MIRACLE MILE begins in such an easygoing, relaxed, and light-humored manner that one might be lulled into believing that the world shown to us is as it had always been. But in truth, great revolutions — and even very violent and momentous ones — had to take place for there to be enough material goods and liberties to go around for everyone. Harry can take it easy because the world he lives in is the product of so many political, social, cultural, and economic upheavals; the peace and calm that he takes so much for granted was won through endless conflicts and clashes of all kinds. Paradoxically, it was very difficult and demanding to get ‘here’, but it’s so very easy to forget how we got ‘here’, as if there had been no other kind of reality but ‘here’. (This is why so many Americans make fun of tragedies around the world. They are so used to everything around them being so amusing and funny that they think everything around the world either is a joke or should be treated as one. Onionization of perception. So, even when Americans are appalled by Chinese treatment of dogs, it’s not long before some smartass comedian turns it into a joke, whereupon it becomes something for us to laugh about than cry about. If we tried to end the hogocaust in this nation, late night comedians will crack joke after joke, and no one will take the issue seriously. This is why Liberals are so eager to control the humor around homosexuality. They only want the kind of humor that makes homos look wonderful or mocks ‘homophobes’, but they’re humor-phobic against any jokes that would ridicule the entire gay agenda. You can laugh WITH the homos at the ‘homophobes’ but not AT the homos.) Humanity seeks pleasures and the good life. It undergoes much pain, suffering, and ‘sacrifice’ to get to the promised land of milk and honey, but upon reaching that place, the milk and honey have the effect of tranquilizing the mind, erasing it of everything but feelings of happiness and good times. While blacks bitch and whine about past ‘racism’, relatively few blacks have any sense of history and really just wanna boogie all night long. Though conservatives claim to love their heritage and traditions, most prefer the amnesia of country music culture, the feel-good mantra of mega-mall church faith, and the material bounty of consumerism. This is all very natural in a way. After all, most people bust their butts so that they won’t have to bust their butts; it’s like many Mexicans work hard in the US so that they can go back to Mexico and buy a big house and take it easy; why would they wanna think of the hard times when they can sit around and drink tequila and watch dancing bikini-clad babes on Telemundo? (Of course, not all peoples are like this. If some people are willing to ‘work hard’ and struggle to earn enough to eventually have a good life, some become addicted to the ‘no pain, no gain’ view of life and welcome the struggle as the very essence of life. This is why Mexicans generally reach only so high. What with their low ambitions, they are content to have earned just enough to eat tacos and drink tequila for the rest of their lives. Jews, in contrast, feel they must play for bigger and bigger stakes no matter how much they have. If George Soros were a Mexican, he would have retired with his first million and bought a house with a swimming pool and sat around listening to Mariachi music. But being a Jew, if he has a billion, he has to make two billion, if he has two billion he has to make five billion, and if he has five billion, he has to make ten billion, etc. Most people work hard to eventually take it easy, but some special people work hard to work harder because they love the sense of gamesmanship and power that come with the competition. Jewish God didn’t just wanna be a god among other gods but the only God in town, and every ambitious modern Jew wants to win and own everything. Jewish God purged the cosmos of all other gods, just like neocons purged the GOP of everyone who didn’t agree with Zionist interests. And Jewish business policy seeks to purge the business world of any businessman, corporation, or nation that won’t bow down to Jewish power and agenda. Whether it’s Chick-Fil-A or Iran, it’s to be targeted if Jews say NO.) And even though people don’t wanna get old, one of the advantages of old age is retirement into an easier life, and in that sense, there was a kind of a merging of the old and the young beginning in the 60s; traditionally, Americans expected to work hard all their lives and then retire to a more easygoing life, especially with the promise of Social Security. But beginning in the 60s, many young people asked why they must work so much like their parents just so they could finally take it easy "when I’m sixty-four"? Why couldn’t they just take it easy in their youth to ‘find themselves’? Why wait til they’re much older, by which time there won’t be much left of themselves to find? And by the 1980s, youth culture was no longer in the fresh dawn of youth rebellion but entered the golden years of cultural entrenchment, not least because aging boomers doggedly clung to youth culture; if being young in the 60s really felt young, being young in the 80s felt kinda old as youth culture was no longer young. It’s no wonder that Harry Washello gets on so well with Julie’s retired grandfather.
People wanna be rich but may not necessarily feel proud of how they became rich, another reason for burying the past in favor of amnesia in the omnipresent present. There could be shame or notoriety involved with the past. In ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Max doesn’t merely want the money(earned through gangsterism) but a clean slate so he can forge a new and respectable identity for himself. (Noodles also settles for a new identity but for a different reason. He’s not hiding from himself but from those who’d kill him. Ironically, Max is later targeted by those who know the real him.) After moving on up, George Jefferson has nightmares about cockroaches in the old apartment he used to live calling out to him, "Come back, George, come back George." The privileged daughter in Kenji Mizoguchi’s WOMAN IN THE RUMOR is ashamed of how her mother made her fortune as a madame at a brothel. The guy in GREAT GATSBY is something of a willful amnesiac. Perhaps, the rise of hyper-narcissism among whites, yellows, blacks, browns, and etc. owes something to shame about their past. Even in the modern history of the West, life had been very tough for many whites. Whites who eventually found a good life in California could have had Okie hayseeds as their forebears; if you wanna be a California Girl, why would you want to be associated with the kind of people in THE GRAPES OF WRATH who were desperate to find jobs and housing; nomadism of 60s Counterculture was about traveling around freely to escape work and responsibility in search of fun and ‘meaning’ whereas nomadism of the 1930s was all about hardship and looking for jobs — any kind of job — to eat and survive; 60s counterculture nomadism was about young people getting away from everyone else(and being so hip and cool) whereas 30s Great Depression nomadism was about families trying to remain together amidst the economic woes(which was painful and sad). Many rich Jews had grandparents who were dirty peddlers. Many affluent people in today’s China had dirty peasants as parents or were dirty peasants themselves not long ago. We associate Germany and Japan with wealth, but the state of their economies in the first part of the 20th century faced serious challenges, and hard times followed the aftermath of WWII. Many German women sold their bodies for bars of soap. And any number of 1940s and 1950s Japanese films show desperate poverty and misery. Some may lay the blame of historical amnesia on young people who were later born into prosperity, but in truth, their parents and grandparents were the ones who buried the past in shame. One reason why the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ didn’t much discuss their past was they felt shame in all the misery and privations they’d been through. (On top of that, having grown up ‘tough’, they thought it shameful to even complain about their hardships. If they’d at least taken moral pride in their hardships and relayed their memories to their children and grandchildren, future generations may have felt a closer bond with the past. Instead, many felt shame about their earlier hardships in the prevailing keeping-up-with-the-Jones cultural mode of the postwar era. Furthermore, even those who felt no shame in the earlier struggles thought it unseemly to ‘brag’ of what they’d gone through and survived. Thus, older people had no cultural ammunition against the bombardment of consumerism and hedonism of the new prosperity upon the eyes and ears of young people. Who wanted to think about the Okies when the cool thing was to scream at the Beatles and buy all their albums? To be sure, there was the rise of social consciousness among the young in the 60s, but it was more a vain statement and moral grandstanding than anything concerned with actual reality.) Though her story takes place in the 1930s, the heroine of MILDRED PIERCE could just as easily have been a mother in the 50s or even the 60s trying her best to shield her children from the disheartening facts of life. In that sense, she is as much a villain as a heroine. She works very hard to make a better life for herself and her daughter, but there’s an element of crassness and self-loathing. In some ways, even though the daughter is a loathsome bitch, she understands her mother better than the mother does herself. The mother is selfish in her selflessness. She does so much for her daughter partly because she feels a certain disdain for the world of ordinary people. She wants her daughter to be better than other daughters. She wants her daughter to appreciate her sacrifice, but she showers her daughter in such a manner with the very things that encourage the latter to feel snobby and better than everyone else. She pours gas on the fire and then wonders why the flames are going out of control.
There was a time when Americans were into stuff like GRAPES OF WRATH, but as the good times rolled around in the 50s and 60s with Elvis and Beach Boys, Californian boys or girls were mainly interested in impressing their peers and having a good time. One reason for the demise of the Western genre was probably its theme of struggle and privation(but then, even the Western increasingly became scrubbed clean of everything but the exciting stuff; it was the rare western like THE BIG TRAIL and CIMARRON that showed the whole panorama of the western experience, the everyday stuff as well as the cool gunman stuff; though the grittier revisionist westerns were made in the late 60s and 70s, they were mostly box office failures and faded from the big screen by the mid 70s). While pioneers sought freedom by moving westward, a Westerner couldn’t be free as we define the term — ‘having a good time’ and ‘hip and cool’ sense of a counterculture hippie or 007. For the Westerner, freedom meant waking up early everyday to chop down trees, feed the livestock, shovel manure, dig a hole for the outhouse, till the soil, etc. It meant the freedom to struggle and eke out a living. The family had to stick together to take care of one another and to fight the ‘Injuns’. Everyone had to be tough; even men who weren’t tough by nature had to be manly. Take the Jorgensen character in THE SEARCHERS who’s always saying "by golly". He’s a mild-mannered man, but he knows how to use a gun and teams up with other men to chase after Indians who abducted white womenfolk. In a way, women may be even more willfully amnesiac of the past because they tend to be more look-and-smell conscious. Men can look all sweaty and not smell too good and still be proudly manly, but modern womanhood is closely associated with prettiness, neatness, and pleasant-odor-ness, and it just so happened that womenfolk didn’t take regular showers in the past. Even up to the 1950s, a lot of womenfolk in cities didn’t shower everyday, not least because many white folks lived in tenement houses where several families had to share the same bathroom. (This is where victimology serves to justify a people’s past stinkery. You can say your people were poor and stunk in the past because they were victims and, as such, lacked access to regular shower and soap. The Holocaust motif of the shower room serving as gas chamber is especially powerful in this regard. As Jews in the Nazi camps were dirty and stinky, they obviously wanted nothing more than a shower to clean themselves. But imagine being lured to a shower room and then being gassed to death. It sounds especially cruel.) When white people were awful proud of their history and heritage, they were more interested with the past. But once white history became synonymous with the history of ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘xenophobia’, slavery, imperialism, the Holocaust, and just about every ‘evil’ that one could possibly imagine, whites became warier of their history. At one time, history for most white people had been a source of inspiration, confidence, and justification, but many white people now fear reading about the past because it’s one big finger-pointing of moral condemnation. There was a time when non-whites had been less enthralled with their past since it seemed to be one of decline or defeat vis-a-vis white folks, but this is no longer the case. Now, Jews and gays feel a great deal of pride in their historical suffering. Though whites suffered a lot too, their historical pain is seen as having been of the ‘mundane’ kind, the result of economic hardships, class repression, and warfare, than of something truly EVIL as ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘antisemitism’, and ‘homophobia’. (To be sure, class oppression used to be a major theme, especially on the Left. Indeed, the worst possible epithet among Marxists was ‘bourgeois’, and radical leftists even explained imperialism, National Socialism, and ‘racism’ as mere instruments of the capitalist elites. But with the rise of Jews and Jewish consciousness, the biggest sin among leftists went from ‘class exploitation’ to ‘racism’ and/or ‘antisemitism’, indeed even more so as the Soviet Bloc nations became increasingly anti-Zionist.)
In contrast, there is a certain cachet to the Holocaust and American slavery, not least because both came to be associated with momentous wars defined in terms of good vs evil. Also, Jews and blacks have clear forces to blame for their suffering whereas whites don’t since whites mostly suffered under white systems. Jews can blame gentiles, and blacks can blame whites. But it’s murkier for whites to blame whites.
This was why class-consciousness was so useful and effective as a means of creating a kind of white victim consciousness. The idea of whites oppressing whites didn’t sound so compelling since it was ‘all in the family’, at least in Western and Central Europe(as Eastern, Southern, and Southeastern Europe had historically been attacked by non-white or non-western forces all throughout history) — since Western Europe came to define and dominate the Western discourse, the narrative of Mongol invasions, Turkish occupation, and North African incursions came to be mostly ignored, especially as such were evidence of non-white domination over whites; white imperialists of the Northern Europe didn’t want to spread the notion of non-whites gaining power over whites as it undermined the narrative of white superiority. But if one employs class consciousness, the white masses could see themselves as noble victim group apart from the white capitalist class. Though Marxism began as a radical Jewish ideology and greatly harmed Western Civilization, it paradoxically also came to abet a kind of white nationalism. Multi-culturalism today blames all whites — rich, middle, and poor — for the ‘evils of racism’, but classic Marxism spared non-elite whites of moral blame since they were regarded as victims of class oppression and as the vanguard of world revolution. Thus according to Marxist tenets, not all whites need take responsibility for the evils of the world. Only the upper class capitalists need to answer for historical crimes. (Hitler cleverly used a variation of this, thereby absolving the German people of the humiliation of defeat in WWI and the economic depression that followed. Hitler assured the German masses that they were a good, noble, and courageous people who’d lost the war ONLY BECAUSE venal politicians stabbed them in the back. And the economic problems were the result of International Jewry out to fleece, subjugate, and corrupt the German people. So, Germans were good victims, and only the Jew-infested elites were bad; and Hitler, if given the power, would set things right by empowering the masses.) Indeed, after WWII, communist nations remembered the Holocaust as a class crime than a race crime. Polish communists emphasized that the Nazi ‘fascist-capitalists’ killed the innocent masses while hardly mentioning the special Nazi animus against Jews. And Stalin grew ever more suspicious of Jews as they appeared to be drifting from the class-centric ideology of communism to the tribal ideology of Zionism. (Communists argued that fascists were nothing but puppets of monopoly capitalists.) Since most white folks weren’t rich, they could feel moral pride as a noble victim group according to communism. The blame fell only on upper class whites, with most of white history being remembered as a case of white masses suffering under the aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
This is one reason why Jews lost interest in Marxism. Though radical Jews used communism to overthrow the gentile elites in Russia, communism eventually filled the gentile masses with great moral pride in their class victim consciousness, which, in time, morphed into white national consciousness as well — in the USSR, Soviet Power became synonymous with Great White Russian Power. (As Jews have higher IQ and a more intellectual culture, they were bound to rise higher than everyone else even in a communist nation, and so, it was only a matter of time before masses of dimwit gentiles would grow resentful of Jews as the new bourgeoisie, especially since communist societies are supposed to be about equality for all. This class resentment against the neo-elite in the Soviet Union was bound to turn into something resembling white gentile consciousness against Jewish privilege. As long as class identity is at the center of a nation’s ideology, it favors gentiles over Jews as Jews are bound to do better and rise higher. But if the politics of racial identity is at the center and is defined by Jews, whites of all stripes — rich, middle, and poor — can be baited as ‘evil anti-Semites’ by even the richest and most privileged Jews. Thus, what goes by the name of ‘anti-racism’ is really a new form of Jewish ‘racism’ that favors even rich venal Jews over poor whites. A rich Jew can pull all manner of dirty tricks to enrich himself, but if a poor white grumbles about Jewish power, he is struck down as a ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’ ‘anti-Semite’ who dares to ‘scapegoat’ a helpless Jew.) And once this mass white Russian consciousness took hold, Jewish grip on power became more tenuous. The white Russian masses — and other goy masses in Eastern Bloc nations — came to see even communist Jews as the new alien elites.
It is for this reason that the New Progressivism isn’t really leftist at all. All this stuff about ‘gay rights’ is a form of haute-leftism, aristo-leftism, or privileftism. In the past, the radical left used to side with the masses of workers — and farmers — against the aristocrats and bourgeoisie. Leftist leaders stood for basic things of relevance to the masses — land, bread, peace, justice, etc. — and attacked stuff like gay culture as part of bourgeois capitalist decadence. Today, the fact that New Progressivism is so heavily weighted toward gay stuff is proof that its main concerns are elitist and privilege-centric, especially as homos have traditionally been fancy tutti-fruiters who designed fluffy-duffy stuff for the rich and famous. Flowery gays always catered to rich, refined, and sophisticated elites who could afford haute fashions and designs — like the folks in DEVIL WEARS PRADA. Notice that the New Progressivism disdains the white masses of working class folks and middle class folks but sings praises to everything whoopsy-doo gay. Same goes for black politics. There was a time when leftism tried to link up with poor blacks. Now, most white and Jewish liberals wanna help create a separate ‘clean-cut’ mulatto community — made up of the likes of Obama, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, and John McWhorter(and even better if black & gay) — that is ever-so-gay friendly, while finding clever ways to push out troublesome unruly masses of blacks out of the ‘inner-cities’ marked for eventual ‘gentrification’. Jewish and white liberal elites cherry-pick the Nice Negroes for themselves while dumping the rotten apple blacker Negroes to the less privileged white communities and then accuse whites who complain about rising crime as ‘racists’. Liberal white/Jewish elites take the Malcolm Gladwells and John McWhorters of the world while ‘racist’ white masses have to deal with the Mike Tysons. Since privileged liberals love the Gladwells and McWhorters while white masses fear and/or hate the Tysons, rich liberals must be wonderful while less privileged whites must be ‘racist’. This is how the vile scum who write for Huffington, Salon, and Slate really think. 90% of bitching and whining on ‘progressive’ sites is about prioritizing ‘gay privilege’(as the most compelling moral issue of the day) and showering fancy mulattos with special favors to serve the liberal white community.
Perhaps, the sense of time-out-of-time-ness is more powerful in L.A. due to the overlapping of so many narratives and styles. In some ways, L.A. is one of the youngest part of America. L.A. developed considerably later than Eastern cities like NY and Boston, Southern cities like Atlanta, and Midwest cities like Chicago and St. Louis. Yet, in some ways, L.A is the oldest major American city since the Spanish discovered that part of the world before Anglo-Americans even settled the East Coast. While the SW territories were sparsely settled by the Spanish, the Hispanic imprint across the region was undeniable, which is why there is the Hispanic motif of Carlotta in VERTIGO and the woman who sings "Crying" in Spanish in MULHOLLAND DR. — there’s a sense of lost history dug up via psych-archeology, making the song ring with both familiarity and unfamiliarity. Due to Spanish expansion, the Southwest, in contrast to the Central and Upper West, was less of a wilderness. Anglos took over an under-developed but not an undeveloped world.
Another surreal aspect of L.A. owes to the contrast between its nature and its artificiality. There are wonderful forest and national parks around the L.A. region and the Pacific coastline. But L.A. has also become synonymous with Hollywood and Disneyland. Such profusion of timeless nature and preponderance of fads and fashion has prevented LA from developing a character as distinct as that of Chicago, Atlanta, or New York. When we think of L.A., there’s also the contradiction between taking-it-easy/dreams-come-true and non-stop-ambition/dog-eat-dog-competition. Hollywood and the music industry sell fantasies of fun and pleasure — California Girls, Muscle Beach, Surfing and Sunshine, Sprawling Suburbs hard to tell apart from the Sprawling city, and Mall Rat culture, etc. — , but people in the entertainment industry are among the biggest cutthroat sons-of-bitches in the world. The success of Jews in both L.A. and N.Y. — as well in Chicago and Washington D.C. — show that Jews have many adaptive talents and modes of competition. Whether intellectually, culturally, politically, artistically, musically, fashion-istically, and etc, Jews have shown an ability to excel in just about everything. This is why it’s difficult to pigeonhole Jewish success. Classical anti-Semites prefer to diminish Jewish talent and ability as nothing but ‘copying’ or ‘imitating’ or ‘theorizing’ or ‘marketing’ or whatever, but the fact is Jews have succeeded in just about every field under just about any condition. There’s a big difference between the classic New York Jew and the nouveau L.A. Jew, but the L.A. Jew has been just as successful as the N.Y. Jew. Intellectual or populist, deep or shallow, Jews know how to beat out the competition with their quicksilver brains. Jews also did remarkably well in the Deep South as retailers. A Southern Anglo might feel like a fish out of water in the Northeast, and an Northeastern Anglo might feel like a fish out of water in the South, and both might feel like strangers in the West even though they’re all Anglos. In contrast, even though Jews are not even Anglo, they might effectively worm themselves more effectively into the world of Northeast Anglos, the world of Southern Anglos, and the world of Western Anglos. Perhaps, the Jewish and Anglo approach/attitude is fundamentally different in this sense: Anglos are used to the sense of home. Their home had been Britain for a long stretch. And then, they created new permanent homes in America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And even where they were minorities, as in India, Hong Kong, and Rhodesia, they made themselves the ‘permanent masters’ over the natives. Thus, they sought to remake non-British lands in the image of Britain itself. So, Anglos got used to the idea of permanent home at home and away from home. Anglos also expected others to adopt or adapt to the Anglo way and generally abhorred the idea of going ‘native’ or adapting to the modes of other cultures. In contrast, Jews were without a home, and so they perfected the art of ‘getting along’ or ‘playing along’. Jews did this in Europe for centuries. And when Jews spread out to other parts of the world, they did so not as masters but as followers, hangers-on, and taggers-along. Jews followed the Anglos, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese in their various empire building enterprises. So, in both the Old World and New World, Jews never expected to have a home of their own. They always expected to be guests in the home of other peoples, and so, they perfected the ability to ‘fit in’ and ‘play along’. Thus, even when Jews settled into a majority goy community, they never fully became part of that goy community, and instead, perfected the art of imitating and playing along to the ways of the community, in the process ‘perfecting’ the imitation so that Jews did the goy stuff better than the goy did. (It’s like Jews wrote Christmas songs better than the Christians did but without the commitment to the Christian Faith. Jews ‘perfected’ their imitation of Christmas-ness not to be Christians but to profit from and to gain control over Christians, and this may explain why so many Christians have become so enamored with Jews, indeed, as if Jews are actually more Christian than real Christians are. Homosexuals learned this from Jews and used similar manipulations to create the sense of the ‘new normal’, which is why so many straight Americans think that ‘gay marriage’ is a truer form of marriage than real marriage is. It’s like David in A.I. is, in some ways, supposed to be more of a boy than a real boy because he wishes so desperately to be a real boy. The notion of the American Dream has thus been corrupted by Jews and homos as something that favors dreaminess over reality, which is why the so-called ‘Dream Act’ would bestow short-cut citizenship to Illegals. You see, Illegals have this ‘dream’ of becoming Americans — just like David in A.I. has a dream of being a real boy — and, since America is all about a ‘dream’, we must make their dream come true, just as we must make the dream of homos to get married come true. Otherwise, as destroyers of ‘dreams’, we have betrayed the true spirit of America. It’s like what the Stockard Channing says of the homo Negro or homogro hustler in SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION; he may have been a fraud but he so desperately dreamt of living the privileged life, and so, his dreaminess somehow ennobled his transgressions, whereas, her children, born to privilege, just took the good life for granted as worthless brats. Now, having dreams is nice, but the notion that anything has value because it is ‘dreamt’ is ludicrous; Ivy League colleges ought to just admit everyone who ‘dreams’ of going there since, well, Americanism is all about making ‘dreams come true’. Or since the American Dream is about everyone having a home, how about we universalize home ownership for all the ‘dreamers’. We tried that already? How did it turn out? It used to be that the American Dream meant that you wanted something and were willing to work for it according to agreed-upon rules, but now, it’s come to mean certain groups should get whatever they dream/demand; so Jews can gamble on Wall Street but get their ‘nest egg’ back at our expense; the Albert Brooks character in LOST IN AMERICA was truly prophetic of the things-to-come in the future. It is really a cynical manipulation of the notion of American Dream by Jews and homos to push their sick and perverse agenda. To some extent, the white gentiles elites eventually lost the stomach to tell others to work and attain their dreams since so many of them came to be into privilege. If at least you built your own empire, you can take pride in your hard work and tell others that they too must sweat and strive to make dreams come true. But if you were born to privilege and luxury and had it easy all your life, you’re loathe to talk about hard work since everything was handed to you on a silver platter. Who are you to be lecturing others about hard work? So, as American elites filled up with an elite class of people who inherited their privilege, they lacked the spine to tell other Americans to make things work on their own. Since they themselves were born to privilege and was given everything, they felt maybe everyone should be bestowed with the same ‘rights’. It was generosity borne of ‘guilt’ and weakness than of conviction and strength.) Thus, a part of the Jewish mind-set was ever ready to pack up and go elsewhere and Zelig-ishly change into something else. Paradoxically, the lack of Jewish commitment to a particular goy majority culture enabled them to imitate it so well. Jews didn’t so much see it as a new life(to embrace fully) but as a new production(for Broadway); normal life is accepted and lived unconsciously and complacently, whereas a production is prepared and processed creatively and competitively — and this may explain why Jews feel such rapport with homos, who also love the artifice of playacting, what with men acting like women, and etc; it’s no wonder that Jews and homos team up in Mel Brooks’s THE PRODUCERS. Jews approached the goy culture with their minds/wits and thus understood things about it that the goyim were blind too in their complacent acceptance of their traditions, symbols, and values. For Christians, Christmas was their Holiday that went way back; they never thought about it. For Jews, it was something to study, dissect, manipulate, and ‘perfect’ into pop cultural expressions and mega-retail ideas.
In contrast, Anglos who settled in the East sought to build a new England to call their permanent home. And Anglos in the South developed their own rooted sense of culture and identity. Same with Western Anglos with their saddles and winchester rifles. Though Anglos changed in character and attitude as they moved from place to place, they were trying to re-establish a sense of permanent/dominant home wherever they went. Thus, Northeastern Anglos, Southern Anglos, and Western Anglos became very distinct from one another and today, many cannot see eye-to-eye on anything. In contrast, modern Jews didn’t try to define a single correct form of Jewishness or how-to-be-Jewish. Though NY Jews could be very New-York-ish, they could easily morph into San Fran Jews or Miami Jews or LA Jews once they made the move. The division between liberal Jews and neocon Jews isn’t as unbridgeable as between liberal Anglos and conservative Anglos. Liberal Anglo-ism and conservative Anglo-ism are divided not only ideologically but regionally. Even Northern Anglo conservatism is very different from Southern Anglo conservatism. But Jewish ideologies are never quite fixed. Neocons and liberal Zionists may pretend to squabble in public, but they are all wily Jews under the cover. It’s no wonder that Jewish Trotskyites so easily became Jewish conservatives. It’s no wonder that Jewish champions of the working class became Jewish champions of open borders and then became Jewish champions of ‘gay rights’.
For much of the 20th century, Hollywood was rather odd as the official factory/outlet of American Popular Culture that, however, happened to be controlled by Jews who were only 2 to 3% of the American population. Before Jews took over Wall Street, Washington, and Ivy League universities, they took over American popular culture, the factory of ‘dreams’.
Though Jews amassed great power in NY, they didn’t gain total domination of its top institutions until the late 70s and early 80s, except in media and advertising, which they did earlier. In contrast, Jews gained dominance in the movie industry almost from the beginning. Part of the reason for the discrepancy was that Eastern Jews were up against some formidable and deeply-entrenched elite wasp forces in the East Coast, especially in law firms, Wall Street, Ivy Leagues, and government. Jews had an easier time in the West because they were up against Western Anglos who happened to be far more simple-minded than the intellectual East Coast Wasps Brahmins whose roots and networks of power could be traced to the beginning of America. Jews, ever so keen on the strategy of divide-and-conquer, feared the unity of Eastern Wasps and Western Anglos against the Jews, and so, for a time at least, many Western Jews egged on Western Anglos to see Eastern Anglos as their enemies — just like Jews today encourage Northern and Midwest Anglos to see Southern Anglos as a bunch of ‘bigots’. The Western myth was useful to Jews in pitting the Western Anglo model against the Eastern Anglo model. By making the West the new icon of Americanism, it encouraged tough Western Anglos to distinguish themselves from stuffy Eastern Anglos. Hollywood Jews also loved the gangster genre for it romanticized the rise of urban ethnic power against the Anglo-American order. Though most gangster films pretended to carry the moral message that "crime doesn’t pay", they essentially glamorized the rise of ethnics by-any-means-necessary. Jews love THE GODFATHER because the clan-ism, ruthlessness, and cunningness of the Sicilian Corleones in their rise against the Anglo-American establishment paralleled the ethnic rise of Jews. (One thing Wasps never understood about Jews is how ‘personal’ Jews take everything. In THE GODFATHER universe, gangsters make a distinction between what is ‘business’ and what is ‘personal’.
‘Business’ may help you or hurt you, but it’s the closest thing to the ‘rule of law’ among the hoods. So, when the Sollozzo the ‘Turk’ made a move against Vito Corleone, it was ‘business’. Sollozzo had respect for Don Corleone, but he saw himself as the new kid on the block. So, just as young Vito got rid of Fanucci, Sollozzo made a move on Vito Corleone. He calls it ‘business’, and he’s right. He didn’t mean any ‘disrespect’ to Vito Corleone. He had no personal animus. He was playing by the rules of ‘business’ among gangsters, i.e. if an old Don is ‘slipping’, then get rid of him so and take the power yourself. Tom Hagen is correct in his assessment and urges Sonny to cut a deal with Sollozzo. It’s a terrible thing for a son to do — make peace with a man who tried to kill his father — , but Sonny thinks that maybe Hagen is right. It is ‘business’, and that’s how hoods play the game. But Michael sees it differently. Though he rationalizes his alternative proposal — the assassination of Sollozzo — as ‘business’, he’s really motivated by ‘personal’ issues. Sollozzo tried to kill Michael’s father, and Michael is gonna take revenge, and there are no ifs and buts about it. So, even as Michael outwardly plays the game of ‘business’, he’s really driven by ‘personal’ emotions. His most formidable adversary, Hyman Roth, is the same way. Roth acts as if Michael is like his own son, but he can’t let go of the fact that Michael killed Moe Green. The Jewish soul/heart is very vindictive and vengeful. White gentiles may think everything is hunky dory because they now love Jews and wanna get along, but Jews don’t feel that way. To the Jews, white gentiles will always be the vile antisemitic scum who stole the Jewish God — and made Him into the Christian God — , carried out pogroms, forced Jews into ghettos, committed genocide, and didn’t let Jes into country clubs or marry their daughters. Also, the mere fact that white gentiles are better-looking than Jews fills Jews with intense personal envy and hatred toward whites. Jews feel like the evil queens in SNOW WHITE and SLEEPING BEAUTY. It doesn’t matter if white Americans fought Nazi Germans. Jews remember that prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the majority of Americans didn’t want to get involved. If by some chance, USSR instead of Japan had attacked the US in 1941, Americans might have allied with Germans to fight the Russians — and let Germans kill all the Jews they want. Also, Jews see all northern Europeans and Americans of northern European stock as latent Nazis, i.e. ‘good’ on the outside but infected with the ineradicable bug of antisemitism on the inside, which is why Jews are so tireless in their ideological fumigation of political incorrectness. And indeed, even though most white gentiles are not crypto-Nazis, Jews are correct in feeling that, in a climate of total free speech, there would be lots of discussion about Jewish power that will poke holes in the Jewish dam of power, finally crumble and crash. Jews feel a great inferiority complex because they feel that the ‘Aryans’ and Wasps look better. Even if handsome white gentiles are sincerely good-willed toward Jews, the paranoid Jewish mind thinks, "I’ll bet he thinks of me as an ugly hook-nosed curly haired Jew!!" Jews know they cannot play fair with whites as whites can make a good case against Jewish power. So, there are two sets of rules for everything. If Jews were to secretly/illegally record powerful white gentiles saying nasty things about Jews, the main focus by the media will be on the nasty comments, but if white gentiles were to secretly/illegally record powerful Jews saying nasty things about whites, the main focus by the media will be on the illegality perpetrated against hapless Jews. Anyway, Wasps eventually figured that in a nation founded on an ‘idea’ like the United States, everything should be decided by ‘business’. The ‘business’ of America is about power and wealth based on meritocracy for equally free individuals. Since Wasps had violated these rules of ‘business’ by having denied equal rights to non-whites in the past, they figured they should go the extra step in being in ‘business’ in the postwar era. They should let the ‘best man win’ and leave it at that. And so, the more intelligent and ambitious Jews kept winning and winning over the less intelligent Wasps. What Wasps failed to grasp was that even though Jews rose to the top via ‘business’ of individual freedom and meritocracy, Jews were not going to allow ‘business’ to get the better of them one day. If the business of America is ‘let the best man win, shake his hands, and leave it at that’ and if Wasps finally accepted their defeat at the hands of Jews on those grounds, Jews are deadset on holding power as permanent elites regardless of the rules of ‘business’. Jews with their haggly-waggy and hideous-insidious Semitic hearts have no use for gentlemanly rules or conscience. Like Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth, Jews will do ‘business’ when it suits them, but they are really driven by the ‘personal’ agenda of totally defeating their enemies, real and perceived, and maintaining total control. When Tom Hagen asks Michael in THE GODFATHER PART II, "you wanna wipe everyone out?", Michael replies, "I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies." But what is meant by ‘enemy’? In the end, Michael even decides to wipe out Roth, Pentageli, and Fredo even after they are no longer any threat to him. Jews are like Sicilians in this regard, only much smarter and more savvy. They are not suckers who believe in good-will without outsiders; if Jews practice goodwill, it is only amongst themselves. Just like Vito Corleone waited an entire lifetime to kill the man who killed his family, Jews have a vendetta to totally defeat the white race. It didn’t matter that the old man in THE GODFATHER PART II had mellowed out, was supplying Vito Corleone with olive oil, and had only a few more yrs to live. It didn’t matter that Vito also made his money by killing other men, even innocent ones. Vito couldn’t let it go; he had to get near the old man and rip out his guts. In THE GODFATHER PART ONE, Vito makes peace with the Tataglia clan and pledges he will not be the one to strike first, but he’s being very devious; while he intends to keep his word and does, he is actually preparing Michael to wipe out all the enemies. Similarly, Jews acted like they just wanted to get along in America and become good Americans and make America a fair society for all. But Jews have long seen white gentiles, especially of Northern stock, as scumbags to destroy and kill. Indeed, consider how Tim Wise the dirty Jew talks of the Greatest Generation and happily welcomes its passing into history as the Greatest Genocide of White Folks. The WWII generation of mostly white gentiles fought a horrific war and saved the free world from Nazism. They probably thought Jews appreciated their heroism and sacrifice. But Jews hated them almost as much as they hated the Nazis. And now that white America is fading into twilight, the Jew sticks a knife into the old white man’s belly and gloats in delight. It is the Jewish way and has always been. It’s like South African Jews messed it up for white Afrikaners, but then, they move to white nations and expect to be given sanctuary from murderous Negroes. They do this without any remorse or guilt conscience. Guilt conscience regarding other peoples exists only in Christianity. Jews and Muslims never felt sorry for what they did to others; Chinese, Japanese, and Africans never felt sorry for their deeds against others either. But Christians, especially morally puritanical Protestants, were animated by moral doubt and guilt. Christian guilt conscience, when restrained and controlled by white gentiles, played a positive role in bringing forth social and political reforms, but once it fell into the hands of Jewish radicals, it was molded and manipulated into a form of suicidalism for the white race. Also, white gentiles need to understand how the minority mind-set is different from the majority one. As solid majorities in Europe and in North America, white gentiles came to relax about their power and take it for granted. Thus, white gentiles fought brutal wars against American Indians, but once the dust had settled, many white folks figured it was time to bury the hatchet and make peace with the Red Man and smoke the peace pipe and even apologize for excessive white brutality. As whites held the power in America, such gestures were decent and noble. Jews, being a small minority, never had and never will develop similarly lax attitudes about power. Jews know that no matter how rich and powerful they become, they comprise only 2% of the US population. If they were to lose control of information and the narrative in America, they could find themselves in big trouble, as happened to Russian oligarchic Jews when Vladimir Putin came on the scene. Minority elites have to be extra-tough and extra-dogged in their wielding of power, just like a lion tamer must constantly make sounds with the whip to remind lions who’s boss. So, it’s naive wishful thinking to hope that Jews will ever become like Wasps. Even if Jews become even more powerful and richer than they are now, they will always be more mindful of their weaknesses and vulnerabilities than of their strengths and advantages. Jews, lacking the power of demography, will always be in the vicious weasel mode. Since Jews cannot be the majority in America, they figure the next best thing is to destroy the majority power of whites, which has already been accomplished as more than 50% of new babies being born in America are non-white. The idiocy of American conservatism is it is most slavish to the group that has done and is doing it the most harm.) Today, Hollywood is even more surreal because its actual power is greater despite the extinction of the old studio system. There was a time when Hollywood studios didn’t merely have the power but exuded the image of power with their giant movie-making complexes; old studios were like dinosaurs that once ruled the earth, and their decline in the 60s was seen as irreversible and permanent, but in their stead, a new breed of moguls and visionaries streamlined and rebuilt a new Hollywood that was far more adaptable to changes and new fashions, and therefore, far more formidable. The great movie studio backlots have disappeared, and the Hollywood industry is no longer necessarily IN the Hollywood area.
In contrast, in physical terms, Harvard is still the same university in Cambridge despite additional buildings. The great New York museums are the same museums in the same place. But, much of New Hollywood, like much of new Las Vegas, is entirely new.
And with massive poor white flight and brown flight away from California, much of California may be remade into a less populous state with more rich liberal white and Jewish folks. Nothing seems to be permanent, fixed, or stable in L.A. and San Francisco. Even their kind of ‘liberalism’ has seen vast changes. San Francisco used to be famous for bohemians and hippies, but it’s now essentially the paradise for rich high-tech geeks. Los Angeles used to be the city of California Girls but now it’s more a case of Brown Drown and Hello Yellow, which I suppose are still preferable to Black Attack. The only constant is that Jews and gay are growing ever more powerful, and everyone else is lining up to suck Jewish cock and kiss homo ass.
Anyway, given the ways of L.A. it was the perfect setting for MIRACLE MILE. It’s a place where everything’s real and unreal. In contrast, Martin Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS, crazy as it is, is very clearly New-York-ish in tics and neuroses. New-York-ish-ness thrives on specificity whereas LA-ish-ness thrives on you-can-be-anything-goes. If you are not New-York-ish, you’re a fish out of water in NY, but even if you’re not L.A.-ish, you’re still L.A.-ish because part of L.A.-ishness is the sense that you can be whatever in the city of artifice.
Though MIRACLE MILE can be designated as an "LA movie", the concept is less clear because the very idea of L.A. is less clear. While N.Y. is very diverse in culture, ethnicity, and income, people have a clear idea of what New York culture is all aboutt, not least because(despite its separation into boroughs) everything and everyone are so crowded together. So, even if blacks, Italians, Jews, Anglos, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Muslims, and etc. don’t see eye to eye in NY, they have no choice but to be packed in together as New Yorkers. In contrast, the spread-out feel and the gently sloped quality of much of L.A. region made it possible to put off indefinitely the meaning of what it means to be an Angeleno. Perhaps, this was one reason why California Anglos weren’t properly resistant to the vast demographic changes that were about to take place. All that sunshine, space, surfing, and ‘come and knock on our door’ daydreaming put them at ease.
This sense of time-out-of-time-ness made a splash in 1977 when STAR WARS began with the words, "Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away..." What Lucas did was combine elements of science fiction with fairytales, a case of ‘once upon a time in a space opera’. It wasn’t original but seemed bold with all its state-of-the-art special effects. Generally, science fiction stories were set in the future, but in the Lucas universe, it had all happened long long ago in a mythical fairytale land. Though time-juggling was nothing new in science fiction, Lucas, along with Spielberg, created a whole new template for the mainstream audience. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, unlike STAR WARS, was set in the present(late 70s) but upended the sense of time(and place). Airplanes that had disappeared during WWII reappear in a Mexican desert. It was if the past was present, present was past. And the space aliens link us to the glimpse of the infinite. It was 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as a birthday party. Interestingly, the juggling of historical time in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS paralleled Spielberg’s juggling of the entire history of filmmaking styles. The opening credits remind us of Kubrick’s 2001. The winds blowing across the dust in the first scene reminds us of Kurosawa’s powerful use of natural elements. The Mexican soldiers or officers could be right out of TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE or THE WILD BUNCH. The shot of the stranded ship in the Gobi desert reminds us of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Spielberg’s symphonic camera movements and looming close-ups could be right out of Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Indeed, it’s almost like pop-Nietzschean representation of Americana. Instead of ‘Aryan’ heroes and heroines presented in god-like proportions and postures, regular Americans are presented in a larger-than-life manner. Government operations — the speech by the French astronomer Lacombe(Francois Truffaut) inside a large auditorium and the marching of secret agents in sunglasses — are reminiscent of the visual arrangements in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. And the final encounter with the space aliens borrow certain cues from the Nuremberg Rally and the closing ceremony of the 1936 German Olympics. (There is some of this in E.T. as well. Consider the opening scene where the space aliens are collecting plants in a dark forest when humans suddenly appear as drive them away. As the space ship ascends into the sky, the rays from the flashlights form a pattern similar to Albert Speer’s columns of lights at Nazi rallies. E.T. is left behind and hiding from humans like a Jew from Nazis or a fugitive slave from white southerners. Spielberg’s message is clear: there is a latent Nazi-nature within white gentile Americans. Though the humans in the opening scene were only being curious and even though the American government that later takes control of Elliott and E.T. turn out to be decent — like the government forces in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS — , there is a sense that these good Americans could, under different circumstances, turn into evil Americans. Americans searching the forest for a strange creature out of mere curiosity, under different circumstances, could be searching for Jews to kill. By golly, after all, what’s the real difference white gentile Germans and white gentile Americans? What if Japan hadn’t attacked the US and what if UK had made an alliance with Germany? Though government officials tracking E.T. mean no harm, there’s the ominous feeling of Southern officials hunting for fugitive black slaves. Spielberg made three movies about American race issue: THE COLOR PURPLE, AMISTAD, and LINCOLN, and all three films show that the goodness of white Americans cannot be taken for granted. America was divided between the idea racial equality and the idea racial inequality throughout its history, with the victory of the former never a sure thing. And even though Americans overcame the cancer of ‘racism’, it hasn’t gone away and there’s always the danger of relapse. LINCOLN is about the very difficult struggle of good Americans finally prevailing over evil Americans. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is, on the surface, about good Americans fighting bad Germans, but it implies that the good Americans could just as well have been the bad Germans. After all, most of the soldiers in the movie are just following orders, and in that sense, are no better or worse than German soldiers. If they had been born as Germans, would they not have done as Hitler ordered them? So, the stuff about ‘saving Ryan’ is really about how they come to save their own souls by turning FROM soldiers-who-take-orders INTO soldiers-who-realize-that-they-are-indeed-better-than-the-bad-Germans-because-they-risk-their-lives-to-save-a-poor-kid. Initially, they were reluctant to go on a mission to save Ryan, implying that white gentile soldiers who don’t wanna risk their lives for one of their own aren’t exactly gonna be thrilled about saving Jews. Thus, it’s imperative that they come to believe in saving Ryan as an emotional/moral conduit to wanting to save Jews. The great irony is that the white gentiles’ growing sympathy for Jews eventually undermined their concern for their own kind. Today, America sacrifices thousands of Ryans to go fight and die in wars for global Zionist interests. We need a movie called SENDING PRIVATE RYAN ALL OVER THE WORLD TO SERVE JEWS WHO ARE DESTROYING THE WHITE RACE. It’s an elaborate variation of the old trope in WWII TV series where German soldiers were differentiated from American soldiers: whereas Americans did everything possible — even laying down their own arms — to save fellow soldiers held hostage by Germans, Germans ruthlessly shot their own men held hostage by Americans in order to kill more Americans. So, Spielberg’s movies are as much about fear of white Americans as about affection for them. On the one hand, Spielberg is happy that his tribal kind found a good life and much success and wealth in America. But on the other hand, Spielberg fears that there’s a latent side of white America that can, under different circumstances, can become ‘hateful’ and murderous. After all, US used to be a slave nation; after all, white Americans wiped out the American Indians. For some reason though, Spielberg never made anything about poor Indians, and maybe it’s because the plight of Indians is rather similar to that of Palestinians under the iron heel of Zionist imperialists. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T. Americans seem to act like Nazis... but then, turn out to be good guys, and so, we can all breathe a sigh of relief about ourselves. Spielberg is subliminally telling us that there is a good side and evil side in our hearts — the evil side that wants to hunt down the ‘nigger slave’ or kill a ‘subhuman kike’ vs the good side that wants to help the magic Negro or save a poor saintly Jew — , and for us to be win the affection of a lovable creature like E.T., we must go with our ‘better angels’. Spielberg subliminally accuses us of latent Nazism but then absolves us of the accusation by having us cheer for the good side. People associate Spielberg’s movies with warmth and trust, but a closer inspection reveals that the element of trust in his works is always conditional. It’s like the Tom Cruise character trusts his colleagues in the first third of MINORITY REPORT, but when HE becomes the target, all his friends suddenly turn ‘Nazi’ on him and he must flee as the ‘hunted Jew’. Homos pull the same psychology on us, not-so-subtly implying that there is the evil ‘homophobic’ side of us and the wonderful homomaniac side of us, and in order for us to be covered with kissy-wissies and huggy-wugs in the New Normal Order, we must repress the ‘homophobic’ side and choose the homomaniacal side, thus becoming ‘more evolved’. And notice how Elliott’s soul/body fuses with that of E.T. so that when E.T. feels pain, Elliott feels the pain too. When E.T. feels sick, Elliott feels sick too. In other words, goy hearts and minds must ‘share the pain’ of Jews and Negroes. If Jews feel a certain way, we too must feel the same way. It’s no wonder Heritage Foundation fired Jason Richwine. American conservatism is now fused heart and soul with the neocon agenda. Elliott could also be a kind of indirect allusion. He looks like the kid in THE OMEN who looks sort of like Adolf Hitler. So, his link with Damien indirectly links him with Hitler. In this sense, in a way, E.T. could be a Jewish fantasy where the boy Hitler is reborn as American suburban kid and learns to love the figure of the fugitive slave or Jew-in-hiding as represented by E.T., who looks like a cross between Carl Sagan the Jew and Whoopie Goldberg the Negress — who later starred in THE COLOR PURPLE.) Spielberg, to his credit, has spoken of his debt to Riefenstahl as well as to Disney, an admirer of Riefenstahl. The scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of Asian-Indians pointing to the sky owes to fascist pageantry and especially the cinema of Fritz Lang. Though Lang, a half-Jew, fled from the Nazis and worked in Hollywood, perhaps no film artist did more to lay down the foundation for what came to be known as fascist aesthetics, at least in film. Interestingly enough, the screenplay of METROPOLIS was written by Thea Von Harbou, who was, at the time, Lang’s wife. She was a proto-fascist and intended METROPOLIS to be a fascist sci-fi epic proposing the Third Way that could unite the capitalists with the proletariat. If Soviet communist cinema glorified the overthrow of the bourgeoisie/aristocratic classes, METROPOLIS hoped for a unity between the high and the low.
(Many of early Soviet films were all about ceaseless fury of chaos, motion, and destructive energy, as if the revolutionary storm was laying waste to everything in its path. In contrast, the cinema of Lang and later Riefenstahl was one of construction and unity, the dream of melding the upper elements with lower elements in an organic whole, the dream bridging the destinies of heroes and gods.) METROPOLIS envisioned a fascist union of all social elements, and it’s no wonder Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels loved the film’s vision and message. Lang also made the NIBELUNGEN SAGA. His two best films are probably M and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, the latter often regarded as a not-so-subtle critique of the rise of fascism in Germany. Actually, neither film is blatantly political and, as such, open to all sorts of ideological interpretations. Though certainly not pro-fascist, their view of human nature, so unremittingly dark and disturbing, discourage any hope of ‘rational’ or utopian solutions to social problems.
Though Riefenstahl had a singularly great eye, she owed a great debt to Lang and the German filmmakers of the ‘mountain-climbing’ genre. She also borrowed elements from the Soviets, even if mainly in opposition; anti-inspiration is a kind of inspiration. Given the cross-influences in cinema, it’s not always easy to identify what is and isn’t fascist aesthetics in cinema. The simplest answer would be ‘those movies made in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’, but in fact, many such movies were little more than pale imitations of Hollywood movies. Most films made in Nazi Germany were musicals, romances, and genre films that were hardly distinguishable from the Hollywood product. On both sides of the Atlantic, the movie industry mostly wanted to make money and give people the fantasies that they wanted: the mass opiate cinema of deception. I mean no one learnt anything real about the Old South by watching GONE WITH THE WIND, no more than THE WIZARD OF OZ had something real to say about Kansas. Similarly, most Soviet films weren’t like the experimental works of Eisenstein, Pudovskin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov. The main admirers of such films were intellectuals, not least in the free West. Your average Soviet citizen preferred the films of Charlie Chaplin and the like, and the Soviet Union also made a whole bunch of pale imitations of the Hollywood formula.
