of Serbs which had earlier been able to live as minorities in several Yugoslav republics under the protection of the federation. But most western politicians hesitated to grant Bosnia independence. Not only because there was no Bosnian nationality: In the beginning of the 90-ies there lived 1,7 million Muslims (Bosniaks), 1,3 million Serbs (orthodox Catholics), 700000 Croats (Roman Catholics) and 300000 defining themselves as “Yugoslavs” – all of them speaking the same language.
However, now was the time for the USA, risking to lag behind, losing its position as overlord in Western Europe, to enter into the arena. For quite a time the USA had resisted the German ambitions to disintegrate Yugoslavia by granting its northern republics political independence. Now, on the contrary, it pushed and lured (at the beginning secretly) the Muslim leaders of Bosnia to proclaim the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The USA started secret deliveries of weaponry to Bosnia, evidently fully conscious of the prospect that this would lead to a civil war at the same time as it would increase the pressure on the Albanians in Serbia’s Kosovo province.
At this time in our Western media we were provided with juicy reports of Serbian massacres in Moslem villages and of the establishment of Serbian concentration camps. To put it mildly, this was not the whole truth of the matter.
A world opinion was soon fabricated, demanding a US intervention (under the flag of UN) because nowadays nobody is allowed to wage a war of some importance without US participation or, at least, US approval. Through some US bombings and after dispatching some UN ground forces the Dayton Agreement was enforced: In the middle of the 90-ties Bosnia was separated from Yugoslavia as a UN protectorate, dominated by the USA and its puppy, Great Britain. The “ethnical cleansing” of Bosnia from Serbs was continued under official UN protection. A tribunal in The Hague was established in order to confirm that the Serbs, and the Serbs alone, were responsible for the Bosnia war and its atrocities, thus making the US intervention necessary. The plans, harboured by Germany and France, of gaining a larger measure of independence for Western Europe within NATO, were effectively crossed – which was one of the main objectives of the US intervention[1]
I am afraid it will take some time before someone will make a black movie comedy about the Balkan wars from this bird’s perspective, demonstrating the fact that these wars were not more or less silly that other wars – i.e. from the perspective of those who triggered them or profited of them.
Above all Tanovic’s film is an allegory with a pacifist message – the Balkan fratricides shouldn’t have happened:
Two Bosniaks (?) and one Serb (?) by mistake jump into the same trench between the frontlines. One of the Bosniaks regretfully is lying on top of a mine which will explode if he moves away from his position. The mine is laid by a Serb as a booby trap. Most of the time the men are quarrelling, sometimes they are forced to collaborate by the circumstances, sometimes they even talk about common girlfriends from the past. The UN forces arrive at the spot in order to solve the problem but finally abstain in order to avoid political complications. In the end the Serb and the Bosniak, half by mistake, kill each other. The Man on the mine is left alone in the same position as before. As a humanitarian gesture the UN commander makes sure that both sides will, later, bombard the trench believing that the opposite side has conquered it.
Tanovic took part in the fights in Bosnia. He admits that he has a firm personal opinion in the matter, at the same time he is claiming that he has made a non-partisan movie. However, that would have been to ask too much from him. He has got one thing right – on the trench level, from the point of view of the victims, the Bosnia war was just another absurd and un-necessary slaughter. But this insight doesn’t help much. Anyone could have figured that out without knowing anything about this special war.
And in fact the war took place. Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats may have provided the fertile soil. But who planted the seed?
By representing the war as taking place in a closed chamber where the distrust between Bosniaks and Serbs (where are the Croats?) provides the only motive force behind the war he is, I think, getting the criticism against the West (at this stage of the war the UN troops, dominated by Frenchmen and Britons) completely wrong. For, according to Tanovic, it is their inertia and their lack of commitment which is to blame. If my picture of the war (nowadays apparently shared by Mr Bildt and others) is even a bit true this is to turn the world upside down as the Western powers have, for quite a time, been firmly committed to the project of achieving the re-balkanisation of the region which triggered the war.
It is not too far-fetched to track, in Tanovics film, an ardent wish for a US intervention on the Bosniak side. At the time of the drama in the trench this intervention was in fact already at work, through secret channels, a fact that Tanovic ought to be familiar with as he shot the movie. The year after it became all too apparent.
So, as a matter of fact, it was the USA who laid the mine underneath Bosnia. Why does the non-partisan Tanovic forget this – after all, he was there?
Therefore one might feel a slight discomfort experiencing that the same USA is awarding No Man’s Land as “best foreign movie”.
But, alas, perhaps I’m just paranoid as usual!
Jurassic Park
One day I went to see Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg.
Why did I do that?
Why do we choose to review a certain movie? Of course, it might be done for various reasons. E.g. consumer information: it you consider your own taste superior you may inform your readers, if any, which movies are "good" and which are "bad" or even "lousy". However, as you all know, such evaluations use to be very subjective. On the other hand, if you happen to know something about movies in general, you may point out the exclusive and the novel in new issues, so as to enable your readers to keep in pace with the latest trends - but why keep in pace with the latest trends?
Instead you may try to focus on the message (if any) of a movie. You may then try to relate this message to something, e.g. to current political and social ideas.
Even narrow-minded cineasts have to admit that this latter method has some merits: almost any movie will carry some interest. The fact that somebody has invested five to 200 million dollar to produce it alone tends to make a movie a matter of reflection. Either the financer thinks it has something important to tell. Or, more commonly, it will, according to opinion polls, contain a stuff making it attractive to a large and paying audience so as to give the invester a nice profit. Of course, it is always interesting to find out what makes a large audience tick - even if the primary target invariably is the US and West European audience. This is a great advantage with the study of popular culture. Besides, it is often more fun, which is important, because you are not only a critic, but also part of the audience.
That is why I went to see "Jurassic Park".
Certainly, I had been watching some Spielberg-movies before. Therefore, I had some expectations as to what I was to get, given the theme of the film:
The Hero was to be a Man of a undefined age with a sexual life like a younger american teenager (otherwise american parents would have to keep their kids from the movie). He had to be a scientist carrying a hat (because this hat was a real hit with Indiana Jones, and you would not expect the producer to abandon a hit). He would have a strong inclination towards an adventurous life and he would not hesitate to use force whenever judged necessary. He would have to judge it necessary pretty often. The Heroïne would be implanted in the plot exclusively in order for the girls in the audience to get some romance (you would not expect sex from the heroïnes of Spielberg movies) but above all in order for the audience to notice when someting horrifying is going to happen. Then she will put her eyes and her mouth wide open like a newly caught trout. There will have to be at least two kids in order for the kids of the audience to have someone to identify with. Those kids will be of the usual american child actor kind - never failing correctly to pronounce their lines and liable to become drug addicts before the age of 18. They are there to worship the hero. Now and then they will be rescued by him. There will be a fat Bad Guy to be beaten up by the Hero at the end. Some years ago he would have been a nazi, or possibly, before the asiatic upsurge on the West coast, a Korean. And then the main attraction: big lizzards, lizzards, lizzards. Lizzards made by plastic to be sold as smaller replicas inte the toy-shops afterwards, or printed on T-shirts. By the way, everything would be made of plastic.