Interestingly, the two biggest movies of 1977 were surprising variations of the sci-fi genre and, of course, came to entirely alter the future of cinema. To some extent, STAR WARS was inspired by FLASH GORDON and the like, but for Lucas, who’d come to cinema via inspiration drawn from Akira Kurosawa and under the tutelage of Francis Ford Coppola, the stakes were much higher. He conceived of his ideas on a scale that was both grandly mythic and quirkily personal. Not for nothing was its hero named Luke Skywalker. STAR WARS wasn’t just a fantasy for the masses but Lucas’s own private fantasy. Likewise, Spielberg personalized CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as a fantasy of Jewish Americana. The character of Roy(Richard Dreyfus) as the Jew(or Jewishy character) who meets god-beings from outer-space was very much an alter ego of Spielberg himself. If the Star Child in Kubrick’s 2001 is an Anglo, the chosen one in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is a pushy Jew. (To be sure, Roy may be something more than Spielberg’s fantasy double. He could be Spielberg’s wishful idealization of his father. When a divorce happens in a family, children feel abandoned by the father and have difficulty adjusting emotionally. Children naturally feel as though parents exist and live for them. So, when a parent departs, the child wonders such an unthinkable thing happened. One possible consolation is the idea that the parent left behind what he loved and cared about most — his children — because he had a higher calling in life. Roy leaves his family but not for something selfish like an affair with another woman. He leaves because he was called by higher beings from Heaven and just had to know, had to attain the higher state of cosmic being. There’s something similar in the documentary MY ARCHITECT: A SON’S JOURNEY, made by the son of Louis Kahn. In the film, the son patiently but also desperately searches as to how his father’s familial neglect could have been justified and half-finds the answer from a Bangladeshi man who expresses gratitude for what Kahn did for his country. Incidentally, some people might call Kahn’s design brutalist and graceless, but the lush music and the soft sentimentality of the documentary beautifies it, which goes to show cinema isn’t just about reality-as-seen. On the other hand, I rather like brutalism in architecture. Kahn was like a Jewish Albert Speer, even if for something like Globomania than Germania. The parent-children dynamics is crucial to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. There are moments that recall the family scenes in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and of course, Spielberg owes a good deal to Frank Capra. It’s interesting how Roy the man does everything that leads him away from his family whereas Jillian the woman does everything to win her child back. Was Spielberg saying something about the fundamental difference between the male psyche and the female psyche? Could it be that Kubrick took some ideas from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS in his conception of THE SHINING where the father figure also becomes ‘possessed’ by mysterious powers? There too, the man becomes more and more estranged from his family as he seeks the ‘higher power’ and ‘higher truth’ while the woman and the child draw closer together. Perhaps, this was one reason why America became a feminized nation. Paradoxically, America’s giving full power to male adventurousness may have drawn the son closer to the mother. The American male had such power and freedom that he did his own thing like Robert Duvall character in THE GREAT SANTINI. Thus, the son was likely to feel neglected and grow closer to the mother, and in time, the son became more feminized and wussified, more ‘sensitive’, and then, they themselves raised even wussier boys. Can you imagine the kind of son Ken Burns might raise? Makes my skin crawl just to think about it. Also, if tough adventurous fathers worked with their hands and feet, their sensitive sons who’d grown closer to the mother often preferred reading books and later wrote books. Eventually of course, the pen is mightier than the sword or the shovel. It’s like the difference between the father’s son Hank Stamper the outdoors man and mother’s son Leland Stamper the bookish intellectual in Ken Kesey’s SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. In the long run, the Lelands of the world were bound to win out as they wrote the books that became the learning material in every school. The institutionalization and expansion of prolonged education also had an effect in ‘wussifying’ men. Traditionally, young boys were taken from their mothers and forced to join their fathers at a young age. So, young farmboys found themselves working alongside their fathers from childhood. Or boys followed their fathers into the coal mine, like in John Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY. Prior to WWII, it was not unusual for young boys to just get rudimentary education and then find work and become one of the men. But as more and more kids not only hung around to finish highschool but also put off future in college, their manhood was softened by idealism than hardened by realism — or their manhood was turned trashy with too much partying. We can see this among conservative men too. Just look at pansy boys like Rich Lowry and Tucker Carlson. They are as icky as Ken Burns. Incidentally, I wonder if one reason Spielberg developed such a close and slavish relationship with Stanley Kubrick was to find the father-figure that he never properly had. From this angle, A.I. takes on a whole new meaning. In the film, the robot kid thinks his ‘mother’ loves him and goes searching for her, but of course she didn’t really care for him at all. And it turns out Kubrick pretty much used Spielberg and didn’t much respect him as an artist. Kubrick turned out to be more like the scientist played by William Hurt, a man wrapped up with his own obsessions who manipulates everyone and everything around him. Interestingly enough, Spielberg may have been the reason why Kubrick failed to finish a project in the twelve years between FULL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT. His Holocaust film idea, ARYAN PAPERS, may have been derailed by SCHINDLER’S LIST, and his extensive preparation for A.I. may have been abandoned because he decided it was custom-made for Spielberg. If not for Spielberg, Kubrick might have made those two films before EYES WIDE SHUT.) Lucas imagined himself as a Jedi Knight sky pilot, and Spielberg imagined himself as a modern day Moses. What’s truly interesting is that both liberals, one gentile and other a Jew, drew heavily from the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Some have even commented on STAR WARS as a ‘bad Nazis vs good Nazis’ story. Lucas’s debts to Riefenstahl are more obvious and less perverse since Lucas is a goy(who happened to admire the crypto-fascist mythologist Joseph Campbell). But Spielberg the Jew — who would later come to make SCHINDLER’S LIST — is a rather odd person to be channeling Riefenstahl. (To be sure, Spielberg learned from EVERYONE and borrowed from EVERYTHING, and one could argue Lean, Kurosawa, Ford, Hitchcock, Disney, and Eisenstein were as big if not bigger influences on him than Riefenstahl.) Riefenstahlism perfected a kind of Titanism, Olympianism, larger-than-life-ism, or grand-heroism. She mastered the technique of capturing not just the faces but the radiant glow of wonderment on them. In TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, Hitler looms/towers over us like a god-like figure, and the faces of German masses are mesmerized by his presence. Eisenstein used faces powerfully, but his effect was dynamic than mesmeric. Forces clash in his films between the agents and enemies of history; faces are bullets; they are weapons of rage, courage, vengeance, determination, hate. In some cases, Spielberg utilized Eisenstein’s dynamic style, but at other times, he went for the mesmerism of Riefenstahl. In TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, the Fuhrer and the masses are one. Their spirits converge in the rapture of holy ‘Aryan’ unity. Spielberg moves from Eisensteinism to Riefenstahlism in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Initially, we don’t know if the extraterrestrials are menacing or friendly. They seem to be causing all sorts of havoc, and the visual style is like pop Eisensteinism. But when the encounter finally happens, it’s like the holy rapture in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Humans and aliens even communicate by a strange kind of hand signals that look like the Nazi salute(which is amusing if you consider the leading scientist is played by the half-Jewish Francois Truffaut). Heil Spielberg.
What Lucas and Spielberg took from Riefenstahl was the titanic, bombastic, and rapturous style that became part of the neo-pop-fascist aesthetic that is now the norm of blockbuster movie-making. (STAR WARS generally drew from pagan mythology whereas the ‘spiritual’ thrust of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is essentially Biblical.) Just imagine that. The stratospheric revival of Hollywood’s fortunes came by the way of lessons and ideas drawn from fascist film-making. Of course, most people prefer not to mention this since ‘fascism’ is simply supposed to mean ‘nasty political evil’. (To be sure, it should be noted that the fascist aesthetics would have existed even if Italy and Germany hadn’t come under the rule of Mussolini and Hitler. Elements of the fascist style have always been around in myths and in theories of power. Aesthetically, all superhero stories have fascist overtones, even if created by Jews. The nature of myths is such that even LORD OF THE RINGS, though created by a political anti-fascist, is essentially mytho-fascist. It’s like Marxism, though officially atheist/secular, was really a new kind of prophetic spiritualism.)
If STAR WARS made for an odd science fiction film because it relied so heavily on mythology and fairytales — some call it more ‘fantasy’ than science fiction — , the oddness of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as science fiction owed to its closeness to nature. Indeed, the main appeal of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS had as much if not more to do with its communion with nature as with alien beings. To an extent, it works as a travelogue taking us around the world, from Mexico to India to Mongolia and then all across America. It takes us to natural wonders like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Even when alien ships are not zipping through the air, Spielberg presents nighttime skies over suburbs and small towns with a great sense of wonder. You can almost breathe the cool fresh air, so different from the air of cities where most audiences saw the movie. As a child in a crowded and noisy city when I saw it in 1977, it was as if I was transported to an enchanted Americana far removed from the world of, say, something like TAXI DRIVER — and some of the areas near I lived were worse than that, especially with them damn Negroes. It was like entering the world of PEANUTS comics, especially before Peppermint Patty arrived on the scene with her BAD NEWS BEARS act and brought along Franklin the Negro and Marcie the lesbian. The scene with the cherubic child Barry in Muncie Indiana, a place where you can hear the crickets, stare at the moon-shadow upon the house, and see shimmering stars in the sky was, for me at least, as magical as anything in the movie, especially as they reminded me of my earlier childhood before the move to the city. Yet, it was only nighttime in a region of America. It seemed special to a lot of people because America had become so urbanized and crowded, so lit up with electricity — and because Spielberg, who grew up in the suburbs and mastered film technique from a young age, had a personal connection to this side of America and the magic touch to transport it to the silver screen. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is like a planetarium show with a story, and JURASSIC PARK is like zoo tour with a story. When space aliens switch off electric grids across entire neighborhoods, the stars really come to life. Ironically, man’s looming encounter with technologically ultra-advanced beings from outer-space brings him closer to the nature of his own world. Indeed, Roy begins to see mountains in his head. The woman starts painting mountains. It’s as if they break from the daily routine of modern artificial life and come to sense a closer connection to nature. The aliens have sent a coded message that they want a special meeting with humans — not with all humans but special humans, those smart enough to break the code and those ‘spiritually blessed’ enough to receive the ‘light’. They don’t wanna meet in the middle of the day in some big city or urban center. They want a special gathering in the dark of night at some nature spot, and the scientist and government agents devise ways to move most people out of the area.
There is something primordial and mysterious about the night. Consider the nighttime torch-light parade in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. Or consider the closing ceremony of OLYMPIAD at nighttime where Albert Speer’s columns of light shoot up into the sky and converge into a firmament. And the athletes of the world — ostensibly the most beautiful specimens of the human species, the best of the best — come together to celebrate the moment. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS taps into something like that.
In science fiction stories about human technology, man feels the power — unless technology gets the better of man, as in THE TERMINATOR. But in space alien movies where visitors from other worlds are much more advanced than us, all our science and technology are like children’s toys. As space aliens have technological supremacy over us, we are bound to feel naked and identify more closely with nature. The value of technology is power. It makes us feel masterful and in control, as we humans do over the natural world. But when the superior technology is with the OTHER, our technology loses its mystique or mechanique of power. Thus, we are liable to become more nature-oriented or more spiritual-oriented(as Hindus became when they were conquered by invaders with better weapons and fighting skills; Jews, like Hindus, were often conquered and expelled by more powerful peoples with better military technology throughout history; as a defeated people, faced with the option of returning to nature or conceiving of higher spirituality, they opted for the latter; Hindus managed to do both, merging animistic nature worship with some of the most abstract spiritual ideas ever conceived by man; oddly enough, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS both strives for ‘spirituality’ in the tradition of Jews and delights in nature in the way of pagans). Before the white man arrived in the New Land, American Indians felt empowered by their technology of spears, bows and arrows, tomahawks, and teepee. But when the white man showed up with much better technology, Indians identified more closely with nature. Japan’s mystical sense of the sacred unity of man and land became more significant when it was threatened by the technology of the West. Thus, the arrival of the aliens with infinitely superior technology in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS makes everyone feel a bit more primitive and closer to nature. Thankfully, the aliens turn out to be wise, kind, and friendly — though only after messing up so many kitchens, living rooms, and trucks. When WE control the technology, we feel more intelligent and more powerful than the rest of the universe. When confronted with superior alien technology, we feel more childlike, natural, and/or mystical.
In Tarkovsky’s STALKER, the characters wander around the Zone that’s been supposedly been altered by alien visitation. If such a thing really happened, aliens must have some powerful techno-mojo beyond our understanding. In Shyamalan Night’s SIGNS, the arrival of space aliens draws a family closer to one another and to God.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was special because even though audiences went to see spaceships and visual effects, they were equally awed by Spielberg’s pop-poetic celebration of nature: the hills, the woods, deserts, mountains, the clouds, and the sky. It was as much a nature program and a woodland fairytale as a science fiction spectacle. And it made us ‘believe’ with our hearts(as opposed to just with our eyes), even if we weren’t sure what exactly we were supposed to believe. In his review, Stanley Kauffmann not only called it the greatest science fiction movie but recounted how a black man leaving the theater beamed, ‘it made me feel good’. It is significant that Kauffmann mentioned the man’s race and his feelings. Many liberal Jews who’d had the best hopes for solving the race problems in the 50s and 60s witnessed big cities go to hell with black riots, black crime, and black behavior. Many white/Jewish liberals simply didn’t know what to do. So, the fact that a movie made a black guy feel good and ‘believe’ — like everyone else of whatever color in the audience — was a kind of opiate(and even maybe a kind of future ‘hope’, as the image that Jews created for their boy Obama was that of a kind of ‘special superior alien’ from another world; John Sayles had a similar idea with BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET. Better UFO Negro than mofo Negro.) CLOSE ENCOUNTERS may not have solved any social problems, but for two hours, all Americans(even a Negro) felt as one, a common brotherhood and sisterhood and childhood of humanity despite our differences of race or ethnicity across the globe. We felt as one in our sharing of the grand encounter with the wondrous beings from outer-space. Though the government keeps most people away and stages the Encounter as an event between only the best of the human race and the space aliens, the movie audience have special passes to the whole event for the price of admission. (And even though the space aliens finally settled on the good ole USA, it was only after they made sure that the entire world — even Hindus and Mongols — heard their heavenly message carried in songs.) So, the appeal of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS was both exclusive and inclusive. It was both an encounter of the few at Devil’s Tower and encounter for everyone(who bought a movie ticket). If the Nuremberg Rally was only for the ‘Aryans’, Spielberg’s Rally was for everyone. Spielberg had universalized the rapturous fascist aesthetic.
We were all made Star Children. Perhaps, many Americans needed such uplift in the late 70s as social problems began to mount. And with crimes in the city, there was the dream of quiet suburbs where you could still see a fair amount of stars in the sky and hear the crickets(instead of police sirens and the obnoxious yapping of Negroes). If a movie could turn even make a Negro feel nice sentiments for a few hours and make him feel ‘good’ in childlike wonderment, it was just the thing America praying for. And this torch of comfort was later passed to E.T. and then to Oprah and then finally to Obama, some of whose rallies was like Close Encounter with the Magic Negro.
Woody Allen and Spielberg have as alike as they are different. They are both masters of shtick and turn everything they touch into a kind of shtick. Allen turned ‘art film’ into fun art-film-comedy-with-middle-brow appeal. Spielberg took Riefenstahlisms, Kurosawa-ism, Kubrick-ism, and Lean-isms — and everything else — and molded them all into popcorn-movie-isms but with almost unsurpassed combination of film sense and film form. Like Mozart of AMADEUS, he may not be deep but he’s has the magic touch to turn even dross into gold. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is kitsch, but it’s the rare kitsch that works as something of real and lasting value. Even today, its magic hasn’t diminished — as long as you turn off your faculty of logical thought. But that’s the power of magic and faith. People like Spielberg have the special talent to dissolve our rational doubts and make us ‘believe’; they also have the skill to suspend our cynicism and make us embrace ‘innocence’. (This is one reason why so many Liberals voted for Obama again in 2012. Though they’d grown somewhat cynical about the magic mulatto since 2008, all the special propaganda and coverage in the Jewish-controlled media made them believe again.) Faith dissolves all doubts. So, Hitler and Mao could contradict themselves year after year, but their mesmerized devotees would follow and sing hosannas to them just the same. Spielberg understands the magic of cinema; he knows how to cast a spell on us. In fairytales, faith comes naturally, but it’s not so easy to invoke faith(especially blind faith) in science fiction that is supposed to unfold according to some logical premise. But then, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is not about the science of UFOs but the religion of UFOs. Its space aliens are really extraterrestrial angels.
Children easily fall under the magic of movies and fairytales. Eventually, people grow older and either become cynical and reject the childhood magic of fantasies OR cling to the magic by finding new manifestations in the myth of Oprah, Obama, or the mountain-sized Negro who wuvs a wittle white mouse in GREEN MILE(a children’s movie for silly adults with stunted emotions). But there those like Spielberg who, from a young age, weren’t only spellbound by the magic of Oz but wanted to seek the secrets behind it. And once they began to access the secret, they wanted to own and control it because, after all, the control of the power of dreams is a formidable kind of power. Marxism was about economics whereas fascism was about art, even if not good art. Soviet Union’s core ideology revolved around statistics of wheat and steel production. Nazi Germany’s core ideology was about beauty and myth, the stuff of art and imagination. It’s easier to sway large numbers of people with myths and emotions than with material facts and figures. Even the best teacher requires years and years to demonstrate the veracity of certain truths. It takes time for people to learn how to read correctly, do math problems, and understand statistics. But dumb or smart, people can be manipulated emotionally via music and images to believe or feel anything almost instantly. The MLK cult is powerful because of the soul-music-spiritualism of the man’s charisma and oratory. Even the most cynical liberal turns to butter and wets his pants when he hears "I have a dream." Chris Matthews has chills going up his legs when he hears Obama’s speeches. Norman Rockwell’s painting of an innocent-looking black girl in a white dress going to school(while being pelted with tomatoes and watermelons) did more to win over millions of people to the side of the Civil Rights Movement than thousands of pages of rational arguments. A movie like THE HELP may be artistically worthless, but it does more to persuade white women to worship the Magic Negress than any set of rational or factual arguments, especially since so many facts contradict the silly notion of the Noble Negro. Thus, fascists better understood the nature of mass culture, mass politics, and mass psychology. Of course, even communist regimes maintained mass support more through pageantry and imagery than ideas or thought. This isn’t to minimize the importance of ideology but to underline the fact that ideas truly gain the magic only when sacralized and sensationalized through the power of sound and imagery, which is why Christianity relied heavily on iconography, music, and grand ritualism. Spielberg understands this better than just about anyone. While one bunch of leftist were ‘rationally’ deconstructing the tropes used for ‘right-wing’ or ‘reactionary’ oppression, the likes of Spielberg were constructing new tropes with which to cast a spell on the masses to bring them under Jewish control. Ironically, Spielberg borrowed and reformulated the tropes of even right-wing and antisemitic artists in this construction, but he achieved something remarkable and became the most powerful filmmaker in the world, which is to say, he attained far greater ‘sacral’ power than the pope. Colonel Kilgore(Robert Duvall) in APOCALYPSE NOW says, "Charlie don’t surf!" Charlie don’t have the firepower of Americans either. Well, the Pope doesn’t make movies. Jews do, and so Jews control the new true religion of world conversion: Entertainment, which is the New Enlightenment. Of course, Cecil B. DeMille understood this long before Spielberg, but it was Spielberg who lifted the circus act from the ground and turned into a sky castle in the air conquering every part of the globe.
Many people understandably don’t like Spielberg for various reasons. Apart from the issue of his likableness on a person-to-person basis, his template for a ‘new’ kind of cinema has been both a favorite scapegoat of what went wrong with Hollywood(among personal/intellectual film-makers) and an object of envy(for all those who wanna be the next Spielberg). Many in Hollywood have aspired to be the new Spielberg but have failed. (Though what Spielberg seems to be doing is simpleminded and easy, it is anything but. Spielberg is a real giant of cinema with total mastery of form. Just as it’s no easy thing to write a hit tune that’s beloved generation after generation, it takes a lot of skills and effort to make movies with both popular and lasting value, something Spielberg has done time and time again. The most universally recognized paradox of entertainment is ‘the easiest to enjoy is the hardest to make’. Similarly, it’s the rare athlete who makes the almost impossible seem so easy.) Many people hate the fact that so many movie-makers try to be the new Spielberg. They believe that Spielberg’s kind of neo/sham-spiritualist fairytale populism has produced generations of film-makers who are cynically naive(a corrupt form of willful naivete): naive in their faith in cinema as a kind of never-ending Neverland and cynical in their use of hoary tricks to dupe the sucker masses and rake in millions or even billions. Worse, there are guys like Michael Bay, hack Spielbergs without the magic, who’ve turned cinema into professional wrestling matches for special effects. Of course, an average dumbass might not even know the difference between Spielberg, who is genuinely talented, and Michael Bay, who is a by-the-numbers Hollywood clone. To some people, PEARL HARBOR and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN might as well be the same thing.
When something is so very successful, it tends to crowd everything else out because it’s the hot item with which everyone wants to make his fortune. (This is no less true in ‘independent cinema’, as illustrated by the case of PULP FICTION, the success of which not only kept it running in Art House theaters forever — thus keeping other films out — but encouraged every other Indie to try to be the Next Tarantino, especially as independent film companies were scouting for Tarantinos of their own.) Moviegoers are like drug addicts looking for a new fix of the ‘best stuff’, and blockbuster cinema is less about heart, mind, and/or body than about sensations. It’s not about real thinking, real emoting, or real feeling. Some movies stimulate the mind(Resnais), some stir the heart(DeSica), and some stress the flesh-and-bone(Herzog). In blockbuster movies, ‘ideas’ almost rise above cliches(like the ‘intellectualism’ of DARK KNIGHT RISES), ‘emotions’ are push-button reflexes(like the easy sentiments of smiles, tears, and cheers in FORREST GUMP), and ‘physicality’ is thrills(where we are made to care more about the excitement of the action than its passion and/or consequences). What really matters is getting the right kind of narcotic or sugar high, and Spielberg came up with the biggest and best kind of Big Gulp drink. Movies always provided the audience with pleasure, but Spielberg — and to a lesser extent Lucas — found and vibrated the most erogenous buttons in the mind, heart, and body; he perfected the art of producing ‘squirting orgasms’ of ‘innocence’ at the PG-13 level. In this way, his movies are like pubescent porn. Disney had come close, as had DeMille, in perfecting the ‘art’ of ecstatic pleasure in cinema, but their methods and styles were restrained by a certain sensibility, especially as the ‘Puritanical’ strain of American culture — as well as the element of Anglo stress on dignity and self-control — tended to be distrustful of anything that turned on the emotional and/or sensual faucet at full blast, even if the emotions and sensations were ‘innocent’ and non-sexual; it simply wasn’t considered ‘good form’, and this is what worried many Americans in the past about the power of cinema: conservatives saw it as a corrupting influence that unleashed emotions and sensations that should be kept under check, and liberals saw it as a numbing influence that undermined intellectualism and rationalism. At any rate, Disney made what later came to be known as G-rated movies, and DeMille, cheesy and simpleminded as he was, made films for grownups, and therefore, their works were never as shamelessly excessive in their manipulations as the works of wunderkind Spielberg, who combined R-rated thrills with G-rated gush to produce PG-rated corn-porns. The kind of orgasms one gets from Spielberg’s movies are not sexual, and indeed, most of them don’t even have sexy women(though male leads fare somewhat better, especially Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Sam Neill in JURASSIC PARK). Rather, it’s a kind of fairytale rapture, a kind of orgas-magic, candy for the eyes and sugar for the ears. But what makes Spielberg’s movies far more overwhelming than earlier movie fantasies aimed at kids, even the best of Disney, is due to the fact that he came to prominence after the 60s when the permissiveness of cinematic expression was truly unprecedented. So, if Disney had to keep everything safe and sound, Spielberg could incorporate darker images of violence and horror to intensify the emotional thrill of his movies. To be sure, some Disney films are plenty dark — first time I saw SLEEPING BEAUTY in a revival theater at the age of 6, I was as terrified as entranced by the wicked sorcery of the enchantress, especially the scene where the Prince’s hands are cuffed by dark magic — , but it was only beginning in the late 60s that mainstream filmmaking allowed images of raw physical violence. So, JAWS is both a mass audience popcorn movie and a real horror-show that had people both laughing and screaming. (If Hitchcock popularized adult themes, Spielberg adult-ified popular themes.) CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is filled with wonder but heavily indebted to horror movies, especially William Friedkin’s THE EXORCIST. JURASSIC PARK is what might be called horror-wonder movie. Spielberg instinctively and perhaps even intellectually understood that horror and wonder are not necessarily opposites, and even if they are, opposites can attract and bond into something even more powerful. Indeed, there’s a similar tension between romance and sex, thus charging them with mystery and power. On the one hand, there is the beauty and innocence of romance. The handsome face of the man, the grace of the woman. Their courtship, refined manners, the ritual of correct manners. The perfume, the well-spoken words, the pretty dresses. This is the fairytale side of love. But there is also the ‘fuc*ing’, the primordial serpentine penis lunging into the hairy sea-creature look-alike vagina with fishy smells. The loss of control during the act, the animal groaning-sounds, the clawing and hair-pulling and all that business. The beauty tries to tame and shame the beast, but in the end, the beast humps the beauty. Romance goes from acting like prince and princess to acting like werewolves getting it on. The magic of TWILIGHT — the blend of horror and wonder, of innocence and profanity — understands this tension. (Monstrousness in love can also be a kind of narcissism. In TWILIGHT, Edward Cullen warns Bella not to come near him because he’s a monster and killer, but monstrousness is also associated with power, and that turns women on. Also, men are fascinated with womenfolk because girls make them feel both assaultive and protective. One part of male psyche looks at a pretty girl and wants to devour her sexually, but another side wants to protect her from other men and even from himself. It’s like Edward wants to suck Bella’s blood but also feels extremely protective of her, not least from himself.) Disney understood the psychology of the audience better than just about anyone, but he worked in a time when children’s movies and even movies for adults had to remain within certain expressive boundaries. Spielberg made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS after the success of THE EXORCIST. He could combine elements of PINOCCHIO with elements of THE EXORCIST. He could also take elements from Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl. Thus, Spielberg’s formula combined G-rated wonder with R-rated horror. The effects were viscerally more powerful, and yet, packaged as popcorn movie fun. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK has moments to turn your hair grey — and lots of gut-kicking violence — but shrouded in the spirit of ‘harmless fun’. It’s like a roller-coaster ride that, even while scaring the living daylights out of riders, ensures them that they’re totally safe; a combination of absolute fear and absolute security. (Other than the works of Spielberg and Friedkin, the disaster movies of the 70s, especially the ones with faulty airplanes and the one with a burning skyscraper, helped to further the art of audience manipulation on a grand scale. In a way, TITANIC, the biggest hit of all time, is really just a highfalutin disaster movie, the culmination of all the tricks and thrills perfected by masters and hacks of 70s cinema.) E.T. is known to have scared a lot of kids, but the fright drew them even closer to the story. Initially, a kid may be frightened of E.T., but when it turns out to be kind and gentle, the kid feels even more drawn to it. (If E.T. were ONLY cute and cuddly in a familiar way, audience emotions would have been lax and complacent. But because it initially looks grotesque and ugly, we watch it with a kind of fascination and LEARN to love it, not so much for its looks but for its soul. Thus, our bonding becomes stronger, as with the character of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME — the movie as I haven’t read the book — and the character of ELEPHANT MAN. We can flatter ourselves that we were able to look through the ugly exterior to see and feel the warm heart within.) And when E.T. is tracked and captured by Big Government Complex, you feel for the poor creature as if you’re watching The Passion of E.T.
Spielberg shameless added R-rated elements to G-rated material — and also adding G-rated elements to R-rated material. So, SCHINDLER’S LIST, though horrifying, is also like a feel-good family movie. It’s like CHRISTMAS CAROL where an ‘Aryan’ has a change of heart and learns to love Jews. And SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is like Norman Rockwellian movie with George Romero-level brutality. And there’s John Williams to butter and bake everything into an emotional vanilla cream pie. You get the mmmm and the ahhhh.
Though MIRACLE MILE was not a big-budget blockbuster movie, one can easily detect its channeling of Steven Spielberg as well as David Lynch. Its beginning at the La Brea tar pits has a theme park element, prefiguring JURASSIC PARK. The story is introduced in a spirit of fun, and even cynical jesting is toothless and mild. There’s an old-fashioned innocence to the romance of Harry and Julie, even though both are attuned to contemporary sexual mores. We even see them riding the merry-go-around like little children. Though set in the 1980s, we see Harry playing in a Big Band in an open park, and the audience is made up of old as well as the young. Harry gets along nicely with Julie’s grandfather who offers to buy them a tube-steak. The image of the young couple, both hip and old-fashioned and chummy with old folks, seems utterly odd and very normal, indeed, all the more odd for being so normal(in a world where the ‘new normal’ was being defined by what had previously been regarded as abnormal; of course, today, THE WALTONS seem odder than FAMILY GUY precisely because of its normality). Harry and Julie are not squares or rubes who feel alienated in the modern city. It’s as if in the post-modern world of the 80s, there’s really no more new and no more old. Everyone’s a part of a non-stop post-modern costume party. Indeed, there’s more enmity between Julie’s grandparents — though a love/hate thing — than between Julie/Harry and the oldsters. (Later, we see a fat old street cleaner making sexual jokes to a fashionable yuppess.) The first part of the movie — to the moment when a panic-stricken Harry tells others in the restaurant of the strange phone call about an impending nuclear war — is the most amazing. It begins so mild-and-mellow but then lurches suddenly and compellingly into perversity and darkness. (Similar things happen in RISKY BUSINESS and BLUE VELVET, but we are prepared that something ‘bad’ or ‘crazy’ is about to happen, especially with the opening dream-shower scene in the former and imagery of the severed ear & ant world in the latter. Though the video documentary about the cosmos and evolution in the natural museum is sort of weird, someone who didn’t know anything about MIRACLE MILE watching it for the first time would likely have been entirely taken aback by the crazy turn of events. And yet, once one has seen MIRACLE MILE and knows the story, it’s easy to see how the mild first part of the movie actually brilliantly fits into the overall scheme of things.) It’s not so much that the nutty phone call sounded all that plausible or realistic. Rather, it’s the mood and ambience created by De Jarnatt that gradually dissolves our distinctive sense of what is and isn’t real. One could even read the entire nuclear scare scenario as nothing but Harry Washello’s nightmare.
Though technology makes the people who own it feel empowered — like the white man with the gun against the Indians — , there is one technology that freaked everyone in the 20th century. Nuclear weapons of course. The idea of nuclear power is science-fiction-like even though scientifically real. Though much about science dazzles and fascinates us, the notion that there is enough energy packed inside the nucleus of a raisin to power NY for a full day is mind-boggling, something that people who live with common sense — 99% of us — have difficulty wrapping their minds around. However true it may be, it just seems unreal to the human brain, which evolved to resist such counterintuitive notions. (In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, someone says, "Einstein was right", then someone else says, "Einstein was probably one of THEM", the ‘them’ being space aliens with super-advanced technology. That some guy actually conceived of a formula that prophesied the reality of nuclear power — though others eventually developed it – seems beyond our understanding. Einstein’s formula is the scientific equivalent of the Jewish conception of the monotheistic God. Jews created God, but gentiles ‘stole’ Him — or renegade Jews such as Jesus and Paul passed His power onto gentiles — , and gentiles gained control over Jews. Jews came to see Jesus as Americans came to see the Rosenbergs who slipped nuclear secrets to the Soviets: a traitor to their own kind. But what angered Jews far more than what the Rosenbergs did — indeed, many American Jews, in their knee-jerk tribalism, rallied to the Rosenbergs — was what the Wasp goyim had done with the Jewish secret of the Bomb. Though Jews came up with the formula and the bomb, American wasps who controlled the government and the military gained control of the bomb created by Jewish scientists. So, the Jews invented but the Wasps took, or that’s how Jews came to see it. Of course, now things have changed and Jews now own everything, not least due to the meritocratic system established by wasps that eventually allowed the best Jewish minds and best black athletes to beat white minds and white bodies. But things were different in the past. Wasps once ruled most of the powerful institutions, and many wasp overlords simply didn’t trust Jews — and for good reason, as the Rosenberg case amply illustrated.) Though mankind continued to gain ever greater power with science and technology, it was only with the arrival of nuclear power that man gained something like the power of the gods. As Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now, I am become death, destroyer of the world." It was then that man or Jewish man became god, but this godly power was taken by Wasps(just as Egyptians in TEN COMMANDMENTS ‘stole’ the baby Moses from the Jews) — though it is now in the hands of Jews since Jews own all of America stock, lock, and barrel. There are a lot of things about technology that scare us, but we still see them as the tools and instruments of man. But the idea of nuclear weapon puts us in a wholly different cast of mind. Bombings of Tokyo killed more people than the bombing of Nagasaki. Far more people died of conventional warfare in the European theater than died due to atomic bombs in Japan. Yet, the idea of the atomic bomb is simply more frightening because of the scale of destruction caused by a single bomb(followed by radiation sickness) — and since WWII, bombs a thousand times more powerful than ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been built. It seems surreal, indeed not only futuristic but god-satanic. It sounds less like a weapon built by man but something stolen from the gods, like when Prometheus passed the secret of fire from the gods to mankind. (This is why the nuclear explosion in NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND doesn’t seem jarring. It’s the sort of thing we would expect in the epic world of fantasy.) It’s as if modern man bit into the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and emerged stronger than weaker. But was the Bomb invented by mankind or a very special kind of mankind called Jews & white folks? (Though Jews put the finishing touch on the science, they relied on a long history of white European achievement, without which an Einstein or an Oppenheimer wouldn’t have been possible. Even so, despite the fact that there were many brilliant white scientists in Germany, UK, and US, it’s undeniable that many of the most astounding scientists of the 20th century were Jews. So, in a way, this business of saying ‘mankind did this’ or mankind did that’ is very misleading. Suppose there were no white folks and Jewish folks. In 10,000 yrs, would Negroes have invented the atomic bomb? Or would they have gone on for another 10,000 yrs as little more than spear-chucking savages? Indeed, what would most blacks be today if it hadn’t been for white contact with Africa? 99% of blacks would be half-naked savages beating on bongo drums, shaking their booties, and chucking spears at angry hippos. And even if there are black geniuses among the blacks, what could they achieve as individuals when most of their brethren and sistren are a bunch of ugabuga jigger-jivers with no use for higher knowledge? If Einstein or Oppenheimer had been born amongst savages, they would have been little more than savages themselves. For there to be infrastructure and institutions that support research and progress, there has to be civilization where stable people go about the daily business of trade and production in accordance to complex rules and laws. As most Negroes are incapable of developing such a system, even the geniuses among blacks don’t have much to build on and must eke out their survival as savages... which is why most smart blacks would rather go live in EU or the US where their smarts can be put to some productive use than hang around fellow blacks in Africa who only wanna shake their booties and seek answers from witch doctors. In a civilization, the stable and well-organized mediocre masses, at the very minimum, work together to erect a tower for geniuses to climb and reach the stars. In most of Africa, the mindless idiots tear everything down so that even the best and brightest have to spend most of their time just trying to make ends meet. This is why it’s problematic to credit all of mankind for developing atomic power or going to the moon. The credit must go primarily to white folks and Jewish folks. Even Asians, accomplished as they are, failed to make progress into modernity without the interference of Western imperialism and/or threats. Until the West forced the East to change, most of the East was content to be like what North Korea, Burma, and Nepal are today.) Paradoxically, nothing both frightens and relieves us like the atomic bomb, its frightfulness being what is most reassuring about it. Most of us believe that it will never be used again because it’s so destructive, and some historians believe that the Cold War remained cold largely because of the Bomb. Perhaps, if both Nazi Germany and Soviet Union had nukes in 1941, Hitler never would have attacked the latter. And if Saddam Hussein had the Bomb, US would likely not have invaded Iraq. Though Americans were upset about the Soviets getting the Bomb, the consolation was that both sides understood that neither could win WWIII. And, that was why all the stuff about the ‘missile gap’ from Kennedy to Reagan missed the point. The real point was that gap or no gap — actually, US always had the more formidable arsenal — , both sides had enough to lay the world to ruins. So, even as US and USSR got more and bigger bombs in the decades following WWII, most people came to forget about it and learn to love the Bomb. The Bomb was so scary that even crazy leaders were likely to sober up. Even so, there was the lurking fear among many people that WWIII might just be possible, and films and TV shows like FAIL SAFE, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, LA JETEE, TERMINATOR, THE DAY AFTER, TESTAMENT, PLANET OF THE APES series, 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT, Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, and others played on those fears — though Kubrick’s film mostly played it for laughs. (It lingers today in the hysteria of Zionist Neocons and their goy stooges in the GOP on the subject of Iran. Lies have been spread that the president of Iran said he wants to wipe Israel off the face of the map, and of course, these lies have been hardly corrected by our Jew-owned mass media. But even if Iran were to get the Bomb, we know it poses no threat to Israel that has anywhere from one hundred to three hundred illegal nukes, something no one talks about, which is yet more proof that our media are controlled by deceitful Jews.) Though nuclear warfare seems only remotely possible, we know if it happens, it won’t be just a war or even a very destructive war — like World War II — but an absolute calamity akin to the asteroid impact that may have killed off the dinosaurs. It would really be armageddon, a holocaust for humanity. As Einstein succinctly put it, if WWIII were fought with nukes, WWIV would be a sticks-and-stones affair. So, nuclear war scares us least precisely because it scares us most. It just doesn’t seem possible that any sane nation — or even a crazy one — would use nukes. We can imagine the likes of Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara(who wanted to trigger off a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis), Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara(of Aum Shinrikyo notoriety), or the Ted Kaczynski(aka the Unabomber) wanting to use it. Luckily, it takes a nation-state and complex facilities to build a Bomb, so the idea of nukes falling into the hands of terrorists seems like science fiction(at least for the foreseeable future). Also, with the rise of new means of surveillance, it’s becoming ever more difficult for terrorists and subversives to infiltrate the West and plan attacks. The real danger facing the West is not terrorism but waves of non-white immigration at a time when white birthrates are falling drastically. We should fear the empty wombs of white women more than the non-existent Bombs of Muslims.
Because of the duality of the Bomb — as both the most terrifying and most reassuring weapon — , it functioned as a useful metaphor for the surrealism of our political and social culture. In the 50s, people were afraid of the Bomb as the destroyer of the world, but school children were instructed to hide under their desks as if they could thus escape harm. The whole idea was ludicrous but also logical or at least psycho-logical. When confronted with something so crazy, one tries to ‘something’, ‘anything’, to alleviate one’s fears. In a way the parody AIRPLANE! played on the same fears, a kind of looney tunes version of DR. STRANGELOVE as well as a lampoon of all those 70s disaster movies. Passengers really can’t do anything in a crash, so what’s there to do but make jokes as a form of reassurance? It makes sense because it makes no sense. (Maybe laughing about it will make the fears go away, which is why DR. STRANGELOVE is both a joke about nuclear warfare and a joke about joking about nuclear warfare. We laugh as if to feel superior to the fools who control the nukes in the film and as if to reassure ourselves that civilization is a joke anyway and maybe not worth saving as man is really just a hairless ape. It’s like the Nazis in the bunker in DOWNFALL drinking, dancing, partying, and having sex as the Soviets close in, as if such joyousness can block out reality or turn it into a joke where it doesn’t matter which side wins or loses. Winners laugh the laughter of victory, but losers can laugh the laughter of defeat. It’s like Jake La Motta smiles at Sugar Ray Robinson after getting TKO’d. Of course, as General Patton said of losers who laugh, it doesn’t change the fact that you or your side lost. No matter how much you try to convince yourself that it was all a joke and it doesn’t matter which side won or lost, you know deep in your heart that your side lost. So, even though white conservatives try to make jokes about the victory of Jews, homos, and Obama, the fact is they’ve been reduced to a bunch of pitiful losers. When we laugh at DR. STRANGELOVE, we feel glibly superior to the characters driven by paranoia or petty egos. But the joke is on the viewer as well because a real nuclear would, of course, be no laughing matter; thus, our air of glib superiority is exposed as a form of cowardly therapy in face of our fears. Jews have been a witty and funny people who’ve long used humor as both therapy and weapon against their enemies. A clever funny Jew often outwitted bigger and stronger dimwit goyim. And when Jews got clobbered, they made jokes about it as if their power of laughter could somehow salvage their confidence from the calamity, as if to say, "you hurt me but didn’t really hurt me because here I am cracking jokes." And there’s an element of this about THE PRODUCERS and the "Inquisition" number in HISTORY OF THE WORLD PART ONE by Mel Brooks. Jewish attitude to such things is two-faced, like everything else about Jews. One part of Jewishness finds it appalling to make light of tragic events. Another part of Jewishness delights in the indomitable spirit that keeps on going like the Energizer Bunny. And Jews especially love the politics of laughter today for they are now the total victors. So, Jewish laughter went from therapy for the losers to triumph for the winners. Jews laughed at stuff like THE PRODUCERS in the past as a way of saying that they survived and kept their sense of humor. Today, Jews watch the stage version of THE PRODUCERS to celebrate their victory over the gentiles.) When confronted with the horrific and unstoppable, we have nothing left but the power to ‘make sense of it’. It’s like making a human sacrifice to a volcano that’s about to erupt and wipe out the entire community. In THE BIRD OF PARADISE, which MIRACLE MILE pays homage to, a volcano is about to erupt and destroy the entire island, and the natives figure a woman has to be sacrificed. It’s a way of ‘making sense out of no sense’ in the face of the unstoppable. So, when a stewardess instructs passengers on a plane to sit in a certain position as the plane is about to crash and burn, there is a kind of psycho-logic to it. It’s the nature of humans to do something even when there’s nothing to be done. It’s like knowing that in the coming election, your candidate is gonna be totally clobbered, but you go to the polls anyway; it’s like knowing that you’re ill and have a year to live but trying to finish college anyway.
Because nuclear war is so unlikely, it carries an element of joking around or pulling a prank. So, when Harry gets the strange phone call, neither he nor we are sure if it was real or fake. And when Harry warns others in the restaurant, some take it seriously, others brush it off as silliness. And some jump on the panic train for the adventure(for fun) — especially the woman dressed up as an airplane stewardess; she could be someone right out of AIRPLANE! If people were told nuclear missiles were headed their way, how many would take it seriously? (On the other hand, plenty of people took Welles’s WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast a tad too seriously. A woman even committed suicide.)
Perhaps, the sensibilities of Lucas and Spielberg mutated from exposure to the cultural radioactivity of the Cold War. They grew up when reality no longer seemed real. The world had come out of a horrible war many times worse than WWI, but postwar world was one of unprecedented peace and prosperity, at least in the First World. US and USSR, the great allies that had defeated the evil of Nazism, were mortal enemies and stockpiling nukes to blow up each other. Technology and economic growth improved lives at a rapid pace and made life more fun, making people more relaxed with their BBQs in their backyards. But the heating Cold War rhetoric and the chaos of the 60s seemed to bring the advanced world to the brink of nuclear war and/or social collapse, especially during the May 68 Movement. The modern world called for serious, intelligent, and responsible men to tackle ever more complex problems, but popular culture and alternative ideologies spread non-too-serious-nor-intellectual vibes, especially to young people, that all you needed was ‘love’, drugs, rock n roll, and free love. Especially as the so-called ‘best and brightest’ seemed clueless in solving the problems of urban riots, crime, youth unrest, and Vietnam, the New Left was more about grand gestures and symbolism than clear ideas and agendas. 60s kicked off with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Beach Boys. It progressed into an era of Vietnam War and the Beatles. It was a time of ever bigger Bombs and ever smaller transistor radios, a time when American and Soviet rockets were shooting into space for the moon for ‘all mankind’ and aimed at one another to maybe end mankind. The world seemed to be getting ever more serious/complex and ever more simple/juvenile at the same time. More gravely under threat of war and more at peace with growing prosperity. Dylan went from activist to entertainer to artist. Beatles met with Bertrand Russell and composed "All You Need Is Love" an anthem for the Counterculture.
Though Spielberg wasn’t into radical intellectual ideas or Rock music/Counterculture, he came of age when things were getting unreal, when the unreal became the new real. In this light, his formulation of a ‘radical’ new kind of old-fashioned neo-Hollywood made sense. In a way, what he was doing was no less ‘conceptual’ than Andy Warhol’s shtick. The fascistic could be made democratic, the democratic could be made spiritual, the spiritual could be made popcorn, popcorn could be made political. What did it matter if CLOSE ENCOUNTERS blended the ingredients of Frank Capra and Stanley Kubrick, Looney Tunes and Leni Riefenstahl? If Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans can be art, why can’t anything be anything? Who says something couldn’t be a prank and a prayer, a personal vision and populist pandering? (It certainly worked for the Catholic Church throughout the ages.) If Woody Allen could be Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman, why shouldn’t Spielberg be David Lean and Buster Keaton? Throughout film history, every director was influenced by other directors, but most directors prior to Spielberg settled on singularities of sensibility, value system, or world view. Kubrick was Kubrick, Peckinpah was Peckinpah, Ford was Ford, Zinnemann was Zinnemann, etc. Even directors who were versatile, like Howard Hawks for instance, played within genre rules and styles in accordance with the project at hand; thus, Hawks of SCARFACE was different from Hawks of HIS GIRL FRIDAY or ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS. But when one watches something like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, E.T. or EMPIRE OF THE SUN, the styles, sensibilities, and influences are all over the map. Though we can recognize something as Spielbergian, it’s a bursting compound of many references inside Spielberg’s encyclopedic and computer-like mind. Too-much-ness is the hallmark of Spielbergism, but his characteristic deftness and brilliance made the excessive and obnoxious seem fun and natural. (Of course, John Williams’s scores helped some. Williams, like Spielberg, is expert at making the unwieldy seem easy, the heavy feel light.)
Who else but Spielberg would have thought to turn Americana/Suburbia into a fairytale fantasy of fascist-consumerist spiritualism? Who would have thought to mythologize Jewishness as Spielberg did? It’s not just that Roy is a short wide-eyed Jew who’s chosen over the tall goyim wearing sunglasses by the wise space aliens. (Spielberg knows the magic is in the EYES. Eisenstein purposely didn’t show the faces/eyes of the Czarist soldiers in the Odessa step sequence in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN to dehumanize them further. Eyes are the key, as in MINORITY REPORT; they are the windows to the human soul. Roy is to UFO-chasing what Benjamin Braddock is to girl-chasing in THE GRADUATE. Both win out over the bigger, taller, and better-looking goyim. It’s the Triumph of the Shlemiel. Dorks win big too. Think of the goofy-looking keyboard player/controller in the final scene: the white-shirted guy from whom the camera slowly pulls back after Francois-Truffaut-as-Lacombe gives the Jewish-Hitler-salute to the Space Critter. He’s a dork but featured in an iconic, almost sacral, manner, as if he too is a part of this holy communion with space angels. The guy looks Jewish, Dreyfus is Jewish, Truffaut and Bob Balaban are Jewish. And space aliens, in their infinite knowledge, may be space Jews for all we know, especially as someone says, ‘Einstein was probably one of them.’ It’s interesting how CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is both so exclusively tribal and inclusively populist. The privileged encounter for a select group of humans suggests that only the best and brightest — good number of which are Jews — should have the power and privilege to gain the higher truth/power, just like Jews in Hollywood and Harvard seem to think elite institutions should be reserved mostly for their own kind. Of course, there’s always an extra slot for the pushy Jew from below, and Roy is one pushy character who breaks just about every rule to get his way; if most gentiles just go along, the Jew will find a way, some way, to make it to the mountain top. But even as Jews keep control of the upper echelons of Hollywood for themselves, they make products that make us feel enraptured and ‘empowered’. In politics, Jews created Obama, a kind of space-alien-like Negro, or brother from another planet, who’s supposed to be high above us, a kind of messiah from the heavens, but he’s also marketed as ‘one of us’; he may not make hand signals as in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but he has his gentle fist-bumps. If Nazi salutes can become Jewish-space-alien signals, why can’t ghetto gestures, whose original purpose was to tribally exclude whitey, become the ‘bridge’ between Ebony and Ivory? Anyway, the keyboardist in the white shirt looks dorky, but Spielberg’s pomp-and-spectacle elevated him into an object of grandeur, as if even an ordinary-looking American could be made to embody the epic aura of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL or GONE WITH THE WIND. It’s ridiculous but still amazing. It’s easy to convey the larger-than-life dimensions of a man with charisma, but it’s no easy feat to imbue even the most nondescript person with something approaching godliness. It’s like the will-nilly to power.)
Spielberg has been eclectic and all-over-the-map — it’s as if all the movies he’s seen are part of the vast toy collection(or toy story) in the Xanadu of his own mind, and he will play with them as he wishes, imbuing them with new life, imprinting them with love for the Jew, just like David was imprinted with love for his ‘mother’, and indeed, the toy motif runs through CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, E.T. EMPIRE OF THE SUN, JURASSIC PARK, A.I. and even SCHINDLER’S LIST, with the little girl in red coat walking around like a toy — but also highly ‘synthesizational’, indeed so much so that all the influences he draws upon converge into something that can be said to be uniquely Spielbergian. He reformulates and re-employs influences with such hypnotic power that we often forget the references/homages/borrowings, which goes to show that emotions can easily override the mind. For example, the scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS where three small space ships appear before the humans as a prelude to the grand finale(when heavenly fireworks hail the grand entrance of the mother ship) could be a reworking of the three-man-march-and-salute of Hitler, Himmler, and the S.A. chief in the Nuremberg stadium before the eternal fire(presumably honoring fallen soldiers) in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. After the three ships scatter, we see storm clouds brewing and then a burst of spaceships heading straight for the space-port like a swarm of locusts, scattering the frightened humans in all directions. It could well be a variation of the scene in SEVEN SAMURAI when the bandits on horseback appear suddenly on a hilltop, panicking the peasants who scatter in every direction. (All the running about by the crowds in India also owes something to Kurosawa’s dynamism. They are then followed by long shots that owe more to David Lean and Riefenstahl. And when an elderly Hindu asks the people where the ‘music’ came from, we see multitudes of fingers point to the sky, an image that owes something to Eisenstein and Lang.)
Even though 1941, though a grand folly, is obviously a work of a master, whereas AIRPLANE! is not, the Zucker/Abrams movie works better because it’s just ‘mindlessly’ joke-oriented, throwing one gag after another at us. If you’re gonna be stupid and juvenile, it’s better to play the clown than the maestro. Jokes are like action in boxing — if movements are made clear to the eye, they’ll miss the target. There always has to be an element of surprise, something that is sorely missing in 1941. (Of course, not all funny movies are joke-or-gag-oriented, and comedies work beautifully according to a set plan or overall design/vision, as with the comedy-of-manners SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT or a conceptual comedy like PLAYTIME, or the works of Charlie Chaplin. But the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges thrived on anarchy and chaos, and it was the role of directors to serve them than to impose any overweening scheme over them. Comedies work like chess games where everything somehow connects with everything else, whereas farces and lampoons work like rolling of the dice; elements don’t have to connect as long as the jokes keep rolling along. DR. STRANGELOVE is comedy, AIRPLANE! is lampoon.)
In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Spielberg also revamped the use of ‘reverse-expectation’. In a way, this is a hoary horror movie trick, but Spielberg reprogrammed it to invoke a sense of magic and wonder instead of just anxiety and fright. Consider the scene where Roy in his truck is lost on the road in the middle of night. Lights appear on the rear window of the truck, making us feel nervous. Could it be a UFO? But they turn out to be headlights of another car, restoring our sense of normalcy — both disappointing and relieving us because we wanna see a UFO but also fear being scared. Soon after, similar lights appear in the rear window, and we think it’s another car. But the lights began to slowly ascend, a moment of fright but also wonder; they are finally here! If not for the earlier moment when strange lights didn’t turn out to be so strange, the second appearance of lights would have been far less effective. We thought "UFO!" in the first moment, but it was a car; we think "car" in the second moment, but it’s a UFO. This is a variation of what Spielberg pulled off in JAWS. We know there’s a shark out there somewhere, but the fright makes us ‘see’ sharks even where there aren’t any. After a fisherman drags in a big shark, we think maybe the threat is gone. There’s even a prank with kids with a fake shark fin. But then, after we’ve been reassured that all is well, just when we least expect it, the shark comes and takes another bite. In JAWS, Spielberg was obviously working in the horror tradition, but beginning with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, he began to use reverse-expectation to heighten our sense of wonder instead of just trying to scare us. Consider when the paleontologists first set their eyes on dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK, surely one of the most wondrous scenes in all of cinema. (Few movies are as keen on the going-on-a-family-trip mentality as JURASSIC PARK is. Children love the idea of going on trip away from the humdrum same old same old routine of family life. The initial excitement of being far from home makes everything seem paradisiacal, and kids wanna stay forever and never return home. But things often go wrong, or even if everything goes as planned, the sensory overload and exhaustion finally get to the children, and they realize, as Dorothy did in THE WIZARD OF OZ, "there’s no place like home." So, even though everyone went to see JURASSIC PARK to see awesome dinosaurs, by the final scene there was no sight more wondrous and welcome than of birds in our world. Spielberg’s shtick in JURASSIC PARK is nothing new, but he not only did it better than most but understood something a bit more about human psychology. Blockbuster movies generally offer escapism without taking into account the other side of the equation that makes us want to return home. It’s like Odysseus, after all the epic events and adventures, really just wants to return to his wife, son, and dog. It’s like David in A.I. finally wants to ‘go home’. And E.T. wants to go home too. It’s this paradoxical relation between wanting to leave home and wanting to return home in human psychology that Spielberg understood so well. It’s like Elliott, feeling misunderstood by everyone, wants to live in his own fantasy world with E.T. but eventually rediscovers and reconnects with his mother’s love through the fantastic friendship with E.T. It’s like the kid in EMPIRE OF THE SUN has one hell of an adventure in China during WWII but, when reunited with his parents again, wants to be with them forever. Jews ‘go home’ at the end of SCHINDLER’S LIST too. This sentimentality, nostalgia, and longing softened the edges of the often violent, frightening, and bombastic images of Spielberg’s cinema, making his movies both thrilling and assuring.)
There can be an element of dramatic irony to reverse-expectation. When the town sheriff(Roy Scheider) tosses fish parts into the water, the Great White surfaces briefly but not the sheriff to see, so we are freaked but he isn’t, but then, he sees it too, and so, the first wave of fright(ours) and second wave of
fright(his) overlap to create an ever more powerful impression that if we and the sheriff had seen the shark at the same time. (Spielberg pulls the same trick with wonderment when the visitors see the dinosaurs for the first time in JURASSIC PARK. Instead of everyone noticing all at once, we see one character noticing it in sitting position, then in standing position, and then another character noticing and then another character noticing, and then all of them stepping out of the jeep to notice some more. Thus, there’s a layering of impressions/perceptions. It’s like how the same musical melody can be repeated over and over in variations to expand and deepen its beauty and power. So, even though the scene is about seeing-dinosaurs-for-the-first-time as objective fact, it’s layered with various subjective senses of wonderment that cascade over one another, which amplifies the sense of wonder. It’s like a visual equivalent of Phil Specter’s Wall of Sound, how a pop song can be made to sound spectacular and orchestral.) In a scene in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, townsfolk are gathered to greet the UFO, but lights in the sky turn out to be or are interfered by government helicopters. Roy comes to suspect that maybe he’s just seeing nonsense images in his head — all those mountain-shaped-objects — and decides to call it quits, regain sanity, and rejoin his family. But when he accidentally tears off the top of his clay mountain model, he finally sees IT. As in other cases of reverse-expectation, Spielberg restores a sense of normality just before plunging us into the ‘madness’, obsession, or ‘calling’ even deeper.
Maybe Spielberg was partly drawing from Fellini’s 8 ½, and, in a way, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is his most personal film — even more than E.T. Just as Guido, as alter ego of Fellini, is so obsessed with film-making that he can no longer tell reality from fantasy — he’s working on a science fiction movie by the way — and finally makes peace with the fanciful idea that fantasy and reality are two sides of the same coin, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS conveys Spielberg’s total immersion and obsession with movies. It’s almost as if space aliens are like the gods of cinema. Just as Roy cannot do anything but follow the heavenly light after he’s been struck or ‘chosen’, Spielberg became completely enraptured with movies from a young age. It was like Moses after seeing the Burning Bush. It was like Dorothy on the journey to see the wizard of Oz. But if Dorothy wanted to see the wizard so as to return to Kansas, Spielberg wanted to be the new wizard. That’s the magic of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. It is so close to ‘home’, a loving portrait of family and suburbia and Indiana summers of fresh air buzzing with crickets under starry skies; but it is also out-of-this-world, so ‘far out’. It is Kansas and Oz in one package.
Spielberg understands the childhood mentality in each of us. Kids know "there’s no place like home sweet home", but they also wanna go to Neverland/Disneyland. Kids love running out of the house and running back to the house. It’s like a mini-epic-adventure, and this mentality remains in all of us to some degree, which is why adults love movies like PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES. It’s wanderlust and returnlust. Even the most famously ‘rootless’ and ‘wandering’ tribe, the Jews, are also defined by their close identification with the fate of Israel, their ancient homeland.
Anyway, given some similarities between 8 ½ and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, it isn’t surprising that Bob Fosse’s own 8 ½, ALL THAT JAZZ, has some of the feel of Spielberg’s movie. The fantasy sequences and the grand musical finale in that film — and the main character’s going to meet his guardian angel — may as much to Spielbergism as to Fellini-ism. It’s so very personal and so very showbiz. There’s an element of Jewish burlesque in both movies.
It’s interesting how Spielberg, who was once considered the fast-paced state-of-the-art filmmaker, can now be appreciated as something of a formal classicist. Though new directors built on and expanded upon Spielberg’s thrill-packed cinema, Spielberg himself owed everything to old masters such as David Lean, Kurosawa, Ford, Hawks, Riefenstahl, Eisenstein, and many others. One notable difference between CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and movies like AVATAR and LORD OF THE RINGS is in the sense of scale and perspective. Spielberg’s camera is often hyper and restless but knows when to sit still and be awed by grandeur. The camera chases the characters all around the mountainside, but Devil’s Tower looms over them as a massive object — which later makes the appearance of the space alien mother-ship all the more awesome for overshadowing Devil’s Tower. Thanks to such proportionality, Spielberg doesn’t lose sight of what makes awesomeness awesome and humanness human. In AVATAR, it’s hard to maintain what is spectacular and what is human, what is big and what is small, what is fantastic and what is real, as everything is jumbled together into a never-ending assault on the senses. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the camera remains on the human level while observing the wonders of nature and space ships. Awesome things are awesome because they are beyond the human, so if we lose the sense of the human scale, we also lose the sense of awesomeness; it’s like even a small mound can be awesome to an ant from an ant-perspective, but if an ant saw things on the human scale, a small mound would be just a puny clump of dirt. When the mother-ship finally appears in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the camera looks up along with the people craning their necks in absolute wonderment at the scale of the thing. And then, the long shot of the mother-ship over the Devil’s Tower pays off precisely because of Spielberg’s careful preparation in the mindfulness of perspective, proportion, and scale. Prior to the massive ship’s appearance, we could almost believe that nothing that man or any living creature(even space aliens) might build could be bigger than Devil’s Tower. But when we gape at the mother-ship hovering as a vessel several times the size of Devil’s Tower, we know we’re in a whole new ballpark. In contrast, sense of scale is almost nonexistent in AVATAR and LORD OF THE RINGS with their superman cameras. The camera spans the vastest spaces and penetrates the tiniest corridors with such ease that there’s little sense of sweat and effort, of having made it to the mountaintop. (In this sense, Spielberg shares something crucial with Riefenstahl, whose break in cinema came through mountain-climbing movies, where the glory came not with the ease of movement but in the courage and resolve to make the dangerous and difficult climb to the top. Spielberg’s movies are lots of fun, but things don’t happen ‘easily’.) Though Spielberg mastered the use of computers and CGI, he still maintains a more classic sense of perspective in movies such as the latest INDIANA JONES movie and TIN TIN, suffusing his movies with a sense of care and wonder so lacking in the works of many of today’s ‘hot directors’.
In a way, one could argue that Tarantino is a darker version of Spielberg(and Scorsese too of course). He too has a voracious appetite for movies and had drawn influences from just about everyone — including from Spielberg, as the avenging Jewish screen angel in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS recalls the death angel in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, though I suspect the image also owes something to the final shot of SUNSET BOULEVARD of the aging actress who can no longer differentiate reality from fantasy, can no longer tell if she’s in love or at war with the public — , but there’s a one big difference between the two men. In the final equation, despite Spielberg’s debt to earlier movie-makers, he’s his own man and his movies are his own. With Tarantino, with the exception of RESERVOIR DOGS, I’m not so sure if his movies can really be said to be his. In PULP FICTION, all the influences and homages, at best, amount to little more than pastiches of movie geek references, and at worst, reek of stale perfume or warmed-over greasy left-over food. I didn’t care that Uma Thurman’s hairstyle or wig was similar to Anna Karina’s. PULP FICTION was less a real movie than a game of spot-the-references, mostly of bad 70s exploitation pictures. Indeed, another key difference is Spielberg generally learned from the best whereas Tarantino is essentially a bottom feeder who loves trash. KILL BILL was bad chop suey of mostly third-rate kung fu, samurai, and yakuza movie cliches. (Trashy material can serve as inspiration for worthy movies — consider some of Walter Hill’s works — or can even be transformed into something of artistic worth, as Welles did with TOUCH OF EVIL and Truffaut did with SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, both based on pulp novels. Tarantino, in contrast, loves to make trash even trashier. He doesn’t recycle trash for reusability but pisses and poops all over it and calls it art. More than anyone, he represents the Andy Warholization of cinema.) Spielberg may not be ‘pure’, but his movies still have a feeling of purity that is entirely Spielbergian. However much CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and E.T. may owe to Disney, they are creations of special universes all their own. They remind you of Disney but don’t seem inferior to or a pale imitation(or corruption) of Disney. But, while spotting Leone references in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, all I felt was a desire to watch Leone movie instead of Tarantino’s vile and ugly junk. Watching KILL BILL, I kept wondering why I should watch this garbage that only imitates other garbage? Spielberg is a cunning Jew and maybe not the most mature person in the world but in interviews still comes across as a thoughtful person. Listen to Tarantino’s interviews and he comes across as an obnoxious self-absorbed jerk. He’s said to have high intelligence, in which case, he may be the first mentally retarded genius the world has known.
Though the sudden shift from the pleasantness of the opening act to the darker hue and cry of the remainder of MIRACLE MILE is jarring on first impression, the continuities and connections come into focus as the circular story winds back to where it all began. As in BLUE VELVET — perhaps in a more savvy and elusive way — , there are undertones in the opening pleasantries that hint at the possibility, even likelihood, of a world governed by darker and mysterious forces, indeed as if what we take for granted as happiness and well-being in life are but a bubble to be pricked in an instant.
Also, even amidst the smiles and sunshine, the introduction touches on something approaching dream reality, and in dreams also lay hidden the stuff of nightmares. The scene in the natural history museum is, for instance, both fun and funereal. A museum filled with dead skulls and reminders of extinct species of animals and plants is a mausoleum of sorts. But it’s alive with happy schoolchildren milling about, and Harry has a way with kids; he even sort of acts like one of them. Though the TV monitor features a straight-faced documentary about cosmic evolution, there’s something amusing about a tale of billions of years condensed to a minute long animation narrated with objective certitude, as if we really know what really happened since the beginning of time and space; science is the mind with a few facts and guesses playing god. Though the museum is filled with all manner of interesting objects — everything ranging from genuine artifacts to kitschy paintings and replicas — , Harry wanders around it like something between a kindergarten and a dating service. And yet, his romantic interest is, in some odd way, very much in the spirit of the museum since the story of life has been about sex and reproduction. The history of life is the history of mating. Harry stands in line behind Julie at the gift store in hopes of striking up a conversation, but she departs after making a purchase. Harry’s only consolation is a prism he purchases before leaving the store. He mildly scolds himself — everything about him is mild — for not having been bolder, as he’s now sure he’ll never see her again. As he mildly grieves that she’s lost forever, he holds the prism before sunlight, and rainbow colors streak the back of his hand; just then, Julie appears. It’s all seems low-key and ordinary yet magical and dreamlike, mundane yet miraculous, all-too-possible yet too-good-to-be-true. De Jarnatt’s ingenuity of mood and tone, as well as his acumen with angles and accents of visuals and drama, is truly amazing, all the more so as MIRACLE MILE was only his second(and last) directorial effort — his first movie was CHERRY 2000.
And then, there’s the music of Tangerine Dream, the New Age band that also scored RISKY BUSINESS. Like BLUE VELVET and RISKY BUSINESS, MIRACLE MILE is very much a Night Movie. For most of childhood and growing-up-years, night is a time for sleep. No wonder then that stories like PETER PAN are almost like waking dreams, what with magical figures appearing in the middle of night. As kids grow into adults, one of the main rewards is to sleep later and later, even staying up all night. And yet, an element of dreaminess still lingers in the experience of night. Perhaps, it’s partly a predatory instinct as many animals hunt in the night, and humans too evolved as hunters and prey as well as gatherers. In a dangerous would, early man couldn’t have had slept very soundly as his kind could be devoured by stalking predators in the middle of night; also, there could have been advantages in using the cover of night to attack enemies; also, the appearance of bright stars and constellations could have aided early man as to his whereabouts and directions. And instead of sleeping in within the silence of closed rooms, early man heard sounds of beasts, birds, insects, and elements(rain, wind, streams, etc) everywhere. Thus, dreaming and being awake during nighttime may have been seen as one-and-the-same, as if night itself is a dream regardless of one’s conscious state. And in this domain, there was no division between the world of nature and world of man.
Especially in modern society, there’s a sense that some cities, especially on weekends, never sleep. Street lights stay on through the night, neon signs glow everywhere, headlights of cars stream all through the darkness, and businesses remain open to the late hours or even around the clock. Staying up all night in the big city is one of the rituals of growing up, which is why movies like LA DOLCE VITA, THE GRADUATE, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, and METROPOLITAN have a special place in our hearts; both end with their protagonist pulling out all-nighters to come to a better understanding of their lives and their places in the world; it’s as if they finally completed the circle, i.e. they went from grown-ups with freedom of night to reborn souls who witnessed the death of night and the birth of the new day. If earlier they discovered the freedom of adulthood in the night, they finally discover the responsibility of adulthood with the breaking of new dawn.
When we gain the freedom of the night, there’s no more business with parents and highschool deans reprimanding us for staying up too late or not waking up early enough. In college, you can do as you like; pass or fail, no one’s gonna get on your back except your conscience. (Of course, it’s different after college, as your boss will dig into you for arriving late to work, which makes the workplace more like highschool than like college, which is becoming more like vacation resorts to attract more tuition-paying students. Perhaps the biggest difference between college attendees and military recruits is their sleeping schedules. Former become freer, the latter even less free than in childhood.) On Fridays and Saturdays, it’s a common ritual for young people to prepare themselves for late night partying or the like. In MIRACLE MILE, Harry makes a date with Julie and promises to pick her up little at midnight at her work — a 24 hr burger joint/coffee shop called Johnie’s with an aptly named display of Fat Boy holding a burger outside.
As young adults(for whom nighttime freedom was still relatively fresh and exciting) comprised MIRACLE MILE’s main target audience, they would have understood the mythic allure of the night as a fulfilment of dreams into reality. It’s like the two sex scenes with Lana(Rebecca De Mornay) — first at Joel’s suburban home and then in the city subway — in RISKY BUSINESS; Joel used to dream and dream(daytime and nighttime) of sex, but he’s finally doing it, and the actuality seems surreal as the fulfilment of the forbidden; he’s living it but a part of him refuses to believe it and still mentally processes it as a dream. Unlike most of his peers who think of sex as something casual and fun, Joel idealizes and dreams of the perfect sex with the ideal partner, and when it finally happens, instead of being disappointed with the reality — as Dudley Moore’s character is in 10 — , he finds it to be better than his wildest imagination would have suggested. It’s like the moment in UGETSU when the merchant, holding the ghost noblewoman’s in his arms, says, "I never knew such pleasures even existed." Joel was hoping for sex to be great, but even his feverish imagination had no idea it would be so unbelievable amazing. Thus, the scene is almost like a dream reality, a reality that is too good to be real. Later, when he has sex with Lana in the subway, it’s dreamy for a different reason — the dream of mastery. He’s changed from a dazed virgin who couldn’t believe his eyes(in his parent’s house) to a stud-pimp who thrills in his triumph(and in public too). BLUE VELVET presents an ever darker twist on this obsession, and there are also plenty of twisted sexual situations in AFTER HOURS, albeit ones that never come to fruition. It goes from a guy meeting a girl(who notices him reading Henry Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER) to his being invited to her place, where he expects some action, but his night with her is interrupted by one situation after another — even by an account of how the woman’s former husband used to play-rape her pretending she’s Dorothy from THE WIZARD OF OZ.
Even as people have fun or party into the wee hours of the night, an element of unreality intrudes because of bio-chemistry and the nature of nightlife itself. Even in the throes of excitement with loud music and dance, something within the body starts snoozing off in accordance to the biological clock. (THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? took this to its logical conclusion, where dance turns into trance turns into tragedy. And horror of the dance party scene in JACOB’S LADDER, we eventually learn, was due to the discrepancy between a soul that wants to live and body that needs to die.) Some people rely on caffeine and other drugs to stay up late, and of course, drugs alter one’s sense of reality, making one feel as if awake in a dream.
Though many movies feature the night, there’s an entire category of movies that specializes in the alternate-reality of the night. In such movies, nighttime is something more than time after daylight. It’s presented as wholly different kind of reality, a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland universe. This is part of the magic of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. It’s like daylight hours are mere rehearsals for the magic of the night. In horror movies, most demons, vampires, and werewolves come out in the night. In fantasies, the elves and fairies come out in the night, like in the story where they help a shoemaker. Night can be terror, it can be wonder. It can be dread and fright, it can be peace and solace. Everything feels different during night hours; while most of the city is quieter at night, some parts are especially busy and come alive; and, there are the first half of night when most people have fun and the second half of night when only the true nighters still hang around clubs and bars. In RISKY BUSINESS, Joel finds both his happiest dreams and worst nightmares in the night. He makes it back to daylight, but he knows he’s been bitten and converted by the night. He’s made it through the waking dream and survived, and despite his fears and anxieties, he knows he has to return, just like Willard in APOCALYPSE NOW has to go back to the jungle. Once he’s had the taste of the (cunt)hunt — even or especially because he’s been hunted himself — , he knows he has to return to face the test again for higher stakes of pleasure and danger. This dual aspect of the night as both alluring and appalling can be felt in films like TAXI DRIVER and THE FIGHT CLUB. There’s something transformative about making-it-through-the-night. It’s like a rite-of-passage from which one awakens to a new self. Consider the ending of HAROLD AND MAUDE where Harold stays up all night as Maude dies of overdose and then goes for a crazy drive in the new morning. Or BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY where the guy makes it through the night and rediscovers the taste of fresh-baked bread. Or how Jenny dies during the night in LOVE STORY. Or consider a night-time of horrors in THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The ending is all the more powerful because the Negro makes it through the hellish night, only to be killed as ‘one of them’. Similar kind of shock jolts us in SOMETHING WILD. When the Ray Liotta character first appears, it is nighttime and we come to associate everything about him with darkness. So, when the Jeff Daniels character saves the girl and makes it to his suburban home in the brightness of morning, we feel safe and secure, as if order has been restored to the world. They survived the night. So, when the Ray Liotta suddenly appears at the house and shatters the glass door, it’s like night crashing into day, as if a nightmare stalked them and exploded into their waking hours — ironically however, even though Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith made it safely to day, they fall to sleep from exhaustion of having stayed up all night. The moment of truth in BABY IT’S YOU comes after the guy makes an all-night drive to see his estranged girlfriend at her college. One could say that the-night-as-metaphor-for-the trial-of-the-soul-or-rite-of-passage-to-deeper-truth is something of a cliche in both pop culture and high art — consider Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and films of Ingmar Bergman, especially PERSONA, where two psyches wrestle in the dark womb of night. And there’s Tarkovsky’s THE SACRIFICE, a nighttime epic if there ever was one — and like MIRACLE MILE, a film fueled by anxieties of world apocalypse and the need for meaning in the face of the eternal abyss. (One crucial difference between THE SACRIFICE and MIRACLE MILE is that the character of Tarkovsky’s film seems to have been obsessed with man’s decline/doom all his life whereas Harry Washello appears to have been the most carefree person on the planet prior to the shocking turn of events. Thus in THE SACRIFICE, the curse is a kind of a blessing, a fulfilment of the character’s fears and doubts about humanity. As someone who’d long thought about the meaning of life, the crisis of the night is an opportunity for him to play the role of prophet, at least in his own eyes. He’s been studying for this test all his life. Harry, in contrast, especially as a young man in good ole USA, never seems to have thought about life and death, so he suddenly has to make sense of everything in a few hours; he has to take an exam on a subject he didn’t even know existed. It’s like the opening dream sequence in RISKY BUSINESS where Joel finds himself in the middle of a SAT examination utterly unprepared and with only a few minutes to finish to take the test.) There’s also JULIET OF THE SPIRTS, especially the nighttime phantasmagoria followed by Juliet walking into the sunlight. FELLINI SATYRICON had a similar ending with a new day following a long crazy night. And there’s the nighttime psycho-drama of a tired old man in Alain Resnais’s PROVIDENCE. And BUBBLEGUM CRISIS episodes I and VI also struggle through the night to the breaking of dawn. And there are countless other examples. But precisely because night-as-metaphor is such a shopworn cliche, it is the rare work that captures the deeper qualities of the night(especially as fading into day), and MIRACLE MILE is one of the most remarkable.
Also, despite some of the problems of the second half of the movie, De Jarnatt was no mere sensationalist or trickster. He wasn’t Terry Gilliam who, one may recall, was much lauded in the 80s for TIME BANDITS and especially for BRAZIL. I liked parts of TIME BANDITS but thought then and do so now that BRAZIL is a stupid mess. Whatever De Jarnatt’s deficiencies, one can sense his thought processes permeating through MIRACLE MILE, whereas BRAZIL is an avalanche of mindless spectacle. For starters, what’s the point of turning political satire into musical-styled fantasy? The point of satire in works like 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD was to feel their way through the elaborate layers of officialdom, fantasies, and delusions to access the source of deception/corruption in both its political and psychological dimensions. Gilliam reversed the process. He takes the mere shell of ideas from true satirists and blows them up into kaleidoscopic hot air balloons. (Gilliam seems never to have understood why AMARCORD failed as satire of Fascism despite Fellini’s assertions of social critique. When a work is as inflated and infantile as the very thing it professes to mock, the joke is really on the artist and the audience that falls for it.) For De Jarnatt, post-modernism was a means to think about society, and even if you don’t agree with his premises or conclusions, you can still appreciate his creative methodology of working through ideas. For Gilliam, post-modernism is just a lame excuse to over-load with movies with as many homages, references, and parodies as possible. If Huxley and Orwell used satire to scratch at truth behind the kitsch, the Gilliam of BRAZIL pours kitsch over satire. (Gilliam struck gold only once with FISHER KING, proving he’s better off dealing with matters of the heart than pontificating about ideas of the mind. As if BRAZIL wasn’t insult enough to 1984, he made a travesty out of LA JETEE with 12 MONKEYS.)
There was a new quality to the Nighttime Flick of the 80s, and perhaps the Glenn Frey music video of "You Belong to the City" — for MIAMI VICE — caught the mood perfectly. Perhaps, it had something to do with the change of visual styles and cultural fads. The grittier realist visuals of early 70s cinema didn’t make nighttime particularly alluring or appetizing. The NY of THE FRENCH CONNECTION looks grimy during the day and grungy in the night. In the 50s and 60s, many color films lacked the visual crispness and the most luminous tonalities of 80s cinema. Also, there was the whole return-to-nature mentality of the Counterculture. Thus, visual use of color tended to be either very artificial(as in 007 movies) or very naturalistic, as in STRAW DOGS or FIVE EASY PIECES. And nighttime scenes tended to look either very dark or artificially illuminated. Beginning around the mid-70s, a new way of depicting the night came into vogue. Perhaps advances in camera and lighting technology caught nuances of darkness better without undue use of lighting. In the older films, darkness without lighting looks very dark, almost to the point where we can hardly make out what’s going on. (This didn’t matter so much in b/w films where stark contrasts between the visible and the hidden became part of the expressive language, especially in film noir. But color heightened the sense of realism and called for greater approximations of the nuances between brightness and darkness.) Thus, not-so-subtle use of lighting was employed in night scenes, and it showed; the viewer might notice that the characters in the foreground are unnaturally illuminated though the space around them is considerably darker. This is even truer of much older movies — like Hitchcock’s works of the 50s. By the late 70s and 80s, new lenses and film stock allowed the capture of images in the dark with less obtrusive use of lighting. Stanley Kubrick was a pioneer of this technology with BARRY LYNDON, taken even further by the makers of AMADEUS in the 80s. But the changes were also evident in Spielberg’s night scenes in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. Nighttime and darkness in his movie simply looked and felt different than in earlier films. A whole new spectrum of tonalities opened up between lightness and darkness, everything from the familiar(like soft velvety shades in a child’s room filled with toys) to the otherworldly(strangely animate clouds bursting with red and purple, as if gods are crushing grapes into wine up above).
Thus, nighttime came to fuller and more vivid life in the movies of the late 70s and 80s. You can see it in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, THE WARRIORS, and SUPERMAN, and, of course, in so many 80s movies. RISKY BUSINESS, if shot in the manner of 60s or early 70s cinema, wouldn’t have been as effective and edgy, so luminous and lurid. Its nighttime is more alive and vivid than its daytime — in that sense, I suppose FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, a total celebration of the day, is its opposite.
Consider the dark and shades images in the music video "Captain of the Heart" by the duo Double. There are palettes and tones rarely captured in films of earlier periods. Darkness takes on soft velvety hues instead of being bound by stark contrasts. Kon Ichikawa elevated the use of hues and tones to a new level of artistry with MAKIOKA SISTERS. Ridley Scott achieved similar marvels with his Chanel No. 5 commercials. This was also the most striking feature ofJean-Jacques Beineix’s DIVA, which seized some of the most dazzling and alluring images of darkness, dim-lit spaces, and night life. It even made a joke of its mastery of light-and-dark by having a villain lured and killed by the glowing light of a misplaced elevator button. DIVA had nothing going for it but its look, but what a look it was.
Doing night/dark scenes was one of the biggest challenges of cinema(the main trick of which was the capturing and projecting of light from one device to another), and various means were employed, including the highly unsatisfying day-for-night technique. The classic Hollywood method was to highlight the foreground at the expense of the background, and the effect tended to look stagy. (Antonioni’s use of darkness in BLOW-UP was something of a break-through and probably was a key influence on THE GRADUATE, one of the most audacious uses of light, color, and darkness in Hollywood film-making. Instead of lighting the dark with obvious tricks, Antonioni allowed our eyes to gradually adjust to the dark, as if peering into the shadow world within the camera itself. While much of THE GRADUATE played by conventional rules, there were moments when Nichols was less interested in highlighting the characters apart from dark space enveloping them than connecting them to the darkness, thus making the space no less important than the characters.) But it was really with the development of new techniques in the late 70s and 80s that opened up darkness and nighttime to entirely new ways of exploration and illustration. It’s hard to think of a film made prior to the late 70s that captured nighttime with such combination of clarity and nuance as Brian De Palma’s BLOW OUT. Natural colors in dim light appeared more vibrant than ever, and it wasn’t long before Michael Mann turned this into an obsessive fetish in movies like MANHUNTER, with their slick lurid imagery. Compare the night scenes in DAZED AND CONFUSED with those of AMERICAN GRAFFITI. If Linklater’s film had been made in the 70s, the nighttime scenes might have looked a bit crude, as in Lucas’s film. This isn’t necessarily to favor one visual mode/texture over another as there’s no single correct or ‘best’ look for all movies; besides, like anything else in the history of cinema, the technological advances in the 80s were mostly wasted on trash, mostly awful music videos and even worse genre movies aimed at teenagers. For every BLOW OUT, there were lots of ugly cheapie horror movies; and for every RISKY BUSINESS, there were hundreds of teen sex trash. And personally, I never cared for Michael Mann’s overly stylized fetishism reeking/streaking of neon-narcissist mannerisms. But, there’s something to be said for the nighttime scenes in E.T., AFTER HOURS, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., BLUE VELVET(not a favorite), and many others. To what extent this owed to technological breakthroughs or shift in cultural fashions/preferences(often the result of neo-test-marketing), I can’t say, but pop culture undoubtedly went through a serious make-over beginning in the late 70s.
If Reagan wanted us to see the Morning-in-America with new eyes — following the clearing of the haze of pot smoke and tear gas of the 60s and 70s — , pop culture visuals made us see the Night-in-America in a whole new way as well. Possibly, the opening scene of TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. was maybe a kind of joke on the ‘Morning in America’ TV ad. Notice how the montages switch quickly from the bright daylight of the Presidential motorcade to the flashy nighttime of poker games and cat-n-mouse chase between federal agents and a terrorist. Americans voted for Reagan because he psychically reconnected them to the suburban/small town/country air of dewy mornings, but the new Zeitgeist was really about the amoral revival of glittering night life. Though urban nightlife was always about hedonism and loosening of inhibitions, the 80s seemed especially ‘materialistic’ and crass because of the absence of moral themes and dichotomies. In the 50s and early 60s, America still had something of the old ‘innocence’, and we can sense this in AMERICAN GRAFFITI. We know things are changing in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but we know there’s a price to pay for violating social norms and pressures. In the late 60s, nighttime hedonism was conflated with themes of love, liberation, finding oneself, and etc. The rowdy people in the orgy/party in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and COOGAN’S BLUFF may be full of shit and really just looking for sex-and-drugs, but there are vibes of social experimentation/revolution in the air, the conceit that they’re doing something more than just looking for fun. And then, in the 70s, nightlife was conflated with self-realization and self-actualization. The male version of this was dramatized in Mike Nichols’s CARNAL KNOWLEDGE and the female version in Paul Mazursky’s UNMARRIED WOMAN. So, even though a bunch of people were cruising the night for some action, there was still the pretense that it was ABOUT something. Then came disco culture of the late 70s that made a mockery of everything. It produced some good music but was gay-ish, ridiculous, and tasteless to the max. Even so, the sheer outlandishness and campy bad taste were seen as some kind of ‘cultural statements’. But it became clear that the 60s were really over — and not just gone but forgotten — and 70s were over too, failing as both cultural extension and social reaction to the 60s. The ridiculous excessiveness of disco, the rise of campy gay culture, the overblown personalities in the arts, the dreary ‘radicalism’ of punk, and staleness of political discourse made a mockery of everything. It was as if Americans arrived at an impasse where real problems could no long be solved with real truth and real debate, especially as everyone had a different take on what was ‘real’ and ‘authentic’(given that politics, culture, social sciences, and economics don’t work like math and hard sciences.) Thus, the revival of America had to be based on a myth. John Lennon was dead, and Americans decided to ‘imagine’ a former Hollywood actor in the role of the President. It was as if the whole arc of the great social changes had ended in the joke of late 70s Carter presidency and disco mania.
But then, even though Reagan put forth a conservative vision mythologizing America’s return to former glory, everyone knew America could not ‘go home again’. Reagan was a useful prop to put Americans at ease following decades of social upheavals — many of which went awry — and to offer a respite for the elites, old and new, to rejig the system for the new globalist order yet to be birthed. Reagan was a midwife in this operation.
Significantly, even though the great themes of the 60s and 70s were over, the modes libertine-ism and hedonism remained. Since the themes were gone, the new hedonism could be more nakedly narcissistic. In the 60s, for example, young men may have been looking for sex but still felt obligated to grow their hair long, pontificate about ‘free love’, and speak some Mahirishi Yogi mumbo jumbo about liberation through sex and drugs. In the 70s, a bunch of women may have been looking for easy sex, but they went for the ‘natural’ look — like Carole King on the cover of TAPESTRY — and spoke in slogans borrowed from Germanine Greer and her ilk, always mindful of making ‘statements’ about sexual liberation and empowerment, like Gloria on ALL IN THE FAMILY.
Perhaps what made a mockery of it all was the rise of gay movement. One had to admit there was a compelling moral component to the movements centered around blacks, youths, and women. It was understandable for blacks to want equality and reconnect with their African roots. It made sense for young people to demand more freedom and try to think their own thoughts and pursue their own feelings instead of just conforming to the System. And it’s perfectly understandable why women wanted more freedom in sexual and social matters. Also, being a woman, a young person, or a member of a particular race is perfectly normal and natural, and indeed central to what makes us human.
But when homos got into the act of empowerment and liberation, the whole notion of social progress got silly. What was the gay idea of liberation, progress, and freedom? A bunch of guys in leather fuc*ing each other in the ass in bathhouses, a bunch of men wearing women’s dresses and acting all fruity. For awhile, the movement was also very contradictory. The new feminists that took over NOW tended to be neo-puritanical lesbians who saw everything as ‘sexism’ and ‘sexual exploitation’; they pushed a kind of asexualism. In contrast, the homo men were into raunchy sexual ‘objectification’ of one another, into all sorts of displays of sexual excess, and pornography. Lesbian feminists were anti-porn, and gay men were for more porn. Lesbian feminists were colorless sexual Stalinists whereas gay men were flamboyant in leather and lace on the disco floor. The silliness of where this gay stuff was going could be seen in William Friedkin’s CRUISING. No matter how one looks at it, there’s something ridiculous about gay culture and gay ways, and so, when the gay stuff became part of the culture of liberation and moral ‘evolution’, the whole arc of ‘social progress’ came to a bad end, a joke. Disco even made black culture look stupid, what with all those Negroes in ‘faggoty’ sunglasses and pants making fools of themselves. Men-in-dresses obsessed with porny behavior made a mockery of feminism. And the fact that the culture had gone from groovy hippies to grooving hips gave the lie to the notion that the boomer generation was all about meaning and truth. They were really about pleasure. Just like Beatles’ idealistic Apples venture turned out to be a sham, much of the social revolution of the 60s and 70s was also a sham, driven less by hunger for truth than addiction to more freedom to ‘fuc*’ and have a good time. And if the achievements of black athletes in the 50s and 60s had been associated with social progress, it was clear by the 80s that the only thing black athletes really cared about was money, fame, and lots of ‘white pussy’. So, there’s a double meaning to the scene in RISKY BUSINESS where a bunch of kids sit together and say it’s all about the ‘money’. They could be seen as ‘shallow and crass’ but also honest and straightforward. As beneficiaries of the social changes in the 60s and 70s, ‘freedom’ wasn’t a ‘theme’ for the 80s generation(later called ‘generation X’)but a casual fact. Though disdained by boomers for having no grand theme in their lives — thus the ‘X’ — , the 80s generation exposed the real truth about the boomers: the boomers’ main obsessions were fun and pleasure, which had only been wrapped in the veneer of ‘altruism’ and ‘meaning’; boomers could put off careers and search for meaning ONLY BECAUSE jobs were plentiful — if they ever needed one — and because their parents paid for their youthful adventures; and when most hippies and such types talked about sharing, they meant OTHERS should share with them than vice versa, e.g. a lot of hippie bums arrived in San Francisco and expected to be taken care of. The mind-set was turning from the Freedom Ride to the Free Ride. Possibly, the rise of credit culture, though brazenly capitalist in its foundations, contributed greatly to the liberalization of society. Without credit, people are mindful of how much they earn and how much they can spend; they need to save in order to spend, and the very nature of saving is psychologically conservative as it’s about hoarding, protecting, and being responsible with one’s limited wealth. But once credit was easily made available to everyone, Americans stopped worrying about saving since they could spend today and put off worries for tomorrow. (The rise of political correctness in the 1980s was partly a desperate attempt by radical boomers to prop up the myth that their generation was committed to grand themes. With the end of the Draft in the early 70s, the Counterculture movement collapsed overnight, making many people wonder if boomer protesters had really been motivated by anti-war idealism or cowardice. And the majority of boomers voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984. And boomer entrepreneurs in technology and finance were soon making more money than the older generations had ever dreamt of. So, it was becoming plain as day that the boomers were as ‘greedy’, if not more so, than generations before or after them; after all, the 80s generation during the Reagan Decade was still in middle school, high school, or college. To salvage the boomer myth of altruism and higher commitment, political correctness served as a handy tool. Thus, even as boomers got ever piggier and richer, pontificating about virtues in accordance with political correctness made them feel as a special people: "I may be worth many millions, but I’m for ‘gay marriage’, and that means I’m for ‘equality’." Political Correctness was also necessary for the Left since more freedom didn’t necessarily mean more freedom for the leftist cause. It could just as well mean more free speech for ‘racists’ as for ‘Marxists’, and so the goal of PC has been to rig the idea of freedom so that ‘hate speech’ is not free speech, with ‘hate’ defined by terminologists of the ‘left’. Boomer radicals thought more freedom would naturally favor the Left over the Right, but the rise of conservatism in the 1980s made them change their mind. Freedom as freedom was dangerous. It had to be rigged to favor the ‘left’, Jews, and homos. When liberals and leftists didn’t have total control of society — even most whites who voted for FDR repeatedly were culturally conservative — , they needed free speech protections to critique the power structure of society, but once they gained the power, they were less interested in critique and more in dogmatique, and so, the new agenda was to control free speech. When Jewish liberals didn’t have sufficient power, they said even Stalinists should have total freedom of speech. But now that they have the power, they wanna lock up anyone who dares to speak truth to Jewish and Homo power.) Though social struggles for greater freedom defined the period from the 50s to the 70s, what had they really been for? Once freedom and equality had been attained, what did people really want? Blacks wanted ‘white pussy’, blings, money, Cadillacs, and gold-plated guns to flash around. Homos wanted to make as much money as possible and do all their feathery-fruity stuff by ramming one another in the ass all over the place, that is until the AIDS epidemic put a plug in that bug. And a lot of women just wanted more freedom to fuc*, suck, be sluts, obsess about their pooters or vaginas, and hookup with puddy studs. The culmination of all this could be illustrated if we imagine Lady Gaga with a dildo strap-on ramming Obama in the ass as he rams the ass of Lawrence O’Donnell as he sucks a Mayor Bloomberg’s Jewish cock. That’s what the whole thing has finally amounted to. Porniness came to permeate just about everything. In the end, the fight for freedom was not for any higher meaning but for greater orgasmic pleasure. It’s like Howard Stern said in PRIVATE PARTS that Negroes in the 50s/60s really marched for Civil Rights to hump white women. And it seems much of white girls’ yammering about ‘empowerment’ is to be shameless in hunting for the biggest Negro whankers to stretch out their vaginas in search for the biggest squirting orgasms. What is one of the most talked-about TV shows lately? GIRLS, and what is it about? It’s a grungier version of SEX AND THE CITY where girls got nothing on their minds but getting their vaginas stuffed by idiot boys. Of course, there’s supposed to be social themes/issues on the show between the hideous sex(with Miss Piggy Lena Dunham), but they all revolve around mindless and trashy fuc*ing and sucking. (Jews defend interracism as a matter of individual happiness, i.e. if it pleases a white woman to go with a Negro stud, why should she be denied? Every individual should have the freedom to maximize his or her pleasure as long as he or she doesn’t harm others, at least according to libertarian principles. But most Jews are ‘liberals’ and don’t subscribe to libertarianism, so why are they for interracism? It has less to do with individual freedoms than with Jewish/Negro power over whites. Jews want interracism because Jewish boys wanna hump blonde shikses. And Jews want interracism between whites and Negroes because Jewish men delight in the sexual defeat of white males at the hands of blacks, and ugly Jewish girls delight in the loss of white beauty through race-mixing with Negroes: if white beauty survives via interracism, it is as appropriation into blackness, as in the case of Halle Berry, a ‘black woman’ with ‘white features’. Of course, Negroes love interracism because Negro men love ‘white pussy’ and wanna rub it into ‘faggoty-ass white boys’; and though Negro women initially hated the idea of Negro men going with white women, many of them have come around to supporting interracism since every white woman who has babies with Negroes will be producing ‘black babies’ and be passing ‘white beauty’ over to the black race. Thus, it’s not so much that white women are stealing black men from black women but that black men are stealing positive white features from the white race. For this reason, libertarianism fails in the argument for interracism. When a white woman goes with a Negro, she isn’t merely an individual doing her own thing. She is hurting the white race as a whole. She is a sexual agent who passes white qualities of higher intelligence and particular beauty to the enemy, just like communist agents in the 1940s and 1950s were passing American secrets to the Soviets. White race has its interests and needs, and those who act in ways that undermine or endanger the needs of the white race in the competition for global survival and power must be seen as race traitors hurting the race-as-a-whole than as free individuals doing their own thing. And if pleasure is what counts most, then white males should serve their own pleasure by promoting white interests, white pride, white power, and white everything-necessary-to-make-white-males-feel-better. No true white male can look upon a white woman going with a Negro and just brush it off as a matter of individual freedom. Deep in his heart, he must know that the mudshark is a race traitor who made a conscious racial choice of favoring the Negro male as the superior partner over the white male. A true white male must understand that interracism is a form of ‘racism’, i.e. it is predicated on racial differences and ideas of racial superiority than on racial equality. When a white whore goes with a Negro, she is saying the Negro male is better than the white male. If she’s willing to betray her own race for her animalistic pleasure, then the white male must have the will to do whatever necessary to turn the tide of interracism for his own pleasure. What is a nobler pleasure? Betraying your race for your selfish individual pleasure predicated on bestial jungle-fever or defending your people by promoting policies that sustain and maintain the dignity and integrity of your entire race?)
One significant difference between 60s/70s freedom and 80s freedom was the rise of a new kind of Control. This Control wasn’t to turn back the tide of freedom but to tame it and harness it(and make it more predictable and profitable). In the heady days of the 60s and 70s, the emphasis on freedom and greater libertine-ism overlooked the dangers of opening the Pandora’s Box. All the warnings from conservatives and traditional liberals were regarded as ‘reactionary’, ‘paranoid’, and ‘bigoted’. But blacks with more freedom burned down cities and committed lots of crime. Young people on drugs and hooked to Rock culture got sloppy and shat all over at Woodstock and acted like lunatics at Altamont. At a Who Concert, there was a stampede where several people were trampled to death. At Steve Dahl’s Disco Demolition, the mob got out of hand and began to tear the stadium apart. Working class ethnics were acting like hippies had done at Altamont a decade earlier. John Lennon, who became something of a patron saint of rebels, outsiders, eccentrics, and non-conformist idealists, was brutally murdered by an eccentric, non-conformist, and rebel-outsider utopian nut. A little more than a decade earlier, Roman Polanski, the famously perverse film director, lost his wife to Charles Manson the pervert who didn’t merely talk the talk but walked the walk. Though Woodstock was hyped as a momentous event, it was also a disaster where 100,000s of youngsters left the place looking and smelling like a vast trash heap and manure dump. A lot of ‘enlightened’ people in the 60s took a Rousseau-ean view of human nature and said all would be well if we let people just let it all hang loose. And so, the May 68 movement in Paris was initially greeted with enthusiasm... before it soon descended into mindless mayhem. Though Mao’s China was no democracy, a similar kind of dynamics came into play. As the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Mao told the military and other powerful organs not to get in the way of the Red Guards. Mao had trust in the Red Guards to do the right thing. Even when he heard reports of violence spinning out of control, he reassured the Communist Party that a ‘revolution is not a tea party’. But things got so crazy that Mao finally relented to the military to restore order. Once the crackdown took place, the revolution was back in ‘control mode’. The ideals of the Cultural Revolution were not denounced and the movement was officially deemed a success, but no longer would young people be allowed to do as they please. Their ‘rebellion’ would henceforth be strictly ordered and directed. A similar mind-set took hold in the West as things got more and more out of control — Steven Pinker talks about how his view of human nature changed as the 60s and 70s unleashed social disaster upon disaster. The genie of freedom and libertine-ism couldn’t be put back inside the bottle, but the powers-that-be finally decided that the pursuit of pleasure would have to be controlled. So, even as rock concerts got bigger and bigger, security got tighter and the seating carefully assigned. The kind of ‘first come first serve’ stampede at the Who concert in 1979 would be unthinkable today. One thing I noticed about rock concerts in the 80s and 90s was how tightly controlled they were, a stark contrast to the Rock scene in the late 60s and 70s. So, the vibes of freedom still remained, but everything was under greater control and supervision. And if you got out of hand, there were security ‘goons’ all around to descend upon you and drag you away.
Of course, this was necessary, but it was also disingenuous because the official line was that the 60s liberated us and we should do as we please. From the mid-70s to late-70s, the socio-cultural carryover from the 60s could be seen and felt everywhere. On weekend evenings, I remember crowds of youngsters gathering by the lakefront to smoke weed and drink beer and play loud music, and cops didn’t do a thing. And as in the beer party in DAZED AND CONFUSED, you could see a bunch of people gathering in parks without permit and drinking beer and letting it all hang loose. Cops rarely interfered unless violence broke out. But by the early 80s, a new policy must have been in place because the whole scene had changed and police presence was much greater. It was as if the hippie thing had morphed into the WARRIORS thing, and something had to be done about it. It was as if the elites feared that everything would descend into ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK scenario. In 1981, I attended a high school graduation ceremony, and there were water guns, toilet tissues, lots of hollering, and etc. You could still see the 70s cultural carryover effect, and it was as if administrators could and would do nothing about the new freedom. In the late 70s and early 80s, a middle school I attended(which had lots of Jewish kids) had a fund-raising event where students would volunteer to be auctioned off as slaves-for-a-day, and no one thought anything was wrong with it; a fat old female Jewish teacher bought one kid and dressed him up like the mammy in GONE WITH THE WIND. When I began high school, senior pranks were serious business, with naked streakers zipping down the hall way, swarms of crickets and grasshoppers and greased hogs released in the school library, and etc. But by the time I graduated in the mid 80s, things had changed. What amounted to a senior prank was one guy setting off the fire alarm. And we were perfect angels at the graduation ceremony. Not even the wilder kids in school dared pull any stunt. And yet, the 80s were probably more openly and officially hedonistic than the 60s and the 70s. More freedom but under more control. As prophesied by Aldous Huxley in BRAVE NEW WORLD, the controls were being put in place to, paradoxically, maximize the feeling of freedom/pleasure. If the explosion of libertine-ism in the 60s/70s was both greeted(by liberals) and feared(by conservatives) as rebellion against the Order, in the 1980s libertine-ism was turned into a means to control the youth population. Pleasure can drive people crazy and wild, but pleasure can also be engineered and institutionalized; it could be used as mind-control tools; ‘mind over matter’ may be true, but no less true is ‘sensations over mind’; if in the 60s sensations tended to make one lose control of one’s mind, beginning in the 80s sensations tended to make institutions gain control of people’s minds.