Being a Spielberg movie it would keep a fairly low political profile: it would not offend anybody, except, possibly, Arab people. Of course there would be a streak of occultism (as in the Indiana Jones movies) or ekologism (as in Jaws 1-3), or preferably both, because these themes seem to make the Western middle class tick.
Occultism and UFO-ism has been the hallmark of Spielberg movies since the beginning. In the absence of such stuff, a variety of shallow vitalism would do. Steven Spielberg is a post-modern moviemaker of the New Age.
These thing I expected, and these things I got.
I tell you: this film really needed all marketing the Spielberg could afford. In this particular case I am prepared to make an exception from my principle of not expressing categorical value judgements as to the artistic qualities of movies. Because Jurassic Park is in every respect an unusually lousy and uninteresting piece of art - a fact which, in its turn, is very interesting given its tremendous financial success.
But, you may wonder: what about the contents of the movie? Isn´t there really a theme worth discussion? For 200 million dollar you might expect such a thing?
Of course there is a mundane quasi-eco-philosophical theme in Jurassic Park providing an intellectual fig-leaf: Nature (or is it still Jehova like in Indiana Jones movies?) will certainly strike back if Man trespasses his eternal boundaries and tries to reveal its secrets. Spielberg lets a "chaos-matematician" (Jeff Glodblum has been provided a pair of eyeglasses for the purpose) hang around in a corner, muttering plattitudes such as "Nature will always out-smart us, even if we believe ourselves to have guaranteed the opposite", e g by being cautious to clone only female dinosaurs out of fossile DNA. This is because the chaos theory is said to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that no scientific truth is to be trusted. Spielberg is using modern science like the christian fundamentalists are using it. Such people consider quantum-physics confirmed by the Holy Book, and the Holy Book confirmed by modern quantum-physics, without having studied either of them. From the fact that all observations and prognoses carry a certain moment of incertainty the enemies of Reason erronously deny the potentials of human knowledge in general so as to substitute it for religion and superstition.
If Spielberg (which I seriously doubt) really has a commitment to environmental issues - I will give him a free-of-charge hint of a suitable theme for his next movie: Why not picture (in Technicolor and, if possible, with all the odours) the famous raft, loaded with waste from the Manhattan hospitals, anchored outside the peninsula for years because the authorities had refused to rise the funds necessary to dispose of it? One summer after another it made the Long Island beaches blossom with old syringes and blood-stained dressings. It it has not been removed, it is still there.
The history how the raft was left there, in the middle of the city, is by far more fantastic, and has more relevance for environmental issues than any invented stories of cloned dinosaurs. Above all I shall look forward to the final scene where the crooked muslim garbage enterpriser and Indiana Jones (with eggshells on the brim of his hat) are fighting a life and death struggle by means of HIV-contaminated syringes and surgical scalpels among a mess of worn out condoms, amputated toes and mouldy milk packages.
When Thomas Alva Edison invented the kinetoscope ( a forerunner of the film projector) in 1891 he put a coin slot on it. Ever since then the movie art has been the most consistently commercial of all. And the Spielberg films are the most consistently commercial movies to be seen. Not a single sparrow falls to the ground in them if not preceeded by a thorough market research.
Steven Spielberg is still the richest and most influential of all moviemakers in the world. This being the case it is with an almost physical delight I can establish that the Spielberg way of moviemaking has painted itself into a corner where it will finally collapse under the pressure of marketing expenditures.
Shekash Kapur, in his film Elizabeth –the Virgin Queen provides us with a partly credible account of a crucial historical period in England’s history. In this process England, in the middle of the 16th century, managed to survive as an independent state (at least up till now), its royal power was cemented (well…), and the first foundations of the British Empire were laid during another period of big power rivalry in Western Europe. If Kapur´s account is credible it is, however, not necessarily a complete, or even a true one.
All struggle for power within and between states is a struggle between classes and their interests. In Elizabeth’s time, as well as in the present time, it is carried out in the name of ideologies.In those days the legitimacy of power was founded on religion. The King was king of God’s grace – among protestants without middle hands, or in catholic states indirectly so. Religion was the natural language of the ideological discourse – you had to motivate political power as well as your revolt against that power by means of religious arguments. When the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus haunted the continent in order to defend ”the true protestant creed” in the 17th century he was at least as sincere as the chief editors of our large daily newspapers when they are defending private capital, the EU or the NATO-bombings of the week. Had it been in the interest of the Swedish ruling classes to defend the pope and the Kaiser – or if a chief editor suddenly had become a socialist – they both would have had to look for other jobs.
In the sixteenth century the struggle was still waged under the banner of religion. However, a century before already enlightened European circles had begun to nourish the thought that religion, from the point of view of history or the Prince, was rather a container into which ideologies and interests could conveniently be stuffed. Enlightened Princes had been acting accordingly for quite a while. During the Enlightenment religion to an increasing extent was to be regarded as a myth, useful to society. Following the French Revolution religion in our part of the world -–with some conspicuous exceptions – has ceased to function as the ideological language.
Nowadays our ideologists of power – e.g. our above mentioned chief editors - are using a dull and flat economy language. All important slogans have to be formulated in economish – unless the men in power plan something really sanguineous and disgusting, in which case they prefer freedom and humanity as pretexts.
Henry VIII, of the Welsh Tudor breed, was an enlightened renaissance prince. When the crippled Richard III of York lost his horse and his kingdom at Bosworth Field in 1485 to Henry´s ancestor the Tudor dynasty ascended in power. By means of a cunning combination of poison, daggers, marriages and executions they had tried to consolidate their power. However, they had been so successful in mustering out incompetents and rivals even within their own breed that in the middle of the 16th century there were very few males left to inherit the throne of England.
Henry begot Elizabeth with his second wife, Anne Boleyn, in 1533. Then he succeeded in 1) decapitating his wife, pretending she had committed adultery 2) convincing the Parliament that their marriage had been invalid from its origin 3) establishing the bastard Elizabeth as a claimant of the English throne (as the third in order). This is an excellent example of the old truth that those in power have no need for further logic.