It is then not surprising that Michael Jackson the freak got conflated with the Reagan 80s. And if conservatives were worried about rise of movie violence in the 60s and 70s, Reagan made joking references to the movies of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. While some liberals griped about the change in the social mood, others welcomed this change as they came into positions of power. As students in the 60s and early 70s, they loved to scream and stick it to people in authority, but as professors, teachers, and bureaucrats in the 80s, they didn’t want young ones and their underlings to give them any lip. Generally, big rebels make big tyrants, and the big rebels of the 60s became the new big tyrants. Also, if some boomers in the 60s wanted to lead the rebellion, others just wanted to follow and obey a movement. Such people never had much use for freedom. They just wanted someone/something to follow. As bureaucrats and commissars in the 80s, they were willing to enact any social controls ordered from above. Yet, just as the end of the Cultural Revolution meant neither the end of Maoism as the official ideology nor the end of Communist Party domination, the tightening of social controls in the 80s didn’t mean the end of Boomer power. If anything, the Controls made the boomers even more powerful than ever. In the 60s and 70s, boomers loosened the screws of social order, and in the 80s, they tightened the screws with themselves now inside the power structure.
It’s as if Randall McMurphy turned into Nurse Ratched but maintained his cult of maverickery. So, if old Nurse Ratched controlled people with elevator muzak, new Nurse Ratched controls people with Rock music. Though the Control is still there — tighter than ever — , people are less likely to notice it since society outwardly seems so ‘wild’, ‘free’ and fun. Just look at the hedonism all around. The regime in China is banking on the same concept. It used to view popular culture as a threat to ideological purity and political authority. Now, the regime figures that entertainment will distract the people from more fundamental issues of political freedom and human rights.
Also, the new popular culture in the West has become far more idol-ized and packaged than in the period from mid 60s to mid 70s. That was a time when pop culture was, for a time, taken over by mavericks, individualists, and innovators. Beatles, Dylan, Byrds, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Pete Townshend, Pink Floyd, and many others with personal visions/passions. It seemed as if mavericks were in command, and Rolling Stone magazine and Creem from that era favored the artist over the mere entertainer or industry-promoted idol. But mavericks eventually burned out or ran out of steam. Also, the anti-industry stance turned into dogma and ideology, churning out something as dreary as punk music that was as formulaic(in its anti-formula-ism) as the stuff pushed by the industry. Anti-formula is still formula. And there were some ‘artists’ in pop culture who took themselves so seriously that the thing got pompous and silly — like Yes, Moody Blues singing stuff like "Timothy Leary’s Dead" , and some of David Bowie’s more outlandish posturing. Anyway, at some point, the industry began to study pop cultural phenomena thru psycho-social lenses, and marketing consultants devised new ways to maximize audiences and profits through new methods of test-marketing.
Eventually in movies and music, box office and billboard came to mean everything. And musicians and movie people who used to take themselves seriously couldn’t resist the amount of money to be made. If the culture in the late 60s and the early 70s still recognized and admired musicians and movie-makers for their creative personalities, the culture of the late 70s and 80s was only talking about the big hitters, setting forth a new template for the cultural Zeitgeist. (While the influence of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris had much to recommend it, perhaps the downside was the pride of shamelessness in the rise of new criticism. Traditionally, critics were supposed to be ‘better’ than the general public and maintain a certain distance from popular culture, which explains the paucity of serious movie criticism in most American newspapers until the 1960s. It was as if most Hollywood movies were not even worthy of being reviewed except as consumer report. Critics were supposed to have higher standards and prefer Art over ‘trash’. Sure, they could enjoy entertainment and express their enthusiasm, but their primary role was to be standard-bearers of Culture. The negative aspect of this sensibility was the repressiveness, pretentiousness, and/or prickliness, as when Dwight MacDonald and John Simon sneered at ‘trash’ and/or ‘Midcult’. But the positive side was in reminding arts/culture critics to maintain higher standards and expend the bulk of their energies on worthier stuff. But once the inhibitions were gone, many culture critics began to use the critical forum as a lazy lounge for their quirks and indulgences. Of course, Kael and Sarris didn’t want nor foresee this — and there were factors bigger than their influence — , but it’s where the culture ended up. Perhaps, ‘art’ was bound to fade out with the coming of democratization and mass culture. Traditionally, the ideal of Art combined the attributes of form, talent, theme, and brilliance. Though change was an ongoing process in art, there used to be a traditional set of criteria as to the proper expressions of form. And even among top practitioners, skill and talent varied from artist to artist. But form and talent weren’t enough. Ideally, art was to convey higher, grander, or deeper themes about God, beauty, love, truth, meaning, and etc. Brilliance and/or originality also mattered because a true artists didn’t merely express proper forms weighted with meaning with expertise but expanded upon them in their own way. So, the ideal work of art would be of proper form, crafted with expertise, possessed of higher meaning, and marked by brilliance/originality. In traditional society, only the upper classes could enjoy art. Therefore, art wasn’t a matter of daily entertainment but of relatively rare privilege. Few people were involved in the arts, and few people could enjoy art; thus, even attending a small concert was like an event. And even the best artists could only draw from a fixed set of influences as travel for man and of information was difficult. Only a handful of people could work as painters, sculptors, musicians, and etc., and only a handful of people could enjoy art, concerts, and theater. So, special care went into art. Since it was not a daily or weekly thing, artists figured they shouldn’t waste their time on silly matters but work on grand themes or important ideas. Or even if light or frivolous, it should be of good taste and appeal to the ‘better kind of people’, as with the comedy of manners, which couldn’t be like ANIMAL HOUSE, STRIPES, or DRUNKEN MASTER. And since the aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie partook of Culture as something of privilege and higher taste/knowledge, they were mindful to patronize the kinds of art that underlined their superiority over the unwashed masses. If indeed the upper classes indulged in cultural trash like THE THREE STOOGES, what would have been the basis for their superiority? Prior to the rise of mass media and entertainment, due to limitations of production and information, the experience of arts & culture mainly revolved around learning about old works than staying abreast of the new. (Paradoxically, higher standards in arts & culture were often insisted upon by mediocre minds within the privileged order. Being unimaginative or lacking in genuine appreciation of creativity, such people needed clear standards of what is ‘high’ and what is ‘low’ since they, as individuals, were blind and deaf to sublimity and wit. Thus, the notion of ‘high culture’ became a kind of crutch for the philistines among the rich and privileged. Higher standards were also championed by social inferiors who aspired to rise in society. For them, the idea of High Culture served as a kind of beacon for their social navigation. Possessing little on their own in terms of money or talent, they felt a certain therapeutic value in being associated with ‘high culture’. This was especially true of Hitler, meager of means and talent. By associating himself with ‘high culture’ in a rather philistine manner, he could live the fiction that he understood true art and talent better than anyone else. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who stood for higher standards were mediocrities or philistines — and it’s also true that many brash modernists were hacks and no-talents hiding behind the cult of ‘avant-garde-ism’ — , but generally speaking, the truly talented in the new social order preferred to explore new possibilities than cling to old criteria.)
Suppose only ten films were made per year. Most of one’s movie experience would involve the watching of old movies. But as ten or so movies are released every week, a lot of people are too busy keeping up with the new stuff to learn about the old. And as so many books are published every month, a lot of people are too busy reading new books to catch up on the classics. But imagine if only five books were published a year. We would be mostly reading classic literature. With the advent of mass culture, a lot more was happening in arts and culture. If in earlier times, one could experience all of the new and still have ample time left to catch up with the old, today one barely has time enough to keep with just a portion of the new. With the rise of mass culture, since so much could be done so fast, Art no longer became especially meaningful or eventful. When art was special and privileged, a creative figure might not have wasted his brilliance on triviality. But with so many people with the freedom/privilege to attend art school, paint, sculpt, write, and do lots of other stuff, creative people began to disassociate the elements that had once comprised the definition of art. Brilliance could be used for brilliance sake, as in LOONEY TUNES cartoons. New forms needn’t have anything to do with proper forms. Themes no longer needed to serve art; they could be used for propaganda or cheap melodrama to milk the public for tears and money. If you’re a film-maker and have only two years to live and could only make one more movie, you will likely try to bring elements of form, theme, expertise, and brilliance together to make your final masterpiece. But if you could live for 50 yrs and crank out a movie every other year, you would be far less mindful of what ‘art’ is all about.) So, even as movie-makers came to resent Spielberg and Lucas, they wanted to be like wunderkinds because that’s where the money and power were. Stallone, who’d written and acted in the heartfelt ROCKY, was making dumb sequels that raked in more money. Spielberg wasn’t content to make his own blockbusters but producd second-rate copycat blockbusters like GOONIES to rake in more dough. John Hughes began as a formula director of cookie-cutter teen fantasies like SIXTEEN CANDLES and BREAKFAST CLUB, but as if that wasn’t enough, he hired hacks to direct copycat movies like PRETTY IN PINK and SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL. And sequels became the norm — and not just one sequel but another followed by another. And then came the endless remakes, and then TV-shows-made-into-movies. Given that TV has been far more formulaic than cinema, the rise of formula-ism in cinema was bound to make it more like TV. (Ironically, critics in recent yrs have preferred TV over cinema as the purveyor of higher entertainment. But if SIX FEET UNDER, DEADWOOD, and SOPRANOS are prime examples of this, count me out.) Shamelessness also spread among the movie actors. In the 60s and 70s, second-rate actors took roles in superhero movies while first-rank actors sought worthier roles. By the 90s, big-name actors were lining up to do TV-remake-movies, superhero movies, comic book movies, and sitcom-style movies. If Marlon Brando had taken on the role of Penguin in a 60s BATMAN movie, he would have raised some eyebrows; and indeed, he did just that when he appeared in SUPERMAN(1978) for a hefty sum. (Similarly, it was a big deal when Reagan made a couple of millions after he left the Presidency, but no one raised eyebrows about Clinton and the $100 million he raked in after he left office.) Today, the money is just too awesome and irresistible and there’s no longer any stigma for serious actors to take on really dumb roles — or for a serious director like Christopher Nolan to make a series of movies about some guy prancing around in a bat costume. And in popular music, idol-ism dominates the profits and discourse; it’s almost as if the culture has come full circle. The boomer narrative once argued that, prior to cultural changes wrought by Rock culture, popular music industry used to be controlled by big-shots in stuffy suits who favored the staid formula to the rebel/maverick. For the industry, musicians were nothing but hirelings and pawns to crank out hits: human jukeboxes. But then came Rock music culture with eccentric artists and ‘radical’ expressions, people who had ‘something to say’ and insisted on doing their own stuff., i.e. musicians who took pride in being genuine artists in their own right. But a survey of today’s music scene would suggest a more thorough triumph of formula-ism than in the pre-Rock era. Many people fail to see this because of the sexual raunchiness and foul language that give the impression of ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellion’, but it’s all industry-packaged-and-approved.
Worse, if there were writers and journalists in the late 60s and 70s who did try to separate the wheat from the chaff, most of today’s journalists and ‘critics’ in music and movies might as well be part of the industry’s publicity wing.
And go look on youtube at the pop music scene around the world since the 80s(and especially the 90s) and everything seems to be converging into a globo-idolism, whether it’s from France, Greece, Sweden, Japan, Turkey, Mexico, Korea, UK, India, and etc. ‘Freedom’ is now bottled fizzle.
Spielberg played a key role in the development of the new cultural mind-set. His Zelig-like elasticity has been nothing less than amazing. What sets him apart from the older masters is not his eclecticism. Kurosawa made drama, period films, action adventures, crime thrillers, nature films, etc. Bergman made comedies of manners as well as psychological ‘art films’. John Ford made social dramas, Westerns, adventure films, etc. Only a few directors were as single-minded as Bresson or Ozu. Even so, regardless of Bergman’s chosen format — comedy, historical drama, modern drama, musical(MAGIC LANTERN), etc. — there was a consistency in his sensibility and view of life; he’d put away childish things and played the role of serious artist. Same with Kurosawa. Wwhether he was making RASHOMON, IKIRU, SEVEN SAMURAI, HIDDEN FORTRESS, BAD SLEEP WELL, or YOJIMBO, Kurosawa had a certain vision of life rooted in his life experiences; he made different kinds of movies not just to see what he could do but to broaden the range of what could be shown of life/reality/meaning/truth. There’s a certain power, a toughness and commitment to a ‘philosophy’ of life. And this is true of Robert Altman’s movies as well. However varied in style, theme, and/or quality, Altman too had a tough-minded take on life. Some film-makers are genuinely curious about reality & the world and fascinated with cinema as a powerful instrument of truth and deception in translating the world, and they feel within themselves the conflict between the temptation to spin lies(to please/manipulate the audience, to win plaudits, to push an agenda, to maximize profits, to hide from the ugly truth) and the responsibility to tell the truth(come what may, rewards or repercussions). It is then not surprising that Orson Welles’s first film was CITIZEN KANE, a most powerful demonstration of cinema as a tool of truth and deception; and it was also fitting that Kurosawa arrived on the international scene with RASHOMON, which not only grappled with the theme of Truth but, like Welles’s film, mesmerized audiences with cinema as a two-faced teller of lies and truth; cinema captured real images and motions of reality, but it was an illusion filtered through mechanical devices; movie actors, unlike fictional characters in novels or stage actors in drama, looked and acted like real people in the real world, but it was all an elaborate game; thus, cinema itself functioned as a ‘witness’ of truths/lies in RASHOMON; not only can’t we trust the witnesses but the witness(the camera) of the witnesses. In contrast to filmmakers like Welles, Kurosawa, and Altman, Spielberg grew up caring not a whit about reality or the world. TV and movies were his reality, especially he could spend entire days and evenings glued to the tube and going to the movies or reading books about movies; he didn’t have to worry about wars, hunger, the Depression, poverty, etc. Thus for Spielberg, cinema was less a fascinating tool for knowing and depicting reality but a means to take flight away from reality, a means to remain a child forever. Cinema was Peter Pan. Because Spielberg grew up with such a (almost autistic)fixation on fantasy(and mechanics of creating that fantasy), he was more interested in what could be done with cinema as a toy of fantasy than what could be done with cinema as a tool of reality. Thus, even though there is a recognizable Spielbergism when it comes to emotions, style and technique, and agenda(Jewish power) in all of his movies, there really isn’t anything like a genuinely adult philosophy or understanding of life. (In some of his serious movies, he seems to be putting on a pretense of maturity than really being mature. It’s like arriving at a dinner party with proper attire and manners but without any real understanding of what the event is about. It’s like the Tom Hanks character in BIG.) What can one say about someone who makes both E.T. and MUNICH with equal dedication and expertise? Someone who makes JURASSIC PARK and SCHINDLER’S LIST in the same year?
How can someone who can be SO serious also be SO goofy and vice versa? YOJIMBO is crazy comedy and IKIRU is solemn drama, but we can see how they both sprouted and grew from the same root emotions and vision of life in Kurosawa’s heart. Same could be said of Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent THE WILD BUNCH and funny/comical THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE — different above-ground but grow from the same seeds — , which explains why Peckinpah declined to direct KING KONG and SUPERMAN; he didn’t see much about them that could be related to his vision of life. Spielberg, on the other hand, is equally at home with HOOK and AMISTAD. Now, one can argue that all of Spielberg’s films, from the most infantile to the gravest, all have something in common, and in a way, this is true. But the fact that Spielberg can swing so widely and easily from the most trivial to the most tragic with a straight face suggests there is no real core vision there. Same goes for Woody Allen, the director of BANANAS and INTERIORS. Bergman made comedies and serious films, but we can still find the connection between the man who made SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT and THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY. We know that even his funny stuff are made with a seriousness of intention. BANANAS is very funny and even has some brilliant moments, but it is the work of a clown without commitment to anything. So, how did Allen go from that movie to something like INTERIORS or ANOTHER WOMAN? It’s like there is no real core there, and maybe this elastic malleability — at least outside the tribal interest of Jewishness — is more pronounced among Jews since they learned to wear so many guises and employ so many tricks through their thousands of years of wandering and survival. Maybe it’s like the Converso Complex: Pretending or wishing so hard to be something one is not that one almost believes one is really that thing but, at the same time, feeling deep inside that one isn’t and can never be that thing, the pretense of which can be cast off almost immediately if one must be something else. (This is where David the robot in A.I. is an absurdly tragic figure. He is like a Jew kid in trying to be something he is not, a real boy. Spielberg as a child might have had moments when he wished he could be like the goy kid: bigger, stronger, better-looking, part of the majority, celebrating Christmas, and favored as the most American of Americans. Like David pleads to the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy, maybe Spielberg had moments when he wished some magical being could turn him into a goy boy. It’s like Michael Jackson wanted to be something between a white woman and Mickey Mouse. But Spielberg was able to grow up, take recognition and pride in his Jewishness, and find advantages as a Jew that he couldn’t have as a dimwit goy. Spielberg came to accept what he is and find greater meaning from it, whereas David cannot break out of the ‘spell’ that forever keeps his mental state trapped in the ‘innocence’ of childhood. Spielberg, like Moses, grew up amongst goyim but came to fully accept his origins and identity as a Jew. In contrast, David cannot never let go of the illusion that he is the ‘son’ of a human mother and wishes to be turned into a real boy so he could truly be that ‘son’.) It’s like Jonathan Rosenbaum said he spent his entire youth in the South, but when he moved to NY, he lost his accent within a matter of weeks. There is Method Identity and Core Identity. A Method actor will take on a role and try to be that character 24/7 as long as he’s on the project. He’ll talk, walk, dress, feel, and act like that character wherever he goes. So, if a Jewish guy is playing an Italian-American, he will be more Italian-American than Italian-American. He will be completely devoted to playing that role, so much so that he becomes almost indistinguishable from the role and its identity, and we might even be fooled that we are seeing the real him. But Method Identity is just a play, no matter how hard it’s played. When the Method actor takes on a new role, he will totally change into the new part. So, if a Method actor plays a fanatical Nazi, he is the most fanatical Nazi we ever saw; but if his next role is as a Holocaust Jew, he is the Holocaustiest Jew one could possibly imagine. For this reason, we must not be fooled by the Method Identities of Jews. Jews may act more German than German, more Russian than Russian, more American than American, more leftist than leftist, but they are all Method Roles. Their true core identity is and always will be Jewish, Jewish, and Jewish.
The only core among Jews is Jewishness, and everything else is just a put-on, even if the put-on may be even more convincing than the real thing. This is what’s so beguiling about Jews. Someone who watches SAVING PRIVATE RYAN might think that Spielberg is the greatest American patriot that ever lived and is full of admiration for the Greatest Generation. But indeed, his core identity is as a Jew, and he is no less different from Tim Wise in wanting the GG to die off as soon as possible so that white American power will be crushed forever. Spielberg, no less than Jewish porn-kings, wants the entire white race to be conquered and controlled by the Jews. Spielberg relishes the defeat of white America no less than the defeat of Nazi Germany. His LINCOLN begins with black soldiers stomping the faces of fallen white soldiers into the mud. That is how Spielberg feels about white Americans who still believe in white identity and pride. Just like Jews wrote songs like "God Bless America" but worked to undermine America, Jews like Spielberg come across as so pro-Americana in movies like E.T. and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, but that’s not the real core of his being. The real core is Jewish Supremacism.
In some ways, the neo-Control-ism that took hold in the late 70s was a good thing. For America to be revived from the excesses of the 60s and the hangover of the 70s, the BAD NEWS BEARS devil-may-care attitude of who-cares-if-you-win-or-lose had to go. Things did get sloppy by the late 70s. The deaths at the Who concert in 1979 and the madness of the Disco Demolition were obviously disturbing. And if the anarchic Counterculture attitudes had first affected the college students, freaks, and dropouts in the late 60s and early 70s, it eventually came to affect the children of the middle class and working class by the late 70s. They all had long hair, smoked pot, listened to Rock music all day, and etc. These people were not going to make good workers, and it was one sure sign that American Labor was in trouble — not only due to its impossible demands but their overall demeanor. In contrast, Japanese workers had their act together. And though the pranks and revelry at the high school graduation of 1981 seemed kinda funny, it was also stupid and ugly. There was a time when farm children had to walk miles to attend school to learn how reading and writing, like in LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE. Modern kids had it so much easier, but they lacked respect and appreciation for what they had. And if in the 60s and 70s, rebellion flashed a cachet of resistance, it was just mindless revelry by the late 70s, as in the vile movie ANIMAL HOUSE. Also, the boom of post-war American dominance could no longer be taken for granted. After the 60s and 70s, America needed to get its act together. It’s like the guy in BREAKING AWAY finally decides to grow up and attend college than ride his bicycle and hang around ‘loser’ friends. He’s not just breaking away to win the race but breaking away to say goodbye to the past. (In THE REVENGE OF THE NERDS, a very iconic 80s movie, it’s the nerds and not the slobs who inherit the earth. In STRIPES, a bunch of bums are shaped into and shipped out as real soldiers. In BILLY MADISON — 1995 Adam Sandler movie — , an irresponsible lout goes back to school and learns the value of hard work and earnest effort. In some ways, it was a variation of the Rodney Dangerfield movie BACK TO SCHOOL but with a young than old guy.) So, the return of Controls was necessary and welcome. But it all seemed so strange because the Boomers, even as they instituted all sorts of Controls, were also tirelessly pontificating about the great explosion of freedom and rebellion in the 60s. Like most of my peers, I grew up hearing about the legendary Beatles and Stones in their heyday. PBS presented endless documentaries about the heroes and themes of the 60s, the whole cult of rebellion and resistance and disobedience and sticking it to the man. PBS never tired of showing WOODSTOCK while never showing GIMME SHELTER. It showed GETTING STRAIGHT a whole bunch of times(though it may no longer be groovy with the ‘progressives’ for its negative aspersions about homosexuality). I was bombarded with so much of pro-60s propaganda and programming that I thought everything prior to(and after) the 60s must have been pretty awful and lame. I watched how courageous the 60s generation had been in standing up for their freedoms, liberties, and rights. And for a time, the narrative was that all this glorious achievement were being rolled back by Reagan and his conservative minions in the 80s. The problem was it wasn’t true. Most of the institutions in the 80s were controlled even more by liberals than had been the case in the 1960s, and boomers were gaining more power by the hour in the 80s. It was the boomers who were formulating new Controls in management, education, sensitivity, organization, terminology, and etc. It was becoming clear as day(for anyone with eyes) that many boomers had always been more interested in power and money than in freedom. They had used the language of ‘freedom’ to attack the system, but once they entered the system — with much help or minimum resistance from traditional liberals — , they immediately went to work to castigate and suppress any freedom contrary to their official orthodoxy. Schools and workplaces became places where saying the ‘wrong’ thing could get you fired or sent to sensitivity training. (The late 60s and 70s were maybe the freest period in American history. Prior to the 60s, there were all sorts of codes at school, work, and other places as to how one should look and what one could say. At one time, the Beatles were thought to have scandalously long hair, and there were segments of America that freaked out, even in the mid-60s, over what Lennon said about Jesus. In the 1950s, Sam Peckinpah got fired at a TV studio for wearing blue jeans. Then, the dam burst in the late 60s, and Americans of all age were freer than ever. Even older folks grew their hair long or longer and grew sideburns in the late 60s and early 70s. Lyndon B. Johnson, after leaving the Oval Office, looked like a hippie. People could dress, speak, and act more freely at school, work, and all sorts of public places. Kissinger didn’t even try to hide his ‘scandal’ with the ladies, and it only added to his mystique. Henry Fonda, who’d always played characters of nobility, saintliness, or simple dignity, decided to play a vicious grand villain in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST who even shot a helpless kid. There was a streaker at an Oscar ceremony in the early 70s, and some goof-ball pulled a prank at the 1972 Munich Olympics as a marathon runner coming in first place. The old controls were gone and new ones yet to be put into place by political correctness. Because old controls were no more, more freedom meant all kinds of freedoms, more ‘fag jokes’ as well as more ‘radical speech’, more lewd ‘sexist’ stuff as well as feminist stuff. Before the 60s, women had less power in the workplace, but it was also generally expected of most men to control their behavior, at least in front of other people. But as men and women mingled more in the workplace in the 1970s in a spirit of greater freedom, there was bound to be a lot of mixed/confused signals, eventually leading to all the feminist brouhaha about ‘sexual harassment’. To be sure, the ‘sexual harassment’ hysteria was led mostly by the kind of women who would never be ‘harassed’ to begin with. In truth, many of them were envious of prettier women who were being ‘harassed’ — or courted or admired — by good-looking men. Since their ugly mugs not noticed, they decided to make all expressions of sexual admiration into ‘sexual harassment’. This isn’t to minimize the problem of real sexual harassment, as some men are indeed creeps or cretins, but ‘sexual harassment’ as concocted by feminism was as often the product of resentment of ugly women who never got any kind of attention. So, an ugly woman would sit at work and notice a bunch of men saying stuff about a good-looking woman. Since she was ignored and envious of the attention men were paying to other women, she would make believe that she herself was being ‘harassed’ by displays of ‘male chauvinism’. It’s like the woman who recently falsely accused conservative men of threatening her with rape turns out to be the kind of woman no living creature, not even a warthog, would even dare imagine having sex with, consensual, coercive, or otherwise.)
Of course, one problem of the New Left was the lack of a single governing/unifying ideology. With communism, there was the official thesis of class conflict as the main mover of history. So, the primary objective was for the People to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to be led to a better world under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. While traditional leftism in America had been class-based, the New Left of the 60s embraced youth culture and then women’s rights, racial politics, gay liberation, and whatever else that came down the pipeline from the academia/media(though, of course, some new -isms got more favorable coverage than others. For example, the media promoted Hispanic Power and Gay Power over Arab-American power, as most Arab-Americans were strongly anti-Zionist. Though Jews didn’t have direct control over every segment of the New Left, their growing stranglehold over the media and academia ensured that certain groups would receive far more favorable press and funding than other groups. If the alliance was good for the Jews, all the better. Jews favored black movement to guilt-bait white political consciousness; Jews supported the brown movement to demographically undermine white majority power; Jews supported the pink movement to weaken the moral authority of American conservatism). And it just so happened that all these agendas didn’t see eye to eye. Puritanical feminists wanted to ban porn whereas most liberal Jews defended porn. Blacks wanted special ‘rights’ based on race while white blue collar folks wanted class-based interests. Feminists bitched about ‘misogyny’ while black rappers hollered about them ‘skanky bitchass hos’. (You could see some of the divisions in THE COLOR PURPLE, told from a lesbian-feminist perspective, where a black woman who be looking like E.T. is brutalized by black men. Even though Spielberg is a liberal Jew, he seems to be intimidated by the male Negro. None of his movies have a black male lead. THE COLOR PURPLE’s leading character is a black FEMALE beaten up by a black thug of a husband; he be like a male chauvinist slave-owner of his po’ hepless wife. AMISTAD has positive black males, but they are powerless objects of pity of the film’s main white characters. LINCOLN is about some decent bunch of white folks working to save the Negro from bondage. Spielberg would rather deal in the mode of setting the Negro free than actually being confronted by a free Negro who might wanna kick his scrawny Jewish ass. The black kid in THE LOST WORLD is a girl. Indeed, one of the attractions of watching a Spielberg movie has been to get away from the reality of Negroes. You could believe all of America is a mostly white suburbia.) Thus, the New-New Left lacked a coherent ideology. As its various groups lacked a common ideology and agenda, the perception of the COMMON ENEMY became the most central organizing principle. (If the bourgeoisie-as-main-enemy were to vanish from the earth, the elements of the Old Left with their shared class-based ideology would work together to create a ‘classless’ society. But if the ‘racist’-white-folks-as-main-enemy were to vanish from the earth, the elements of the New Left with their divergent identities/interests would splinter almost overnight. Leftism went from ideologicalism to identitarianism.
The new left was about Blood and Toil, a racial/ethnic identity politics based on the narrative of victim-hood under ‘evil privileged whites’. Imagine if US had no white gentile folks. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Homos, feminists, Muslims, and etc. would agree on nothing. And Jews would no longer have the convenient scapegoat — Evil White Folks — at whom to divert resentment against Jews felt other groups. If whites didn’t exist, blacks and ‘browns’ would go after Jews, that is unless Jews use divide-and-rule over browns and blacks, and that is another reason why Jews push for more immigration. Jews don’t just wanna play white vs non-white but non-white vs non-white among blacks, ‘browns’, yellows, etc.) Since the various groups within the New Left couldn’t see eye to eye on much, they all needed to focus their sight on the biggest enemy of all: the Evil White Conservative Male who is ‘xenophobic’, ‘racist’, ‘misogynous’ and waging ‘war on women’, ‘homophobic’... as well as ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’. Especially since the elites of the New-New Left are mainly compose of Jews, and since Jews really don’t care for blacks, Hispanics, and gentile women(except as sex meat to exploit) — and Jews know that their coalition is inherently unstable — , Jews have been virulently doing to the white race what Nazis once did to Jews. Though Jews are the real power behind the New-New Left — just like Barzini was the real power behind Tataglia in THE GODFATHER and like Hyman Roth was the real power behind the Rosato Brothers in THE GODFATHER PART II — , white conservatives seem to believe they’ll be spared if they get on their knees and suck up to Jews. It doesn’t work that way. It’s rather like Sal asking Tom in THE GODFATHER if he can be let off the hook for old time sakes. Ain’t gonna happen. (Sal’s case is especially tragic since the Corleones used him as bait. Corleones needed someone inside the family to turn against the family so as to make the enemy feel that the Corleones had been fooled. So, Vito left Clemenza and Sal defenseless against Barzini so that one of them would have no choice but to cut a deal with Barzini. Sal didn’t betray the family out of greed or ill-will but out of desperation, and the Corleones willfully put him — and Clemenza — in that spot. With Sal serving as conduit between Michael and Barzini, the five rival clans of the Corleones would be put at ease, but it had all been a trick by the Corleones. So, even though Sal is killed as a traitor, he was essentially forced to betray the family; Corleones really betrayed him by leaving him no choice but to betray the family. Jews, both liberal Zionists and Neocons, are playing white conservatives the same way. Jews are always looking at all the angles. They are a devious people. It’s like Zuckerberg playing both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ to push ‘immigration reform’. There’s nothing Jews do out of simple good faith. Jews despise nothing more than earnestness and trust. Jews don’t live by trust but by ‘understanding’. Jews never trust others or even one another. They always seek to come to an ‘understanding’. So, if you do a favor to a Jew out of simple good faith, the Jew doesn’t feel appreciation but think, "what an idiot". As white conservatives keep sucking up to Jews, Jews feel nothing but contempt and figure on milking white dummies for all they’re worth. Imagine a man and a woman where the man is a cynical bastard while the woman is a slavish whore. The woman pledges total faith to the man, and the man says she must prove her loyalty by opening her mouth for him to pee into. After he golden-showers the whore, does anyone think he’s going to respect her?) Jews have it in for the white race, and the force behind this will is like that of the Terminator: "It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." Actually, Jews do feel fear, but one should never expect any pity or remorse from Jews. There is no bargaining with the Jews. Just like Michael knew that he couldn’t cut a deal with Sollozzo the Turk in good faith, you can’t make any deal with Jews. It’s either you or them. When hideous Jews are using their power to vilify and dehumanize white Americans the Eternal Villain — except white Americans who are racial turncoats or into self-debasement at the feet of the Cabal and its allies — , it’s time for white Americans to wake up and call out their main enemy that is the JEW. When the Jew spits in your face, spit back, or better yet, punch him in the face. Don’t ever think that by shaking his hand and kissing his toe, he’s gonna stop spitting at you and start to love you. The need for white Americans to wake up is more urgent than ever because the media are so completely in the hands of Jews. There was a time from the mid-60s to the 70s when journalism became freer and was more willing to take on the powers-that-be, not least because the powers-that-be back then were still prominently Wasp-ish and white-American. But ever since Jews gained total or near-total control of all the elite institutions — especially the media — , we can no longer expect the media/journalism to play a combative and questioning role. The very Jews who condemned the Vietnam War(and the lies surrounding it) used the power of the media to drum up support for the invasion of Iraq because they thought it’d be good for Israel. And when the war went badly, they dumped all the blame on Bush and a handful of zealous Neocons, when, in fact, liberal Zionists were in on the plot too. And just look at the coverage of the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012. And now that Democrats raise a lot more money than Republicans, what happened to all the complaints about campaign financing from liberal Jews? Or look at the coverage of crime. In the 70s and 80s, there was still genuine coverage of crime, but nowadays, all we hear is that ‘teens’ and ‘youths’ are causing problem. We heard that George Zimmerman is some quasi-KKK ‘white guy’ who shot a helpless little black boy ‘armed with only Skittles’.
Jews destroy careers left and right with methods many times more potent and abusive than McCarthyism, but since every elite institution is controlled by Jews, there is no one to call out on Jewish power. Even Jews like Philip Roth, Alan Dershowitz, and David Mamet, who’ve attacked political correctness, are more than willing to support any form of political correctness that penalizes and vilifies any critic of Jewish power or Zionism. Political Correctness now prevents many academics and journalists from ‘going there’ and discussing truths that are considered ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’ toward the ‘powerless’. But if blacks beat up underclass whites, who are the powerless party in the melee and violence? When Jews harass and blacklist someone like Rick Sanchez, who is the powerless party? Of course, Jews know that there is no such thing as absolute power or absolute powerlessness in a democratic society like the US. Whites may, by and large, be richer and better off than blacks, but that doesn’t mean every white person is better off than every black person. Far from it. There are many poor white families who are terrorized by blacks. Also, there are all sorts of power. There’s intellectual power, media power, financial power, electoral power, demographic power, cultural power, physical power. Even a poor male criminal can exert physical power over a rich woman. Even a poor black thug can rob and maim a middle class white person. But, when it comes to anti-white politics, Jews insist on pushing the concept of absolute power. We are to believe that whites are all-powerful and that Jews/gays/non-whites/feminists are all-powerless regardless of the real power they have. This is why it’s not irrational or crazy to refer to Jews as ‘dirty Jews’. They play a very dirty game, and they gained the reputation for their dirtiness by all the dirty shit they pulled over thousands of years.
Nighttime aesthetics of 80s cinema are vividly evident in MIRACLE MILE. The return of artificiality in fashion especially made 80s nightlife appealing to the movie audience. The darkness seemed less menacing and more alluring. The anti-materialist and the new realist — neon-realist if not neo-realist — thrust of so many late 60s and early 70s cinema created a tension between characters and nighttime environments. Characters were seeking authenticity and truth against the artificiality of nightlife even as they reveled in it — consider a film like KLUTE. Nightlife is inherently artificial since nighttime is naturally dark. Consider any big city, especially Las Vegas, the capital of artificial everything. Given the moralistic strain in American culture going back to the New England Puritans & social reformers and given the cult of authenticity of the 60s and early 70s, Americans were both lured and repulsed by night life/night light. Consider the homosexual Catholic man who picks up Joe Buck in MIDNIGHT COWBOY. On the one hand, he’s excited to be in hustling/bustling NY, a city that never sleeps, and pick up a stud for a good time. But another side of him is disgusted with himself for giving into temptation in the city of sin and corruption.
Many liberals and leftists also had conflicting feelings about urban nightlife. On the one hand, one could be totally free of traditional inhibitions, so different and distanced from the conservative world of small town Wasp America or tribalism of ethnic America. But it also stunk with the excesses of capitalism, greed, and exploitation. Consider the depiction of sordid and lurid nightlife in John Cassavetes’s THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. And even NY liberals were disturbed by the drugs, prostitution, porn, and crime that came to dominate so much of urban nightlife in NY in the late 60s and 70s. Things got so bad that even liberals got some kicks from movies like DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH. But something had changed by the 1980s. Nightlife got cleaner. Partly, it was because the culture changed. Gone was the rather messy and anarchic aesthetics of 60s Counterculture. It was no longer cool to look like you didn’t shower for two weeks and bought your clothes at a thrift store. The lights got brighter and the designs got more streamlined. With de-industrialization, many working class ethnic types left for other areas, leaving urban centers to fill up with ‘creative class’ that patronized fancier, hipper, and trendier galleries and restaurants. With the VCR revolution, porn went from movie theaters to the rental stores. With rise in gay culture — and the dampening of crazy gay culture due to AIDS epidemic — , lots of yuppie gays cleaned up parts of the city to make it neater and more fancifully lit. Fading from the scene were the leather-jacket gays who liked to stuff their fists up the arses of other men. Instead, there were the spandex gays who liked to do aerobics at health clubs along with straight people. It was cool to be embrace artificiality(over authenticity) again since it was clean and smelled like soap. Even blue-collar life in Bruce Springsteen’s 1980s music video looked spruced up and Irish-Spring-ed. It looked ‘Zestfully Clean’. Even the ‘pig manure’ that Stallone was submerged in RAMBO looked like Designer Shit, more like mud therapy for men. And Hanoi Jane of the 70s morphed into Workout Jane in the 1980s with her books and videos. Though I haven’t seen it, FLASHDANCE was one of the biggest hits of the 80s and set the tone for the new artificiality in cinema. If SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER retained some of 1970s realist grit, FLASHDANCE was all neon-lights and celebration of artificiality. With its synthesizer-driven rhythms, buns wrapped tightly in spandex, and water-splashing from above on the energizer-bunny of a dancer, it was a shameless celebration of glowing plastic; even her ‘working class’ identity was pure shtick, more a brand than any reflection of reality. She wasn’t the Norma Rae-type. If the poor girl in CARRIE got splashed with pig blood, it was time to zestfully cleanse away the grime in FLASHDANCE. 80s aesthetics was a decisive break, and yet, in a twist of perverse irony, also a revival of New England Anglo-American ideal of order and cleanliness. Though the sexual ‘repression’ was a thing of the past in the highly libertine and hedonistic culture — indeed Hollywood had to set stories in obscure small towns as in FOOTLOOSE or in the ‘bad old days’ as in FAR FROM HEAVEN(a kind of victim nostalgia as nothing tastes so tantalizing and/or ennobling as forbidden fruit) to rail against repressiveness — , the new sexual expressions were scrubbed and tailored. Contrast the sweaty & somber tones of LAST TANGO IN PARIS and the slick & splashy polish of 9 ½ WEEKS. (Anglo/American or Northern-European culture of order, cleanliness, and purism survived structurally even if in service of drastically different themes. So, if Anglo-Americans once used to be purist about racial and sexual matters — sexually inhibited and racially less tolerant of blood-mixing — , many are now purist in their devotion to multi-culturalism and interracism. It may seem ironic that purist Anglo-Americans should now be promoting ‘impure’ race-mixing, but it’s simply the case of purism of race or religious faith being transferred to the purism of ideology. Since ‘racism’ and ‘racial purity’ are now considered to be morally impure, today’s ideologically purist Anglo-Americans are rabid pushers and promoters of interracism as race-mixing has been associated with moral cleansing/redemption of ‘racist’ whites, i.e. for the white race to be washed pure of its ‘racist’ contaminants, it must be genetically baptized in the blood of other races. Similar mentality hangs over much of Northern Europe. In the past, they’d been purist about national identity, racial composition, religious faith, or cultural heritage. Or, if on the left, the main focus of purism was class solidarity. But ever since globalist Jews spread the ideology of multi-culturalism all over the West, people in Sweden believe their purist devotion must be toward turning Sweden into an Afro-Arab-Europe as fast as possible. Jews understand psychology and know how to manipulate white minds. Even as Jews attack the old sexual puritanism and racial purism of white people, they know that the white purist mentality can be manipulated to serve different ends. Thus, white purist mentality that had once been committed to working for white interest is now furiously at work to undermine the very survival of the white race. White folks today are like the people known as the Eternals in the Vortex in ZARDOZ. They change from fanatical devotion to their self-preservation to fervent commitment to their self-destruction. Despite the change in goals, their mind-set remains the same. They full devote themselves to one thing and cannot abide anything that says different. So, in a way, Jews don’t have to take a gun and shoot the white race in the head; they can just manipulate the white race’s psychology to point the gun at its own head and pull the trigger. It’s like if you know the psychology of dogs, you can manipulate the dog’s naturally aggressive hunting instinct to protect and herd the sheep than hunt and eat the sheep. Today, Jews are the shepherds who use the white gentile elites as running dogs to control the masses of white sheep that are being led to racial slaughter. Notice how Jews use the likes of Ted Kennedy, John McCain, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid, and Rand Paul to push for ‘amnesty’ so that the white race will be demographically eclipsed sooner than later. And yet, most American conservatives think there’s no greater honor than playing fetch for Jews.) In a way, the older generation and the 60s boomer generation had one thing in common. They were more comfortable with stinkery. While upper and middle class wasps were into water and soap and cleanliness, things had been different for most other Americans. Many farming folks couldn’t wash regularly, especially in winter, since they didn’t even have modern plumbing with regular hot water. The kind of social reality depicted in GRAPES OF WRATH wasn’t uncommon in the first half of the 20th century. And even in tenement apartments with showers, many families might have to share the same bathroom, and that meant not everyone got to shower on a daily basis. And there was almost no air conditioning for most people until after WWII. On top of that, many ethnic families ate smellier foods. It’s like Mr. Potter in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE refers to Italian-Americans as ‘garlic eaters’. And Negroes sure loved them raw onions; in the housing project of my childhood, a Negro walking by was like a truck loaded with onions rolling by. And Mexican-Americans and Western folks could be eating all them beans like the fellas in BLAZING SADDLES. It was only in postwar America that the majority of Americans could rise to middle class affluence and live like the all-American Wasp middle class. They could own homes and have showers, and as young people from different ethnic groups went out on dates, they became more conscious of how they smelled; it’s interesting that smell/scent/odor is one of the main motifs in TWILIGHT; generally, it was better to be odorless than odorous, and this was one of the ways immigrants adapted to the Anglo-American ideal; Jews had a more complicated relation to smellology as there was no single kind of Jew; thus, a German Jew might be offended by smells by a Polish Jew who might be offended by smells of a Greek Jew; a French Jew might be eating snails while an English Jew might stick to fish and chips; as a result, Jews were both tolerant and intolerant of smells; part of them sided with Wasps against stinky ethnics, but another side of them wanted to spread the ethnic stink to freak out the Wasps. Furthermore, as more people got fancy leaning in college and got white collar jobs, they got more sensitive about how they smelled — something that didn’t matter so much for dirty farmers and sweaty factory workers. For a while, it was like all of America was becoming more Anglo-Americanized. In some cases, the boomer kids picked up the proper middle class ways and complained that their parents were still stuck in the old hayseed or ethnic ways. Ethnic kids might be ashamed of the stinky foods their parents ate; children of Okies in California might be ashamed of the uncouth ‘hick’ habits of their parents and grandparents. But in another way, the kids resented their parents’ status-seeking obsessions and efforts to turn them into good middle class boys and girls modeled on wasp kids; they wanted to reclaim an element of authenticity of culture and nature. (In a way, the tension in THE GRADUATE arises partly from the sense that Benjamin Braddock is an ethnic Jew who, via some Twilight-Zone twist of fate, found himself in a Wasp household. He says he’s worried about the ‘future’, but it could just as well as be about the ‘past’, i.e. where are his Jewish parents and Jewish home? How did he end up in the middle of Wasp LA? One of the attractions of Mrs. Robinson is there’s a Jewishy quality about her even if Anne Bancroft wasn’t Jewish. A part of Braddock relishes freedom and individualism, but it’s as if another side of him wants to reconnect with his true roots, and his Waspy parents ain’t it. It’s sort of like the reverse of Norman Bates who wants to both break away from his mother — or what’s left of her — and to cling to her forever and ever as the only true meaning of his existence. Bates knows where he came from but also feels imprisoned by it but also loves his ‘mother’ too much. Braddock never quite feels at home and mopes around like a Jewish kid adopted by Wasps. It’s like Mrs. Robinson isn’t just the ‘older woman’ but the real mother — the Jewish one — he’s been looking for all his life.) Even so, old habits die hard, and the Archie Bunker generation wasn’t the cleanest and most hygiene-oriented, but that didn’t really matter with the boomers of the 60s and 70s since they decided to get even stinkier. The boomer kids at Woostock not only didn’t shower for three days but shat all over the place and stepped on the shit. Even famous celebrities began to look real grubby. Jim Morrison looked like a hobo, and Paul McCartney grew a beard and looked like a bum, so much so that some of his fans once followed a real bum for some distance thinking it was Paul in disguise(as related in the book SHOUT! by Philip Norman). If the Greatest Generation didn’t shower regularly, it was as if the Boomers didn’t wanna shower at all and just took dips in lakes once in awhile and pasted patchouli over their bodies. And for a time in the 70s, it became unfashionable for women to put on makeup in some quarters. The Steve Jobs biography says he didn’t shower much either, though things surely changed by the 80s.
An uncertainty marked Benjamin Braddock in THE GRADUATE. At home, he shuts himself in his room and stares into the aquarium. He finds some excitement with Mrs. Robinson but tires of that too. In contrast, Joel in RISKY BUSINESS cranks up the music and dances like a wild man. To be sure, Joel has college to look forward to whereas Benjamin is out of college and has to face the real world. But one gets the sense that Joel would be just as excited after college. He’s not looking for meaning or truth. He’s looking for success and power. He’d gladly sign onto ‘plastics’. Though Paul Brickman in the commentary track on RISKY BUSINESS reiterates the same liberal tripe about the ‘Reagan 80s’ and the culture of greed and materialism, he really ought to know better. It was the boomers, who’d been yammering about truth, justice, and authenticity in the 60s and early 70s, who created the new 80s ‘culture of greed’. A typical specimen of such creature can be found in the lawyer character in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. Someone mentions that he once used to be like a civil liberties lawyer but then went for the money; he’s typical of boomers who talked a good game in their youth but became more nakedly ‘greedy’ than their parents. The so-called Generation X picked up the ‘new materialism’ less from Reagan than from the Boomers were all grown and going for the mega-bucks and without shame. So, it was amusing to hear Bill Clinton bitch in 1992 about how Reagan and Bush had presided over a decade of ‘greed’, indeed all the more so since Boomers who took full charge in the 1990s under Clinton turned out to be far ‘greedier’ and more materialistic than any previous generation. Of course, the likes of Paul Brickman were too afraid to look at themselves in the mirror. They refused to face the fact that the 80s generation picked up their attitudes from the Boomer socio-cultural make-over that began in the late 70s. (To be sure, we must be careful not speak of boomers as a single or single-minded entity. After all, the majority of boomers voted for Nixon in 1972, and as many boomers supported the Vietnam War as opposed it. Most boomers were nowhere near Woodstock, and many found it excessive and disgusting. But as in a movie theater, those who cheer and jeer get noticed over those who remain silent, even if the silent members of the crowd outnumber the noisy ones. So, even if ‘radical’ boomers may have been in the minority in the late 60s and 70s, they were the ones making the noise and getting noticed, especially in big cities and college campuses where most of the power was concentrated. Noisy boomers of leftist orientation were also favored by the liberal-dominated media. They were also a lot more creative in most fields than conservative boomers were. But even conservative boomers were deeply impacted by the 60s social revolution. Even if they rejected the new politics, they adopted the new symbolism, new attitudes, and new fashions. It’s like Ann Coulter considers herself a ‘Deadhead’. And everyone liked Rock music, even the kind played at Woodstock. Counterculture, like it or not, was making things happen, and people are naturally fascinated by things that happen than by things that stand/sit still. Also, some of the key members of the New Right in the 80s and 90s were former ‘radical’ boomers, such as P.J. O’Rourke, and they brought over to the Right some of the counterculture attitudes even if their politics had changed. And the reason why Rush Limbaugh was able to survive so many sex and drug scandals was because of the new libertine-ism that arose from the 60s. His career in radio might have ended in scandal in the 40s or 50s. And it wasn’t the case that all boomers decided all at once to become ‘greedy’ in the 1980s. Many resisted but couldn’t keep resisting in the long run because boomers who made the dough were gaining the status and power. It was just the law of human nature that even purist radical boomers would eventually gravitate toward materialism and status-ism. In the 60s, a young boomer who made a lot of noise about revolution and rebellion might have won all the accolades. But in the 80s, boomers working as financiers, lawyers, politicians, movie-makers, entertainment agents, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and etc. were raking in all the cash. They were buying the nice homes, getting the pretty chicks, and throwing the parties. If you remained a purist ‘radical’ boomer who said NO to all that, others might pay token respect to your dedication, but you were not going to be invited to parties, own homes and yachts, get the pretty women or attract the cool guys, and etc. As the old saying goes, money talks, bullshit walks. Of course, bullshit backed with money is regarded as truth while truth without money is regarded as bullshit, which is why Malcolm Gladwell is considered a serious scholar but Jason Richwine must be destroyed as a heretic. So, it was only a matter of time before most of the ‘radical’ boomers hitched on the career path, and in a way, careerism was more essential to their well-being than for people in the past. Among earlier generations, there was a greater sense of community bound by shared ethnicity, values, and traditions; even if you didn’t amount to much in terms of career, you were treated as someone within the community. But in the post-60s/70s world, you had to be someone as an individual or else be treated as a nothing. Careerology became the new identity. Even an Italian-American loser in the traditional Italian-American community felt as a member of the community. But if you were an Italian-American loser in post-ethnic America, you were just a nobody. At one time, you could be a ‘loser’ and still be ‘one of us’. But in the careerological world, you have to be somebody to belong to anything. Though multi-culturalism provides a sense of political community for non-whites, it is a poor substitute for the traditional community in terms of real cultural identity. To be ‘multi-cultural’ means to have your non-white identity politically hijacked and manipulated by Jews as a weapon against white majority America.)
Consider the shifts that took place in the movie industry. In the 60s, Hollywood was financially in trouble, and the old guard didn’t know how to dig itself out of the hole. The children of the old moguls and new generation of mogul-wanna-be’s were affected by the 60s Counterculture and conceived of a new movie industry premised on personal vision, risk-taking, audacity, and authenticity. And for a time, it seemed as though New Hollywood came upon the right idea, what with the critical and box office successes of films like EASY RIDER, LAST PICTURE SHOW, and M*A*S*H. Granted, not all the famous hits of New Hollywood were made by young directors, but a new spirit filled the air. But by the late 70s, it had mostly dissipated, and the boomers lost their interest in Counterculture ideals and attitudes; what had once been far-out and groovy seemed not only passe, lame, and embarrassing but bad for the bottom line in the industry, music and movies. Though Counterculture was meant to be a corrective to the naive corruption of the older generation, it turned out to be a form of corrupt naivete. Counterculture boomers had sought to expose the corruption behind the facade of repressive ‘innocence’ of earlier generations, but they turned out to be plenty innocent themselves in their arrogantly conceited conviction that they were so good and pure because they dropped some acid to the Beatles, meditated on Timothy Leary and Che Guevara, and chanted anti-war slogans through bearded lips. The movers and shakers of New Hollywood thought they held the secrets of changing not only the industry but all of America as they’d seen the light with the help of drugs, hippies, ‘revolutionary’ consciousness, European ‘auteurism’ as guide, etc. But, in reality, New Hollywood produced a lot of lousy, indulgent, and/or pompous movies that made no money and sunk the industry into even deeper trouble. For a glimpse of New Hollywood at its worst, consider Paul Mazursky’s execrable ALEX IN WONDERLAND. In a way, however, Mazursky’s film and Hal Ashby’s SHAMPOO(starring Warren Beatty)were admitting that there was something phony about the assumptions behind the Counterculture and Sexual Revolution. Where all this would lead had been foretold by Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA and Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM, where the experiment of the love triangle come to a bad end. Beatty was one of the key figures of the time, though perhaps not as iconic as Hanoi Jane Fonda. Though not technically a Boomer — he was born in 1937 — , he was associated with BONNIE AND CLYDE, one of the landmark movies that changed American cinema and electrified the Counterculture. To Beatty’s credit, he took chances with films like MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER and SHAMPOO in which he played far-from-perfect characters. Later in the 70s, he even recruited Pauline Kael to remake Hollywood into a more welcome place for creative talent. But all said and done, he knew which way the wind was blowing. His big hit of the 70s was HEAVEN CAN WAIT, a piece of fluff, though I remember being strangely moved as a child. (Even now, something about it gets to me on some level, especially the way it ends with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty meeting again as strangers who nevertheless sense an echo of familiarity in one another. Intentionally or not, that scene has a psychic connection to the moment in BONNIE AND CLYDE when Beatty and Dunaway stare at one another for one last time before the hail of bullets. Though the glance lasts but for a second, it’s like a promise of souls to find each other again. It’s one of the most touching split seconds in movie history, and Beatty could have been channeling that moment when his character-as-rich-guy in HEAVEN CAN WAIT worries if Julie Christie’s character will recognize him in another life. It’s as if Beatty’s loaded glance pierced Christie’s heart just deep enough for her to find ‘him’ again in another time and place; it’s like how UFO rays seared into Roy’s face in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS eventually lead him to his destiny. HEAVEN CAN WAIT’s ‘happy ending’ has a bittersweet quality. Beatty’s character found another body, one that even won the Superbowl. But his memory is erased, and his soul melds into someone else. He becomes a stranger to the woman he fell in love with, and yet, there’s a glimmer of recognition through the haze of amnesia, and the movie ends with the hope of retrieved love that can never be fully recovered.)
I’m not sure of the significance of the rainbow motif in MIRACLE MILE. It’s partly seems to be an allusion to Thomas Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, the CliffsNotes to which one of the secondary characters is seen reading. I haven’t read anything by Pynchon, but GRAVITY’S RAINBOW is said to revolve around the development of V-2 rockets in Nazi Germany during WWII. The interpretation of the title of Pynchon’s novel in Wikipedia — ‘rainbow’ referring to the arc of rocket missiles — could well apply to the themes of MIRACLE MILE. In a way, the choice of location in L.A. that is the movie’s title has a ring not unlike "Gravity’s Rainbow". ‘Miracle’ is often associated with rainbows, and ‘mile’, as a means of measurement, has a certain ‘scientific’ ring to it not unlike ‘gravity’. Both "Gravity’s Rainbow" and "Miracle Mile" then connote something poetic/subjective and denote something physical/objective. The motif of Harry’s prism also suggests something like ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It transforms the mundane ordinariness of sunlight into a spectrum of miraculous rainbow colors upon his flesh. In another sense, it’s as though Harry enters another dimension in which the hidden realities are revealed through the prism of dreams.
There are striking images all throughout MIRACLE MILE, especially in the first quarter of the film. The very first image of distant lights of nighttime L.A., the precise framing of people and objects in the natural museum, the bubbling of tar pits lodged with replicas of extinct species, Harry and Julie bobbing up and down on merry-go-around, the blinking lights of the hamburger joint twinkling like diamonds, an old-fashioned trolley sliding around a modern apartment complex, and etc. And there is also the preponderance of cool blue. Harry Washello wears a blue suit, his car is blue, a stock broker woman at the burger joint wears a blue suit, a pseudo-airline-stewardess dons a blue uniform, and etc. Could it be a homage to Lynch’s BLUE VELVET, or does the color blue have a special significance in GRAVITY’S RAINBOW? Is blue the color of dreams that’s neither light/white nor dark/black? Blue is the color of day that blocks out the blackness of space. Salvador Dali often used blue — as well as purple — , and the color seemed to have been a favorite of surrealists.
A blue-suited financial analyst named Landa enters the coffee shop(Julie’s place of employment) and speed-reads through a CliffsNotes of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW while simultaneously checking business reports on the TV monitor. Though an attractive(even beautiful) blonde yuppie woman, she has a short haircut and something about her makes her seem androgynous. As contrast and comparison, there is a flamboyantly dressed transvestite seated at a counter perpendicular to hers. It’s like a Twilight Zone scenario where things are off-kilter but everyone carries on like everything’s normal; the transvestite, for one, converses with a conservatively dressed middle aged man, the guy who played the doctor in THE TERMINATOR. One could surmise that much, if not all, of the story is really just a dream, especially from the odd occurrence — a blackout caused the freak coincidence of a pigeon picking up and placing Harry’s discarded cigarette on her nest sitting atop electric cables at Harry’s apartment complex — soon after Harry takes a nap to refreshen himself for late night date with Julie. (It’s interesting that Harry’s path keeps crossing and missing Julie’s. They first meet at the natural museum, but she walks away, and he thinks he’s lost her forever, but then she reappears. They become a couple and agree to a date, but Harry arrives late and tries to contact her. And through the rest of the night and early morning, they keep on bumping into and away from one another, until they are finally together forever but not in such a good way.) On the other hand, there’s something slightly unreal about the opening scene of the movie as well: the childlike way Harry encounters Julie at the museum, his purchasing of lobsters to set them free in the ocean, his interest in big band Jazz music in the MTV 80s, and the ease with which the young couple get along with Julie’s grandparents(plus the fact that there’s no mention of parents or other relatives). But the movie really lurches into Lynch-ian territory when Harry tosses a cigarette butt as he ponders the possibility of being married to Julie. Just then, we see a homeless person feeding pigeons, one of which picks up Harry’s discarded cigarette and uses it to refurbish its nest in which eggs are incubating. Harry’s random deed sets off a series of events that fundamentally alters his entire life — even if the remainder of his life constitutes barely half a day. It’s sort of the like the Butterfly Effect or a kind of Kubrick-ian accident that sets off unforeseeable possibilities. It all seems accidental and absurd yet logical and inevitable at the same time. In the simplest sense, Harry tossed a cigarette butt like millions of people do every hour of everyday. Yet, a bird comes along just then and picks up the smoldering butt to use as reinforcing material for its nest when its effect is just the opposite. The nest begins to burn and the eggs become toasted. (That Harry was thinking of building his own nest with Julie when he tossed the cigarette that burned down the bird nest — and led to the blackout that made him miss the date with Julie — makes it all more ironically significant. And maybe De Jarnatt was suggesting that atomic bombs are like eggs that nations ‘hatch’ to secure and prolong their own survival but can easily have the opposite effect. Harry’s innocent/inadvertent but crucial role in the destruction of the bird nest and the ensuing blackout in his apartment also implicate all of us in the problems of the world. We tend to blame powerful politicians and corporations, but maybe all the little things we do everyday also play a role, however unintended and unforseen, in the degradation or even destruction of the world. And in a way, our will to live, especially live well, as Harry wishes to do with Julie, could be the main reason as to why civilization could be leading toward destruction. A demand for a better life means more exploitation of nature, more industrial pollution, more consumerism, more competition for resources, more global interconnection whereby a problem in one part of the world can easily set off repercussions throughout rest of world, as happened with the financial disaster in 2008. So, even Harry and Julie, two of the nicest people on Earth, could be part of the cause-and-effect in the End of the World. Harry’s ‘innocent accident’ with the cigarette butt reverberates throughout the story as Harry’s panicked account of the phone call also sets off all sorts of unintended consequences.) The blackout prevents Harry’s alarm clock from waking Harry on time. It finally goes off at 3:45 AM after the power’s been restored. Harry thinks it’s only midnight. So, in a movie where time seems out-of-time, Harry really finds himself out-of-time. He still goes looking for Julie at her workplace except that she’s, of course, gone home(her grandma’s place) and went to bed thinking Harry blew her off. At any rate, we are not quite sure if Harry is still in a dream or awake in reality. Either way, given the outcome in the dawn of new day — Harry’s death in nuclear holocaust — , it sounds absurd to say his life was changed forever by the fateful event. After all, there’s no more life for Harry to speak of. Or, if it was all just a dream, Harry would have woken up to reality and continued with his ‘normal’ life. Technically speaking, something that causes death cannot change one’s life except to end it, after which there’s no more life. Yet, from a cosmic perspective, there’s more to one’s existence than his or her manifestation as a living creature. There is ‘life’ outside life. In the realm of spirituality, it often deals with the matter of souls, but even in cosmologies outside religions and myths, there’s an understanding of how everything is part of the cosmic cycles involving energies and matter made up of ‘stardust’ as Carl Sagan put it. In one sense, everyone and everything always existed and will always exist. They don’t arise out of and vanish into nothingness but are the products of the ever-changing and never-ending process of cosmic matter forming, breaking apart, reforming, and etc. in a ceaseless process. The very atoms which once made up the dinosaurs could be part of some Hillbilly, Mexican, or Negro kid right now. So, even if the human destinies of Harry and Julie end one morning at the start of WWIII, it’s not the end of their cosmic ‘lives’ or destinies, which were only altered by the war. The power of self-identity is such that our hopes and imaginations extend it even unto death. In the most material sense, we are just plain dead after we die. Our bodies, drained of life, are nothing but dead matter; actually, following the process of death, the dead cannot even be said to be dead, no more than a rock or a cup of water is dead; it has merely returned to its non-living state like most of what comprises the universe. The concept of death has real meaning only during the process when the living turns into the dying; once the process is completed, what is called dead is just matter returned to nature.
The living cling to the preservation of their unique identities and separate egos even as they ponder the finality of death that returns the once-living to the egoless expanse of nature and the universe. So, people make wills that prescribe what is to be done with their bodies after death. Some want cremation, some want burial. Some want particular kinds of tombstones, statues, or monuments to commemorate their existence on Earth. And the religious believe in afterlife. Some religions conceive of the afterlife purely in the spiritual sense whereas others, such as that of the Ancient Egyptians, believe in the afterlife of the body as well of the spirit. Thus, mummification became central to the Egyptian way of things. When a Pharaoh died, his body was treated in a manner to preserve it as well as possible, and his tomb was filled with all sorts of things like furniture. Even his servants could be killed and buried with him to serve him in the afterlife. Even secularism cannot fully cast off such mind-set, which is why Soviet communists preserved Lenin’s body and Chinese communists preserved Mao’s. It’s as if the spirits of those great are preserved along with their bodies. A part of us wants to ‘live on’ and continue in some physical form after death. ‘Great’ men and women through history had sculptures and paintings made of them. But sometimes, preservation could happen by accident(and against one’s will), as in the case of Pompeii that was covered with volcanic ashes. Thus, the physical forms of the inhabitants became fossilized into something like volcanic rock. In a way, one could say the people of Pompeii ‘survived’ but against their own will, preserved for all time in their horror-stricken states of the worst moment of the worst day of their lives; they were both killed and preserved against their wish. It’s like someone taking a picture or video of you on the toilet and memorializing the awkward moment for ‘all time’. Thus, there’s a difference between triumphant preservation and tragic preservation. Egyptian Pharaohs died as all humans do, but they controlled the manner in which their bodies/memories would be preserved(in utmost dignity) through eternity. It’s as if they had the rare privilege of overcoming death. They robbed death of the power of rotting and returning everything back to the soil. But in the case of tragic preservation, the living creature has no choice in the manner of his/its death and preservation; he/it is just a hapless victim, but the moment of victim-hood is preserved in its ingloriousness forever. While the La Brea tar pits is a treasure trove of prehistoric fossils, it’s dispiriting to ponder the manner in which all those creatures died. It’s like digging up nameless mummies with their throats slit from the Scottish bogs. In some cases, the bodies and names can be reclaimed and memorialized, as was finally the case with the Polish officers who were executed by the NKVD in the Katyn Forest. While most people would prefer a form of triumphant preservation, they would prefer total obliteration(and return to nature) than being preserved like the creatures in the La Brea tar pits or the human fossils at Pompeii. A very disturbing image of human remains is shown near the end of Roberto Rossellini’ VOYAGE IN ITALY, when Ingrid Bergman and Trevor Howard come upon the skeletal remnants of a couple that were buried haphazardly long ago. At the end of MIRACLE MILE, as the helicopter carrying Harry and Julie sink into the tar pits, Julie isn’t merely afraid of the agony of dying but the possibility that she and Harry might be discovered someday in the distant future in their state of misery and defeat. As it turns out, Harry is the stronger of the two. He figures, at the very least, they will have died together. Maybe, Julie’s panic attack can be understood as the result of women being more mindful of appearances, even if it concerns how their remains may look a million yrs from now.
MIRACLE MILE comes full circle. It began with Harry and Julie at the tar pits as visitors, idly strolling past the fossils without any emotional connection to them; at best, the artifacts were of interest to their minds, not to their hearts; and even though Harry’s jokes about the fossils were toothless and without malice, the prospect of future beings making jokes about the recovered remains of Harry and Julie cannot be a heartwarming thought; Harry and Julie don’t ‘feel’ for the fossils as do the future beings in A.I. for David or remnants of extinct humanity. To Julie, the fossils are just exhibits, and to Harry, props for him to toy with to draw Julie’s attention. Neither knows that the tar pits or the fossils in the museum might have anything to do with their own lives or fates. Like most young people, they are emotional occupants of the present and occupied with hopes for a better future. To be sure, they seem to be a bit wiser than most of their contemporaries. If the overwhelming majority of young people care only about the fashions of the moment, Harry has a sense of past culture in his love of big band Jazz music. And Julie, though a fresh young woman, seems close to and deeply concerned about her grandparents. Harry and Julie are trapped in the Now but do have some sense of — even fondness for — reality outside it. And upon meeting Julie, he even comes to assess his life more realistically and thinks maybe he should grow up, find a real job, and become a real man, a husband and father. It’s as if Harry, upon meeting Julie, begins to take stock of himself and make the transition from the dream of youth(where everything seems possible in the put-off future) to reality of adulthood(where decisions with real consequences must be made ). Especially as Julie is lovable but not beautiful, she has a domesticizing than romanticizing effect.
But just when he decides to become more responsible, he slips into a most unreal scenario — the strange phone call that tips him off about a nuclear war — that drags him toward the ultimate reality of existence. Harry’s pathway from reality to deeper reality is unreality. It can’t get any more real yet unreal than sinking into the La Brea tar pits in the midst of a nuclear holocaust. Harry’s playground in the movie’s opening becomes his very tomb. In joining the creatures of the bubbly tar pits, he is submerged and overwhelmed in the truth of life — momentary animation on earth only to sink back into the black oblivion of death. But there is only so much truth we, as living beings, can accept; and it’s no wonder why MIRACLE MILE sunk at the box office and may have finished off De Jarnatt’s career as a feature film director for good. Even a film as dark as BLUE VELVET has something like a happy ending. And even a stupid TV movie like THE DAY AFTER delivered a kind of collective catharsis in uniting awareness of the dangers of the Bomb; the world got blow up, but everyone died together in apocalyptic rapture to send a message that nuclear war is, well, nasty stuff. Besides, we know from THE WILD BUNCH and SCARFACE that death isn’t necessarily a bummer in movies; it can be exciting, heroic, redemptive, and/or ‘badass’. And even the end of the world can be cool or fantastic, as in THE TERMINATOR series or entire planets and space stations blowing up in STAR WARS.
But the ending of MIRACLE MILE puts us in a grimly sober mood. It’s not what we expected, and it’s not what most of the audience wanted, especially from a 1980s romance-thriller with Anthony Edwards, the sort of flick where everything usually turns out alright at the end — at least for the lead characters. And it’s not just that Harry and Julie don’t survive but what they are forced to confront about themselves, the meaning of life, and the cosmos in the final moments of their doom of essentially being buried alive, their last remaining hope being a nuclear strike on the tar pits that may turn them into ‘diamonds’; the last image of the blast in the movie is ambiguous; did their dream come true or was it their last flicker of hope before sinking into the abyss?
As Julie sinks into the tar pits, what she fears most is being spared the destruction taking place above. At least there is something like a ‘clean’ quick death and ‘rapture’ to a nuclear holocaust. At least her grandparents will be vaporized into ‘spiritual’ essence together. In contrast, her death will be slow and painful beneath mounds and mounds of tar and mud. And even if her body were to be recovered one day — perhaps by a wholly new civilization thousands or millions of yrs in the future — , it will be just an artifact for a bunch of school children to gawk at.
Anyway, we are getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s return to the dusky moment when Harry Washello is about to take a nap to refresh himself for the date with Julie. Consider the homeless person with a shopping cart on the sidewalk below Harry’s balcony. And earlier, there was a homeless man wandering the streets(who later reappears in front of the coffee shop babbling gibberish). Such outcasts or outsiders have often been used as motifs to suggest a hidden reality that people ignore or don’t wanna see. Consider the blind female grocery owner in TOUCH OF EVIL. Consider the story in (the final scene of)PATTON where a slave whispers into a Roman emperor’s ear that ‘all glory is fleeting’. Consider Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR. where a disfigured homeless person stalks the psyche of Diane Selwyn. The outcast person without a place or possession represents what the modern/civilized person fears most — and the ‘homelessness’ was one of the major unifying social issues among liberals during the Reagan Era. We all want to belong, we all want a place and position in life. This is especially true in modern society where cleanliness is next to godliness. If you were homeless in Old America, you might go out West and stake some land for yourself or live by hunting. It didn’t matter that you didn’t wash in several weeks since many people didn’t either. As a drifter, you might find work as on a farm or cattle ranch. Even in the 20th century, you could be like the Joad family in THE GRAPES OF WRATH and move to California for some kind of work. As there were lots of down-and-out people, your troubles weren’t your own. During the Great Depression, even a sense of community grew up around hobo-ism, as shown in movies like MY MAN GODFREY and MEET JOHN DOE. And such conditions were even more common in poorer nations. But in late 20th century America, to be homeless and dirty was almost to be like an untouchable in traditional India. No company would hire you, no one wanted to rent out to you, no one wanted to be around you. If you were Mexican, you might work on the farm picking tomatoes, but such work was seen as degrading for most Americans. Though many people take their security and well-being in life for granted, there is always the fear of losing it all, especially if you’re living under a delusion. Consider Joe Buck in MIDNIGHT COWBOY who thinks he’s gonna strike it rich in NY as ‘one hell of a stud’ but discovers he’s no better off there than in Texas. He quit his job washing dishes in search of something better in the Big Apple. He struts around like a cowboy, a real man among New York ‘fairies’, but he’s just a dime-a-dozen fraud. In one scene, he looks through the window of a diner and sees a young man washing dishes, reminding him of what he used to be and will likely be again. He came to NY to escape from the humdrum, but reality stares back at him. And what kind of ‘friend’ and furnishings does he finally find? Ratso and his decrepit room in an abandoned building. In MULHOLLAND DR., Diane Selwyn came to Hollywood with big dreams, but she’s come to a bad end and is probably behind on her rent and may face eviction. Who knows what she does to make ends meet. She lives with her fantasies, but therein lurks the figure of the homeless person that perhaps stands for everything she dreads: to have nothing, not even a residence where she could lose herself in her dreams.
In the psyche of the every Jew, no matter how rich and privileged he may be, lurks the haunting figure of the homeless/wandering Jew stripped of all worldly possessions. So many times throughout history, Jews almost had it all but then lost it all, only to restart the process again and again. Even rich Jews in Germany who thought their positions and privileges were secure found themselves stripped of everything and reduced to poverty and even mass extermination. Anne Frank may have indulged in her ‘innocent’ daydreams, but she couldn’t escape her fate.
We’d like to feel confident in our security, but something in us makes us doubt everything around us, especially as modern society has become so complex and interdependent. Though the world is threatened with nuclear war in MIRACLE MILE, it doesn’t even have to be anything to cataclysmic to throw the entire system out of order. Indeed, the world averted a total meltdown of the global economy in 2008 only by printing and pumping tremendous amounts of dollars into the economy. (And consider how the nest egg that the couple built up their entire lives in LOST IN AMERICA is blown away in a single night at a Las Vegas Casino. In a way, it makes sense that the wasp wife played by Julie Haggerty, rather than her Jewish husband played by Albert Brooks, blows the entire stash. For Jews, gambling is a means to dupe others and rake in the dough. For less bright goyim with more single-track minds, gambling can easily turn into an obsession of betting the whole house and losing it all, mostly to Jews. Even when Jews gamble, they find ways to hedge their bets to privatize the profits and socialize the losses, which is what Wall Street Jews did in 2008 and with Obama. Since Jews own the courts, the media, and the so-called ‘socialist’ Obama whom they installed in the White House, they knew that, unlike the Albert Brooks character in LOST IN AMERICA, they would ‘get their money back’. Though Jews are itching to be president, one of the advantages of installing a goy in the White House is that the blame can be dumped on the goy if something goes wrong, even if Jews were mainly behind that something. Jews were mainly behind financial deregulation, but Bush got all the blame. Jews urged Bush and Cheney to invade Iraq, but Bush and Cheney got most of the blame. Jews pushed Obama to ‘bail out’ Wall Street, but Obama got the blame. Jews love playing puppet-master.) What if the next economic meltdown cannot be stemmed, and panic spreads everywhere, from NY to London to Paris to Berlin to Moscow to Beijing to Tokyo to LA to Mexico City to Sao Paolo, and etc? Greeks thought they were doing pretty good in the NWO of the Euro Zone, but now Greece has over 25% unemployment and so many of them have been pauperized. Greeks thought they were catching up with advanced nations of Europe but have turned into a nation of homeless bums once the bill came due.
So, outcast figures in narratives often signify the repressed ‘truth’ — the possibility losing it all or the reality of having lost it all but the inability of accepting the truth. Sometimes, the outcast figure makes believe he is still the inside-figure, as for example Burt Lancaster’s character in THE SWIMMER whose odyssey home finally reveals that he no longer has a home. In THE OTHERS, both the living and the dead haunt Nicole Kidman’s character to remind her that she is dead too. But the figure of homelessness or object of humbleness can signify something positive as well as negative. ‘Rosebud’ in CITIZEN KANE reminds Charles Kane of his childhood when he had very little but a better understanding of who he was than he does in old age surrounded with opulence and luxury in the empty caverns of his mansion; he felt more at home in what was barely a home than in a maze-like castle that holds him like a hamster. It’s like Boudu is a bum in Jean Renoir’s film BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING but, in some ways, closer to the truth than are the respectability-obsessed bourgeoisie whose well-intentioned attempt to clean Boudu could really be a way of erasing the walking/talking evidence of truth they don’t wanna face. And the bum-samurai in YOJIMBO is also a kind of carrier of higher truth. Possessions are nice but provide a sense of false security. As Jesus said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God."
In a way, one could argue that all people are homeless and poor, i.e. rich people are really homeless people with big houses and poor people with lots of money. According to such skewed but informative logic, just because one has a big house doesn’t mean one isn’t essentially homeless. Just because one is materially rich doesn’t mean there’s an essence called ‘richness’. It’s like just because we wear clothes doesn’t mean we aren’t naked underneath. We are always fundamentally and essentially naked and only covered with clothing; there is no inherent human essence called clothed-ness. Thus, home is the clothes of an essentially homeless man, and wealth is the money in the hands of an essentially poor man. This may sound pointless but actually plays a fundamental role in affecting the way we see ourselves, our power and our wealth. We are all descendants of a long line of homeless bums and wanderers and exiles. And Jews were poor before they were rich, aka poor with lots of money. The natural state of man is to be poor and homeless. Thus, even a rich man with a big house is really a poor homeless man with lots of money and a big home. We tend to conflate our social positions and wealth with our true selves. But look what became of King Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II. They regarded themselves as innately great kings or emperors but came to realize they’d really been powerless nobodies with lots of fame, fortune, and power. Power and wealth were not intrinsic to their being but something they were surrounded with. A tall person is tall regardless of whether’s he’s rich or poor. A dumb person is dumb regardless of the money he has, a smart person is a smart person regardless of what school he attended. But nothing social, cultural, or economic about us is inscribed in stone. As the Bible says, "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away." Things that surround us and define us are not necessarily intrinsic to us. Of course, according to some religions, even our natural bodies are only fleeting or unstable vessels of souls. According to Buddhism, the soul goes from the ‘clothing’ of one body to another, from those of humans, mammals, birds, fish, frogs, insects, and etc. And there’s the powerful dichotomy of the body and soul in Christianity and Islam; the eternal soul sheds the temporal clothing of the flesh as it ascends to Heaven. While all religions have an aspect of this, some religions tend to see the body and soul as more of a unity, and this was no doubt the case with the Ancient Egyptians who believed that the proper preservation of the body was necessary for the soul’s passage into afterlife.
In THE LAST EMPEROR, Puyi is raised to be the Emperor of China and then he’s used by the Japanese as the Emperor of Manchuoko. But, it turns out all such guises were window-dressing to his real natural self that has always been a homeless poor nobody. Thus, under communism, he finally gains the essential truth of his being by losing everything. (The problem of Jack Torrance is he conflates the Overlook Hotel’s history and legend with his true self when he may well be nothing but a soul-as-tennis-ball being batted around by the demonic gods.) And same goes for the lord in Kurosawa’s RAN. When the film begins, he thinks he’s the greatest lord in Japan. He thinks he is one with the magnificent silk kimono he wears, the gold-studded sword he carries and the clan insignia that flaps in the wind all around him. He believes that power and greatness are the very essence of his being, as if special qualities emanate and radiate from his body and soul. But upon losing his social/political power, he realizes he’s a homeless and powerless nobody. Even when he had the power, he was an intrinsically powerless man with power than an intrinsically powerful man. In the beginning of HIGH AND LOW, the character of Kingo Gondo is riding high. A successful businessman with big plans, he feels confident and invincible. He thinks success in business is the very essence of what makes him what he is. But piece by piece, in order to rescue a kidnaped boy, he surrenders everything he’s worked for and returns to his true essence: a man. People love to accumulate wealth and power and believe that their success and privilege are the very essence of their specialness, but in truth, they are nobodies who became somebodies. (Of course, some nobodies are better positioned than other nobodies to become somebodies due to higher intelligence, creativity, diligence, and ambition, as well as the element of luck, but power and wealth are still not intrinsic to them as flight is natural to a bird. Power and wealth are things they accumulate on the outside, and power and wealth remain as things that could be lost far more easily than they were won.) If they were truly ‘somebodies’ at the core essence of their being, they would still remain ‘somebodies’ even if their power and wealth were taken away. But stripped of such things, Emperor Puyi could turn out to be just a bum inside a communist jail. The French King turned out to be just another hapless victim about to soil his pants as his head was about to be lopped off. The great Tsar of Russia died a nobody killed along with his entire family by a bunch of leftist Jewish goons.
The great American Wasps came to believe they were the very essence of American power, values, history, and identity, and all that, but just look what happened to them? Wasps arrived in the New World with little or nothing and built up vast power and wealth for themselves. So far so good. The problem was they conflated their success with their essence(as did the lord in RAN) and, as a result, became complacent about their power. How could they ever lose their power when power and privilege were the very essence of Waspness? (In a perverse way, the cult of white supremacism continues on the ‘left’ because no matter how low the white man is brought down, he is seen as the ‘powerful and privileged’ member of society who must be magnanimous, generous, and understanding to the ‘less privileged’ members of the minorities. So, even if a white millionaire is reduced to bummery and a mulatto bum is elevated to tycoonery, the white bum is forever associated with the essence of power/privilege while the mulatto tycoon is forever associated with victim-hood and powerlessness. Jews know this game very well. They are the richest and most powerful group in the world but associated with the essence of permanent victim-hood. Though white liberals wave the official flag of ‘anti-racism’, their attitude is essentially rooted in white supremacism because their thoughts and actions are premised on the notion of permanent supreme white power, as if such power is the very essence of being white. Since whites are thus thought to be permanently powerful and privileged, white liberals think whites, as the permanent supreme lords of society, must make nice with the poor and less fortunate among others.) Wasps have been evicted from the House of Power that is now occupied by Jews. Jews are a great people because, deep down inside, they know they are still a homeless, powerless, and moneyless people. They know they are a homeless and powerless people with possession of the castle and the banks. They possess power but are not power. They possess wealth but are not wealth. Jews don’t make the mistake of conflating what they have with what they are. They’ve taken over the Home of the Wasps, but they know they can lose it just as the Wasps lost it. The lesson of Jewish history is NEVER TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED. So, even rich Jews don’t see themselves as Rich Jews but as Poor Jews Who Happen to be Rich. Such paranoia makes Jews far craftier in guarding their wealth and power, though sometimes their excessiveness can turn people off and drive them to something like Nazism, and then, the Jews are really fuc*ed. This is why, in order to prevent such horrors in the future, Jews now employ the trick of divide-and-rule so that white majorities in the US and EU will be reduced into minorities and never be able to challenge Jewish power no matter how much Jews abuse and torment them. Jews know that even leftist whites can turn into rightist whites, just as many communist Germans became Nazi Germans(and after the war, many Nazi Germans became hardy East German communists working for the Stasi). Ideology is unstable. What is more natural is racial identity. Jews know that blacks, yellows, and ‘browns’ will never turn into white people and join forces with whites to take on Jewish power as long as Jews play the game of divide-and-rule.
So, there is a lesson to be learned from the symbolic figure of the homeless, from the gypsies of the world. We see homelessness as unnatural but it is the natural way of man for nothing is certain in this world. For most of human existence, most shelters were feeble — mud or straw huts — or portable, like the teepee of American Indians. And even civilizations were frequently raided, invaded, and sacked, and entire populations would have to move to another place to build another settlement — as ants and bees do. It’s like the birdnest that burns up in MIRACLE MILE. We associate ‘nest’ with security, as in the term ‘nest egg’, but bird nests are flimsy and could be blown away in the wind or go up in fire.
So, it all connects that pigeons, sometimes referred to as ‘rats with wings’, are fed by a homeless person, a kind of a human rat. (Though rats and pigeons are hardly associated with greatness, they thrive better among humans, even as nuisances and pests that people go out of their way to eradicate, than almost all other animals. Rats were around during the Ice Age and still around, but what happened to all the ‘great’ beasts like the Mammoth, Saber-toothed Tiger, Cave Bear, Giant Sloth, and etc.? It’s as if rats are the least ‘pretentious’ of animals. They are shameless in their will to survive, win, and feed on the enemy. It will eat just about anything and live just about anywhere and burrow into all places. There is a core-rat-ness that is unlike the characteristic of other animals — even other rodents — , but rats are among the most adaptable of animals, and in that sense, Nazis had a point in comparing Jews with rats. Though meant as defamation, it was also an underhanded compliment for the rat is made of powerful stuff. Jews-as-rats were so powerful that Hitler thought the ONLY way to deal with the Jewish problem was to eradicate Jews as a race. Lions can be beastly, but there’s a lion-ish way of behavior that lions will not deviate from. Same goes for hawks and eagles. Wasps were like that. Some things were simply beneath their dignity, and so, they preferred not to fight — and even give in — than to get down-and-dirty to fight it out to the end for their own power and survival. Jews are different. There’s no limit to the extent of dirty tricks, cunning, trickery, filth, obscenity, and vileness Jews will not descend so as to destroy the power of Wasps. Wasps believe in shame whereas Jews are shameless. Why did so many Jews go into porn? Jewish mothers were less ashamed of their sons swinging their schlongs on the big screen and using women, especially shikses, as sex meat. Jews were willing to dig up stuff and discuss discomfiting matters that Wasps simply didn’t want to address. Jews kept pulling down the Wasp’s pants to expose the Wasp pud, but the Wasp felt it was beneath his dignity to play such a lowly game against the Jew in turn. So, he just pretended the game wasn’t even happening. So, even though the Jew pulled down the Wasp pants and exposed the Wasp pud, wasps acted like their pants were still up. Though Jews promote interracism where Negro men are humping white women left and right, most white guys pretend it’s not even happening. They don’t have the guts to look reality in the face and see that they’ve been castrated and pussified by Jews who are celebrating the mudsharkization of white womanhood. Just look at John Boehner giving his daughter away to some punkass dread-locked Negro. White man has been whupped and raped in the ass by Jews and Negroes — and his women have been turned into the material property of Jewish ideologues and entertainers — , but white guys are too afraid to address any of these issues because it’s supposedly beneath their dignity. But do pathetic losers even have any dignity left? White dignity now rings so hollow and empty.)
To be sure, Harry Washello isn’t some crass and stupid materialist. If anything, he pursues his interest in Big Band Jazz music than dreaming of mucho dinero. He’s no Gordon Gekko, and yet, the fact that he is able to put off the future indefinitely and follow his muse suggests that he was born to privilege and didn’t have to do any real work. He seems to be a man of means, a child(trust fund baby?) of an affluent family that has provided the means for him to chase after useless dreams — after all, how can anyone support himself in the 1980s by playing Big Band Jazz music? So, even though Washello isn’t a materialistic go-getter; he can afford to take things for granted, and his default mode is complacency, which is why he’s initially panic-stricken by the phone call; it could have been his first encounter with real urgency.
Even the way he talks about finding a teaching gig sounds more like procrastination than resolve. In some ways, he’s the most selfless and generous person in the movie, but ironically, these qualities could be shades of privilege and naivete borne of comfort and absence of worries; he’s something of a pushover because he never had to push others to get what he needed. In contrast, when others hear of the possible nuclear attack, their reactions are far more survivalist, competitive, and self-centered. Though Harry is desperate to survive as well, his main objective is to find Julie, i.e. he’d rather die with her than live without her. Maybe, he’s magnanimous because he was born privileged without worries and resentments. In contrast, the black restaurant owner goes into a save-my-own-black-ass-at-any-cost routine. And a Hispanic guy steals Harry’s blue car; Harry later flags down another car that happens to be blue. The working class guys at the restaurant tend to be more combative. The woman stock-broker, Landa, has the break-the-glass-ceiling or I-got-balls-just-like-men-do mentality. The transvestite is vainly wrapped up tightly in himself. A rotten young Negro that Harry encounters later turns out to be a crook and punk — and one of the most problematic elements in the movie is the ennoblement of the rotten Negro’s death as a kind of tragedy. As for Julie’s grandparents, they probably knew hard times during the Depression.
Oddly enough, the homo dude at the health club(who turns out to be a helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam) seems different from others in having a code of honor. It turns out he not only kept his promise to fly the copter but makes a return trip to pick up Harry and Julie at considerable risk to himself. I guess being a member of a group that’s often been mocked for pansiness and fruity-tutti-ness, he had something to prove: that he’s more man than most men.
In contrast, Harry is different. He’s pleasant and easy-going. Even though he doesn’t try to save the world — but then, how could he? — and fixates mainly on saving the girl he loves, there is a sense that he’s driven by something other than self-preservation. Indeed, as dawn breaks, he sends her off to the rooftop and tells her to go without him if the copter is all ready to go. He’s a good guy, but we question the nature of his goodness, which could be asked of privileged liberal white boys as well. Why do they lack the survivalist instinct, the ruthless will to preserve their own kind against possible enemies? How could they so easily fall for ‘white guilt’? Could it be they don’t take survivalism seriously since they never had to wrestle with the true nature of power? Privilege is nice, power is ruthless. Jews understand the true nature of power because they remember their history under the rule of gentile majorities. And being a small tribe, they had to muster all the will-power and cunning from their head to toe to survive and thrive. Modern Chinese don’t take anything for granted either because they suffered major humiliations since early 19th century, went through the endless series of war and revolution in the 20th century, and because so many of them still remember how poor they used to be. Blacks think in terms of black interest and black power, which comes naturally to them since blacks are naturally more self-centered and less inhibited about what they be feeling in their hearts, which be mostly thuggery; ironically, the main source of Negro hostility and aggressiveness isn’t white injustice but black thuggery; blacks be nasty because blacks be whupping other blacks, which means blacks grow up kicking ass and getting kicked in the ass, but since the grand narrative is ‘white folks oppress blacks’, blacks be rationalizing their rage in terms of ‘striking back at white racism’ when, in fact, much of their rage be the product of their whupping each other’s ass.
White folks were a tougher bunch when they used to struggle for better wages, demand more freedoms and rights from the traditional elites, and fight to wrest the New World from the natives. Even the most liberal bunch of white dweebs, if dropped into 19th century American West where hostile Indian savages were roaming around to scalp white skulls and rape white womenfolk, would regain their survivalist instincts and put up a fight. When things are not good, people turn ‘survivalist’; most whites in the past didn’t have it so good, and that kept them tough and demanding. Indeed, ideology is secondary under such conditions, which is why most people in communist nations, despite all their International Brotherhood propaganda, were into survival mode. When you’re hungry and must stand in lines with ration cards to get basic foodstuff, you don’t become the most generous person in the world. They sang about the Brotherhood of Man in May Day rallies, but no Russian during Soviet times was gonna share his loaf of bread with ‘workers of the world’, not when he had to stand in line for hours to buy one. Thus, in a paradoxical way, ‘greedy’ capitalism created a more generous and socially-minded population by offering more affluence whereas communism created more self-interested people by imposing a system where everyone had to scrounge and scrape for the extra morsel. (To be sure, we are talking of the working classes and middle classes under capitalism. Most folks have very limited ambitions, and if they have enough — the ‘good life’ — , they become complacent and take things in stride. They feel like well-fed dogs that would rather play with rabbits than hunt them. We associate capitalism with boundless ambition and ‘greed’, but most middle class and working class folks in America just want a ‘good life’ and don’t expect or ask for much more. Enough for them is more than enough, and so, they become generous-minded even if they don’t have much; think of all the white working class suckers who donate to Zionist charities; they think Jews need their help! But for some individuals, especially high-IQ Jews, enough is never enough. If they have more, they want even more. If they have a lot, they want a lot more. If they have it all, they gotta have it all and then some. And even when they give to charity, it isn’t to ‘do good’ but gain greater advantage, as with the super-rich Jew who donated to the Sierra Club in order to reverse its stance on immigration. Jewish charity is really about strategy. They are never satisfied with enough wealth, just like people like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and etc. were never satisfied with enough power. Such people are intensely ‘greedy’ and never satisfied with enough. It’s like Bill Gates had to destroy the entire competition before he became the richest man in the world. ONLY THEN, did he decide to work on his image to be the ‘good guy’, but the new image was paid for by the money he raked in by pulling every dirty trick in the book to destroy the competition. There are wolves and dogs in capitalism, and most people are dogs, which is why, as long as they have enough, they have no will to stand up for their interests. If there are obstacles preventing a Jew who’s worth 5 billion from making 10 billion, he will throw tantrums and do whatever necessary to get his 10 billion. But as long as some working class guy has his modest home, big screen TV, and beer in the fridge, he’s unwilling to do much more for his own interest. A billionaire Jew is more likely to feel the injustice of not having a billion more than a white working class guy is likely to feel the injustice of his nation being remade by globalist Jews.) It’s no wonder that Chinese made such a fantastic transition from radical communism to cutthroat capitalism. Under communism, the official ideology was that everyone should share, but in reality, there was nothing to share, so everyone was really looking out for #1. So, when the transition to market economy took place, a lot of Chinese ruthlessly tried to enrich themselves as much as possible without any thought of public good or civil society. When food had been scarce during Maoist times, one simply didn’t survive by being comradely and brotherly despite all the official dogma. The wave of sheer materialism and crass self-centrism that swept across Russia after communism may have owed to the same dynamics. Under communism, you had to always be on the lookout for advantages to get that extra something since even basic items were often in short supply.
To be sure, self-center can be served capitalistically or socialistically. Generally, smart people with work ethic serve their self-interest through capitalist enterprise. But there are many dumb and/or lazy people who prefer serving their self-interest via socialist or welfare policies. Though they yammer about ‘sharing’, they really mean OTHERS should ‘share’ with them. All those Negro leaders who talk about ‘need over greed’ are really yammering selfishly for distributive socialism that takes from whites to give to blacks; it’s not about blacks sharing with others. Think of all the welfare mamas who be getting pregnant in their teen yrs and having other people pay taxes to take care of them. When blacks talk about sharing, they mean "you share with me, I don’t share with you."
Naive white liberals will argue that many blacks are still poor or economically backward because of the history of slavery and past discrimination. Such liberals argue that white success rode on the backs of black labor, so it’s time for blacks to get a break too. But such naive idiocy ignores the fact that whites did more to raise and elevate masses of blacks from savagery than any other people. If anything, blacks rode on the backs of white genius, progress, and productivity. Before whites brought blacks to America and then colonized swaths of black Africa, almost all blacks were illiterate half-naked jungle/savannah savages chucking spears, beating on bongo dreams, brushing their teeth with dried buffalo shit, practicing witchcraft such as killing albinos and using their body parts for medicine, and living in mud/straw huts. Even under slavery, white folks introduced blacks to modern civilization, the idea of progress, idea of work ethic, idea or complex social organization and management, technological progress, universal moral rights, and etc. Even anti-slavery ideals were something blacks picked up from whites, and it was whites who ended slavery not only in the New World but in the Old, including Africa, even though black Africans still practice it all across Africa. Similarly, though blacks bitched about Apartheid, South Africa is the richest nation on the continent because whites ran it. While black labor did play an important role in the development of the New World and South Africa, if labor was the key, why didn’t the rest of the world make the same kind of progress as the West? There was plenty of black labor and slavery in Africa since the beginning of time. Yet, black Africa remained in a constant state of ugabuga savagery of witchcraft and chucking spears at poor wildebeest and onyx that ain’t done nothing to the Negroes. There were tons of black labor all over black Africa, yet why did Apartheid South Africa accomplish so much more, and furthermore, why were blacks in other African nations trying to migrate to Apartheid South Africa for work? Labor is not where the brains and innovations are at. If so, black labor under black power in black Africa would have achieved similar wonders as black labor under the leadership of whites.
After all, even horses and cows can do manual labor; but could horses and cows, on their own, make fields grow wheat without the guidance of humans? So, whenever Negroes and white liberals talk as if Western Civilization owes something to the Negroes for exploiting black labor without giving anything in return, they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Blacks gained a lot more from whites than vice versa EVEN DURING SLAVERY. Slaves in America were living in an advanced civilization whereas even the ‘free’ Negroes in Africa were living in mud huts and shaking their asses like baboons. And as the West believed in the ideals of progress and innovation, it was moving away from slavery and other forms of social oppression, whereas black Africa remained what it had always been: a vast expanse of savagery, slavery, superstition, sadism, brutality, and killing warthogs and onyx. Until the white man brought the light of civilization to black Africa, most blacks were hardly more advanced than chimpanzees and hardly more humane than hyenas and lions. If anything, almost all the success of black America owes to white advice and white guidance. It was by emulating white values and white ways that some Negroes made genuine progress. But whenever and wherever blacks rejected the ‘honkey-ass’ ways and reverted to their jigger-jiverish ways, they’ve done nothing but create one Detroit after another. And just look at the kinds of leaders that the black community has produced. After awhile, Jewish and white liberals got so sick of the worthlessness of homegrown black leadership that they created and funded their own set of ‘black leaders’ to represent the black community. Thus, in a way, Obama is like emperor Puyi. Obama isn’t a genuine homegrown black leader but one that was anointed by Jews and homos who found and trained him. Notice how Jews and homos have been working extra-hard to remake Michelle Obama too, but that’s some tough shit as she is, by nature, a hardcore gorillian with crude features and manners. You can tell she has to make a real effort to hide her jungle howls and sound like an educated and intelligent woman. She tries to smile and look sweet, but she can’t hide her true wild ape-ish fury. Pretending that she’s womanly is like pretending that the gross Williams sisters — of Tennis fame — are feminine. It’s like pretending that Barbra Streisand is an object of male romantic fantasies. It’s a lot of BS, but the powers-that-be can pressure the chickenshit masses to swallow anything. If anyone dares to say Streisand is an ugly Jewess, he or she’ll be struck down as an ‘anti-Semite’. If anyone says William sisters look like two hairless gorillas, he or she will be labeled a ‘racist’. It’s like pretending that Peking Opera is pleasant music. The cult of pretending(that something is true that really isn’t) is the new cross-to-bear of political correctness. In the French film THERESE, we see these crazy nuns torment themselves physically in so many ways, but they go out of their ways to make believe that they’re gaining real spiritual sustenance through such acts of self-debasement. Political correctness is the secular equivalent of some of the nastier aspects of the Christian mind-set(though such mind-sets exist in all religions and cultures). In our redemptive love for Jews, blacks, and homos, we must repress what we find gross or hateful about them and pretend to love their attributes in so many ways. It’s all very sickening. The problem in Christianity isn’t the emphasis on pain per se. Pain is real, and spirituality is about rising above the seduction of pleasure and the fear of pain. (So many pleasurable things that feel like momentary heavens turn out to be long-term hells, like junk food and sugars that turn so many people obese. Or certain drugs that offer temporary highs but lead to prolonged lows. Or ‘ownership society’ that made everyone feel rich with rising home values, only to sink the world into a massive recession. Pain has its own problems. Fear of pain is necessary for survival, but fear of pain can lead to cravenness, cowardice, paralysis. Fear isn’t enough as one must identify the source of one’s fear and confront it. White folks must fear the smarter Jews and stronger Negroes but must also have the courage to confront and overcome these fears by uniting to defeat the power of Jews and Negroes. But white folks pretend there’s nothing to fear from Jews and Negroes because Political Correctness says Jews and Negroes — and homos — are the best and noblest people on Earth, and that to fear or hate them is to be ‘paranoid’, ‘phobic’, or ‘racist’. Paradoxically however, the mandatory love for Jews, Negroes, and homos is based on fear, as white folks who refuse to ‘welcome’ and praise Jews, Negroes, and homos are attacked and defamed as ‘less evolved’ and blacklisted. You better love a Jew and homo because if you don’t, you really have something to fear from the PC police.) The problem is the fetishization of the pain into a knee-jerk ritual. The nuns in THERESE aren’t serving any meaningful purpose in regards to what Jesus stood for. Instead, they’ve reduced His example and teachings into set of habits, manners, and procedures, whereby certain artificially-induced acts of pain fill the practitioner with certitudes of spiritual purity and superiority. Right or wrong, Jesus wrestled with the real world and met with real pain. The real world was filled of pain, and He set His mind to suffer the brunt of it. In contrast, the nuns in THERESE shut themselves from the real world and create pain like chemists create cultures in a petri dish.