Through Henry´s reformation in 1534 England’s dependence on the pope and the Kaiser had been drastically reduced. It had increased again by Bloody Mary’s (Henrys successor’s) marriage with the Habsburger Philip of Spain, in order to crumble when she died without breeding a child. The reformation movement, wherein several princes severed their ties with Rome (and the Kaiser) forming independent, centralised national kingdoms, showed that Europe was pregnant with capitalism – although at the time the pregnancy was but a few nights old.
At a time when the capitalist market and centralised political and military power was still in development the bonds of blood were still of vital importance – almost as sacred and inviolable as today the preservation of private capitalism. You still had to rely on your clan, your family for your physical and economic safety. The royal crown was in the hands of the clan, which combined military and economic strength with an ability smoothly to deal with clan rivalry.
As Elizabeth ascended to the throne, succeeding the short-lived Edward VI and Bloody Mary Tudor these bonds were beginning to loosen their grip. The foundation of national states, the establishment of an ideological state monopoly (e.g. the to-be Anglican church), initiated by the reformation by men like Henry VIII, were important indications of this fact, and the monopolising of violence at the expense of the nobility was another. The pitiless slaughtering of rivals, even within their own family, perpetrated by renaissance princes were further indications of the fact that state interests was beginning to dominate over those of the clan. The renaissance was not a time for loosers or whiners. Elizabeth I was no looser and no whiner.
How much of all this would you find out from the film of Shekash Kapur?
Quite a deal, I think, considering the fact that Elizabeth I is the work of a bourgeois high-caste director. That is, if you are prepared to ignore some anachronisms and misrepresentations such as:
Elizabeth, in the shape of Cate Blanchett is represented as a fresh and clean Australian feminist from the twentieth century. The real Elizabeth was dirty and certainly had a foul smell (she had a bath once a year at the top of her hygienic career). At the end of her life she seemed to have developed a dementia, still she remained vain as a peacock.
She is represented as –at bottom –a pacifist (”I do not like wars. You never know where they end”). But in fact Elizabeth waged several wars during most of her long reign, crushing the Spanish armada, cruelly smashing Irish rebellions, decapitating and mutilating political adversaries upon signs of even minor opposition. She promoted the transformation of England to a capitalist market economy, barring the landless villagers from the commons condemning them to a devastating famine. She introduced laws of forced labour. She took the first bloody steps towards a British colonial system. She was a competent ruler.
She is represented as a woman who would have preferred to dance voltas in the meadow with her slick lover Lord Dudley. According to the film she proclaimed herself a virgin (with the same right as Bill Clinton would have had – had he had the nerve to do it) for the sake of England. “Against her true feminine nature” she shouldered the yoke of power. We are given the impression of a modern woman with no prejudices, having a relaxed attitude towards religion. Certainly, that’s one way of putting it – however it would have been more true to state that she, like her father Henry, simply gave priority to the earthly power.
She is portrayed as the perpetrator of an essentially monogamous, still liberated, sexual life. In the film, in order to accommodate the audience those exercises were performed behind semi-transparent bed curtains. If she let her ladies of the court attend the act(s) that should not be misinterpreted as a sign of her being sexually liberated (or pervert) – it probably was due to her royal contempt for the audience.
In fact, before as well as after her self-proclaimed virginity, Elizabeth is said, for political, maybe even private, reasons to have entertained quite a few gentlemen of distinction and influence, all of whom believing themselves being in special favour. Lord Dudley, the one and only man in her life according to the film, was only the one most often visiting her bed. The fact that he was already married should not, as is implied by the film, have been a major impediment for Elizabeth to marrying him – not for a daughter of Henry VIII. In fact, Lord Dudley’s poor wife suffered a mystical fatal accident already in 1560. However, Lord Dudley was very unpopular in influential circles due to his arrogance and incompetence. This made him politically unsuitable as a spouse. Still he remained her favourite lover until his death in 1588. In fact, Elizabeth on one occasion even tried to make Mary Stuart marry him. So much for Elizabethan true romantic love.
It was rather probably long-term dynastic, e.g. political, deliberations which made Elizabeth refuse to marry Lord Dudley, Philip II, Archduke Charles of Austria, Erik XIV of Sweden, Henry of Anjou (to be king of France, for some reason represented as a transvestite in the film), or Francis, Duke of Alençon and others.
Elizabeth is presented (almost certainly correctly so) as an intelligent woman, taking advice from experienced elderly statesmen like the puritan Francis Walsingham – who, by the way, was executing all her dirty operations. However, he hardly killed Mary of Guise (as we are told) and in reality he was no older than Elizabeth herself. Etc.
Elizabeth was not, as might be concluded from the film of Shekash Kapur, a tolerant, modern humanist. When the film lets her inform us that she is ”the daughter of her father” it is closer to the truth. She too was a renaissance prince(ss), a feminine Stalin with Tjeka and all in a crucial moment of England´s history. Her identification with Virgin Mary was as cunning and deliberate as Stalin’s identification with Ivan the Terrible, the competent Russian renaissance prince, back in the thirties.
You should not deprive the people of anything without giving them something in return. Evidently the newly converted Christian rulers of Rome once upon a time had already made that conclusion as they substituted the cult of Virgin Mary for the old pagan Isis cult .
Elizabeth foreboded a time when the prince had other means of cementing his power than marrying and begetting heirs.
She was what England, at least its ruling class, needed – then.
The mob in the movies
Bourgeois critics have always been unable to recognise the petty-bourgeois character of the gangster. I think the reason for this blindness is that they have never recognised the gangster character of the petty bourgeois...
Bertolt Brecht
The world of crime is often spoken of as the very opposite of this realm of right and justice where we, the straight people, use to earn our living. The literature and art of this world seldom endeavours to liberate us from this illusion. Further this simplistic view is very handy for the rulers of the two worlds in their strivings to maintain the prevailing social order. However, the more fundamental identity of the two spheres is seldom spoken of:
The legal world and the world of crime are both dependent of the production of surplus value by means of the exploitation of man by man. At the top of the social pyramids big thieves reside (in the legal world they are generally called industrialists, tycoons or men of finance). They rule huge economic empires. Relying on their superior means of wealth and violence they try to remain in power. Below you have the professionals, at the bottom the cannon fodder and, of course the petty entrepreneurs. The latter, as you know, may be subdivided into two groups: 1. Those under arrest
2. Those still at large. That is, between the two realms there is a huge subculture of petty entrepreneurs carrying their trade to and fro across the border, not always knowing, often not even caring, on which side they are currently operating.
Morality is not the privilege -or plague- of the legal world. Ethics and social norms exist in both worlds alike. Most of the ethical rules are common to both: submissiveness, loyalty, honesty (sic!) and solidarity with your peers. What the rulers of both worlds hate the most is violence, disorder and anarchy within their own realms. What they desire most is order, fix rules and, above all, sound business. However, in both worlds daring, ruthless and fearless individuals equipped with a minimum of empathy, tend to advance to the top. This apparent contradiction is inherent in the morality of both spheres.
In the legal sphere of our part of the world is has recently again become fashionable to postulate racial differences between the populations up here and down there - the old concepts of psychopathy and sociopathy has been revived in the public debate on crime. Certain individuals, so we are told, simply are scum "by nature". Whether you choose to moralise over this fact or not, and regardless whether this evilness of the scum is genetical, acquired in the mother´s womb or during the first years of their miserable lives, the conclusion will be the same: legal society, we are told, has to protect itself by locking them up and by throwing away the key.
Certainly, there seems to exist a slight difference between the two worlds in the attitude towards violence as an instrument, and this difference may cause people with a poor control of their impulses to end up in the world of crime, unless they could be employed as policemen or soldiers up here. Commercial fiction, especially the movies, has been exploiting this slight difference to and extreme extent, creating since the days of Edgar Allan Poe and "The great train robbery" hordes of products for mass consumption, where crime and violence is the main ingredient.
However, the use of force for the purpose of acquisition or protection of private property was not invented in the world of crime . If the gangster more often than we, the straight (better: so far non-convicted), chooses physically to eliminate adversaries or normbreakers, the primary cause of this is not that he by nature has a greater inclination towards violence or less respect for human lives. His apparent inclination for violence probably depends on the fact that he could not - like the straight bourgeois - rely on the superior force of a State to enforce his will, to protect his property or to acquire the property of others. The real attitude as to the relative value of private property vs. human lives does not differ considerably between the robber with a sawed off shotgun and the frustrated gas station owner with a revolver hidden underneath his cash register. On the other hand, in societies like Japan, where big crime is extremely successful, powerful and centralised, open violence is a very rare phenomenon, even in the illegal part of society.
I have recently reviewed some gangster movies (that is, movies dealing with criminals, not with single human beings who happen to commit a crime) reflecting very different attitudes towards the relationship between the two spheres of capitalist society. They are all from the USA, a society where capitalism , commercial cinema as well as crime are equally and highly developed.
Death Wish (1972, main character played by Charles Bronson) may have initiated the movie back-lash , i e the revenge for two decades of US defeats in the struggle against the Third World and racial equality at home and abroad. This ideological trend was to be given more eloquent, and artistically more sophisticated, expressions in movies like "The Deer Hunter" (1978) by Michael Cimino, in "The year of the Dragon" in the eighties, and more popular ones in the Ramboseries by Silvester Stallone. The hero of Death Wish is a white and well-to-do, formerly peaceloving architect. His wife and daughter were raped and murdered by some black hustlers in the New York subway. Being unable to get his revenge through legal means he then starts his career as a vigilante exterminator of non-suspecting black hustlers in the same subway. He soon becomes the hero of the public. Peace and order start to thrive in the streets of New York as well as in the subway. The authorities, plagued by their legal formalism, insisting on legal security even for black hustlers, has been unable effectively to intervene against hooliganism. Faced with the popularity of the anonymous vigilante killer, they still have to put an end to his infringement on their monopoly of social violence. Of course, this reactionary film does not present the problem in these terms. Instead it is "simplified" into an outright agitation for the right for white middle class people to lynch black hustlers on he spot. Death Wish no doubt reflected the fears and aspirations of wide circles of white US petty bourgeois people.
Essentially similar ideas, although in a more powerful and intelligent manner - keeping the guard against racism - were expressed by Clint Eastwood (later to become a right- of -the -centre politician) in several films on "Dirty Harry" . Eastwood evades the problems raised by vigilantism by making his hero a worn out and frustrated police detective. Thus, he has a legal right to use force, and even the right to kill in all those emergencies he constantly tend to stumble into. Harry Callaghan even seems to perform his duty as an exterminator with a gloomy delight. Because he hates the scum - almost as much as he hates the legal formalism of the courts and the DA:s, which invariably tend to release the criminals delivered to them out of their inclination towards sophistry and exaggerated demands of legal security for suspects. In all the Dirty Harry movies I have seen, however, I have so far never seen a criminal being delivered elsewhere than at the morgue following a confrontation with Harry. This eternal conflict between natural law and legal formalism is a most typical subject of US movies.
Common to those gangster films are their stress on the particularity, evilness and inferior moral of the criminal, and the necessity of our protection against those people by means of violence - an eye for an eye. The material motives of crime are put in the background, because the distinction between the legal world and the world of crime is thought to be a moral one - not a matter of jurisdiction, i.e. it is made by God, not by society, and certainly not by politics.
Maybe , after all, these tales about the bestiality of the criminal serves to prevent us from realising the fact that the world of crime is essentially a mirror of the legal society. The criminals are our antipodes. In a society (as in a universe) where a fix system of co-ordinates does not exist, up and down are, at the most, relative concepts. If the world of crime one day conquers over the legal one, we up here shall by definition become the world of crime - and an outside spectator would notice no difference from the former state of the world.
This is not to embellish the world of crime. This is a description of capitalist society at the end of the 20th century and a precondition for all political action.
Francis Coppola´s movies of The Godfather (after the novel of Mario Puzo) broke radically against the primitive conceptions of the gangster movies mentioned above. For the first time (since the Dreigroschenoper by Brecht) the world of crime is depicted as a capitalist market society with its own classes, castes, having its own laws, norms and systems of rewards and sanctions. The criminals present as relatively normal bourgeois human beings, on the whole neither better nor worse than ourselves. Going legal for them is an alternative career to be pondered. In spite of their mandatory layers of spun sugar the Godfather films have the great merit of contributing to our understanding of crime as a social phenomenon.
The success of the Godfather movies of course initiated a new wave of movies, exploiting the Mafia as an environment for their plots. With very few exceptions, however, these films lack artistic or political value - an exception being Joel and Ethan Coens "Millers Crossing" because of its intelligent discourse of moral issues.
The new movie by Quentin Tarantino, "Pulp Fiction" really is not a gangster movie, if such an epithet should be reserved for works dealing with the relationship between the world of crime and the world of legality. For in this movie all characters (with the possible exception of the milkman) are criminals. The two gangster heroes (John Travolta performs a miracle with one of those characters) under these circumstances behaves like perfect bourgeois bureaucrats, discussing issues of religion, human relations, sex and philosophy between their missions of violence - completely separating their professional and personal spheres.