Same goes for much of political correctness. In the past, many liberals, naive or well-meaning, sought to deal with the real world of real problems and come up with solutions that alleviate social problems. Today, so many so-called ‘progressives’ lock themselves within the walls of academia or higher institutions and ‘chemically’ create their fancifully/artificially induced pain of ‘white guilt’ with which to prick themselves in meaningless rituals of ideological purification. It is no wonder then that so many white college students, who would never venture into Detroit to fix real problems, go to colleges like Oberlin and imagine that the KKK is stalking around the campus and hysterically freak out over it. Partly, it’s their lame attempt to fix the blame of ‘racism’ on the White Right, but in another way, it’s the collective hallucination of white liberals who’ve been made to fear their own hearts that may be haunted with ‘subconscious racism’ that manifests itself in so many forms of ‘micro-aggression’. Just like many Christians in the Middle Ages not only accused others of being witches but feared of being demon-possessed themselves, today’s politically correct fools have similar fears about ‘racism’. (Of course, it’s still a lot safer and more comfortable dealing with racial issues by watching stuff like MISSISSIPPI BURNING and FRIED GREEN TOMATOES in the safety of a campus town than going to the front lines of racial tensions where most non-blacks are fearful of blacks, but PC liberals were never know for anything resembling real courage. Imagining evil KKK culled from movies is easier than dealing with the fact that Cleveland is a dump because of the excess of black thuggery and savagery. Besides, both MTV and college professors say that if you see the KKK where it isn’t, you’re a good person, but if you see black thugs where they are, you are a bad person. Political Correctness turns everyone into a conscious and subconscious liar.)
Now, it’s true enough that people may well harbor subconscious feelings that their conscious minds abhor. A disturbing aspect of Hitchcock’s movies is that all of us are, in some way, subconscious would-be murderers. But if we must get to the root of the problem — if it indeed is a problem — , then we need a climate of honest discussion that welcomes an open discourse of what’s really in our hearts and minds and why. But such is not allowed, so political correctness has turned into fetishized rituals of self-purification via expressions of ideological hysteria. Just read the headlines of Huffington Post, Slate, Salon, Alternet, Mother Jones, Think Progress, and etc. Day after day, hour after hour, it’s ‘hate’ this, ‘hate’ that; ‘racist’ this, ‘racist’ that; it’s some crap about the war on Negroes, war on women, war on noble ‘undocumented immigrants’. Needless to say, Jews and their mini-me allies the homosexuals, are the leaders of the New Inquisition, or the Jew-Gay Inquisition. If you dare criticize Jewish control of media or Zionism, you are a dirty ‘hater’ and a ‘Nazi’. If you dare question the lunacy called ‘gay marriage’, you are attacked and torn alive as a ‘homophobe’. According to the new-new-left — which is globalist-capitalist and not leftist in any traditionally meaningful sense — , a person is less ‘evolved’ if he or she isn’t on the bandwagon of ‘gay marriage’.
The phenomenon of ‘gay marriage’ mania is worthy of careful study since it tells us so much about who has the power, how power is used, the effectiveness of certain kinds of power, the effect of power on the larger society, the duplicity of the intellectual class(including so-called ‘conservatives’) , the incredible gullibility and gutlessness of the masses, etc. ‘Gay marriage’ is like a near-perfect control experiment of how social change is pushed by the elites on the guinea pig masses. How did something that almost no one — not even homos — accepted or took seriously become something the majority not only supports but reveres as the measure of one’s moral ‘evolution’? What were the means — legal, political, economic, cultural, academic, etc. — used by the elites to push this agenda? And what’s happening with those who’ve opposed this agenda. Just look at all those conservatives falling like flies, one after another, before the altar of ‘gay marriage’. What does this say about conservative values, unity, and principles? When we ponder the likes of Charles Murray, do they really have any core values or will they all grovel before elite power to be invited to cocktail parties? (In COMING APART, Murray says the elites should be mindful of the values and policies they promote because their impact on the masses may be far more negative than upon the successful and privileged. In other words, single-motherhood for the Murphy Browns of the elite world is not what single-motherhood turns out to be for the lower classes. Given this moral logic, why does Murray promote ‘gay marriage’? As if marriage isn’t in big trouble already among the lower elements, he degrades it further by associating its meaning and purpose with privileged decadent homos who practice fecal penetration. Murray says he’s observed homos who are very serious about ‘parenting’, but did he ask, "where is the mother?" As two homos cannot produce life no matter how often they bugger one another, there must be a real mother somewhere? How does she fit into the equation? Murray is just another whore who sucks up to Jews and rich homos.) Are people so eager to be liked by the powers-that-be that they will sell even their core values down the river, and having done so, will they then repress the true nature of their betrayal by fooling themselves that they sincerely changed their minds as the result of moral persuasion? If homos weren’t so powerful and allied with Jews — a people whose anus Murray gives rimjob to 24/7 — , would Murray even give an issue like ‘gay marriage’ his time of day? (Of course, it wouldn’t even be an issue in the first place, no more than ‘incest marriage’ is.) I don’t think so. They are all whores of power, and the fact that there’s such lack of resistance among the conservative elites on the ‘gay marriage’ issue shows that they are more concerned about impressing powerful Jews and privileged homos in the upper echelons of society than about working for the masses of conservatives who refuse to cave before such garbage. All politicians wanna hang with the lords and winners, not with the masses of ‘losers’, which are what most conservative folks are now regarded as by GOP elites. But then, American conservatism wouldn’t be in this mess if it hadn’t encouraged ignorance and stupidity among its base that is now so enthralled with Creationist ignorance, anti-cultural and anti-intellectual Philistine-ism, and/or with soulless or soul-destroying libertarianism.
There’s a dream-in-a-dream-in-a-dream-etc intimation to MIRACLE MILE though not in the literal sense of INCEPTION. One some level, everything in the movie seems a bit dreamy or dreamy-within-dreamy, as if Harry keeps ‘waking’ into deeper layers of sleep than into reality. The first shot of the movie, a crisp view of LA at night, blurs into brassy haze as the image shifts focus to the sliding motion of trombone, sounding a slightly surreal note from the very outset. Though the next scene is during daytime, there’s a feeling of suspended time at the natural history museum. When Julie reappears just when Harry refracts sunlight through a prism, it’s as if she materialized out of a dream. And things get dreamier yet when a pigeon places a smoldering cigarette in its nest and inadvertently blacks out the electricity at Harry’s apartment complex. When Harry eventually arrives at the coffee shop, his car bumps into a palm tree from which rats drop on the hood like coconuts, an image worthy of Bunuel and Lynch. The tropical motif of the palm tree may allude to Vidor’s THE BIRD OF PARADISE(other than its commonality in the area). The sudden appearance of rats is a striking reminder of things-not-being-what-they-seem. I suppose rats, like the motif of the homeless, serve to undermine the illusion of affluence and bliss. One vision of L.A. prior to MIRACLE MILE was Randy Newman’s music video "I Love L.A" where even hobos basked in sunshine, but the other side of L.A. — few yrs after MIRACLE MILE — was the L.A. Riots where Negroes and Hispanics acted not unlike the mob at the end of De Jarnatt’s movie. And later in the decade, there was the O.J. Simpson fiasco. Because L.A. is younger than the cities of the East, South, and Midwest(and because of Hollywood’s allure as the dreams-come-true capital of the world), it has long been a beacon of hope of starting anew and turning hopes into reality; it was the original Off-World Colony(where people of future LA escape to in BLADE RUNNER as the city has become Third-World-ized and polluted). Even a nobody might become somebody in L.A., unlike in more established parts of America where the pie had already been divided long ago. This aspect of the L.A. myth would have you believe it’s more vibrant, democratic, and open than other big cities. But there’s the other side of L.A. that lends the impression of being the most corrupt city in America. It’s as if the rapid transformation from ‘desert’ to megapolis prevented L.A. from maturing into a meaningfully civil society or developing into a sophisticated urban culture. While things may be as corrupt in N.Y., there’s a sense that even criminal and corrupt elements have an understanding of their duties and obligations; corruption has a pedigree of tradition and honor code. But with the rapid rise of L.A. as one of the richest and most powerful cities in the nation, it’s as if the only rule was breaking all the rules to get your way and ahead of everyone else; and if cities like NY and Boston have roots and traditions other than of commerce, the very foundation of LA has been commercial and nothing but. This is even truer of Las Vegas, a city that was conceived, created, and built for nothing but money and more money. Indeed, compare how gangsters act in the East/Midwest with how they act in Las Vegas in the film CASINO. Nicky Santoro(Joe Pesci) is more apt to mind his manners and know his place(in relation to established mafia bosses) in the East than in Las Vegas, where he runs wild and does as he pleases. It’s like the wild west than the gentlemen’s club of corruption. More than in places like NY and Chicago, the public image of L.A. has cops acting like cowboys, and the Rodney King controversy played on this trope of LAPD-gone-wild. Also, the economy of L.A. was heavily based on popular entertainment that somehow seemed less real than the industries of other cities. One felt as if L.A. wasn’t so much a part of real America as the dream factory of America. The fantasy filled many people with hope and drew them to L.A to become movie stars, but more often than not, they became porn actresses or waitresses. (It’s interesting that Joe Buck in MIDNIGHT COWBOY goes to NY to bed down rich old ladies than to LA to become a movie star in westerns. It’s almost like a ridiculous parody of the Ellis Island immigrant experience. Instead of being from the Old World, Joe Buck is from the newer world of the Southwest, but then, the SW seems older than modern N.Y. because it’s culturally more conservative and rustic/rural. Cowboys represent the pioneering spirit, but Joe Buck, who admits he’s not a real cowboy, just wants to ride and leech off rich old ladies; also, even as the cowboy symbolizes the pioneering spirit, he is forever locked in the 19th century. And if immigrants from the Old World hoped to escape the oppression and corruption in search for freedom and rule of law in America, Joe Buck wants to feed off the moral corruption of N.Y. It’s a very twisted story.) Decadence was never in short supply in NY, but it had more of an intellectual/cultural pedigree. Its decadence was meant to be ‘subversive’ and ‘radical’, whereas crazy coke parties and orgies in LA seemed the norm, rather like guilt-free bacchanalia among the rich in Ancient Rome. Compare Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN and Blake Edwards’s 10. Compare the NY Jew and the L.A. Jew in ANNIE HALL. Both are into success and women, but the NY Jew wants to be taken seriously as a satirist and social critic who provokes thought whereas the LA Jew is content to make people laugh and rake in the cash. The NY Jew pretends to scrape away the artifice to reveal the underlying truth whereas the L.A. Jew is happy with artifice. If 70s belonged to NY Jews, it was as if 80s belonged to LA Jews, but then, under the skin, there really is no difference between NY Jews and LA Jews. Paul Simon the NY Jew made a smooth transition to being a LA Jew. Though Jews are often associated with the kind of chutzpah made famous by Alan Dershowitz(among others), even seemingly low-key, laid-back, and nice Jews turn out to be fiercely competitive, manipulative, ruthless, and cunning. Bob Dylan could be nasty but he could be sweet too, but he was no less manipulative when he was being sweet. Growing up in Minnesota, he usually had more money than his friends — his family was solidly middle-class whereas many of his gentile friends were working class. But he would put on sad puppy faces and make his friends buy him stuff like pies and ice cream(at least according to the biography by Bob Spitz). Just like homos, Jews often put on smiley faces and act helpless and in need of your sympathy, but if you don’t give them what they want, they will turn against you and try to do everything to destroy you. (If a billionaire Jew asks you, who have much less, to donate to a Zionist cause, and you refuse, he will attack you as vile and greedy and ruin your reputation. And if you donate to causes they don’t like — organizations that oppose ‘gay marriage’ — , Jews will blacken your reputation through their control of the media. Jews also control the IRS, typical for a people who served as tax collectors of the European elites for centuries, and they don’t just control it to collect taxes but to politically target peoples and groups perceived to be their enemies.)
The Jewish smile is like the curve of a sharp knife, and Jews are raised never to trust others or do favors for others unless it’s part of the strategy of power; Jews believe only suckers and fools — human dogs — act out of sincere good will with no strings attached. Jews are always thinking about power, always seeing life as a kind of a chess game. There is no such thing as good-will toward gentiles among Jews. When Jews see all these naive gentiles being so nice to them, they don’t feel gratitude but only contempt, which they hide behind their smiles. It’s like what Henry(Ray Liotta) says of Paulie(Paul Sorvino) and the restaurant owner in GOODFELLAS. The restaurant guy is afraid of Tommy(Joe Pesci, of course) and asks Paulie to be his partner. He hopes to gain Paulie’s protection by providing Paulie with the share of the profit, but what does Paulie do? He merely takes the restaurant guy for a sucker and milks his business for all it’s worth, and finally, the place is set on fire for insurance money. This is what Jews have done to American conservatives. The GOP hoped it would gain some protection from Jewish media and power by going out on a limb for Israel and by silencing all ‘anti-Semites’ on the American Right, but what did Jews do for American Conservatism in return? Jews are saying that the GOP, for its own good, must come out for ‘gay marriage’ and ‘open borders’. (The difference between Jews and whites is this: Imagine if a white guy went to the Jewish community and said he knows what is good for the Jews. Jews would mock and tear into his arrogance C the presumption of knowing what is good for the Jews more than Jews know themselves C and tell him to shove off. But if a Jew goes to the white community and says he knows what is best for the white community, dimwit white goyim are all ears and trust the conniving Jew whose real agenda is to weaken the white community. Jews insist on deciding what is good for themselves, but Whites let Jews decide what is good for whites.)Good will is simply impossible with Jews. Jews are cunning, and homos are twisted, and both communities have had thousands of years of experience in gaining power and privilege through all sorts of underhanded trickery. They’ve long mastered the art of mafia-dom. In some ways, Jews and homos are historical opposites. Jewish cultural continuity was ensured by blood and ancestry. All real Jews can trace their ancestry to ancient Jews. Jews throughout history are like the roots and branches of a tree that are all connected. No such connection exists among homos since there is no such thing as a homo ‘race’ — unless cloning changes this — , so the homo community has been like mushrooms that pop up seemingly out of nowhere. Gays can arise even among hardcore Muslims and Fundamentalist Christians. But there’s no guarantee that even homo parents — homo male and homo female having reluctant sex — will produce homo kids. The chances are the kid will be straight even if both his or her parents are homo. So, there is no clear line of ancestry or continuity among homos. Thus, Jewish sexuality has traditionally been moralistic whereas homo sexuality has been sensualist. Jewish culture has been about adhering to proper sexual morality so that the Jewish race will continue and multiply. Since homos cannot hope to sustain any such kind of sexual morality — homosexuality doesn’t produce life and even if homos were to have children through straight sex, the kids will likely be straight — , homosexuality became more sensual-oriented, more concerned with the pleasure of the moment, of the Now. Thus, homosexuality was closely associated with the paganism of the Greeks, whereas Jews stoned homos to death. (To be sure, the Torah doesn’t say people with homo leanings should be killed. It targets people who ACT on homo impulses. So, technically, one could be a homo in an ancient Jewish community as long as one didn’t give into the urges of performing fecal penetration.) At some point in history, the word-centric Jews figured that power of words would not be enough for Jews to gain control of the world. Words are power, but people are also moved and affected by sounds, images, and sensuality. Jews understood that homos are disproportionately represented in the creative and artistic fields, so forging this new alliance became central to the expansion of Jewish power. When most Jews were deeply religious, such an alliance simply wasn’t viable since the Jewish religion says homosexuality is filthy and those caught in the act of sodomy should be stoned to death; Jewish religion also disdained homo-related paganism and idolatry. To be sure, Jews often dealt as traders and businessmen with filthy goyim, but even then, among all kinds of businesses, Jews preferred finance and the exchange of money. In some perverse way, it makes sense for dollar bills to be marked with "In God We Trust" as finance/money is to material wealth what God is to idolatry. Pagan idols had material existence as objects people could see and touch. In contrast, the Jewish God is a concept that existed in abstraction. Similarly, there are two kinds of wealth. There’s wealth as physical objects such as land, mansions, jewelry, and horses AND there’s wealth denoted in the form of money or contracts(wealth guaranteed by words on paper). Just as Jews worshiped the God of the Book, Jews preferred wealth that could be printed or signed on paper. Such wealth was more portable, and portability was essential for Jews as they couldn’t be sure of their material possessions. So, if a bunch of French Jews felt the social climate was turning hostile, they could transfer their financial wealth from Paris to London or NY. It would be much more difficult to transfer their wealth in material form. Of course, many Jewish middlemen, especially pawnbrokers, accumulated lots of material things, even things that were idolatrous and ‘filthy’. But their religion made allowances for such practices as long as the items were treated as ‘goods’ to be traded than as objects of permanent value, let alone as objects worthy of reverence and worship. So, Jewish merchants would buy and sell Christian Crosses and pagan jewelry, but it was deemed spiritually okay since they were buying from one bunch of dumb goyim and selling to another bunch of dumb goyim. (Similarly, while the sale of opium within Britain was forbidden, it was encouraged in China as the drug was messing up the minds of all them ‘chinks’.) Even so, as long as Jews remained religious, they could never gain control over the images and sounds of goy society. They could only trade in that stuff. Engaging with such stuff on a creative level would have been deemed sinful and idolatrous. So, for Jews to really make a difference, they needed to be Emancipated. The effect of Emancipation was twofold. One was the reduction of gentile discrimination against Jews, but the other and possibly more important component was the Jewish abandonment of cultural orthodoxy. Only through such transformation could Jews shift their intellectualism from spiritual to ideological/academic matters. Only then could Jewish talent participate in the creation and dissemination of sounds and images that had once been demeaned as idolatrous or sinful. (Franz Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS is interesting from this perspective. It was as if the modern Jew is the product of a metamorphosis that fundamentally altered Jewish identity. But instead of breaking out of the cocoon as a beautiful butterfly, the Jew felt as a cockroach due to both external signals and inner doubts. Even as Jews tried to be like goyim, they felt that the eyes of goyim still looked upon them as pests. And even as modern Jews wanted to see themselves differently — improved, enlightened, and progressive — , an element of Jewish guilt hiding within their souls condemned their betrayal of sacred identity and tradition. Jews felt as cockroaches from the inside as well as from the outside. In a way, the modernization of Jewishness was a form of psycho-cultural Holocaust. Just as Nazis hunted down Jews like rats, modernization of Jewish consciousness waged war on the Old Jewish elements still hiding within the Jewish mind. God and Jewish habits had to be purged from the Jewish psyche, and Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud were among the main leaders of this movement. But even as old Jewish beliefs and taboos were smoked out and purged from the Jewish subconscious, the Jewish personality remained much the same. Thus, even as Freud rooted out the neurosis of Old Jewishness, he felt pride in being a feisty Jew with big hairy balls. He would eradicate God out of the Jewish mind, but his truth would be the new god permeating the minds/souls of not only all modern Jews but all modern gentiles. As Jews would dominate the field of psychology, Freudianism would be the priestly instrument of power for Jews and the mind-control device over the goyim. Jewish God is a contradiction because, in some ways, He was the first atheist of sorts. He said all gods are false, all idols are false idols, and all cosmologies are lies. Well, all gods except Himself and all cosmologies except the one with Him at the center of the universe. Thus, even though Judaism revolves around God, for there to be the one-and-only God, all others gods had to be rejected and extinguished. Judaism maintained faith in God but demanded atheism against all other gods. Thus, in a way, Judaism inadvertently took a step toward atheism. It eradicated all gods except one, and so, there was only one more God to take down. And in taking Him down, modern atheists ironically modeled themselves on Him. So, when Christopher Hitchens wrote, "God is not great", he spoke as if he is now the one and only god. Richard Dawkins writes with the same kind of one-and-only godly authority.) And only by breaking out of traditionalism could Jews forge an alliance with the very people that Jews had held in utter contempt: the homosexual fruiters. All throughout history, Jews saw homos as a bunch of filthy sodomites. Sensualist homos, who loved beauty and art, reciprocated by seeing Jews as a bunch of drab and grubby moralists. But with Emancipation, the secular Jewish prick could finally ease into the gay anus to pump up a new kind of locomotive power in culture and entertainment. Indeed, the Jew-Gay friction may prove to be one of the most important and formidable in world history. But it hadn’t always been a sure thing. Many Jews in the late 19th century and 20th century were radical leftists committed to the proletariat, and these far-left Jews regarded homosexuality as a kind of decadent bourgeois or aristocratic vice. The gulf between gay culture/sensibility and leftist radicalism was wide and real. There were many prominent gay leftists, but even they were uneasy about being both gay and leftist. Pier Paolo Pasolini was ideologically Marxist and sexually a homo. He regarded his cruising for ‘rough trade’ with poor Italian boys as a form of bourgeois exploitation, albeit one he couldn’t resist. Luchino Visconti was an aristocrat, a Marxist, and a homosexual, and his films betray his troubled conscience about his obsession/commitment with all three. Evil, corruption, and decadence in many leftist works were often associated with homosexuality. Consider the lesbian Nazi bitch in Roberto Rossellini’s OPEN CITY. The wicked son in Visconti’s THE DAMNED is a transsexual, and his perversity is used as a metaphor for the sickness of Nazism as the cancerous outgrowth of decadent bourgeois-aristocratism. Or consider the depiction of the homosexual Bavarian emperor in LUDWIG II. In THE CONFORMIST, we are to believe that a man was driven to the compulsive conformism of Fascism because he was molested as a young boy by a homosexual chauffeur. The most sadistic and perverse character in Costa Gavras’s Z is a homosexual thug. Even as late as the 1980s, Brian De Palma featured a transsexual as a psycho-killer in DRESSED TO KILL, which could be a reworking of the sexual ambiguity of Norman Bates in PSYCHO, a young man pretending to be an old woman. When ‘bourgeois’ was the favorite epithet of the Left, homosexuality was regarded with fishy disdain since so much of gay culture was associated with the privileged and decadent capitalist class. Indeed, during the Cold War, one of the moral arguments of the capitalist/bourgeois Free World was that it was far more tolerant of gays than the oppressive communist nations that locked up gays as ‘class-enemy perverts’. Even so, many gays in the West were on the Left because their practical enemies were cultural conservatives; they didn’t have to worry about communism since communists were far away; also, even as communists forbade homosexuality in their own nations, they generally tolerated or even promoted homosexualism in the West to morally undermine capitalism; it’s like Brits didn’t allow sale of opium in Britain but allowed it in China to morally weaken the Chinese. There were some communist front-groups in the West that were dominated by homos. Because of the cachet of ‘subversion’ associated with the Left, many homos in the West felt obligated to side with the International Left as homos were regarded as ‘subversive’ as well. And during the 1950s, both communists and homosexuals were seen as enemies of God and Country.
But in fact, communism couldn’t abide by homosexuality, and communist subversion(and/or Third World Liberation movements) and homosexual subversion were two very different things. Michel Foucault the homosexual, at one time, sided with Iranian Muslim radicals as fellow dissidents and subversives against American capitalist hegemony, but when the Iranian Revolution showed its true face, Foucault found himself championing Zionism and the Jews. (He had to have noticed that only in the modern capitalist west could a homo be free as a homo.) Also, gays, who happen to be naturally flamboyant, flowery, fruity, and show-offy, simply had little stomach for the ‘drabness’ and conformity of communist aesthetics. If anything, many gay artists in the 70s and 80s found themselves far more attracted to Nazi aesthetics. Indeed, if the Nazis had played it differently, the Jew-Gay creative friction might have been less powerful. If communism was a ‘drab’ ideological movement, Nazism was a cult of beauty and design, which made it naturally more attractive to homos. And there were lots of homos who joined the Nazi movement, not least because they resented being called ‘faggoten’ by German communists. Indeed, liberals and leftists tried to defame Hitler as a closet-homosexual. Liberal journalists described Hitler’s gestures and mannerisms as flaming and fruity-like. And Charlie Chaplin’s globe dance in THE GREAT DICTATOR makes the alter-Fuhrer look like some prancing whoopsy-doer, more a reincarnation of Ludwig II than a virile Teutonic warrior-hero. Ironically, Jew and gays now do control the world in the way Chaplin-as-Hitler toys with the globe. Because of the neo-paganism of the Nazis and the prevalence of homos in the Nazi S.A., National Socialism could have been a major homo-friendly movement and might have won over considerable numbers of creative gays in the West. But for Hitler to make the movement palatable to the mainstream population and to ward off rumors spread by the Left that he was a closet-‘faggot’, he had to do away with the gay stuff. (Even so, Nazi Germany was far more tolerant of lesbians than most democratic societies were.) As Nazism turned crazy and ignited WWII and killed a bunch of homos as well as Jews, most homos got turned off by right-wing ideology. Besides, even if communists persecuted homos in communist nations, in the Free West homos were more likely to find support from liberals and leftists than from conservatives. Though most liberals disdained homosexuality, they were nevertheless more tolerant of homosexuals than were conservatives, many of whom were steeped in Catholic tradition that held that homos are wicked sodomites. (As liberals were more into the arts and culture, they also had more personal connections with homos.) Jews, who gained ever greater control of media and entertainment, came to realize that there’s a lot of gay talent, and it would be a shame to let all that talent go to waste when it could be used to make tons of profits for Jews. So, just as Jews forged an alliance with Negroes from whom Jews profited handsomely in the areas of sports and music, Jews forged an alliance with gays in the areas of creativity and design, and both groups got very rich. People are vain and addicted to fantasies of beauty and glamour, and that is what gays excelled at, and Jews knew they would be stupid to miss out on the opportunity of recruiting talented gays to gain more power in arts, culture, and entertainment. Also, Jews discovered that, of all the groups, they felt closest to the gays in many respects. Though Jews found much creative inspiration from black music and enjoyed watching basketball games, most Jews couldn’t hang out with most Negroes. Most Negroes were too strong, too wild, too stupid. Jews had, at one time, had a creative friction going with Germanic ‘Aryans’, but it led to a battle of tribalism: that of Jewish Power vs ‘Aryan’ Power. So, even though Jews and Germans learned much from one another, the friction became too great and led to the great horrors of WWII. But homos were different. Though there is a gay community, it’s not a fixed community like those of races or ethnic groups. Gays are like rootless sexual wanderers. They are exiles(or self-exiles) from all sorts of communities: white, black, Asian, Arab, Jewish, Mexican, Brazilian, etc. They may be perverted sexually, but they got talent. And many gay men have the diligence and finesse that focus their minds on their goals. In a way, the gay mind is like on some kind of natural drug. College students are known to use Ritalin to study for exams — supposedly, the drug calms and mellows their minds for improved concentration on certain tasks, especially studying for exams. It could be that a lot of straight guys are too charged with hormones to calm themselves for key tasks. In contrast, gay men have some feminine chemicals that sort of smooth out their rough male emotions, and this natural feline-ness lowers their need to howl and sharpens their ability to bitch and purr. In a way, it’s the aristocratic style. Why is the Tim Roth character so much more formidable than the bigger rowdier male barbarian types in ROB BOY? The wild guys make a lot of noise and bash heads. In contrast, the gay-ish Tim Roth character is more precise, elegant, and efficient in the mastery of fighting style. He is more cat-like. Thus, the effeminate gay style can actually be more effective than the merely rah-rah male style. How did Sugar Ray Leonard beat Marvin Hagler? Hagler was bigger and stronger, but Leonard was more cat-like and gayish though not sexually gay. He wove in and out. Hagler fought with hard leather while Leonard pranced around and tied Hagler with lace. Though gays are sexual exiles, they, with Jewish help, have built up an exile community that is more powerful than the communities from which they were exiled(or self-exiled). We are living in a world of reverse-exile-ism. The exiles have gained control of the Tower while the rest of us normal people must bow down to the new lords. Jewish communities used to be ghettos of the city, but the Jewish-occupied parts of the city now control all of America. Homos used to build their own enclaves and refuges in the city, but now the homo urban centers are the most powerful next to Jewish-dominant ones. Thus, we now live in a Jew-Gay order run by Jewlites and gaylites. Though they are the privileged elites, they play at being victim exiles. They are the exilites. And they spread their power and dominance so far and wide that even white conservatives just wanna go out of their way to win the approval of Jews and gays. And ‘gay pride’ parades are beginning to attract more straights than gays. Straight people wanna be associated with ‘rainbow gays’ since WILL & GRACE and celebrity culture — as well as public education propaganda — have brainwashed them that gays are automatic saints radiating with love, talent, and goodness of heart. To love and revere homos and win their approval is what most white liberals aspire to nowadays. People have always been suckers and fools, but if most people in the past were suckers for normal values, they are now suckers for deviant lifestyles of homos that have no value to themselves. If straight people uphold conservative values, they can use those values for their own interests, but what can straight people gain by upholding gay values/agenda?
Most people are silly children who can be led to believe anything. After all, how else did so many Russians become communists overnight? How else did so many Germans fall for Hitler’s insane agendas? How else did Jews fool most Americans that Palestinians are the new Nazis? How else did Chinese go along with something as moronic as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? How else did so many conservatives vote for dummy George W. Bush? How else did 80% of Americans support the Iraq War thinking Hussein was gonna use WMD? You see, dumb Americans can be led to believe and support ANYTHING.
Anyway, Jews finally found their most precious allies, and they happen to be homos, which is truly ironic since no tradition has been as anti-homosexual as the Jewish one. Some cultures were tolerant of homosexuals, and some cultures had obligatory homosexualism(as among the ruthless Spartans), and some cultures disdained homosexuals but minus an agenda to have them killed. In contrast, the orthodox moralism of the Ancient Hebrews simply had no place for homosexuality. Just as the monotheism of Judaism forbade all other gods and idols — and stoned to death any Jew who dared worship a ‘false god’ — , Jewish moralism couldn’t abide by anything that deviated from the main moral principles. Since Jewish morality was firmly rooted in sexual morality of racial and tribal continuity, Jews regarded real sexuality as the ONLY sexuality. Jews were strict mono-sexuals and, as such, forbade alternative sexual lifestyles, especially ones that were deemed filthy. Jews circumcised the squishy penis to make it dry and clean before the eyes of God, so the idea of sticking a circumcised Jewish penis into the fecal hole of another man was simply too gross for Jews to accept. Why cut off the foreskin to cleanse the penis only to push it into a fecal hole? It wasn’t just gross but an affront to God who had an interest in the appearance and proper use of the Jewish pud; in a way, the penis was the one idol that Jews could sort of worship as God had instructed them on how to prepare it correctly. But homosexual fecal penetration was like vilest form of sexual idolatry. Maybe filthy pagan goyim did that stuff, but it was inconceivable for a decent Jew to be defiling the Jewish pud that had been ritually cleansed by instructions from God.
Arguably, Jews became sexually more moralistic as a result of their nomadism. Since a permanent homeland for the Jews continued to elude them, Jewish continuity depended foremost on blood. So, correct sexualism became central to Jewish identity and values. Also, as Judaism didn’t allow idols, Jewish culture became more people-centric. In contrast, the great pagan powers had permanent settlements to call as their own kingdoms or homelands. Thus, the great pagan civilizations came to identify their essence with land, monuments, art and architecture, and etc. As a result, many great pagan peoples came to associate their essence less with sexual continuity than with the permanence of grand structures and monuments, with paintings and sculptures. Though all such things were artificial, they seemed so grand, powerful, and everlasting. A Greek might stare at great statues of gods and heroes carved out of marble, and as such objects seemed permanent and everlasting, he might feel assured of the survival of Greek civilization. So, even though Greeks were very much interested in sex and producing heirs and tribal continuity and all that, they also fixated on artificial idolatry as a barometer of their power and permanence. But of course, art and architecture only give the illusion of power and permanence. Even the most awesome stone sculpture of a great god or hero is just a block of stone. It may last as a work of art, but it won’t ensure the survival of the people who carved it. As pagan peoples became so art-and-idol-centric, they sometimes came to favor the artificial representation over the biological reproduction. Since Jews had no idols to fixate their minds on and since they often lived in exile as nomads, their sense of security and continuity came to be deeply rooted in sexual morality. Only by having children and raising them properly under strict moral guidance could the Jews survive as a people, a power, and a culture. And indeed, they survived longer than just about all other peoples. Pagan cultures were bound to be more gay-friendly since they were more art-and-idol-centric, and homos were especially adept at such stuff. If you want great-looking idols, gay artists generally have the edge. Just consider the number of great gay figures in Ancient Greece. And many of the greatest artists of the Renaissance were gays, bi-sexuals, and gay pedophiles.
Now, one might be tempted to conflate gayness with creativity itself, but one must resist such gushing generalizations as most homos are NOT talented and may even have awful tastes. And, of course, there have been countless great straight artists. We must define homosexuality in terms of what it is that other kinds of sexuality are not. So, if we say ‘gayness is about appreciating art’, then anyone who loves art would be a fruiter. Or, if we say ‘gayness is about fine-dining’, then anyone who’s into gourmet food might as well be gay. Communists, Nazis, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, and etc. all like good food, but that doesn’t mean they are gay. It’s like gays drink water and breathe air, but then, so does everyone else. Only a fool would say being gay is about breathing air and drinking water. So, we can’t define homosexuality in that manner. What sets homo men from others is the fact that they have fecal-penetrative ‘sex’ with other men. That is what homos do that non-homos do NOT do.
Even so, one cannot completely divorce sexuality from sensibility, especially in an expressive endeavor like the arts where much of the creative spirit is fueled by sexual/sensual feelings. Just as a straight man’s love for a woman can inspire his art and just as a straight woman’s desire for a man can fire up her literary imagination, it’s true enough that gay sexuality shapes gay sensibility in art; and at its best, gay sensibility in the arts can be formidable in the sublime fusion of male energy and female psyche. This is why a healthy society must make a place for homos to do their thing and be left alone. The mind-set of the Christian Right’s kneejerk anti-gay vitriol has done much to drive away creativity from the conservative community. On the other hand, the notion that homosexuality is deserving of the same biological and moral recognition as real sexuality is also offensive. No matter how much we may admire gay sensibility in the arts, the fact is the act of homosexuality, especially between the men, is really gross on the OBJECTIVE level. Fecal penetration is simply not a good or healthy thing. And there is something funny about guys talking and gesturing like girls. Just consider the gay couple — where one guy looks like Eleanor Clift — in MEAN STREETS.
Anyway, Jews and gays have struck up a grand bargain. Since Emancipation, the overwhelming majority of Jews became secular and ‘liberal’, and their sense of Jewishness has been ethnic, political, and ideological than spiritual or religious. When Jews were religiously Jewish, Judaism was mostly about handling Jewish affairs in the Jewish community and maintaining a separateness from the gentile community(even while doing business with it). Today, Jewish-ism is about how to manipulate the Idea of Jewishness so that Jews can gain control over the world. So, even though the Jewish community is reserved only for Jews, Jewish values in their modern universalized form is supposed to reform, change, and save the world. Jews will say the essence of Judaism is ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’, and therefore, Jews should gain power over us to make us to teach us how to be more ‘equal’ and ‘just’. Thus, Jewish tribal interests came to be conflated with universal values. So, Israel, the tribal state of the Jews, is said to be a beacon of universal values. And all those wonderfully idealistic Neocons are trying to spread democracy in the Middle East so that Arabs and Muslims will live with greater freedom, justice, and happiness. Of course, it has NOTHING to do with the possibility that these wars tend to destroy the perceived enemies of Israel. Or, Jews will gain total domination of the media and academia, and then, they’ll justify such power by saying Jewish history has been one long struggle for freedom and justice, and therefore, all those powerful Jews in elite institutions are only trying to create a better society for all of us. So, no matter how richer and more powerful Jews become, we are led to believe that Jews are looking out for OUR best interests since Jewish-ism is really all about Freedom, Justice, and Equality. It’s as though Jews have the Divine Right of Kings or the Mandate of Heaven.
If media ownership were more diversified, there would be more effective ways to speak truth to Jewish power, but then, why criticize Jewish wealth, power, and influence at all when Jews are perfect angels and Jewish values are all about ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, and ‘justice’? So, if a Jew becomes richer while you become poorer, just take comfort in the notion that it’s all in the service of ‘equality’ since Jewishness is synonymous with ‘equality’. It’s like no matter how richer and more privileged the Castros become in Cuba or Kims in North Korea, it’s all in the service of ‘equality’ since communism means equality and since Castros/Kims are communist leaders. Since Jewishness = equality, richer the Jews become, more ‘equal’ America becomes. Same goes for privileged homos. Since ‘gay marriage’ is called ‘marriage equality’, more privilege for homos means that the rich-and-powerful elites are all about equality since they are best friends with rich/privileged homos. Same goes for Negroes in sports. As Negro power has become synonymous with racial equality and diversity, a sports team that is mostly black is said to be more equal-and-diverse despite its total lack of racial equality. But hey, maybe a few black athletes are homosexual, and since the gay agenda is all about ‘equality’, maybe an all black team with a few fruits is the most equal thing in the universe. (This business of calling homosexuals ‘gays’ is plenty bogus. It’s like calling incest-sexuals or kinsexuals ‘happies’. Or imagine calling blacks the ‘beats’ since lots of blacks got the beat. Or imagine calling Jews ‘pushies’ because many Jews are pushy. Or imagine calling Wasps the ‘coldies’ because many wasps are presumably frigid in their emotions. While there are gayish fellas in the homosexual community, not all homos are gayish. Some homos are brutish and even manly. And there are plenty of straight people who tend to be effeminate or gayish — consider Ramzpaul. So, why should a sexual community be designated by its cultural or stylistic attributes? That’d be like calling Arabs ‘hagglers’ or Russians the ‘drunkies’. Or, it’d be like calling Americans ‘gluttonies’ since so many Americans love to pig out. Or, it’s be like calling all Latin males ‘machos’ because many Latino male types like to put on the ‘tough guy’ act.)
Jews like homos because gays can never pose a tribal threat to Jewish power. There is a homo community, but there can never be a gay tribe(unless cloning technology allows gays to produce gay offsprings). Jewish descendants today have a long ancestral link going back thousands of years. There is a genetic thread that stretches from Abraham to Adam Sandler. In contrast, the gay community has a cultural but no biological link to gay communities of the past. Today’s gays are mostly the children of straight people; they happened to be born ‘gay’ as the result of genetic accident. The rise of Chinese can pose a tribal threat to Jews, but gay power is different. Gays don’t have a sense of tribal blood ties to other gays of the past. Thus, the gay community is ever-present(since gays are always being born somehow and somewhere) but also ever-mercurial-and-fluctuating. We know that future Jews will come from today’s Jews who came from yesterday’s Jews, but we don’t know where tomorrow’s gays will come from. Even Dick Cheney and Phyllis Schlafly produced homosexual kids. And even the child of a gay man and a lesbian woman has more of a chance of being straight than homosexual. So, Jews and gays have a kind of symbiotic relationship. Jews are the most tribal people whereas gays are the most trivial people. And of course, there are Jewish gays who are the most powerful elements of the gay community — and maybe the Jewish community as well. Jewish tribalism is the iron fist, and gay creativity is like the velvet glove. One fits into the other and together they penetrate deep inside White America’s ass(that is now the bitch of Jews and homos), and even the once mighty GOP has been reduced to playing cheap whore to Jews and homos. It’s such a pathetic and embarrassing sight that the sick elephant should be put out of its misery. And it’s not just ‘conservative’ politicians but ‘conservative’ intellectuals and pundits who suck up to Jews and homos who run the institutions. They are vain careerists first and men of principle second if at all. Just look at the pathetic excuses for ‘conservatives’ such as Charles Murray, Walter Russell Mead, and Dick Cheney. You bet the Jewish Neocons are giggling with glee at the sight of all those gentile ‘conservatives’ groveling before Jews and homos to receive new decrees and mandates.
Of course, Jews don’t need homos to be creative and expressive as plenty of Jews(straight and homo) have exhibited great talent in so many areas. Think of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Marcel Proust, Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan, Irving Berlin, Carole King, and etc. But given that many famous artists and creative figures have been homosexual, Jews figured it’d be to their advantage to forge an alliance with this highly talented and capable group. (Also, by promoting the gay agenda, Jews get to stick it to white Christian/conservative society. And the sight of even manly conservative types falling all over themselves to pander to sneering homos must be the funniest sight Jews have seen in a long time.) Jews gained a lot of profit in music and sports from Negroes — as well as moral capital in pushing the Civil Rights Movement — , but as most Jews are geeks and nerds, they feel more comfortable socializing with dainty gays than with tough blacks. Albert Brooks expressed some of this unease in MODERN ROMANCE; consider the scene where he goes to a party, and some big Negro talks about Brooks’ woman like a piece of meat. And notice how Woody Allen’s films don’t tend to have many Negroes. And consider the scene in SOCIAL NETWORK where ‘Zuckerberg’ feels intimidated by a black guy sitting at the same table as the girl he likes. (To be sure, the treatment of racial dynamics is double-edged in that scene. On the one hand, it’s geeky-Jew–feeling-small-in-the-presence-of-a-possibly-thuggish-Negro, but on the other, it’s a case of noble-Negro-acting-in-defense-of-a-nice-girl-against-a-possible-jerk.) Jews could never stand the likes of Jesse Jackson. And they knew the real MLK was unstable and kept a close watch over him as he was too much into ho’s and booze. Initially, many Jews — who controlled the boxing racket — were worried about all the trouble being caused by Muhammad Ali, especially as the big-mouthed Negro converted to Islam. This is why Jews finally decide to create their own ‘black leader’ in Obama, and Obama understood the nature of the bargain. He knew that he could play political and social Jazz with the Jews. Jews would have their toy Negro, and Obama would gain the fame and ‘power’. Notice he’s a kind of gay-ish black than a macho-man black — though even a gayish black guy may come across as more manly than most straight white guys who now act like a bunch of pansy boys.
Just as Jews found homos useful as allies, homos were drawn to Jews since gays have always loved fancy things. As Jews are the new aristocrats of the West, gays wanna be where the money and power are to offer their floopy-doo services. But it’d be misleading to say homos are only into fancy stuff. A lot of gays are studious and well-focused and proficient in all sorts of fields.
In a way, homos are like Chinese females in relation to Jews. Chinese as a national/tribal group may mean competition for Jews, but race-traitor Chinese women like Amy Chua and wife of Zuckerberg wanna marry rich Jews and surrender their Chinese-ness to Jewish power. For all the talk of teaching her girls Mandarin, we know Chua’s girls are gonna grow up more Jewish than Chinese. Chinese man and Chinese woman together form a tribal block. But a Chinese woman who offers herself to the Jew is like a homo who’s willing to cooperate with Jews to gain power and privilege(as the mini-me of the Jew). I don’t know if Steve De Jarnatt is Jewish or gay, but the sensibility of MIRACLE MILE is eccentric to say the least. There is also the transvestite in the restaurant, and near the end, Harry manages to locate a helicopter pilot at a health club who turns out to be a rather upstanding homo with a homo lover. It’s kinda funny because the homo copter pilot looks like a smaller version of Arnold Schwarzenegger and sounds very masculine, but then, his homo lover looks girlish and even has a female-ish name.
Among the striking images in the movie is the moment when blood from Harry’s nose drips onto his plate of eggs and gyros at the coffee shop. Oliver Stone used a similar image in NIXON when Anthony Hopkins finds his steak dripping in blood. Stone associated the image with the bombing of Cambodia. In MIRACLE MILE, Harry tries to calm his nerves as he ponders the strange phone call few minutes earlier. The image of the blood on the egg extends the significance of the earlier image of eggs in a birdnest engulfed in fire. Egg is obviously the symbol of life. As for the phone caller’s frightened confession that the ‘nuclear wad’ is about to be shot off, there’s the obvious irony of the link between creation and destruction; the caller was also trying to contact his father who shot his wad to create his son. It’s like in Hinduism, there are the god of creation and the god of destruction, and one can’t do without the other. Generally in the Jewish religion, the act of creation is a good thing and destruction is a bad thing, and the latter usually happens(on a large scale) because God is angry with sinful man. But in Hinduism, the god of destruction Shiva — who would be a satanic figure in the Biblical universe — is simply playing his role in the cosmic cycle. Like Botticelli’s PRIMAVERA, the sculptural depiction of Shiva is surely one of the greatest artistic achievements of man. There’s some interesting lines about Shiva in Aldous Huxley’s final novel THE ISLAND.
"Oh you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,
Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at their play,
Who at midnight dance among corpses in the burning grounds,
You Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,
You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,
You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;
You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart
This heart that is now your burning ground.
Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.
That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.
That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers,
And I dance with you."
MIRACLE MILE’s multiple meanings and overlapping themes arise from the manner in which the story elements have been framed and fitted. Without the allusion to the La Brea tar pits, it could have been a story of desperate love in a world destroyed by crazy politicians. But because of the cosmic framing of the story, the destruction is both everything and nothing, both a crashing tidal wave on the human level and a mere ripple on the cosmic level. We hear the scream but also the silence of the terror, which is at once tragic and banal. When unusual things happen, they seem unreal or unjust, deviant or at odds with the true way of how things should be. But if we pull back and watch the event from a larger perspective, what seems unusual on the human scale seems all but inevitable and normal on the grander scale. Cataclysmic events of the past didn’t only destroy life but laid the grounds for new forms of life. If not for the asteroid or something that killed off the dinosaurs, the mammals might never have gained control of the earth. And if it weren’t for huge events that wiped out certain species of mammals, the human species might never have risen to dominance. So, the fall or the end of the human species from nuclear holocaust could be just another event in the cycles of creation and destruction that govern the universe. After all, the Big Bang was a both a terribly destructive and creative event. And for new stars to be born, old stars have to die. In TREE OF LIFE terms, for there to be Grace, there has to be Nature, and vice versa. In this regard, the cosmic aspect of MIRACLE MILE is both reassuring and depressing. Reassuring because we know the world will go on, and there will be new life forms and new civilizations in the future. But also depressing because everything we achieved as humans really didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Each living thing dearly clings to life and thinks he, she, or it has a crucial or important place in the order of things. But in the end, the world goes on as if we hadn’t even existed, just as we go on blissfully ignorant of all life-forms that had once existed on this planet — or other similarly inhabited planets. And civilizations that may rise in the future(from the rubble) and rediscover ours shall eventually fall also, and as they vanish, so will their recovered facts of our civilization, in which case our civilization will not even survive as a memory. It’s like ancient civilizations remain alive as facts because we have recovered them, but if our civilization were to fall and fade, so will our knowledge of the past, which will die with us. (Suppose Negroes were to take over the world and turn every city into Detroit. It will be the death not only of present civilization but memory of past civilizations as Negroes won’t have much use for books except to use as toilet paper. Even African history is something Negroes learned from the white man who did the archaeological research to discover the true history of Africa.)
Harry seems to intuit or channel some of this and is thus able to overcome his fears with a stoic calm.
The consolation comes not only from dying with the woman he loves but from a glimpse of the grander scheme of things.
A sense of larger perspective(albeit on a more practical scale) also defines the character of Landa, the beautiful financial analyst lady. On the surface, she may seem like a crass and materialistic yuppie of the ‘greedy 80s’. Even the sight of her skimming through CliffsNotes for GRAVITY’S RAINBOW suggests a certain shallowness, a sign of her status-seeking, i.e. she has no time for the real thing so she gleans the synopsis as she might figures and data at the stock exchange. But she seems to be highly intelligent, very much aware and up-to-date on what’s going on in the world. She is Darwinism in action. At one point, she utters the words "optimum efficiency", which are the organizing principle of her view and way of life.