Take a neoliberal society, where the state is reduced to a minimum, where competing companies perform police duties for those who can afford it, and where ethics has dissolved into economy and aesthetics - there you have the realistic vision of Pulp Fiction, a highly interesting, and disturbingly funny piece of art.
Land, freedom and White Leghorn Chickens
Ken Loach´s Land and freedom -a critical view
Like so many British intellectuals Ken Loach is a trotskyite. That term does not exhaust the whole truth about this excellent movie director. Surely he has given us many extraordinary works during the last few years - e.g. films like Riff-Raff and Raining stones.
However, his movie Land and Freedom (1996) is evoking many objections. It deals with the Spanish Civil War 1936-38. Land and Freedom pretends to give a realistic picture of a revolutionary period from within and from underneath.
The yellow press (the ”progressive” one inclusive) have given Ken Loach excellent marks for his work. Everybody knows that he is a leftist and a genius. Therefore it must have been a great relief for our bourgeois reviewers to watch this film. Because Loach has succeeded in picturing an anti-fascist movement without in the slightest degree intervening in to-day´s history or annoying those still-going-strong imperialist powers which at the time paved the way for fascism in Spain.
Let us resume the situation
in the western world in 1936: in Germany Hitler was arming himself to his teeth. He was allowed to, since he had persuaded the Western Powers that he was going to confront the bolsheviks. In the Far East fascist Japan had entered Kuomintang China . It was allowed to, since Japan was anti-communist and had not yet bombarded Pearl Harbour. In Italy Mussolini was firmly established since 1922, in Portugal the fascist Salazar since 9 years. Both dictators had cordial relations with those colonial powers controlling the Dardanelles and the Southern Mediterranean Coast.
Then, in the Spanish-African colonies, the rightists revolted under the leadership of Franco against the republican govenment in Spain, beginning their march for Madrid. Encouraged by Great Britain the Popular Front government of France refused to support the legal Spanish government against the fascist revolt.
The 1935 Comintern congress had adopted the policy of a united front against fascism. Essentially this was a defensive policy. On the national level the communist parties of the capitalist countries were to strive for unity with the social democrats and other progressive forces against the extreme right. On the international level the Soviet Union was striving for unity with (above all) France and England against the fascist regimes. In Spain the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), according to the united front policy, was to search unity with petty bourgeois parties against the fascist forces. Therefore it had to avoid extensive nationalizations and confiscations of landed properties, the landlords of which were supporting the goverment.
The motive for this line was evident: you had to avoid alienating the capitalist democracies in the west - and on the Spanish level concentrating a maximal force against Franco.
Except for Mexico the Soviet Union was the only foreign power to support the democratic goverment of Spain against Franco materially and politically. The diverse parts of the workers´ movement first organised a militia in defence of the republic, then a people´s army , buying its arms from the Soviet Union. PCE was to become the motive force of this process - however, anarkist groups, traditionally pretty powerful in Spain, also took part. A rather tiny, trotskyite armed organisation, POUM, also participated. The POUM almost exclusively existed in Cataluna in the north-eastern part of the country.
When Ken Loach makes his account of the civil war sixty years afterwards, he chooses to tell the story of a young communist worker from England going to Spain to fight in defence of the republic (and himself), taking part in the military battle. By accident he ends up in a POUM militia group (maybe he did not really know the position of Trotsky?). Of course he falls in love with a (female) comrade-in-arms. When the various militia groups are to join the people´s army contradictions arise in the front. From this moment on the film is using a trotskyite vocabulary when mentioning the army leadership: the ”stalinists”. The stalinists are posing conditions. The stalinists are forbidding women to do front service (an argument liable to upset feminists of to-day, even those who would not dream of joining a progressive peoples war themselves). The stalinists are bending their neck in front of the western imperialists, prohibiting the confiscation of landlords participating in the resistance.. The stalinists are disarming those POUM militia groups refusing to align themselves with the front. The stalinists are prohibiting wild-cat strikes in cities besieged by the fascits. The stalinists shoot (albeit by mistake) his mistress.
In short, according to Ken Loach, it was the communists, rather than the fascists, who defeated the Spanish revolution.
Of course I could understand why the Spanish leftists felt a bitterness against the PCE at the time - especially since the strategy of PCE ended up in failure. It might even happen that the ”stalinists” were mistaken. It might happen that the defeat was unnecessary. It might happen that the Spanish resistance could have defeated fascism by being as independent towards the Comintern as the Chinese comrades - who, remember, were fighting their war in a sub-continent with a common border with the Soviet Union. The Spanish experience in fact helped in convincing the Soviet Leadership that unity with the West against fascism was not possible to achieve - i.e. it led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 -according to the troskyites a still more hideous betrayal.
Surrounded by fascists in the east and the west, with a hostile British fleet swarming around the coasts, and frustraded (but confiscated) petty owners swarming the whole inside of the country, the Spanish comrades then would have tried to shoulder the task of socialist construction peacefully and calmly.
Quite possibly so. But - in contrast to Ken Loach - I do not regard this development as a historical probability. By the way - is Ken Loach really quite sure that all accusations of betrayal waged against ”antistalinist” dissentors during the war were just inventions of a sick mind in Kreml?
In fact, there were trotskyites in the world at the time, who overtly (like in the US) or covertly propagated the prospect of a Soviet defeat in the future war against Hitler. Maybe some Spanish friends may have believed them, and acted accordingly?
The question is - what does Ken Loach want to tell us by means of this film, besides his evident urge of vulgarizing another trotskyite piece of history-writing to a yearning movie audience in the west, who had its fill with pro-stalinists myths of the 20th century history?
Does he really think there is a need of warning the revolutionary masses of to-day´s Europe of the danger of pro-stalinists infiltrators? Does he feel the necessity of exposing the danger of a lenient attitude towards petty landowner individualism in an on-going peasant revolution in Western Europe? It almost looks like it. However, he is giving us no clue as to how we should behave in the actual anti-fascist struggle of to-day.
When I was very young I was working in a large poultry farm in the countryside. It was an interesting work, from which, alas, I was sacked. If it had not been so, I might have been working there still.
I learnt a lot in that farm. I even became a communist there, by listening to the proprietor´s views on working class issues without him knowing it.
I learnt a lot of anxiety by studying the chickens, especially the thorough-bred, highly productive White Leghorn. You have to approach them very carefully, however, once you have gained a firm grasp of them you might put them in any position you like and they won´t move from the spot.
Another observation I made in the White Leghorn became very important for me in my political work, although in a metaphorical sense: If the plumage of a White Leghorn chicken was shiningly white, without a spot, you could be pretty sure of the fact: that chicken is improductive, i.e.it produces no eggs. It should be decapitated, and you should not even use it for human food.