She has a multi-track mind. She simultaneously watches business news and speed reads through the CliffsNotes. When Harry mentions the odd phone call, everyone in the coffee shop is either annoyed, clueless, or flustered except Landa, who quickly calls up key people to assess the situation. When she learns(presumably from secretaries) that key individuals are headed to the southern hemisphere, she wagers that WWIII is on. Landa is a prime example of the Social Darwinist type. There’s the populist stereotype of the rich/powerful who reached the top through greed, corruption, and masterstrokes of ruthless cunning. Such perception sensationalizes/glamorizes the rich even while excoriating them(as in WALL STREET or GODFATHER movies) and morally justifying our lack of comparable success — we aren’t rich because we are just too damn honest and virtuous — , but in fact, a component of success and power that we generally overlook is the amount of effort and dedication required. Landa has the looks and connections, but she has something else that accounts for her success. She’s tireless and always on the prowl/lookout for opportunities and dangers. She’s Work Ethic on caffeine. She’s a colder and more commanding — and non-goofy — counterpart of Holly Hunter’s character in BROADCAST NEWS. She may be one of those ‘materialistic yuppies’, but we find ourselves admiring her because she is so focused and quick in her thinking and decisions. She is also made of tougher stuff. When a fat blob of a street cleaner says lewd thing to her in the coffee shop, she just ignores the loser. Her mind is focused on what matters, not on trivialities. In some ways, powerful homos like Tim Cook(Apple) and Christopher Hughes(Facebook) have gained power with the same qualities. They’re not only smart but always thinking and planning and staying ahead of the game. Though homos push a cultural agenda that is trivialist and trashy — ‘gay marriage’ indeed! — , the means by which they gained the power and wealth came through genuine hard work. (The gay agenda may be trivialist, but homo power behind the agenda is real and formidable, especially in alliance with Jewish power.) And it was the serious homos who gained power over the flaming fruits. Just as more sober blacks see the wild blacks as embarrassing coon acts — Spike Lee’s movie BAMBOOZLED, for example — , some serious homos regard flaming fruits and bath-house buggerites as the fruity equivalent of Steppin’ Fetchit and Buckwheat. So, for the better kinds of homos, the issue of ‘gay marriage’ isn’t just some life-style shtick but a serious assessment of the kind of dedication and stability a homosexual needs to succeed in life. Though we see it as the trivialization of marriage, homos like Chris Hughes see it as a means to sober-ize the homo community. And as the new elites of society, they don’t just wanna be seen or tolerated as sexual freaks but appreciated, admired, respected, and feared as the Core Power that is not to mess with(because if you do, you will be kicked and fuc*ed in the ass). In the end, it’s all about Power, and there are many more Landas among the Jews, gays, and white liberals than among the more laid-back or hunkering-down white conservatives. There are active conservatives, but they’d rather play at hunting animals and riding motorbikes than doing the sort of things that lead to real economic, cultural, intellectual, or legal power. (Conservatives focus on demographics and winning over the white vote because they’re too lazy and incompetent to prioritize quality over quantity. Jews and homos together comprise at most 5% of the US population, but they rule this nation. As controllers of the academia, media, high-tech, and government, they have the means to change the hearts and minds of most Americans who are not Jewish or homo. That is real power. If American conservatives controlled the media and academia, their agenda would shape news and knowledge, and most likely, even the majority of Hispanics would be voting for the GOP. But conservatives suck so bad in the competition of quality institutions of influence and power, and so, they just rely on the bloc vote of dimwit Christian conservatives. So many white Suburbanites used to have conservative values and voted for the GOP, but in a couple of generations, they turned into ‘anti-racist’ and homomaniacal ‘progressives’. How did this happen? Did they make up their own minds? No, as sheep, they came under the influence of the liberal elites who control higher education, entertainment, and media. Though GOP should appeal mainly to white people, the best way to win over the white middle class is to control the media, academia, government bureaucracies, and Wall Street. Fat chance with that. Wall Street may sometimes go with the GOP but only for tax reasons. Intellectually and socio-culturally, it is entirely on with Jew/homo social agenda. Incidentally, even though Liberal advantage is in the realm of quality — best artists, writers, scientists, businessmen, innovators, actors, song-writers, professors, etc. — , the power garnered by quality can also come to command the power of quantity. Most colleges, for example, are filled with middling than sterling minds. When it comes to quality, a conservative with genuine smarts and vision can make it to the top. His talents/skills may be so undeniable that even liberals can’t keep him down. But in any organization, the quality people tend to be few and far between whereas there are lots of middling talents — quantity people — who, though more intelligent than most Americans, aren’t really special; besides, even lots of very smart people lack vision and originality. Even elite institutions controlled by Liberals may not be able to exclude truly great conservative talents/minds, but they can use their muscle to fill the middling positions with quantity Liberals. Thus, whereas quality Liberals will be supported by a vast army of middling Liberals, quality conservatives will feel isolated and without support; they’ll be in a defensive spot. Great liberal scholars at Ivy League are dutifully followed and protected by an army of middling Liberal scholars, colleagues, and bureaucrats, whereas great conservative scholars have no comparable support systems. Thus, liberals didn’t just win in quality but through the politics of quantity. Stalin understood the power of the middling elements, which is why he managed to outmaneuver Trotsky and other Jewish Bolsheviks. In terms of intellectual quality and credentials, the Jewish Bolsheviks were more formidable, but Stalin had the support of the middling bureaucratic class, and that made all the difference.) Landa and the transvestite in the diner make for an interesting contrast. Landa is a very attractive woman and feminine in her own way, but she has a short no-nonsense haircut, and she seems eager to compete and play with the big boys. It’s like she wants to out-man the man. Despite or especially because of her ambition, she’s very diplomatic and sociable. Though obviously rich and well-connected, she doesn’t put on airs of superiority and seems to get along with everyone. It could be part of her nature, but it could also be due to her understanding that it’s advantageous to have as many ‘friends’ as possible — not friends as in chums or bosom buddies but as individuals who might be of use one day. It’s like Vito Corleone makes a lot of friends, even among the humble folks, because you never know when they might be of use. (It is because Vito helped out the baker that the man’s son-in-law came to pay respect at the hospital and proved to be of invaluable service to Michael who was trying to protect his father.) Humble folks are naturally awed by power and wanna be associated with rich/attractive/important people. Smart people with power know that they must balance cordiality and coldness when dealing with the hoi polloi. If you treat them too cold, they feel slighted and hate you. If you treat them too warmly, they try to get too close. You want them to like you and respect you, but you also want them to know that you’re busy with important matters and need to be given space and left alone. And Landa manages this balance brilliantly. She knows that the coffee shop/diner is a convenient place for her to take a break. Her kindly relations with the black owner — and her helpful tips on financial tips — has created goodwill between the two. So, when she enters his joint, he switches the channel to the business news program. Landa is a formidable blend of feminine grace and masculine calculation. In THE GODFATHER, Sonny was too masculine, just like Uther in EXCALIBUR. He made too many enemies, and he was too hotheaded to see the angles; he rushed into things. Fredo, on the other hand, was too ‘feminine’, too much of a pushover. In contrast, Vito Corleone was hard as nails on the inside but purred like a cat on the outside. Indeed, Mario Puzo said there was something of his mother in the characterization of Don Corleone. Similarly, Landa knows how to play hard and soft, how to play dove and hawk, how to act in self-interest and how to cooperate; she knows game theory. If Landa is a female as male, the transvestite is male as female. If Landa uses her feminine wiles to soften the edges of her masculine ambition, the transvestite transforms his masculine aggression into feminine bitchiness. It’s as if masculine concerns are more basic than feminine ones. Masculinity is about surviving, winning, and gaining power. Femininity is about looking pretty and being noticed. It’s substance vs style. (Of course, it’s not that simple in reality.) Though everyone in the coffee shop is shaken by Harry’s account of the phone call, the transvestite decides to brush it off as a prank phone call. The whole business might interfere with his/her hair-styling schedule in the following day.
It could also be a case of different people projecting their own natures onto the world. The transvestite is something of an actor because he’s a man pretending to be a woman, and so, he might assume that EVERYONE is a kidder, i.e. the guy who made the phone call is a prankster, just like he himself is a fake woman. In contrast, Landa is obsessed about competition and power, so she sees the world in terms of an endless struggle among the powers-that-be to gain the advantage. In her mind, it’s not inconceivable that power-mad people might do something drastic to win the game of power once and for all. At one point, Fred the black restaurant owner says: "Landa, you said we had to strike first... if it ever came down to it. Remember, you told me that?"
Anything can happen in a movie, so movie characters act according to movie logic So, Landa comes across as the sensible one while the transvestite and two others — a middle aged professional(who played the doctor in TERMINATOR) and the fat prole street cleaner(who relates his raunchy wet dream about Landa to a younger co-worker and makes lewd remarks to her) — seem way too complacent in their dismissal of the possible war. The transvestite is too bitchy and self-absorbed to be bothered with such matters, the professional guy is probably tired of life and seen/heard it all, and the fat prole guy has a very limited view of reality; he’s sort of like a potty-mouthed Archie Bunker.
Nevertheless, we are especially drawn to Harry and Julie not only because they are the main characters but because they’re charming and lovable. And we find ourselves admiring Harry for going back to save Julie even it’s a fool’s errand; love may not conquer all but redeems just about anything. One odd thing is he does nothing to call his parents/family members to alert them about the impending nuclear strike.
In a way, the dramatic shift-in-tone in MIRACLE MILE recalls the alternate-reality in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE when George Bailey finds himself in Pottersville, the evil twin of Bedford Falls.
Up to the phone-booth scene, Harry was living in a kind of pleasantville. But once Harry comes to fear the worst, blue heaven turns into black hell. L.A. is about to turn into the Titanic about to hit a giant iceberg, and near the end of the movie, the once peaceable citizens of LA have turned into rats scurrying to leave the sinking ship. (At least people on the Titanic died in grand epic fashion by sinking into the ocean. Harry and Julie sink into a tar pit.) It’s all the stranger because, except for a small group of people at the coffee shop, most of L.A. is either sound asleep or clueless as to what’s about to happen. So, there’s a dual sense of normality/sameness and panic/horror through most of the movie. Harry is convinced that something horrible is about to happen, but the city goes on as usual in ignorant bliss. It’s like stumbling upon a clue that the stock market is about to crash while most of the financial world has no idea of what’s about to go down, and of course, MARGIN CALL played on that idea. MIRACLE MILE was made in 1988, year after the stock market crash and at the end of the Reagan era, during which many people thought the economy would only get better and better. And in the late 1990s, so many people thought that internet stocks would turn all of them into millionaires, and in the late 2000s, it was the real estate boom. So, there is a kind of parallel between the nature of Landa’s profession and Washello’s accidental scoop from someone in the missile silo. Landa’s job is to know before others know, so she appreciates the kind of information Harry stumbled upon in the phone booth — a kind of nightmare lottery prize, without which Harry, Landa, and everyone else in the coffee shop would gone on as usual until LA blew up. Landa, ever the go-getter and power-broker, uses the knowledge to survive and come out on top. Harry, the soft-hearted romantic, can only think of saving Julie or perishing with her, yet in his zeal and determination to save her, he comes to act more like Landa — focused, determined, and resourceful. In a way, the world is on the brink of destruction because of people like Landa and Harry. The people with the power and wealth tend to be ruthless and calculating; and the logic of their ambition and competitive spirit may have driven the world to WWIII in the movie. Yet, such people wouldn’t be so powerful if there weren’t so many people like Harry and Julie who don’t much care about world affairs and defacto go along with the system by being content with micro-happiness. For there to be tyrants, there must be sheep. This isn’t to say that Landa herself is a particularly ruthless or unscrupulous person. Though a successful woman with contacts with powerful people, her interest in Thomas Pynchon’s novel and her friendly rapport with regular people at Johnie’s suggest that she possesses an inner-balance between the will-to-power and critique-of-power(though, of course, it could be just a ruse, as with Hillary Clinton who acts pretends to be a caring person when she’s nothing but a two-faced lying bitch obsessed with power). Harry, as a typical 80s young white male archetype, is both a figure of sympathy and mockery. We like him because he’s nice — and Anthony Edwards as Harry is rather pleasantly good-looking. But some viewers in the 80s might have seen his troubles as a kind of comeuppance for his apathy and false sense of security and privilege. Even his niceness seems to be a kind of naivete, especially when he goes soft on the crazy Negro who done stole a bunch of stereo equipment and then torches two white cops to death — though, to be sure, the very portrayal of the Negro seems to be on the naive side as such Negroes in real life would be far more hostile and nasty. (In reality, such a Negro would have snatched the gun away from Harry at the first chance and whupped his ‘white boy’ ass. Wilson the Negro is very typical of the 1980s archetype of the Neo-Negro as characterized by Eddie Murphy. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, there was the too-good-to-be-true-Negro-as-credit-to-his/her-race and the sambo-coon-steppin-fetchit-Jar-Jar-Binks-like-Negro. Negro as ideal and Negro as ape or clown. With the 60s came the ideal of ‘black-ness’ as opposed to Negro-ness, and blackness was marked by stark pride and brooding rage. Black man didn’t try to be no ‘model minority’ who had to prove himself worthy of being among whites. He didn’t have to seek approval from ‘honkeys’ to feel his own worth as a man. Nor was he a shucking and jiving clown to make white folks laugh. If he practiced humor, it was to laugh AT the white man than to have the white man laugh at him. So, Muhammad Ali was different from the traditional Negro clown. He beat up whites and mocked and laughed at their slowness. 1970s saw the explosion of blaxploitation flicks where black men routinely humped white women and whupped ‘white boys’. Blaxploitation vanished from the scene — maybe Jews figured that angry blacks fueled by such movies were not only attacking white gentiles but beating up Jews as well in NY and LA — , America embraced the Italian Stallion as the white hope ass-kicker of nasty and loud ‘niggers’. In ROCKY II, Apollo Creed got whupped and in ROCKY III, though Clubber Lang won the first bout, Rocky regained the title by whupping that mohawked ‘nigger’. As Rocky was a ‘dago’, I suppose it wasn’t as ‘racist’ as having a blonde guy whupping a Negro, though that did happen in ROCKY I, when Ivan Drago the ‘Aryan’ Slav not only whupped but killed Apollo Creed, whose death was avenged by Rocky the ‘Dago’. Drago’s killing of Creed was both appealing and appalling for white audiences. Despite their conscious anti-communism and ‘anti-racism’, a lot of white guys probably thrilled to the sight of a tall blonde ‘Aryan’ Russian kicking the ass of a ‘nigger’. But as they were supposed to be consciously ‘anti-racist’, they rooted for Rocky the ethnic ‘dago’ — a kind of ‘white nigger’ — to destroy the super-‘honkey’ ‘Aryan’ Russkie, who was a commie to boot. So, you got to see the white man kill a ‘nigger’ and then watch a good white man — friend of the dead ‘nigger’ — destroy the ‘evil commie-racist honkey’. At any rate, if Apollo Creed in the first Rocky movie acted like a blaxploitation star, he was in Neo-Negro mode in parts III and IV. He was still a big tough guy but had been tamed. He was like Lando Calrissian of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, who is sort of jive-ish but a decent guy and a good friend of ‘whiteys’ just the same. The 80s Negro was no longer in the credit-to-his-race mode and could act wild and crazy. But something about him was no longer threatening as had been the case with black stars 60s and 70s, who often threatened to hump white women. MANDINGO was a 1970s movie whereas 1980s, for the most part, hardly showcased interracism on the big screen; it was as if the 1980s Neo-Negro knew his place at least where sex was concerned; there was very little interracist porn as well, and there were complaints by blacks that MTV favored white rockers and few token blacks — like Michael Jackson, Whitney Huston, and Prince — while excluding most other black acts. If not exactly eager-to-please, the 80s Neo-Negro was eager-to-make-white-folks-laugh-and-make-money, and Eddie Murphy was the perfect practitioner in this mode. He was wild-and-crazy but funny than threatening, and there is something of Murphyism in Wilson the Negro of MIRACLE MILE. He’s a criminal and a punk but without the malice that would have made him threatening and dangerous. He’s like a Negro who stumbling into into trouble cuz he just doesn’t know any better.)
I recall seeing illustrations of the La Brea tar pits like the one below back in elementary school:
Similarly, the world of MIRACLE MILE is one of predator and prey. US and USSR are like two saber tooth tigers eyeing each other as the sinking beast to ambush and finish off. But, great power came to be concentrated at the top(in both nations) because most people are content to ignore big issues and settle for little happiness with some money, entertainment, and love. (Only rarely are elites overthrown by the masses, and even when it happens, new elites gain control as the natural mode of society is to have rulers and the ruled. Also, it’s almost never a case of elites vs the masses as it’s so easy for the elites to cleverly manipulate the masses to hate OTHER masses and elites. For example, liberal masses would rather side with liberal elites than join with conservative masses to oppose the joint forces of liberal and conservative elites, and it’s the same with the conservative masses. Conservative masses will side with conservative elites against liberal masses and elites. So, liberal elites don’t need to fear the liberal masses as long as they can direct liberal mass rage at conservative elites and masses, and vice versa. It’s also true of race. Poor blacks would rather support rich and powerful blacks than side with poor whites to challenge ALL rich and powerful people regardless of their race/color. Same goes for a lot of white folks, especially white conservatives. Even poor whites prefer to side with rich conservatives than side with poor blacks against the rich class in general. Also, masses almost never decide the main issues, which are almost always decided for them by their respective elites. So, even though ‘gay marriage’ does absolutely no good for the masses of the Democratic Party, even poor liberals think it is what truly defines their political and moral values. And even though Zionism has no value for white conservative masses, most white conservatives are rabidly pro-Israel — and believe in Obama is secret Muslim out to destroy Israel, even though Jews totally made him — because conservative elites who own ‘right-wing’ Talk Radio told them so. And even though Wall Street policy has been bad for most conservative masses, defending tax cuts for the super-rich has become one of the speaking points of the conservative masses because that’s what Rush Limbaugh yammers about all the time. So, white conservative masses would rather side with Wall Street super-rich than with liberal white working class folks. And even in a one-party state, the elites can always create phantom enemies at home and abroad to keep the masses in line. So, even though communist Cuba has been a miserable place, Castro maintained power by scapegoating America as the source of all evil in the world. Even though Castro became one of the richest man in Latin America and surrounded himself with special power and privilege, he could always direct mass Cuban rage at the Yanqui. And of course, white Hispanic elites pull the same trick all over Latin America. Though they, as white elites, rule over majorities made up of mestizos, mulattos, and native Indians, they direct mass rage at the gringo, Anglo, or yanqui. And Jews are better at this than anyone else. Though they are the true masters and oppressors of 21st America, they direct mass rage of Americans at Chinese, Iranians, Russians, and Arabs. And in America, Jews direct liberal mass rage, ‘brown’ rage, and black rage at white conservatives. So, even though liberal Jews are richer and more privileged than white conservatives, liberal masses dutifully bark and snap at white conservatism but would never think of challenging Jewish power and privilege. Of course, the elites can and do change. Wasps used to comprise the main elites of America, but Jews have taken over the Castle. Wasps, at some point, stopped targeting Jews as the outside/subversive threat against whom all white gentiles should unite to oppose, whereas Jews never relented in rabid and virulent anti-waspism. If not for WWII, wasps may have been able to rally white gentile masses against the Jews, but WWII was very divisive, pitting one bunch of white gentiles against others. Germans, the most respected gentiles of Continental Europe since the late 19th century, imploded with defeat, and then the Cold War pitted NATO whites against Warsaw Pact whites, and Jews played on that division too. Another reason for the rise of Jewish power owes to the victory of liberal wasps over conservative wasps. Traditional conservative wasps were wary of the rise of Jewish power whereas liberal wasps were naive in their embrace of Jews. As liberal wasps were more intellectual and creative than conservative wasps, liberal wasps got to dictate America’s policy regarding Jews, and it was to give Jews the key to the Castle; Jews didn’t just enter into the living room area but into the bedroom to hump the wasp’s wife, and then, the Jew let the Negro into the wasp’s daughter’s bedroom to hump her; finally, as coup de grace, the Jew evicted the wasp male who now lives in the servant’s shack to clean the windows and watch all the changes happening inside the castle from the outside. Incidentally, slavery may be the greatest invention of man. Though we think of ourselves as free, most of us are slaves in one way or the other. I don’t mean to suggest a moral equivalence that would compare our lot with the horrors of Stalin’s gulag, Atlantic Slave Trade, Nazi slave camps, Khmer Rouge Killing Fields, Arab slavery, etc. We are not slaves in the traditional or technical sense. We are free as individuals. But social order in every nation is still one of the master class and servant class. Even if old rules of slavery no longer apply, the fact is only a small share of the population will earn great fortunes and gain tremendous advantages/power while the rest of us are gonna live the role of servants — or animals in the zoo if on welfare. Factory workers are little more than drones, human machines. And people in the aptly named ‘service industry’ are essentially low-paid servants. A rich hotel guest and poor hotel maid may be equally free in the political sense, but in the REAL sense, one belongs to the master class while the other belongs to the servant class. In N.Y., the Wall Street big shots eat at expensive restaurants while servant classes wait their tables, shine their shoes, cut their hair, and open doors for them. So, if we define ‘slavery’ more broadly, most of us are slaves, albeit free ones. Oliver Stone said as much in WALL STREET, but I don’t necessarily share in his condemnation as it has always been and always will be thus — unless bio-engineering drastically changes humanity to make everyone equally intelligent/capable, and new technologies mechanize most of everything, whereupon robots will play the role of slaves/servants, thereby freeing humans to partake in universal aristocracy where everyone can spend his or her time with the arts, sciences, philosophy, and leisure as aristocrats of old did; there would be no moral objection to aristocracy if EVERYONE could be an aristocrat. Among animals, packs form among wolves, prides among lions, and tribes among chimpanzees. Those within the blood clan feel a sense of mutual loyalty, but everyone/everything outside the clan is suspect and is killed/destroyed whenever possible. Thus, bonds formed only within the circle of familiarity. Outsiders were expelled or killed totally. But slavery changed this dynamics. An invention of humans, it changed the way a people of one group came to regard other groups. A human community, instead of totally wiping out the enemy community, would spare the lives of its members and use them as slaves, and a larger community would be formed, one of masters and servants. Thus, slavery may have served as a template for the building of ever more complex human societies made up of masters and servants — who, in time, might merge into one. Masters tended to belong within the circle of familiarity whereas the increasing number of servants originated outside the clan. Prior to the idea of slavery, the conquering folks had no tolerance for conquered folks who were entirely expelled or exterminated. But slavery made the winners tolerate the losers, and it made the losers accept rule of the winners. Perhaps, the domestication of dogs and other animals also aided in the development of the idea of slavery. If members of another species could be tamed and ‘turned’ to serve humans, maybe members of another tribe/community could be ‘turned’ to serve one’s own tribe/community. Thus, larger communities could be formed, and larger societies meant more power and wealth, which meant more science and technology, which meant there would even be nations like the US and USSR with nukes aimed at one another. The abolition of slavery merely changed the rules of slavery. Under old slavery, you had to do as you were told; in the new ‘slavery’, you could choose your own job, but for most people, it was a servant role just the same. A free dumb person is still gonna wait tables or pump gas than rake in billions on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. If anything, the idea of ‘freedom’ paradoxically blinds him to his defacto bondage in servant status. Though both the US and USSR championed ‘universal justice and equality’, both were extensive master/servant nations. The recent immigration issue shows that the master class in the US is still trying to expand the servant class. As Jews are the new masters, they want more non-white servants to use against the white servants who may grow restless under the globo-Zionist yoke.) Landa is like the figure who straddles both worlds: the powerful and the powerless. She hangs out with regular folks, has some interest in art & literature(and social criticism) — I never read Pynchon, but he’s supposed to be one of the great contrarian/anti-establishment writers — , and has connections with powerful people. Compared to her, Harry and Julie are kidstuff. But as Harry says in the opening of the movie, "Love can sure turn your head around." The easy-going Harry becomes very resourceful and dogged in his determination to save Julie or at least reunite with her in what may be their last day on Earth. Just like Benjamin Braddock in THE GRADUATE goes from prey to hunter(and finally clutches Elaine from the ‘Aryan’ Clan), Washello goes from mellow fellow to white knight. In a perverse way, if indeed the whole event is really just Harry’s dream, the nuclear holocaust could be a kind of wish-fulfilment for Harry. In the post-sexual-revolution world — where so many women are rising careerists like Landa and so many guys are slipping in the social hierarchy, even lower on the totem pole than gays and transvestites, who’ve actually been elevated to near the top — , it’s tougher for men to be men, for guys to be guys. (The rise of homo power deserves careful attention because, contrary to the official narrative, so much of it happened secretively and conspiratorially. The favored narrative would have us focus on events such as ‘Stonewall’, the ‘martyrdom’ of Harvey Milk, the ‘homocaust’ of the AIDS epidemic — which elevated homos to the status of tragic victims, even though they brought it upon themselves by buggering one another in the ass all over the place — , and etc., but the real reason for the rise of homo power was that so many homos worked diligently, quietly, and doggedly to gain entry into the most powerful institutions of this nation. Instead of just pushing on the outside, many homos sealed their lips and penetrated through the wall of power. Many homos pretended not to be homo, or they pretended to be homos with no particular agendas. Though homos speak of the ‘closet’ as some kind of prison, it was actually their vehicle/tunnel to power. It was their Trojan Closet that silently laid the groundwork for the Shitzkrieg. So, homo power was long in the making. It didn’t just happen because homos decided to ‘come out’ and make a scene. Before they came out en masse and declared their agenda, they first quietly entered into seats of power — into the GOP and conservative/religious organizations as well into liberal and leftist ones — and created networks and forged a coordinated plan, especially with their powerful allies and sponsors the Jews. Of course, Jewish power rose the same way. If Jews had only been pushy and full of chutzpah, they would have been far less effective in their pursuit of power. After all, Negroes and Italian-Americans were as, if not more, pushy and troublesome as the Jews, but they attained far less power. Jews didn’t merely push on the outside; instead, many Jews just kept their mouths shut or spoke gently and were welcomed into the seats of power. In a way, the pushy Jews and softy Jews played a tag-team match of sorts. Pushy Jews would make a big scene and freak out the Wasp Establishment. Since Wasps were intimidated by pushy Jews, they were grateful when softy Jews knocked on the door. Wasps thought that by allowing softy Jews into the club, the Jewish community would be won over and be less hostile. But once softy Jews were inside the Castle, they secretly unlocked the gates to let in the pushy Jews to drive out the Wasps. So, in a way, the softy Jews were more dangerous than pushy Jews. Same thing happened in the neocon takeover of the GOP. Neocons first approached the GOP as softy Jews who wanted a place at the table alongside other kinds of conservatives, but once they weaseled themselves into key positions of power, they worked with liberal Zionists to destroy all truly conservative elements in the GOP. Obama learned this from Jews. The likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton only knew how to push from the outside. Obama decided to play the softy Negro, and so, whites who’d felt intimidated by the Jacksons and the Sharptons, voted for Obama in the hope that the Nice Negro would finally make the black community nicer and less hostile. But inside the halls of power, Obama has only worked to undermine white power even more at the behest of his Jewish masters. So, even though the rise of homo power is told mostly in terms of official events, the real reason was that so many homos, like ants in Aesop’s story of the THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER, kept a low profile and worked diligently to penetrate into the inner realms of power. The preparation was more important than the presentation. As homos are into stuff like Broadway and Theatre, they know all about the importance of making sure everything is in place before raising the curtain. Before homos pushed ‘gay marriage’, they made sure they had the control and/or support of powerful institutions in the media and government to push such an agenda.) In the past, even non-tough guys had manly roles to play in the world, and women respected them for their manliness. Consider the character of Jorgensen in THE SEARCHERS who always says "By golly". He’s far from John Wayne, but as a man of the West, he knows how to use guns, ride horses, and do manly stuff. And even through much of the 20th century, men were MEN and women were WOMEN, and the power structures were dominated by men — and the military was the bastion of male-hood, especially white malehood. But all of that changed by the end of the 20th century, though the process had been long in the making. (The bad feelings between Julie’s grandparents suggest the long pedigree of war between the sexes.) The end of the world scenario offers Harry the chance to play the role of hero, the man, the knight. This may not be obvious or apparent — especially since Harry seems so amiable and without worries, so content and well-adjusted to the new social order — , but who knows what’s driving him at the subconscious level? In the beginning of the movie, he just seems like a nice guy. He has fun with children at the Page Museum, and he goes about in a goofy way to attract Julie’s attention. He doesn’t even have the killer instinct to order lobsters for dinner when Julie expresses pity for them; he buys a few alive and releases them back to the sea; this is rather ironic since Julie works at a burger joint that serves the meat of dead mammals. He seems happy with himself and the world around him. And he is initially very upset and freaked out about the strange phone call from what may really have been a nuclear missile silo.
On the other hand, the crisis allows another part of him comes to emerge and come alive, perhaps a part of him that he never knew existed. In a way, it’s sort of like David Sumner in STRAW DOGS who goes from nerdy puppy to fierce pitbull when confronted with wolves. When people in the coffee shop ignore Harry’s queries about the phone call, he shouts out uncharacteristically; he’s like a gentle dog barking loudly for the first time. He tries to commandeer the situation. (There’s perhaps added significance to the crisis beginning at the coffee shop/burger joint because restaurant is a predatory hangout of sorts. The transvestite and an aging professional argue about the best rib joint in town, a place that aids and abets the hogocaust. At the natural history museum, Harry joked about frozen mammoth remains being turned into stew. At a seafood restaurant soon thereafter, Harry decides to spare and liberate the lobsters than eat them, at least to impress soft-hearted Julie. But restaurants, high or low, are essentially meat-eating joint. And despite Julie’s pity for the poor lobsters, she apparently has no trouble working at a place where dead mammal meat is served on a regular basis. And as Harry orders eggs and gyros, he too is a meat-eater. When blood drops from his nose on the food, it perhaps signals the transition from his mellow vegetative state to a realization that he too is or must be a predator among predators. When push comes to shove, it’s every man for himself or every man for himself and those who matter to him most. It becomes like the HUNGER GAMES. Harry’s nose bleeds as the result of bumping into the coffee shop glass door right after the fateful phone call. The glassy/transparent features of the phone booth and the door are reflective of the glass cases in the museum and the aquarium at the seafood restaurant. They serve as a premonition that Harry may turn into a fossilized artifact. They also serve to remind us that reality is not always as it seems. What may be invisible may have real power over our lives. It’s like no one can figure out for what reasons WWIII is about to start, but it could be happening. The real motives may be invisible, but they erect barriers between ourselves and survival just the same.) And when the Fred the Negro coffee shop owner won’t turn back the truck to pick up Julie, Harry snatches Fred’s gun and threatens to blow the Negro’s head off unless they go back to pick up Julie. Harry almost surely never used a gun before, or even held one in his hand. Fred says there’s no way he’s going back; Julie is a nice girl and all, but his own ass comes first; and Landa agrees with him; everyone must focus on the ‘business’ of survival, and it’s no time to be ‘personal’, which is a bit ironic since everyone is personally most invested in saving his or her own skin. Fred slows the truck along the highway ramp so that Harry can jump off if he so chooses. It is at this moment that the story begins to feel like a dream inside a dream. The notion of getting off the truck(the only real chance of survival), being stranded in the middle of nowhere, and then finding his way back to Julie to save her in the few hours left is the sort of thing that only makes sense in accordance to dream logic. Harry is knocked unconscious from the jump and comes to his senses when two motorcycles zip past him. The movie lurches from ensemble hullabaloo to eerie solitude. The sudden shift to quietude and isolation from the craziness of what had transpired earlier makes Harry wonder if he is in a dream. He fires off the pistol, and the ringing noise convinces him that he is awake. Stranded in the middle of nowhere, he needs to hitch a ride to go back to get Julie, and the first car that comes along belongs to a young Negro hood. The car is likely stolen, as are the stereo electronics in the trunk. The Negro is a memorable combination of reality and fantasy. Strictly in terms of social reality, he’s a lying, cheating, stealing, untrustworthy, and self-centered Negro like so many of his ilk. But he is also something of an updated liberal version of Steppin’ Fetchit. Though a criminal, he lacks the qualities of thuggery. He could easily have snatched the gun from Harry and overpowered the skinny white boy at numerous times but instead just plays the coon. He’s a criminal Negro but not a fearsome danger to white boys, and this part of him is pure fantasy, like the Negro in ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING who turns out to be a crook and thief but harmless to white kids.
De Jarnatt probably knew full well that many Negroes were criminals and crooks, but the liberal side of him cast the Negro at least partially as a kind of social victim who be doing what he needs to ‘survive’. A naive liberal might argue that Negroes steal and deal because society is unfair to their kind; Negroes grow up learning that they must struggle by ‘any means necessary’ in a ‘racist’ world. It’s as if Negroes are living under the cloud of White Racist Slavery every day. And in a way, one could argue that Harry becomes more and more like the Negro. As he becomes more survivalist, he too begins to break one law/rule after another. Later at a health club, he shoots off his gun to grab people’s attention. Harry threatens the Negro with his gun — taken from Fred — and orders him to drive to Julie’s place. So, one could argue that Harry is becoming ‘niggerized’ under the circumstances. The movie could be saying that law-abiding white folks tend to see blacks as a bunch of ‘no-good stealing and cheating niggers’, but blacks act like that because they’ve always had to struggle to make it from day to day. So, there’s a certain irony. We see the Negro, whose name if Wilson(played by Mykel T. Williamson), as some no-good punk, but Harry too begins to violate certain rules to get what he wants. When Harry and Wilson stop at a gas station reserved only for taxis, a police car appears to check out the situation. Wilson the Negro panics and sprays the cops with gasoline, whereupon the female officer fires her gun(into the air) and sets off a spark that lights her in flames. When her male partner tries to put out the flames, he too lights up. This makes Wilson a murderer, but the movie minimizes the horror by having Wilson rationalize what he did by blaming the female cop for pulling the trigger that set off the conflagration. Wilson did it to ‘survive’, and in that sense, one can argue that he’s no different from anyone else in the movie who’s also willing to do anything to survive(WWIII).
Later, when Harry tells Wilson to wait for him with the car while he goes to get Julie, Wilson drives off in typical Negro fashion. At this point, we are likely to see him as a truly lousy ‘nigger’, but it turns out he violated Harry’s trust for a reason that was similar to Harry’s. If Harry was trying to do whatever’s necessary to save Julie, Wilson the Negro done what he done to save his sister Charlotta — and this sort of redeems him, especially as he and Charlotta later both die rather sadly from gunshots from policemen who see him as a ‘cop killer’. (Wilson’s carrying Charlotta up the escalators could be a homage to the ending of BLACK ORPHEUS, a long forgotten French New Wave film). So, Harry somewhat becomes ‘niggerized’ as he comes to play fast-and-loose with the rules to survive, whereas the Negro, despite his thievery and cop-killing, becomes somewhat redeemed in our eyes because we learn that he was willing to risk his life out of love for a dear person. Julie, who doesn’t know what the hell happened earlier in the night, witnesses the death of Wilson and Charlotta and feels deeply moved. She didn’t wanna see lobsters killed at the restaurant, and the sight of two Negroes dying inside a department store is too much for her. (As Wilson drove the stolen car right through the glass window of the store, it’s as if the lobsters that Harry and Julie set free from the glass aquarium have been tossed back inside; there is no escape. The outside is no safer than the inside.) Indeed, one of the running motifs of the movie is the ideal unity of love and death. If the meaning of love is to live together, then the corollary is to die together, like in ROMEO AND JULIET and countless other love stories. If two people become one through love but if one dies, a kind of fracture has formed in the emotional cosmos — or cosmotion. This is why the image of the unearthed skeleton/mummies of lovers at the end of VOYAGE IN ITALY is as moving as grisly. If the two characters — played by Ingrid Bergman and Trevor Howard — had come upon the skeletal remains of just one person or lots of people, the sight would have been a simple image/reminder of death. Instead, the discovery is of a couple who died together, and it stirs powerful emotions about the nature of life, love, and time. Throughout the film, the married couple are emotionally dead to one another(or want to seem that way, as both have been hurt too often in the past by emotional betrayals and because feeling as little as possible is paradoxically the only way they can stand one another), making one biting remark after another; they are on the verge of separation and divorce, but they are also too cool and dry about it to finalize it once and for all. But then they come upon the mummies of a couple bonded forever in death. Of course, we don’t know how the couple had felt about one another at the time of their demise. Were they still together in love or hate? Is their eternal bondage to one another a blessing or a curse?
The question is relevant to the fossils recovered from the tar pits as well. Some animals died together in affection, trying to rescue one another. Elephants and hippos, for instance, are intensely social and try to help one another in danger. Mammoths and mastodons were surely similar in temperament. But some animals died together as enemies. A giant sloth could have been sinking into the tar pits when a saber-toothed tiger pounced on it for an easy meal, only to follow the sloth into the abyss. Throughout VOYAGE TO ITALY, the relationship between the man and woman appears to have deteriorated to the point where they can hardly stand one another. But the man is dry and genteel and the woman is classy and reserved, and so, they maintain a certain diplomacy between themselves. (Anglo manners have a way of serving as both a wedge and toll-gate bridge between the emotions of two people. Anglo emotions are curbed from being full emotions due to the ideal of self-control, refinement, and dignity. Anglo men don’t hug and kiss each other on the cheeks like Italian men do. And during the day, Anglo man and wife were supposed to treat one another as Mr. and Mrs. than as two lovers. The advantage was emotional stability as opposed to sloppiness, and it also spared Anglos much embarrassment in life. An Italian might feel catharsis in screaming and crying for mama-mia, but he might foolish later for having acted like a bambino. The downside of Anglo emotional restraint was a certain emotional stuntedness and lack of urgency. While adults should learn to control their emotions, it’s natural for children to emote and express themselves and be loved. But many Anglo kids were taught to be emotionally restrained from a very early age, and so, just like the bound feet of Chinese women, the Anglo emotions sometimes didn’t develop naturally. This may partly explain why Anglo-Americans lost to the Jews. Jews are a both very cerebral and emotional. They are like Italians with high IQ. When Jews get pissed, they get really pissed. Anglo-Americans should, by all rights, be mad-as-hell at Jews for messing with white power, but the Anglo-American ideal is to hold back their emotions. They face a formidable enemy in the hideous Jew, but Anglo-Americans simply can’t muster up their true feelings about the Jew. This is why Anglo-Americans need to Chechenize themselves and learn to feel true emotions, those of passionate love for their own people and heritage and determined hate for the enemy. Because of the lack of emotionalism within Anglo-Americanism, many Wasps seek emotional fulfilment via the Negro, Jew, Homo, and even Mexican. Of course, PC prevents white Americans from feeling the entire spectrum of real emotions. If a white person feels genuine passion and pride for his history, heritage, culture, and people, he would condemned as ‘racist’. On the one hand, PC mocks Wasps as ‘cold and unfeeling’, but on the other hand, if Wasps were indeed to generate hot emotions of pride and courage, they would be denounced as ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’. So, the only kind of strong emotions that white Americans are allowed to feel is for OTHER people. It’s no wonder that so many white Americans are emotionally committed to Negroism, Homo-ism, Zionism, Illegalism, and etc. Since they cannot wave the White Power flag, they compensate by waving the anti-White flag. Jews, of course, understand the psychology behind this and milk it for all it’s worth. So, dweeby boy Ken Burns, who isn’t allowed to feel any emotions for his own people, is impassioned about all things Negro. In the past, when Anglos and Anglo-Americans were pushed hard enough, they could awaken into hot emotions, but the delay in the manifestation of such emotions before things really got out-of-hand sometimes had a deleterious impact on history. If Anglos had taken offense at Hitler’s tactics earlier, Hitler might have been discouraged from overt aggressions later. If Americans had been clearer in its objections to Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, Japanese might have thought twice about messing with America. Soviets, after all, sent a clear message to the Japanese in North China that they’re not to mess with. Japan got messed up so badly along the Siberian border that it never thought to mess with Russia again. But Anglo-Americans didn’t push hard enough or show sufficient anger, and so, the Japanese thought it could take on America. Similarly, George H.W. Bush didn’t send a sufficiently clear message to Saddam Hussein that an invasion of Kuwait would not be tolerated by the US, though some may argue that Bush was actually luring Hussein into a war, just as some historians think FDR willfully baited Japan into WWII. At any rate, the Anglo emphasis on manners has had a dual effect of both cooling the emotions between a man and a woman AND making them bearable to one another. Manners invited irony and wit, leading to biting remarks between man and wife. But as manners were ‘nice’, even hatred was expressed gently. And since form was key to manners, expressing outraged offense at the offhanded remarks could mean lack of self-control, which meant that the offended party blinked first. So, a couple would say the meanest things to one another in the gentlest manner, and the offended member would pretend as if he or she didn’t really understand what was said as if it was beneath his or her dignity. But even the lack-of-understanding had to be effected as a pretend-lack-of-understanding since showing that you really didn’t understand would have made you a dumbass. Even though or especially because Anglos kept their emotions under wrap, there could be greater enmity among Anglos than among Italians or among Negroes. Italians might scream at other Italians, and Negroes might howl like baboons, but they would at least get their rage off the chest. They were faster to fight and throw fits but also faster to forgive and hug. In contrast, Anglos generally didn’t get their negative feelings off their chests, and so, the enmity would just remain and fester, and a couple could end up torturing each other micro-aggressively forever and ever, which could be worse than the Scotch-Irish way of biting the ear and then saying sorry into it. It’s like the couple in TWO FOR THE ROAD practice a low-level form of torture on one another, though, to be sure, the sensibility is actually Judeo-Anglo as the screenplay was by Frederic Raphael. Chinese water-torture sounds innocuous — it’s just water dripping on the head, right? — , but it’s especially nerve-racking because it is so prolonged. It’d be better to have the entire bucket poured on you at once and have it done with.) The couple in VOYAGE IN ITALY are Northern European types in Southern Europe. In Italy or Greece, the emotions between man and woman are more direct and hair-pulling. So, Southern Europeans can love more fully and hate more openly. (To be sure, this doesn’t mean that Southern Europeans are necessarily forgiving. After all, lots of Sicilians screamed and hollered about their dead ones but then carried out vendettas that could go back and forth for generations.)
A person’s acute irritation with the petty annoyances may be an indication of pent-up frustration or general lack of direction in life that is crying out for real feelings. (It’s like the ‘silent cry’ of the Holocaust survivor in THE PAWNBROKER, no doubt inspired by the excavation of ‘lost emotion’s in HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR. There was also an element of catharsis in Rock music, especially when laced with new drugs of the 60s, though the stakes were much higher and the rules much less honest, as Counterculture wasn’t merely seeking personal truth but cosmic truth, with the combination of Rock music, drugs, and free sex serving as the new holy trinity of redemption, liberation, and ecstasy, a tall order indeed. It reached full bloom nationwide in 1967, the so-called Summer of Love, but flower power began to wilt pretty fast from naivete and self-indulgence — as well as from innumerable leeches and opportunists who jumped on the bandwagon. In the end, the ‘other side’ that Jim Morrison broke into was early death, and Lennon’s attempt at finding his true self culminated in the ridiculous ‘primal scream’ therapy where he and Yoko babbled like babies crying for mommy.) Though Fredo in THE GODFATHER II ends up in a bad way — killed by Michael — , he does find catharsis through the death of his mother. Fredo, who’d been simmering with envy over his younger brother, finally makes peace with himself at his mother’s funeral. Same thing happens with Connie. She returns home and finally accepts that Michael was trying to be ‘strong for the family’. But in many cases, tragedies can be crippling than crystallizing, and a different kind of catharsis is necessary to break them out of the cocoon. In RAN, the old lord becomes catatonic with the realization that his first and second sons are out to destroy him. Only the reunion with his third son restores some sense to his head.
Even so, the problem of catharsis is that it’s usually short-lived, especially if felt through something other than actual life experience. When Mel Gibson’s PASSION OF THE CHRIST was released, some guy was so moved that he confessed to a murder he’d committed. He felt a dam burst inside his soul; he was inspired by the image of the suffering and death of Jesus on screen and wanted to start a new chapter in his life. But some time later, he withdrew his confession. (A lot of white liberals undergo feelings of emotional, moral, and even spiritual catharsis from movies like SHAWSHANK REMDEPTION and GREEN MILE, which would have you believe a mountain-sized Negro loves a little white mouse. Personally, ROOTS meant a lot to me as a child, especially the scene where Kunta Kinte gets whupped. And SCHINDLER’S LIST made tens of millions of Americans weep for the Jew. And Oprah and Obama play on ‘white guilt redemptive’ emotions. Joseph Goebbels understood the art of propaganda and how it not only affects people’s minds but shakes their emotions to their roots, as if they’d undergone spiritual transformation before the magical figure of Adolf Hitler. And a whole bunch of people were moved to tears by PHILADELPHIA and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. They didn’t just feel sad or sympathetic but ‘broke down’ and came to ‘see the light’ and revere the holy homo. When I watched GANDHI for the first time, I found it to be a life-transforming experience and thought maybe I should live by Gandhi’s creed, that is before I read an article about the real Gandhi. And despite ROOTS and SCHINDLER’S LIST, my perception and experience of real Negroes and Jews have rendered such manipulations as little more than fairytales, not so much in their historical details but in their cheap push-button toying with people’s emotions. So, while cultural offerings of catharsis may feel profound, their effect can be broken by real-life experience. This is why Jews want white liberal elites to live in privileged whitopias. If urban reality reverted to the high-crime 1970s, a lot of white liberals would be shaken out of their PC fixations and see racial reality for what it is, and the impact of liberal propaganda would dissipate. As the real Negro is none-too-likable, Jews have created the Ideal Negro in politics and culture, and the reason why so many privileged white liberals love Negroes is because the bulk of their experience of the Negro comes from the idealized forms of movies, music, academia, and culture.
Of course, another factor for liberal cultural dominance is liberal control of history. No matter what happened in the past, regardless of what is true or untrue, the teller of the tale controls the Official Truth. Suppose John worked hard and led an honest life whereas Bill hardly worked and cheated all his life, but John doesn’t say much of anything while Bill does all the talking in his own favor. People who never observed John and Bill in action will listen to Bill’s tale and conclude that John was the lazy cheating one while Bill was the decent hardworking one. Past vanishes totally unless it is remembered. Past ONLY exists through memory or the constant upkeep of memory as even memory doesn’t have a life of its own. What is remembered must be re-remembered and then re-re-remembered and so on. What is told must be retold and re-retold and re-re-retold, as people tend to forget and new generations are born without historical memory of any kind. And even people who remember tend to remember ‘intellectually’ but not necessarily emotionally. For example, everyone knew of the Holocaust in 1993, but SCHINDLER’S LIST not only recharged historical memory but emotional memory. It made people FEEL about it. No matter how trivial an event, it is a Big Deal if constantly remembered. No matter how momentous an event, it’s as if it never happened unless it is remembered. Why is it that many more Americans heard of Stonewall than the Great Famine under Stalin, Great Leap Forward disaster under Mao, the Killing Fields under the Khmer Rouge? Why is it that most Americans know about Emmitt Till but know close to nothing of the millions of whites robbed, raped, assaulted, or murdered by Negroes since the 1960s? Jews who control the media and academia remember and remember and remind and remind what they want us to remember. Conservatives seem to think that memory and history take care of themselves. They don’t. So, even though blacks have been brutalizing whites for the last several decades, a lot of white liberals have this impression that innocent/helpless Negroes are still being attacked by the KKK because Jew-controlled media keep reminding people of the ‘bad ole days’, whereas mainstream conservatives are deathly afraid of mentioning the history of black crime and violence lest they be called ‘racist’, a career destroyer for anyone thus tagged by hideous Jews.) In the review of Vittorio De Sica’s SHOESHINE, Pauline Kael said she rushed out of the theater weeping and found her estranged lover in the same emotional state, and they felt a rekindling of their love — probably like the couple in VOYAGE IN ITALY when they come upon the mummies. But the feelings didn’t last, and again they went their separate ways. We seek the truth through catharsis, but it almost never holds for long. It’s like a famished man pigging out and feeling satiated enough to never need to eat again, but of course the hunger returns. It’s like a person may take a massive dump and feel totally cleansed, but shit piles up inside all over again. It’s like a person may take a shower and feel absolutely cleansed, but he or she becomes scuzzy again. It’s like a person may have the biggest orgasm of all time and feel no need for more, but then he or she feels horny again a week later. One of the problems of catharsis is it may mean everything to one person while seeming ridiculous or embarrassing to others. Characters break down and cry in soap operas, but we may just crack up at them. The characters in P.T. Anderson’s MAGNOLIA undergo various forms of catharsis — abetted with toadarsis from the sky — , but many viewers just wanted to bitch-slap them and tell them to grow up. One person’s catharsis is another person’s retarsis. I remember some Deadhead friends sitting in a circle and bawling like babies when Jerry Garcia died. It was ridiculous. (In a world where Jerry Garcia is messiah, you can understand why young people fall for trivial nonsense like ‘gay marriage’.) Even when a form of catharsis has real value and power, its meanings fade for the simple fact that life goes on and wearies our memories and feelings.
Thus, catharsis carries maximum meaning only when accompanied with death. If catharsis represents the peak/summit of one’s sensual, emotional, and/or moral realization/actualization/fulfilment, then the rest of life can only be anticlimactic or wearying. In this light, it is fitting that the salmon, upon reaching their destination after a long arduous journey up rivers and streams, mate and die. It’s like the fusion of life, ecstasy, relief, death, and rebirth all at once: an epic culmination and crescendo of an epic journey, beyond which life, if it could continue, would be all pointless anti-climax. And many insects die just upon fulfilling their reproductive act.