Later on, whenever I meet with a trotskyite, I have been struck by the similarity between him and those unhappy specimens of poultry: a snow-white plumage, a lot of ”ka-ka-ka” - but nothing will result out of it.
Being an essentially humane individual I have stayed content by establishing the parallel -I have so far never acted it out. That is, Ken Loach must not feel scared of me. However, next time he is saying ”ka-ka-ka” he should produce an egg.
”Tell me I´ve been a good man”
(Uncle Sam, at the end, in tears)
Recently we´ve seen the second movie by Spielberg, picturing events during WW II.
The first one, Schindler´s list, hailed the Nazi-german slaveholder Oscar Schindler for his achievements during the war. You may remember his classical lines: “If only we´d made more money we´d been able to rescue more of them (Jews)!”, legitimising the establishment of the Israeli state, at the expense of the Arabs instead of the Germans. I think the Schindler movie gave him 12 Oscars. In Private Ryan he seemingly advises us that war is hell. He provides us with several, very detailed instances, proving beyond reasonable doubt that you may even die from it. At least according to the majority of reviewers in the press this is the gist of his message. Anyhow, what seems to make people see the movie is Blood, Bowels and Brain substance. I cannot tell how many Oscars he´ll get this time – I guess he´ll get as many as Schindler gave him.
The plot is as follows: A few days after the Normandy invasion in June 1944 a squad of US soldiers is dispatched in order to locate an airborne soldier, Private Ryan, landed behind the enemy lines. Three brothers of Ryan´s already have been killed in the war so General Marshall considered it detrimental to the morale of the home front if a mother was to be deprived of all her sons in one single war. However, Private Ryan eventually was found and safely brought home to the USA. All of his rescuers were killed in their heroic effort.
This movie carries a lot of strongly realistic battle scenes, shot by means of a shaky hand-borne camera, reproducing on the screen the confusion of a terrified and nauseated soldier during combat. At the same time this kind of photo provides a certain fuzziness, effectively concealing possible defects in directing, acting and props. The technique of putting small bags of ketchup underneath the clothes, letting them detonate in slow-motion in order to simulate the impact of bullets and grenade splinters on living tissue, is used profusely. Once upon a time, back in 1968, it was introduced as a major achievement in ”The raw bunch” by Sam Peckinpah. Nowadays it´s a standard method.
If somebody is investing a lot of money and ketchup only to tell us what we already know, we´ve to think once more, even if he does not encourage us to do so. You know, Mr Spielberg is an ethical man, a man with ambition to teach us something – and of course making a buck in the process. Therefore, it´s always wise to ask yourself: What else is he trying to tell us, that isn´t self-evident? And, if I believe him – what do I do then?
Let´s see!
Spielberg is starting and ending his movie by letting the Star Spangled Banner cover the screen. That is, the very symbol of US patriotism –if you are a good American - or the symbol of US imperialism if you are not. This is the moral fundament of the movie – an impossible one (except as an irony) during the happy years from 1970 up to the Deer Hunter by Cimino in 1978. Today it is possible again to do such things without eliciting any reaction among foreign reviewers. The state of world affairs has changed – and so have the reflexes of our intelligentia.
The morale, or in plain words, the political message of Private Ryan is summed up by one of the squad members as follows:
“It might turn out that saving Private Ryan was the only decent thing we did during this war” and, later on, by the very last words directed to the home front by the same (dying) fighter: “You´ll have to earn this!”
That is:
1. Victorious soldiers are heroes –when they´re on the correct side
2. The west-allied forces during WW II represented the correct side of WW II inasmuch as they represented humanitarianism. The fact that the US, in the middle of a ferocious war, did not hesitate to mobilise every human or material resource in order to prevent a poor widow back in Iowa from loosing all her sons provides the ultimate proof of this.
3. The subsequent development inside the US and the international role played by the US after WW II has legitimised the violence and the human sacrifices on the west front. The very sacrifice, performed by the heroes of Normandy has given the US the right, nay, an obligation to act as the police, the judge and the executioner all over the present world.
Heroes?
Soldiers in an imperialist war are disposable. They cannot choose whether they want to go to war. They are dispatched wherever the State chooses to send them. They have no power whatsoever to control their situation. They are drilled to fear their commanders more than the enemy. They´ll get shot if they don´t obey. Those who have taken part in a regular war know that whatever is done is achieved through coercion, by command, out of fear, and under the threat of reprisals.
You don´t sacrifice your life – your life is sacrificed.
Deeds performed under coercion have no moral value. The status of hero is something ascribed to you post factum, by the state, or by propagandistic movie makers in order for you –dead or alive – to be able to enhance the possibility of recruiting your fatherless sons in the next war.
Nevertheless we easily feel sympathy for those soldiers who have been sacrificed – giving their utmost for a cause, sympathetic to us. That´s only human.
Anyhow – one ought to congratulate a poor soldier if he had the good luck – and good taste - of getting his head shot off in the war against the nazis, thus being cheered today by Spielberg, instead of being killed in the war for the nazis (it surely hurted as much). In that case today he has the doubtful pleasure of being hailed in his grave by a new generation of ugly boot-lickers and racists. Or, instead of, worse still, being killed in the battle against the Germans on the Eastern front – and being forgotten by us altogether.
The two subsequent theses might be questioned too. One wonders, however, for how long? How many more CNN - or BBC- “documentaries” more does it take in order for a new generation to stop making questions about what really happened in WW II and about the real role of the US in the world today?
They may be questioned, firstly as they presuppose, and try to underpin, a much propagated notion that the Normandy invasion was crucial for the outcome of the war. Such was probably not the case.
According to a vast documentation since the end of 1942 the Western allies were well aware of the fact that the Third Reich was going to collapse within a near future – and even more so after the battle of Stalingrad 1942-43. Since 1942 there was a clear insight among the major Western leaders that Socialism very soon was to become their major enemy again. The cold war was prepared during the last three years of the hot one. The development of the A-bomb – and detonating it when the Japanese were in fact lying down already - should be seen in this perspective too.
For three years the Soviet Union had asked the western allies to open a new front in the West. From that side the tactic, however, was to bleed the Russians as thoroughly as possible. In this they were successful – 7.5 million Soviet soldiers and 15 million civilians were killed. As late as in the end of 1942 ( i.e. at the time when West was directing another “decisive” blow against 4 German divisions in El Alamein) the Soviet front engaged 179 German divisions. Only when the danger of a German defeat in the east had become imminent it was time to stage the Normandy invasion. At least that action had double aims.
Secondly, the theses should be questioned as they try to picture the UK and the USA as the bulwark of humanitarianism. This definition certainly would not have been sustained by the oppressed millions of the British Empire (which invented concentration camps and combat gasses before Hitler had even been promoted a corporal) or by large parts of the US people.
You may have noticed the absence of black soldiers in the Ryan squad? The reason is simple. You did not mix the races in the US army in 1944. Because, by that time, and for two decades on, the US practised a racial policy very similar to the one introduced in South Africa only in 1948. I.e. separate toilets, busses, restaurants, schools – and separate units in the army for coloured people under white command (until they realised that the commanding officers should be black in order to make them more difficult for enemy snipers to identify).
Thus, it´s not likely that the motive for the US to invade in Normandy was to clear the continent from a racist regime – which, besides, they had, only a decade ago, been helpful in rearming and giving a carte blanche in the East as they believed it would only kill socialists and Jews. Still, the anti-racist and humanitarian character of WW II is a modern myth, which Spielberg does his best further to establish – i.e. by letting one of the heroes of the squad be a Jew who evidently seriously believed himself to be waging a war against anti-Semitism.
Whatever the reasons for the Normandy invasion, the US was the great power which, thanks to the efforts of Private Ryan and his rescuers, would shoulder the heritage of the old colonial powers , thus being able to wage another 50 aggressive wars during the remainder of the century. In this very moment they prepare new bomb-raids in the Middle east together with UK, their former ally, using the same hypocritically “humanitarian” pretexts that Spielberg is all too helpful in vulgarising through Private Ryan.
Thus, whether the US during the following decades really earned the sacrifice of the Normandy soldiers may be a false question – if I have to answer it anyway my answer will of course be negative.
There is, however, no doubt that the US has earned a lot by it.
But I doubt that´s the message Spielberg wanted to give us by making Private Ryan.
The Matrix
Big Brother Linda´s fallen ill in her stomach
(News bill of a big Swedish evening paper in August 2003)
For quite a time it has been considered evident that the world is not – in all respects – what it appears to be at first sight. Theologians, prophets, philosophers and scholars since thousands of years have earned their living by delivering alternative explanations to what it essentially is instead. If you succeed in selling, or reselling, your explanation you will gain a certain control over the buyer’s soul and body.
If you wish to engage in such philosophical activities – please, take my advice:
Do not take any half measures, be as radical as possible! Doing so is wise from the marketing point of view, but also if you want your mind-goods to be durable.
As an example, Plato’s 2400-year-old image of Humanity (except for himself, of course) sitting fettered in a cave, staring into the wall, and watching the shadows of the real world outside dancing upon it has proved very sustainable. An even more radical denial of a reality outside his head, propagated by the Irish 18th century bishop Berkeley still constitutes a firm ground, and a last resort, for our most modern postmodernist thinkers, as they try to deconstruct all our strivings towards a rational interpretation of the world.
You could not, however, detect anything in the biographies of these thinkers to suggest that their views of Reality had in any respect affected their way of living and working in it. This as opposed to the behaviour of certain Middle Age heretic sects. About a thousand years ago on the European continent the cathars, for instance, fought and died in great number for a similar conviction. They considered the material world a mirage, created by Satan. According to the cathars, only Jesus of Nazareth had pointed to a way out of this evil dream world.
Applying a purely philosophical approach it is certainly impossible to refute such doctrines of reality as these presented above. On the other hand – there is not much to do with them in other respects either. Except using them whenever you wish to discredit science and common sense, assigning to these an explanative value comparable to that of myth and religion. For some reason, however, there seems to exist a constant demand for such doctrines, so we guess that we may not have seen the last version yet.
Still, the world does not always seem to be what it appears to be. In saying this we are not only referring to trivial physical facts, like: it´s not the sun that keeps rolling each day from the east to the west, but the Earth that keeps rotating the other way around,; apples do not fall “downwards” but towards the centre of the nearest celestial body etc. Such truths, while uncontroversial from a political point of view – in these days- tend to be generally accepted, although they stand in conflict with our intuition.
Not so regarding truths about Human Society. Many of us still believe that in our daily work we are producing goods, utilities like food, refrigerators, clothes pegs, scooters or antipersonnel mines. In fact, as we now and then experience the hard way, on the whole this is a delusion – above all we produce profit for capital owners, and we get the sack if we fail to produce a sufficient (i.e. maximal) amount of it, regardless of the material need for scooters, food, clothes pegs etc in the world.
Furthermore, a majority of people still believe themselves now and then electing political representatives to perform certain social and economical changes they would like to se performed. Instead, invariably, they entrust people with power, whose main task seems to be to ensure that nothing changes, that we all continue to shut up, and to produce profitably.
We may even dislike this state of affairs. We may clench our fists back home in our kitchen, we may cherish critical intellectuals and read French philosophers. If you have bothered to read this far it is even highly probable that you yourself harbour oppositional feeling towards the System.
In feeling so you belong to quite a vast and partly illustrious society. In the entertainment industry of the USA a great deal of current useful myths are produced and reproduced in popular editions. Most of its more important products – from Madonna´s latest album to movies like
The Truman Show, Wag the Dog, Minority Report, Dark City och Mulholland Drive etc. as a matter of fact contain some sort of questioning of the dominating world view. Maybe so in order to gain credibility? Maybe as a kind of political vaccination – “better to give people cow pox than to watch them catching smallpox”?
The French (sic!) semiologist and sociologist Jean Baudrillard for more than a quarter of a century has been writing about the crucial part played by the media, especially the electronic ones, in the creation of a parallel, virtual, simulated reality in service of The System, i.e. the political power. He named it simulacra – a “reality” cleared of any trait that might jeopardise the system.
Anyone who have read the news bills about stomach ailments of documentary soap opera celebrities, and about the possible boyfriends of a Swedish princess on an ordinary day, when a thousand workers in our country get the sack, the big powers prepare new wars, and forty thousand people starve to death will get an idea of what simulacra means.
People who grew up with such media, with a joy-stick in one hand, a mobile telephone in one ear and a Mp3-player in the other in general find it easier to name ten soap opera stars, action movie heroes, TV-chefs or rock musicians than they would find it naming ten political leaders, scientists, not to mention influential ten representatives of Monopoly Capital. Simulated reality has invaded and occupied our minds. It has become even more real than reality itself (according to the madman Baudrillard it has even become the only reality). And here we are speaking about everyday peaceful conditions – not mentioning the systematic media lying or spin doctor activities in the ever more frequent periods of war.
In spite of all this –or rather, because of all this – a certain measure of self-reflecting criticism of the System seems to be mandatory for any simulation of reality expecting to gain some public confidence.
Thus, on the desk of the hero, Neo, in the first part of the Matrix movie trilogy by the Warchowski brothers, there is a copy of Baudrillards book Simulacra et Simulation. That is, Neo is only using the cover of the volume as a stash for his illegal data floppies. However, it seems obvious that the Warchowski brothers have browsed through that book now and then.
The plot of the Matrix movies may be a bit tricky to grasp – however it ought to be pretty well-known by now for those interested:
The year is 2199 or so. We are still on the Earth. At the beginning of the third millennium the ever more intelligent computers have struck a massive blow against Humanity and conquered the Earth, laying it in ruins. (Screenwriters always seem to be very impressed by the mental capacity of computers, although such machines, in contrast to monkeys or two years old humans, still are incapable of distinguishing apples from pears).
In spite of their immense intelligence the conquerors have not been able to detect any decent source of energy, so they have been forced to keep us humans for that purpose. Each individual is said to lie in a sort of cocoon (or incubator), plugged into the System, producing and providing biochemical energy for The Matrix – a giant (decimal??) data program. In order for the individuals to reconcile with their fate the Matrix has provided each one of them with a simulated image of reality as perceived in 1999, except that all big problems and controversies has been erased from it.. In the virtual reality people go to work, marry and (be)get children as if nothing had happened. That is, just like we do here and now, scary thought.
A handful of dissidents, headed by the philosophically minded and dymamic Morpheus (read: John the Baptist) have escaped from the virtual existence to live in the Real (??)Reality. According to the movie that reality allow them to fly, walk in the ceiling using their will-power (and probably some strings), and to consult with soothsayers. If you want to move you just send a working copy of yourself over your Panasonic® telephone. Of course Reality contains some handsome ladies, for instance Trinity as a smashing and kicking Mary of Magdala in rubber thights. The Real People inhabit the subterranean city of Zion (!) and move around by means of the giant hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar (!!).
However, the inhabitants of Zion do not seem to have much more fun than the cocoon people in the first part of the film trilogy. In the second part, Matrix Reloaded you get more sex and hullabaloo – possibly due to complaints from the audience. Food is lousy in Zion – everything has a taste of chicken. No wonder they got their own Judas Iskariot in the shape of Cypher, maybe also because Trinty stubbornly had refused to give in to him, awaiting The One.
Thus, the dissident group has been waiting for its Messias, the one who would have the force to unplug the remainder of Humanity, liberating it from the Matrix slavery. No surprise this One is Neo. He´s got the calling and the force, because he is a Hacker. Given the choice by Morpheus he volunteered as a saviour of Humanity by swallowing the red pill which enabled him to se through the virtual veils, abandoning his comfortable state in the bosom of the Matrix. For he was written at a time – do you still remember it? – before all the bursting financial baloons, when the IT-business was the only and great hope for Capitalism.
In the computer age the lonely, slim and pale-faced, under-aged hacker has replaced the tanned, physically fit lonely cowboy as the Partisan of the good guys. Like another modern, fledged youngster, Harry Potter, however, he is in need of a certain amount of computerized training before taking off. His first training flight was a blatant failure, reminding us of the virgin trip of the Swedish jet-fighter JAS.
Neo has to confront the Agents, i.e. the computer geared android emissaries of Matrix, wearing sunglasses, grey suits, equipped with an unlimited amount of lives and a ditto capability of reproducing themselves without sex (copy, cut,paste you know). The remainder of the human beings, who in reality usually are known as the force propelling historical events forwards, remain plugged in, dozing in their cocoon dormitories. It is suggested that they have programmed to prefer their virtual life in the Matrix – they may even resist if someone would try to liberate them. I.e. – they behave quite as predicted by Baudrillard.
We are supposed breathlessly to follow their liberation through three movies – the third one, Matrix Revolutions(!?) will arrive this autumn. The means used for the liberation, however, are somewhat more conventional than you would expect considering the technological level and the promising plot. (Can you imagine Superman as an enthusiastic participator in a saloon fist fight?). Above all, force is used for the purpose, because in the Action World negotiations seem to be considered as suspect as the are by the White House. If force proves inadequate you´ll just use still more force. Above all some sort of Kung-Fu is used, and sometimes some kind of astonishingly obsolete handguns. Only in exceptional cases guns firing nasty rays, or other weapons, not sanctioned by the UN, are used.
Humour and irony seem to be prohibited out there in Zion. Unless you would prefer to regard the whole series as a parody over the action-, martial arts and SF-genres, of course – this interpretation seems very reasonable, especially after the almost unbelievable enmeshing of the intrigue and the time perspectives in the second part. This second part (Matrix Reloaded) in no real follow up, but mostly a retrospective introduction to the final scene. It is a flashback taking place in the head of Trinity as she is falling down from the 40th floor against an almost secure dea- rescue. Here we even get a hint that the whole gang of dissidents around Neo, Trinity and Marcellus in Reality (whatever that means) is part of the System, maybe as a bug in the Matrix program or as a kind of entertainment for its creator.
That would be a consistent development. If you would take the Matrix movies seriously (dreadful thought!) they would indeed also be part of the system. At least this is what Baudrillard himself suggest, when interviewed about his position as an inspirator of the trilogy. But maybe he’s just sulking for not being rewarded sufficiently in cash.
The Matrix movies have been characterised as a successful combination of Speculation and Spectacle. Speculation in double respects – first of all, of course, they wanted our money and they got it. But also philosophical speculation, where the interesting thoughts, alas, are several thousand years old. The new ones are mostly garbage, deliberately made incomprehensible as a cover-up. In the first part this fact often will pass without notice, as the audience never gets the time to reflect over the contents.
The unusual success of the movies may be due to the capability of the Warchawski brothers to pour old philosophical wine into new vessels, interpreting the sentiments of claustrophobia as well as alienation, hopefully present even in to-day’s – or, rather, yesterday’s –young, computerized, mobile phone dependent, black wearing generation. This they’ve done in the shape of a cinematic spectacle, attractive to young movie goers, including high kicks, air flights defying most natural laws, special effects and explosions en masse. That is things that just too often in this movie genre have been introduced to be a substitute for content instead of interpreting it. We who chose to swallow the red pill in the 20th century already may not be very impressed – but The Matrix was evidently not meant for us.
If the world and the society are what they seem to be to us that would perfectly explain why Hollywood and other ideological workshops make such immense efforts to make people believe something else.
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[1] My recapitulation of the above historical events is supported –and inspired – by Peter Gowan’s text in the British Magazine Labour Focus on Eastern Europe -62/1999.