It somehow seems only right that the men in THE WILD BUNCH die as and when they do. They and we wouldn’t have it any other way. As the last of the breed fading into the twilight West, the fight against Mapache is their best chance ticket to Valhalla. If one lives on after the catharsis, the revelation or realization of the great truth eventually turns into an object of nostalgia; something explosive turns into a murmur. Some seek to regain and re-experience the heat of the moment, but catharsis cannot be willed. It is created by a convergence of factors and forces, most of them beyond the control of one’s will. (This is why some people seek the aid of therapists to navigate their minds to the root source of their problems so as to draw it out and have it purged. In some cases, the wish to be purged is so strong that the patient, aided by an unscrupulous psychiatrist or guru, may fantasize traumas of events that never happened, which is why some Catholic priests have been falsely accused of having molested boys. Of course, Jews have used this method on a macro-scale against the entire white race. Thus, even non-whites who never suffered under white oppression feel as though they’d been and still are victims of white ‘racism’. Even privileged white girls in elite universities feel like they’ve been oppressed and molested all their lives by ‘white male patriarchy’. Even rich blacks who gained everything from white civilization only ‘remember’ and see pain and suffering. Even rich homos with all the privilege feel haunted by the ghosts of ‘homophobia’. Jews use the media as quack medicine to turn various groups into ‘victims’ of whites. So, even newly arrived Chinese and Asian immigrants whose ancestors never experienced repression in America — and whose countrymen gained a great deal as the result of American influence and protection — come over here and invoke the suffering of Chinese railroad workers in the 19th century and Japanese ‘interned’ during WWII, claiming them as part of their own narratives, i.e. they too are deserving of special recognition as whatever may have happened to Asian-Americans in the American past casts its holy light on them as well. But who put such ideas into the minds of immigrants? The hideous Jews who control the media and academia. Or consider the new immigrants from Nigeria. West Africans made lots of money by capturing and selling blacks to white slavers, but now, the descendants of those black slave traders arrive as immigrants in America and benefit from ‘affirmative action’ just like black-Americans whose ancestry in this country go back centuries do. And then, there are white Hispanics who arrived in the New World and conquered long before Anglos did. A people whose actions led to the deaths of millions of natives and practiced slavery on a larger scale than in North America. Yet, political psychology allows white Hispanics to pose as ‘people of color’ and ‘remember’ all the traumas resulting from ‘Yanqui imperialismo’. Of course, Italians pulled the same shtick after WWII. Though Mussolini was the founder of Fascism and made the Pact of Steel with Hitler, Italians after the war were allowed to remake themselves as ‘victims of Germans’. And Jews let this narrative slide as they figured Latins could be used against Northern Europeans, and besides, whatever crimes Italians may have committed, they didn’t kill a lot of Jews — relatively speaking, a Jew in Fascist Italy was safer than in most of continental Europe during WWII. If some people are encouraged to feel traumas of experiences they didn’t experience directly — a kind of collective trauma — , some people are made to feel the trauma of collective guilt. This applies to all whites. So, even though Poles had nothing to do with global imperialism and were pushed around by great powers for centuries and even though Polish immigrants mostly worked in factories, Polish-Americans are made to feel the trauma of ‘white guilt’ along with Wasps and ‘rednecks’.) After reaching the mountain peak, the only thing left is climbing back down. The great appeal of the Jesus myth is that the Son of God died at the moment of His catharsis and rose to Heaven. Imagine if Jesus had been whupped real bad but then allowed to live; the rest of His story may have been anti-climactic. Instead, He died young at the peak of His manhood. His defeat could be turned into victory since He overcame the agony and kept His faith in God unto death. Yukio Mishima followed a similar logic in his death ritual: Realizing the harmony of pen and sword and dying at the peak of one’s power and commitment. There was no point to living on after such a grand gesture. It’s like the scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS when Patricia(Jean Seberg) asks the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville(as Mr. Pavulesco), "What is your greatest ambition of your life?", to which he replies, "To become immortal, and then to die."
There was something like a cathartic death wish in Che Guevara as well, which is why he was eager to manipulate the Cuban Missile Crisis to trigger off a nuclear war. While Kennedy and Khrushchev were trying to wind down the crisis — and Castro was shitting bricks — , Che Guevera wanted to provoke US into invading Cuba so that missiles could be launched at the US, followed by a retaliation by the US. Che Guevara — who was nuttier than Japanese militarists near the end of WWII — welcomed the apocalyptic prospect of ‘revolutionary sacrifice’. When Guevara failed to bring about such a grand culmination of revolutionary destiny, he sought his personal brand of revolutionary catharsis in Bolivia by playing Marxist Christ carrying an AK-47 as his cross.
Such themes run through arts and entertainments as well, among both the creative types and their fans. If Che sought revolutionary sacrifice, Santana fantasized "Soul Sacrifice" at Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison pushed the envelope as far as it could go, both creatively and biographically. And many fans of movies and music seek something more than mere art, entertainment, or leisure. Through music and movies, they wanna feel a grand fusion and culmination of all thoughts and feelings, a convergence of all the compelling themes of what life — and this became even truer with the rise of drug culture in the 1960s; all those people at Woodstock and Altamont weren’t merely there for the music but to feel ‘more evolved’ as Star Children who could touch the firmament with their minds turned onto cosmic consciousness. But in most cases, life goes on and even the seemingly greatest moments in history failed to change the world forever. But the Boomers got so swept up in their sense of destiny and achievement that they tried to recreate its excitement over and over. It was there in Live Aid. In the Democratic Convention of 1992, a kind of political Rock concert fest. There it was in the cult of personality of Obama as the fusion of JFK and MLK, whose supposed destinies had been cut short by evil conspiracies. There’s still the dream of the Counterculture that ‘tragically’ came to a bad end with excess drugs and street violence. So, the boomers, in their older yrs, have turned many of the 60s themes into a politically correct theme park for ‘radicals’. Consider the changes. In the 60s, boomer students were at war with the faculty and administrations. Today, the students at places like Oberlin College are such good little running/barking dogs of boomer radical professors and administrators who program and decide everything for the young ones. So, the Counterculture went from anarchic Woodstock to totalitarian Disneyland. If Jews in chutzpah mode called out on Wasp power & privilege in elite institutions of finance, academia, and government in the 60s and 70s, there is no one today to challenge the far more formidable Jewish(and even homo) domination of elite institutions. Jews and gays, by wrapping themselves in the eternal mantle of ‘victim-hood’, can have all the power and privilege, and anyone who blows the whistle on Jewish or homo power is immediately denounced as an ‘anti-Semite’ or ‘homophobe’. Indeed, what is your average white gentile liberal or leftist in today’s political culture? Just a sorry-ass running dog who sucks up to Jews and gays. Just look at Michael Moore. He says he’s for the little guy, but all he ever does is to suck up to Jews, homos, and mulattos like Obama. Your average white gentile liberal or leftist male would rather side with billionaire Democratic Jews, millionaire fancy-ass homos, and racially favored mulatto punks like Obama than side with masses of white gentiles who are being fleeced by Wall Street Jews, taunted and insulted by sleazy and snotty homos, and beaten & robbed by fearsome Negro thugs. And what do we get from white conservative leadership? Sucking up to Jews, waving the Zionist flag, pushing open borders and amnesty for illegal alien law-breakers, and apologizing to ‘progressives’ that too many supporters of the GOP are white! While it’s true that Wasps were powerful in the past, non-Wasp Americans were never so slavish to Wasps as everyone today is to elite Jews, snotty homos, and sniggering mulattos. It’s as if the whole moral, social, and political purpose of one’s life is to win approval from Jews, homos, and mulattos. Even though most blacks hate white conservatives, the GOP pees in its pants when a black guy like Allen West or Dr. Carter comes over to their camp. It’s like white conservatives don’t even have the courage to stand up for their own people against non-whites and Jews who are so full of vindictive and vengeful hate against them. American conservatism has been totally pussy-whipped by Jews. What’s the use of the GOP when it panders to the most powerful group that hates white power the most? Jews hate white conservatives, but white conservatives are full of effusive praise for everything Jewish. This is not a relationship between man and man but between master and servant, or man and dog. Did Jews pledge undying loyalty to Wasps in the past when elite Wasps were suspicious of Jewish ambition and subversion? No, Jews assessed coldly and correctly that Wasps were their main rivals in the game of overlord-ship of America, and Jews did everything to bring down Wasp power. But what do we see in the GOP? We see whore politicians and operatives groveling at the feet of neocons and meekly asking for advice on how to win the hearts and minds of liberal Jews with so much power and wealth? Of course, Neocons, who are Jews first and conservatives second(if at all), tell white conservatives that the way to win over the Jews is to suck up to them even more. So, if a Jew pisses on you, beg him to allow you to suck his cock. If a Jew moons you, beg him to allow you to kiss his ass. If the Jew farts on your face, beg him to allow you to lick his rectum. If he shits on you, beg him to allow you to eat the shit and suck out more shit. Let’s face it. The white race has essentially become the economic, political, cultural, and even spiritual slaves of Jews. It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. (There are groups in the so-called ‘alternative right’ community that try to formulate plans to break free of Jewish domination, but most are hopeless. Some are run by a bunch of mentally retarded crypto-Nazis like Greg Johnson and Alex Kurtagic who, as far as I can tell, have hard-ons for Adolf Hitler and ‘Aryanism’, even though they themselves look like dorks or gnomes. Kurtagic, like Himmler, is a pudgy pear-shaped man, a toady supremacist, who dreams of big strong beefy Viking warriors. If such is his ideal, he should eat fewer donuts and exercise more. But even groups like American Renaissance are pretty pathetic. In their latest conference — just barely held in some secluded location as most hotels and convention halls have banned the organization under pressure from Jews — , there’s no mention of Jewish power in the demise of the white race and power. Instead, Jared Taylor told David Duke to stay away while inviting a couple of Jewish speakers. Whatever the faults of Duke — and there are many — , he is one of the most doggedly courageous figures on the matter of resisting Jewish supremacism. American Renaissance’s pitiful goal was to show that it is not ‘antisemitic’, as if that’s going to persuade ADL and SPLC to lower their heat against American-Renaissance, let alone win over the Jewish community. Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alternative Right site, even made a speech praising some Rabbi but made no mention whatsoever of the fact that Jews are the main agents in the race-cide or racide of the white race. But, even if more courageous alternative right groups were to honestly debate the matter of ‘what is to be done’, they’d only discover there isn’t much that CAN be done. Why? Because power is inter-connected. For example, alternative right guys might say that white conservatives or rightists need to emulate Hollywood and produce more filmmakers. But Hollywood power is connected with financial power as film-making and film distribution are very costly enterprises. And mass entertainment is also connected with political power as TV licensing is controlled by the government. Also, no matter how good a movie, it goes nowhere without advertising, and Jews and homos control advertising. Critics may be of help, but critics are produced by the academia that are, in turn, funded by rich people with certain ideological or tribal orientations. Every kind of power links up with other kinds of power. So, the discussion on the alternative right is rather like the discussion among the Chinese in the 19th century. When faced with the Western threat, Chinese wondered what they must do in order to resist the imperialist powers. Some Chinese thought that they should build guns like the West. But what allowed the West to fund such vast industrial enterprises? What made mass production possible in places like the U.K.? And even if Chinese were able to build guns like the West, what enabled the West to keep innovating in science and technology so that their guns kept getting bigger, better, and more powerful? There was no single source of Western power. It arose from the confluence and convergence of Western modes of finance, competition, freedom, individualism, innovative spirit, pioneering mind-set, rule of law, social mobility, mass education, and etc. So, unless Chinese fundamentally changed everything about China, they couldn’t compete with the West. They couldn’t just take one aspect of Western power and emulate it to challenge the power of the West because the real secret to Western power was the brilliant integration of economic, cultural, social, and political forces. Jews have rigged the system so that white power elements are not allowed to enter into any organization of any significant power. We saw what happened to Jason Richwine recently. We saw what happened to Stephanie Grace at Harvard. Jews have associated all theories about race with Nazism. So, because Nazi racial theories have been discredited or debunked, political correctness would have us believe that ALL theories about race have been likewise discredited or debunked. That’s like saying that since Stalinism, Maoism, and Pol-Pot-ism have been discredited, ALL socialist or statist ideas have also been discredited. And increasingly, individuals or groups that are not pro-homo are also blacklisted or banned from doing business. We saw what happened with Chick Fil-A. And the media, controlled by Jews, no longer champion and uphold free speech/expression but only push ‘correct’ speech and ‘progress’ as defined by Jews and homos. Also, things are getting so that it’s not enough for someone to remain quiet and not oppose the agenda of the New Order. You must show your enthusiasm. In the past, you were an anti-Semite if you expressed hatred against all Jews or blamed Jews for everything. Today, your failure to praise Israel and sing hosannas to Jews is sufficient for you to be labeled as an ‘anti-Semite’ even if you said or did nothing against Jews. As homo activists say of their agenda, it’s not enough to tolerate homos; you MUST WELCOME them. If you don’t, the media will denounce you as ‘less evolved’. It’s like it’s no longer enough for you to acknowledge MLK as an important historical figure. You must speak of him in hushed and reverential tones and weep in his memory as Disciples did before Crucified Jesus. And it’s not enough for you to NOT support ‘white racists’. You must see KKK everywhere and sound the alarm, as at Oberlin college where the entire community had a hysterical self-righteous orgasm fest because of a rumor about someone walking with a blanket. White college kids have been brainwashed that ‘white racism and privilege’ are so endemic in society that they hallucinate sights of it, just like UFO-crazed people in the 70s screamed "UFO!!!" every time they saw something in the sky. White kids weaned on Jewish political correctness are in the Close Encounters of the Racist Kind mind-set. The problems faced by alternative right community seems absurd at least on two counts. As the community is pro-white, you’d think most white people would support it, but, in fact, not only are most white people — even conservatives — not with it but they are virulently against it. Most whites are against pro-white-ness. The other problem is that even though the running theme of the alternative right community is the demise of the white race, whites are still far more powerful, rich, and privileged than non-whites. Whatever the future may hold for the white race due to demographic changes, whites are likely to be the dominant forces in society for a long long time. After all, even Latin American nations where whites are minorities are still dominated by whites. But then, not all whites will fare the same. Some whites in America are getting richer and richer while others are slipping, as Charles Murray pointed out in COMING APART. If we include Jews as whites, whites totally rule this country. But in point of fact, the white race is breaking apart along lines of men and women, straight and homo, ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’, north and south, white Hispanic and non-white Hispanic, young and older, and etc. To some extent, white elites may prefer diversity among the lower orders because it means less Big Labor resistance. In a homogeneous white nation, masses of whites with a common race/culture can unite to force demands from the white elites, but in a diverse society, it’s much more difficult for the various lower elements to form a Big Labor coalition. Poor hillbillies vote for rich Wall Street whites, poor blacks feel closer to rich blacks, and poor browns follow the lead of rich ‘browns’. A real problem for the alternative right community is that it stands for hierarchy and quality-over-equality, but generally speaking, most of the ‘quality’ whites tend to be liberal or ‘leftist’ whereas the bulk of conservative whites — who are supposed to stand for ‘excellence’ — are kinda dumb. Generally, the kind of whites who invoke Nietzsche all the time cling to the therapeutic balm of ‘superiority’ to conceal their actual inferiority when it comes to intellect and creativity. Alex Kurtagic is a good example. He has no taste in the arts and culture but thinks he’s on the side of superior culture because his ideology is expressed through book covers and album covers of superior ‘Aryan’ heroes. So, never mind the actual worth of the music or book beneath the cover. Thus, the alternative right community is for superiority over inferiority but superior whites tend to be liberal and ‘progressive’ while the alternative right community attracts too many mentally challenged crypto-Nazi types who still think Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy. Then, is there nothing the alternative right community can do to change people’s hearts and minds? Perhaps the best chance is to hide the politics and create something of great populist appeal. It costs next to nothing to come up with a great or appealing idea. Consider J.K. Rowhling with the HARRY POTTER series. Or Stephanie Meyer of TWILIGHT fame and Suzanne Collins of HUNGER GAMES. Or the maker of SUPERMAN, which was created with nothing more than pencil and paper. Or consider the screenplay for OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, written by a neo-confederate white guy posing as an American Indian; even many liberals love that movie. While publishing companies have a blacklist order against ‘racists’, as long as a work isn’t obviously stamped with ‘racist’ views, it can slip into the mainstream. The social implications of HUNGER GAMES are pretty subversive of the NWO even though it has been appropriated by liberal Hollywood. So, maybe alternative right types ought to keep their mouths shut about race and politics and work with pencil and paper to create youth fiction or entertainment. Once their works become popular and widely accepted, it won’t matter if they are then outed as ‘racists’. As so many kids will have become addicted to the product, they will likely remain loyal fans just the same. Furthermore, if a famous and much admired person is outed as a ‘racist’, the notoriety may actually legitimize racial theories by association to his or her fame. Consider all the kids who became addicted to HARRY POTTER stories. Suppose Rowhling declared that she is a believer in white power and white survival. Though the media would have turned on her to destroy her, hundreds of millions of children will still love Harry Potter and may even come around to her views out of respect for her. Another thing that the alternative right community must keep in mind is the centrality of targeting the heart of the beast. Every group or ideology has a host of enemies, but some enemies are greater than others. During WWII, Nazi Germany was the main enemy. As Hyman Roth said of the Rosato Brothers and Frank Pantengelli in THE GODFATHER PART 2, they’re ‘small potatoes’. Roth knew Michael Corleone was his main enemy, and vice versa. During the Cold War, US understood that the USSR was the main enemy, not communist Bulgaria and Albania A boxer knows that hitting the head is more important than hitting the body. Even the biggest and strongest boxer will go down if hit hard once in the head. So, the American Right, instead of fixating on ‘small potatoes’ like the threat of Sharia Law, Chechen terrorism, Muslim threat, North Korean invasion, Iran’s non-existent nukes and WMD, and etc., should really be focusing on two questions. Why are Jews so powerful and why do they hate and/or fear whites? Why are so many white people racially and nationally suicidal, and why do so many successful and intelligent whites hate and despise less fortunate whites whose livelihoods are being undermined by the Jew-and-homo controlled NWO? What influences in the media, academia, and culture made smart whites feel that way? If the white race were to awaken and unite, it can take on Jewish power and kick its hideous behind. What hypnotic power does the Jew have over the white race that makes the white race pursue policies that undermine its own survival and interests? What can be done to reprogram the white soul back to normality and health, as it’s abnormal for any people to welcome their own decline and eventual demise. All other questions and issues are secondary. Even the Mexican threat can be reversed if we deal with the Jewish threat as it’s been the Jews who did most to change immigration laws. Just as real estate agents have a saying, "Location, Location, Location", the alternative right needs to concentrate on "Jews, Jews, Jews". Also, in order to gradually win over the white masses, alternative right community must focus on what it is that repels so many decent whites from the movement. To a large measure, it’s the elements of crypto-Nazism that really do taint the movement. When Richard Spencer schmoozes with neo-Nazi scuzzballs like Kurtagic and Johnson, it is disingenuous on his part to say that he has no use for Holocaust Denial. Oppose and fight the Jew but do not support Hitlerism and do not deny the Holocaust. If we could hate and oppose communism without hating the Russian people, we can oppose and fight the Jew without embracing the radical racism of Hitlerism.) The reason we love happy endings, especially in movies and musicals — forms that work most directly on our senses — , is because happy endings are like happy eternals. Paradoxically, it’s as if what ends happily gains eternal life and never ends. So, fairytales often end with the words "and they lived happily ever after". It’s as if the hero and heroine have achieved that state of blissful catharsis that can never be violated or taken away. Of course, fairytales often begin with ‘Once upon a time’, and Lucas did a riff on this with ‘Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away...’ It creates an enclosed sense of circularity, a kind of narrative paradox, i.e. it happened long ago and is thereby impervious to the problems of our world, the real world with all its imperfections and impossibility of absolute solutions, and yet, it ends in a manner whereby happiness is turned into an eternal essence and promise. Fairytales lend the illusion of entering the eternal womb from which we need not be reborn into reality. In a way, it’s like a reverse-birth, like the clown’s dream in Ingmar Bergman’s SAWDUST AND TINSEL in which he grows smaller and smaller, enters his wife’s womb, and disappears into eternal sleep; it’s different from death for one is entering the void that precedes than follows life.
Fairytales often begin with a sense of wonder, as if inside the safe world of the womb, but then comes the horror, and finally, there’s something like a return to the womb. It’s like "Once upon a time, she was happy in the wombic world, but then, she awoke in the real world with all its terrors, but, in the end, she found her way back to the wombic world and lived happily ever after. As a child, she felt connected to her mother’s womb. But as a young woman, she feels fear and anxiety with the onset of her sexuality and all the ‘beasts’ and envious bitches it attracts; just as her beauty blossoms, her mind is filled with monstrous images of beastly men tearing her clothes and humping her hairy pooter; but then, a prince appears whose beauty and nobility calm her sexual fears by elevating lust into an ideal and eternal love. She changes from a mother’s daughter to a wife-mother — from mother’s womb to her own womb. It’s no wonder that so many fairytales have daughters with dead or estranged mothers — as in CINDERELLA and SNOW WHITE — , whereby the daughter can no longer lean on her mother but must find her own path toward meaningful womanhood. This is why TWILIGHT is more fairytale than horror. Bella feels fondness for her mother, but she’s not someone Bella can rely or lean on; the mother also left her husband long ago, so she’s not much on loyalty; and when Bella decides to move to her father’s place, the mother doesn’t seem to mind much at all; Bella finds more of a real family with the Cullens. Bella must find her own path to motherhood, and this begins with the re-connection with her father, who’s a moral figure of maleness than just a horny male. Bella’s sexuality attracts lots of attention at the new school, but she finds most guys icky and annoying. She is partly drawn to the Indian wolf boy but more as a friend than lover. She finds her savior in Edward Cullen because he’s handsome and princely in his self-control; he wants to love her as a princess than a prostitute; he is sexuality idealized and ennobled than sexuality going ‘boing’ as with Beavis-n-Butthead.
So, even though she cannot return to her womb physically, she sort of returns psychologically by becoming pregnant herself under the protection and care of the ideal man. Such circular psychology is expressed in fairytales, and yet, the magic of fairytales is as tangential as circular. Even though the heroine goes from one kind of womb to another, there is the sense that in meeting her true love, a part of her spirit has flown tangentially into the realm of eternal bliss. Thus, fairytales are both safely locked in the circular past — and untouchable by the present — yet also eternally beamed to the future.
This is one of the appealing aspects of Christianity. One part of the religion has safely locked the miracle of Jesus and His life to around 2000 yrs ago. It offers the ‘once upon a time’ aspect to the myth. But there’s also the notion of eternal happiness by entering Heaven and even a bigger promise of eternal bliss in the vague notion of the Second Coming of the Messiah who shall cleanse and redeem the world. Fairytales magically transport us to the past but also carry us to the future while bypassing the present. If science fiction generally deals with the future and if epics generally deal with the past, fairytales connects two realms via some strange connection that seems to skip the present altogether; even when it’s set in the present as in TWILIGHT, the present seems puny and meager compared to the myths of vampires and werewolves rooted deep in the past and surviving, however surreptitiously, into the forever future. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is a strange work because it blends elements of fairytale with science fiction. In terms of science, technology, and history, the world of A.I. is always changing. The story begins many centuries from now when much of the world is underwater and humanity has developed all sorts of amazing robotic technologies. And in the final section, the story leapfrogs thousands of years into the future in which humanity had long ago died out and in which highly advanced robotic beings rule the planet. But there is the figure of David, the robot kid programmed with a fairytale mind. No matter where he is and no matter how much the world has changed around him, it’s as if he’s impervious to the present and only wants to be with his ‘mother’ forever. Thus, even though David’s body exists in the present, his mind is forever past and future. Even long after all of humanity has died out, David longs for the ‘mother’ forever and ever. (Paradoxically though, his desire to be with his ‘mother’ forever is also a kind of fixation on the ‘present’. No matter how much time passes, his mind always thinks of the ‘present’ when he used to be with ‘mommy’. It’s as the ‘present’ has become eternal in David’s mind.) He can no more let go of this fairytale than Jack Torrance can let go of his sense of eternal connection with the Overlook Hotel. Just as the re-creation of dinosaurs brings forth disaster in JURASSIC PARK, Spielberg’s take on A.I. — developed by Brian Aldiss and Stanley Kubrick — seems to suggest that fairytales, as beautiful as they are, can only be monstrous in our world. Our world, ever locked in the changing present, was never meant for permanence, yet the magic of fairytales depends on the notion of the eternal circle of ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’. David cannot break out of the notion of "Once upon a time ‘my mother’ loved me" and "I will find her and we will live happily ever after." In some ways, David is like a persecuted Jew-kid as he’s pursued by humans who are out to destroy him. And yet, he’s also like a Nazi experiment to create something perfect and permanent in this world. David is like the Thousand Year Runt. I suspect his Nazi-Jew duality owed more to Kubrick who truly had a perverse view of things — consider Dr. Strangelove as a kind of Nazi-Jew scientist, and Kubrick married the niece of Veit Harlan, the director of the 1940 version of JEW SUSS in which the sinister Jewish character looked and acted like Kubrick, who was probably both appalled and enthralled by the film.
Ironically, even though fairytales don’t exist in the present/reality — David is a monstrous and tragic testament as to why they mustn’t — , the genius of Spielberg has been the uncanny ability to turn us into mental Davids. Walt Disney made fairytale movies, but most were set in the mythical past. Consider SNOW WHITE, SLEEPING BEAUTY, PINOCCHIO, and etc. Or, they happened in the present or near-present but were about animals, and that provided an unreal and magical quality to the story: BAMBI, DUMBO, LADY AND THE TRAMP. Though the idea of a fairytale set in the present wasn’t invented by Spielberg, it generally failed because the reality of presentness tended to interfere with fairytale elements. For this reason, even when fairytales begin in the present, the characters are often transported to another time, usually the past, as in PETER PAN, THE WIZARD OF OZ, CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, or TIME BANDITS. When we see the present on screen, we expect some degree of reality, and it’s more difficult for us to suspend disbelief and naively/innocently believe in the magic. This is why horror and science-fiction ideas work better in the present. Though they can be fantastic, there’s an element of fearsome power that carries the brutal force of reality and thus can seem more-real-than-real. It’s seems realer to expect the worst than the best from reality; fairies don’t exist in the real world, but monsters do, as there are plenty of rapists, murderers, terrorists, radicals, and Negroes. (Of course, horribly fantastic villains are paradoxically soothing and therapeutic to an audience frustrated with social problems because the horribleness of the fantasy takes their minds off real problems and because the fictional formula allows the good guys to overcome the bad guys. If a nerd is a victim of real-life bullies at school, he might find solace in the might of epic villains in comic books or fantasy movies. By focusing on much greater villainous forces, he takes his mind off the problem of real-life bullies. Also, in fiction the good guys always prevail over the bad guys, and this fills the nerd with hope that even the worst bullies can be overcome; this may explain why so many Jewish kids turned to comic book heroes; it could have been their way of dealing with ‘dumb Polack’ goy bullies. As M. Night Shymalan’s UNBREAKABLE illustrated, the comic book format has long been a crutch for the weakling. White America is bullied by black America, but white people don’t know what to do about it. There are too many blacks, and there’s also the element of ‘white guilt’, which makes honest discussion of black problems ‘racist’. So, whites find solace in grand villains in popcorn movies. Such villains — usually white — with great powers seem to dwarf the threat posed by blacks. Consider the scene in DARK KNIGHT RISES where most football players on the field are killed instantly by the villain. In reality, white guys feel intimidated and pussified by tougher and more muscular blacks. But in the BATMAN movie, they can make believe that there are bigger white villains that can whup ‘nigger’ ass with a flick of the wrist. Thus, the grand villain is both frightening and therapeutic. The white audience roots for the hero to defeat him, but they also feel good to see a force that can whup any ‘nigger’ ass. In this sense, ROCKY IV was like a comic book superhero movie. Ivan Drago was a very bad guy, but he whupped a Negro.) So, even though E.T. isn’t exactly one of my favorite movies, its fairytale magic was all the more remarkable as the story took place in the all-too-real suburban present. Of course, it’s nominally a science fiction movie since the walking-turd-creature came from outer space, which means there’s some ‘rational’ explanation behind space travel and all that. Even so, once E.T. befriends Elliott, it works on the level of a fairytale, and I recall being totally enchanted by the story. As a highschool freshman, I should have know better, but then, plenty of adult movie critics swooned over it too. In the 1970s, Disney made a bunch of fairytale like movies set in the present, but they simply didn’t work. Yet, Spielberg achieved something that few people thought would have been so effective. He created a fairytale that was set entirely in the present that was as magical as the fairytales of the ‘once upon a time’ variety. So, even though Spielberg didn’t invent the idea, his innovative treatment changed the course of film history. Spielberg understood better than anyone else that children have no sense of historical time and place. Their backyard can be a world of wonders. A trip to a nearby town can be an epic adventure. A month can seem like forever. Kids have a fairytale mind, and it’s as though Spielberg perfected the ‘art’ of tapping into it. Most of us forget how we felt as children, just as we forget most of our dreams. But it’s as if Spielberg, even as a child, thought about the psychology of childhood and formulated his observations into lifelong lessons. He created his own inner-David, and through a study of its psycho-soulful mechanics, he gained access to the ‘child-within-us’ whose existence we forgot ourselves but never disappeared; he could see a hidden part of us that we cannot; he’s like a doctor with X-ray eyes into our souls, though for his own aggrandizement and Jewish power than for our own good. Though Spielberg has been accused of not growing up, the bigger problem may be he is sufficiently adult and ‘intellectual’ enough to pry into and play with the part of OURSELVES that hasn’t grown up. In other words, his movies may be less the work of a childlike adult than a cunning adult who manipulates the childlikeness of other adults who are truly childlike in their hearts. (In a way, Spielbergism is to childlikeness what Freudianism is to sexual-ness. Civilized man was repressive of his sexuality and wore the mask of respectability. Sex happened in the bedroom, but sexual matters were banished or sublimated in the public sphere. Freud’s ideas paved the way for the eventual sexualization of public space though not quite as Freud intended. Today, many people are utterly shameless about their sexual wants, peccadillos, hang-ups, obsessions, experiences, and fantasies. Indeed, many people feel compelled to repress their natural shame and to talk openly about sexual matters as if to prove their ‘liberated’ credentials; they are unnaturally forcing themselves to be ‘natural’; such people don’t seem to understand that true nature tends toward concealment, e.g. when animals in nature eat or have sex, they generally try to do it in secrecy as openness = vulnerability. Howard Stern and FAMILY GUY rule the airwaves. Much of pop music is about ‘suck me, fuc* me’. Even children have access to all sorts of porn on the internet. So, the shame that used to be attached to public sexual expression/behavior is no more. Exhibitionism is the norm. School kids even dance like they’re humping and pumping. Homosexuality, a form of ‘sexuality’ defined by fecal penetration between men, is celebrated parades and marches over. Public institutions fly the ‘gay flag’. Even a mediocre athlete wins plaudits by ‘coming out’ with the fact that he likes to suck dicks and stick his dick into the fecal tunnel of another man. If anything, shame over sexuality is now thought to be shameful. So, Howard Stern and Sarah Silverman have nothing to be ashamed of, but if you find them tawdry and vulgar, you are ‘repressed’ and should feel ashamed. So, a ‘gay pride’ parade isn’t shameful, but it’s shameful to find it shameful. So, being a slut is not shameful, but shaming sluts is shameful. On the surface, Spielbergism sounds like the total opposite of Freudianism. In most of his movies, Spielberg has refrained from showing any nudity; the sexuality in MUNICH tends toward darkness. Most of his films are oriented toward children or teenagers. And even the adult ones like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and SCHINDLER’S LIST have a certain ‘innocence’ to them, an uh-goshy-ness buoyed by John William’s music. There’s an element of OLD YELLER or LASSIE COME HOME in their sentimentality. If Freud awakened people to adult sexuality and if Spielberg hugged people with childhood innocence, why are their ideas/expressions related in some way? Because both attacked the idea of shame. According to Pop-Freudianism, one shouldn’t be ashamed of sexual feelings and instead should find liberation through open expressions of sexual emotions. One need not feel any shame, as shame is repressive and can lead to neurosis. Pop-Freudianism may be a stupid cartoon version of Freud’s original idea, but it has had a tremendous influence on society. But, as it turned out, sexuality wasn’t the only thing adults had to repress in a civilized order. As a passage in the Bible says, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things." Actually, even in primitive societies, boys and girls reach an age when they must put childhood behind them and become full adults; this is often actualized through painful/bloody rituals. In that sense, ‘childish savages’ are not so childish, indeed less so than so many modern men and women who refused to grow up. But, just as adults had long traditionally repressed their sexuality, they’d also repressed their wish to be children again. As the old Mexican villager says in THE WILD BUNCH, "We all dream of being a child again..." And in the famous debate on RETURN OF THE JEDI, John Simon argues that children should be encouraged to grow into adults instead of being allowed to remain ‘stupid children forever’. He especially excoriates adults, such as Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, for ‘lacking in adult mentalities’. There’s even an extreme case of childlike behavior known as ‘infantilism’ where full-grown adults literally dress and act like babies. Though most people are far from clinically infantilist, there is something within them that longs for the innocence, simpleness, and magic of childhood. Who doesn’t have fond memories of Christmas when they were children? Who can forget the first trip to the zoo? Or how they once used to be hugged by mom and dad? There is a ‘rosebud’ in each of us; incidentally, as ‘rosebud’ signifies childhood innocence in CITIZEN KANE but also alluded to Marion Davies’ clitoris in the real world, it is a perfect summation of the strange parallels between childlikeness and sexual-ness. But society expected boys and girls to grow up and become men and women. So, when adults acted like children, it was something to be ashamed of. Men who cried were said to ‘cry like a baby’. Men who played with toys used to be objects of derision. So, childhood ‘innocence’ in an adult was something to be ashamed of, no less than overt sexuality. So, adults could neither be like ‘innocent’ children nor ‘debauched’ beasts, at least in public. Thus, even though ‘innocence’ and ‘debauchery’ are opposites, they were bosom bodies as both were repressed by demands of adult civilization — similarly, Jews and homos were traditional enemies but became partners-in-crime as stealthy outsiders in a majority gentile/straight society. Also, ‘innocence’ could be, in its own way, just as orgasmic as ‘debauchery’. ‘Innocent’ children may not know the pleasures of sex and orgasm, but they find a kind of stupendous rapture with magic and wonderment. For a child, a movie isn’t just a fiction story but something of mouth-gaping awesomeness. They swallow the movie whole like the woman the penis in DEEP THROAT. ‘Innocence’ can be an orgasmic blast for a child who sees a movie for the first time. It’s like their eyes and ears feel massive orgasms of sensual delight and pleasure. Traditionally, this was expected of and tolerated in children because children obviously don’t know any better. But it was shameful for adults to be taken in the same way. It’s been noted by Japanologists that children in Japan are allowed to do as they please until the age of 6. They are allowed to be orgasmic in their ‘innocence’, say and do anything and be hugged with affection by parents and others; but on the sixth birthday, everything changes abruptly, and they’re suddenly expected to be like adults and made to feel shame in acting childish; because of this traumatic shift, Japanese have problems with emotional maturation; as children, they were allowed excessive freedom of carefree innocence, but then suddenly, they are expected to act like adults, for which they were never prepared; thus, a gradual developmental link between childhood and adulthood is missing among the Japanese, it’s like they go from babyhood to adulthood in a single day, and this may explain why Japanese can be awfully childish and brusquely adult but lacking in the shadings in between. Japanese sexuality is especially disturbing for its blend of ‘debauchery’ and ‘innocence’, especially in the animated genre called ‘hentai’, where cutely drawn figures are sexually abused in all sorts of ways; and Ian Buruma has written of a popular genre where a Japanese man who was abandoned by his mother finds a prostitute and asks her to play his ‘mother’. In traditional America, adults could enjoy popular entertainment, but they weren’t supposed to fall under its magic spell. But, Spielbergism changed something in American attitudes. Though not the first, he perfected the ‘art’ of making ‘innocence’ a shame-free emotion among adults. Then, it’s no wonder that Pauline Kael, who loved BONNIE AND CLYDE and LAST TANGO IN PARIS, also loved E.T. Arthur Penn’s crime movie made violence sexy and guilt-free. LAST TANGO turned sex into a powerful expression of one’s desires. And E.T. made innocence both ecstatic and shame-free, even or especially for adults. It was like total orgasmic ‘innocence’, thus an anti-innocent ‘innocence’. Spielberg used ‘innocence’ as a dildo. So, paradoxically, ‘innocence’ and ‘debauchery’ became exposed as being two sides of the same coin, and adults in the new cultural order could enjoy/experience both in total abandon without shame or guilt. There was an element of this in Rock culture too with its culture of arrested development, but Rock music was still the music of young adults fully developed at least in physicality and carnality — except in the Lolita-ish pop music culture of France and Japan. If one listened to Rock music long past youth, he could still emote at the level of a young adult. But to get off on something like E.T. was to revert to childhood mentality and feel no shame about it. Disney made wonderful works of children’s entertainment, but they were understood to be ‘for children’. And parents understood that they took their children to such shows and movies for the children’s sake. And even if adults really got into a Disney movie, they were expected to act as though they were only amused or somewhat enchanted. They would have been thought embarrassingly silly if they gushed about it as ‘innocent’ children do. But such inhibitions were gone once Spielberg altered the cultural landscape. After E.T., adults no longer needed to feel shame about sticking a thumb in their mouths, and John Lasseter ran with this with his PIXAR movies, for which full-grown critics go goo-goo-ga-ga over. Adults loved FINDING NEMO as much if not more than children did. Though ‘debauchery’ is associated with adulthood while ‘innocence’ is associated with childhood, they have something in common in that both are about the loss of self-control and the embrace of sensations over reason. Sex is an animalistic act, so even Albert Einstein was grunting like a childish ape while humping women. So, even though we try to shield ‘innocent’ children from sexuality, there is something childlike about sexuality and something sexual about childhood. Animals are childlike in their ‘savage innocence’, and sexuality is a form of ‘savage innocence’, which is why primitive women of the Tropics run around with their exposed titties bouncing all around, as in THE BOUNTY. In the Beginning, according to the Bible, Adam and Eve were both openly sexual and totally innocent. They were nude and saw each other’s genitals — and probably ‘did it’ — but felt no shame. But then, they ate from the Tree of Knowledge and sinned against God, and so, innocence and sexuality, which used to be one, became separated into childhood and adulthood, especially with Eve giving birth to babies after the Fall. Innocence was only okay for children. Sexuality was only okay for adults, though it had to be supervised and repressed by morality. Of course, everything is good in moderation. Some degree of free sexuality is healthy for a society. Some degree of childhood longing among adults is good too as no one can be 100% adult all the time. But, there is a reason why social and moral categories exist, and one must never throw the baby out with the bath-water. When childlikeness turns into full-blown infantilism and when sexuality turns into open exhibitionism, we end up with a putrid and shameless society where people lose sight of their responsibilities, individualities, and dignities. Just look at the ugliness and vulgarity of ‘gay pride’ parades. What’s next? Incest pride parades? Just look at the infantile eating habits of Americans. Gluttony used to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Today, gluttony is the social norm, and adults all over the world eat like babies who want all the ice cream in the world or will go waaaaaaah. This isn’t just an American problem but a Mexican and Chinese problem as well. There’s no shame in the amount that people eat and the weight they gain as they feel and act like babies. Some might feel that their freedom to eat as much as they want is a kind of consumptive empowerment, but are obese people empowered health-wise? No, they become more dependent on medical care and grow weaker from various ailments. They become addicts of the food industry’s advertising and sugary delights, just as skanks and sluts who believe themselves to be ‘sexually empowered’ are sensory junkies of the Pop Culture industry combines infantilism with perversion. Was Marilyn Monroe really ‘empowered’ by allowing Jews to turn her into a third-rate slut? Of course, pimps want whores to feel that they are free and empowered, like the character Sport with Iris in TAXI DRIVER. But are whores really empowered? Power comes from self-control, not from abandonment of control. Of course, if one excessively tries to repress one’s natural feelings, one grows weaker as thoughts and actions are fueled by animal passions and instincts. But such drives must be controlled and channeled properly. One must channel one’s animal instincts and shape and direct them. Otherwise, one is a slave to one’s own instincts. Worse, one’s animal passions can be manipulated by the powers-that-be for their own profiteering and aggrandizement. So, food industries want us to eat as much as possible. Likewise, pop culture industries want us to become addicted to images of wanton sex, violence, and idiocy. It’s no wonder that there are so many young people who flip burgers and make minimum wage but then blow off their meager earnings on the latest pop culture fads in the ridiculous conviction that such things ‘empower’ and ‘liberate’ them. Power means self-control. To be under the control of others means a lack of power, and being mindlessly free to do as one pleases leads to the loss of power. People who act like animals don’t get very far in life. Just look at Detroit and white-trash-villes across America. Also, people without self-control might think of themselves as free and liberated, but their infantile/animal minds are easily manipulated and defacto controlled by the powers-that-be. How easy it is for the pop culture industry to persuade debauched fools to watch the latest trashy movies and buy the latest trashy songs. It’s like gambling. Las Vegas welcomes everyone and makes them feel free and liberated. Visitors feel ‘empowered’ in doing as they please with their money. But what is Las Vegas really about? It’s about fooling the dummies with the illusion of freedom so that they’ll freely give up their hard-earned money to the casinos. Gambling is about loss of self-control, and no one with self-control should waste his time or money on such a rigged game. One of the bulwarks against the power of big government was the sense that grownups should take care of themselves as adults with self-control. There was dignity in working and taking care of one’s own family. One was supposed to depend on government ONLY IF one was disabled or in dire need. But the rising infantilist mentality has removed shame from dependence, and so many healthy adults in UK and US feel no longer feel any shame about living on handouts from cradle to grave. At least communism and fascism required people to work and contribute to the common good for them to get statist benefits. No such conditions exist in the infantilist social-democratic Welfare State where a girl can just have babies out of wedlock and be set for life. In the French film AMELIE, the character loves to help people reconnect to their ‘innocence’, but in the end, she realizes she must put childish things behind and grow up and find a man. ‘Innocence’ is sweet and something we shouldn’t forget, but if we cling to it like a Teddy Bear, it becomes pathetic, as with the stupid minions of Oprah who pee in their pants because the billionaire mammy is letting them suckle on her big fat chocolate milk titties. Jews and Obama wanna infantilize Americans and make them more dependent on government so as to gain greater control over them. Pop Freudianism and Spielbergism have both played a significant role in this social development. Spielberg claims to be an admirer of John Ford, but a film like HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY makes you feel like an adult, whereas WAR HORSE, well-made as it is, makes you wanna suck your thumb and say ‘goo’. Power is the combination of release and control. It’s like driving a car. You must have reserves of fuel, and you must step on the accelerator to release the energy, but you must also control its outflow, you must have your hands on the steering wheel, you must have your eyes on the road, and you need to know when to slow down and brake, like when going downhill. Drunken drivers are a danger to others, but they are not powerful. The reason why much of Heavy Metal music is awful is because there’s the release but no control. John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix didn’t only release tons of energy but had tremendous mastery over them. A boxer who enters the ring and just flails away is not a real boxer but a fool and an ugly sight to see. Too much of Metal music is just white guys hollering and acting batshit crazy without a clue. Same goes for punk rock. Though I detest Rap music, it is powerful music because of the combination of release and control.) For even as we forget the magical psychology of our childhoods, its shadows lurk in our subconscious and haunt us for the rest of our lives. Perhaps, this is why, even when adults see a movie by Spielberg and try to resist his button-pushing manipulations, they can’t help feeling that he is massaging, loosening, and ‘liberating’ the part of our psyche that we’d forgotten. It’s kinda like what the heroine does in the French film AMELIE when she finds and returns a box of toys to a man who’d lost it long ago; he is reconnected with his ‘rosebud’. Upon inspecting objects inside the box, he feels a gush of emotions. This was perhaps why Stanley Kauffmann, though already an elderly critic of notable intellect and erudition, was moved to declare CLOSE ENCOUNTERS the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It wasn’t so much the ideas but Spielberg’s masterly button-pushing of the psyche to make grownups feel young again. (Sometimes, Spielberg pushed this too far, almost to the point of self-parody, as in the "Kick the Can" episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE THE MOVIE. His near-equal in this field might be Hayao Miyazaki, whose LAPUTA: CASTLE IN THE SKY surely cribbed some ideas from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, especially in the design of the sky island that resembles the mother-ship in Spielberg’s movie. Even so, most of Miyazaki’s movies are set in the mythic past, alternative fantasy-universes of Europe that seem both universal — as Western motifs became standards for all humanity — and exotic, especially as they were made for the non-Western Japanese. But then, one could argue that there are certain parallels between the Jewish and the Japanese imaginations of the West. Though Jews have become very much a part of Western Civilization and History, they’ve also maintained a separate identity with roots in the Near East and a divergent sense of destiny that has often been at odds with the white/Western narrative. Of all the non-Western nations, Japan did most to modernize and westernize faster and further than any other, and yet Japan remains not only stubbornly different from the West but more resistant to Western influences than other non-white nations. Thus, among all the modernized non-western nations, Japan is both most and least western. Consider the role of Christianity in Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan as opposed to its roles in Japan. A significantly larger share of the population are Christian in Philippines, South Korea, an Taiwan — and incredibly even in Mainland China where Christianity was reintroduced only in the 1980s — than in Japan. On the other hand, Japanese seem to take Christmas more seriously than other Asian nations. It seems Japanese are accepting of the wrappings than with the trappings of Western civilization. At their core, the Japanese are more inclined to cling to their sense of Japanese soul-ness. Though China has a history considerably older than Japan’s, Chiang Kai-Shek, the supreme ruler of the KMT, converted to Christianity, and Mao swallowed whole hog the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. American style democracy was imposed on Japan, but Japanese have maintained the essence of their native soul. In this, they are like the Jews who are both the most and least Western of Western peoples. In many areas, one might say Jews are even more Western than most Westerners; they are more into individualism, more into science and technology, more into philosophy, more into arts and culture, more interested in the history of the West than, say, most ‘dumb Polacks’ are. Though Jews are the most anti-American of white Americans, your average Jew knows more about American history than most white American conservatives do. And yet, something of the original Jewish soul remains, and it’s as though Jews try to learn and master the various aspects of Western Civilization not so much to assimilate into it but to gain domination over it. As most Jews are white or partially white, they’ve gained far more power than the Japanese who, while powerful in Japan, could always be identified as members of another race in the West. Even in our ‘anti-racist’ age, most white people are more worried about yellow power than Jewish power, and Jews wanna maintain this bias because it’s to their advantage, not least in diverting white fears about Jewish power onto Asian power — along with Muslim/Arab/Iranian power. In other words, it’s bad form to say Jews run Hollywood, but it’s okay to sound alarms about Arab interests or Asian interests buying up shares in Hollywood. Even so, despite their ambiguous and contentious relations to Western Civilizations, both Jews and Japanese are mesmerized by much of Western history, culture, arts, motifs, themes, beauty, and etc. Japanese are not Christian but they love the festivity of Christmas. Spielberg is Jewish, but much of his inspiration have been drawn from Christianity, Christmas motifs, European fairytales — especially expanded through the imagination of classic gentile Walt Disney — , and even the neo-paganism of someone like Leni Riefenstahl. Japanese have incorporated basically Western or ‘Aryan’ physical features in their manga and anime — genres more popular than live-action movies in Japan, suggesting that Japanese would rather pretend to look white than acknowledge their own Asian-ness; yet when, these manga and anime are made into live-action movies, Japanese cast Japanese actors than western actors in the roles, indicating that while Japanese wanna look western in fantasy, they cling to their own Japanese-ness in reality. Japanese are opposed to any significant kind of immigration — indeed, they have problems even with Brazilian-Japanese who’ve returned home — and very mindful of their racial essence, yet they also seem to be obsessed with idealized motifs and themes of Western culture and beauty. Jews in the West are pushing a very different kind of policy; they are trying to increase immigration of non-whites and muddy-mix up the races, mainly to break the backbone of the majority white population so that it will never be able to challenge the elite power of Jews, but when it comes to popular imagination, Jews still prefer and promote the white over the non-white. Even though Jews wanna mudshark-ize as many white women as possible, they also market and sell ‘white Aryan beauty’ as the appealing ideal. Even though Jews wanna bring in more short brown Mexicans to the US and turn them against whites, Jewish-run Hollywood is hardly interested in featuring short mestizos — or Hindus, who are mostly featured as clowns or caricatures. There has been the rise of black stars, but most Jews still see white beauty and glamour as the most marketable item. If Japanese idealize, idolize, and market white beauty but from afar — and therefore cannot lay claim to it or control it in actuality — , Jews do the same thing but from within Western Civilization, and not only from inside America but from inside of the white soul which Jews came to own and control through their control of academia and media. Also, if white Americans continue to remember the Japanese as the people who attacked Pearl Harbor — the aggressor race — , the main image of the Jews is as the victims of the Holocaust. Japanese were the main allies of the evil Nazis, whereas Jews were the main victims. Of course, Jewish communists killed many more white gentiles than Japanese ever did or could, but as Jews control the media and academia, most people don’t know the dark side of Jewish history. And even though Jewish control of US social and political policy led to countless white victims of black crime, sexual enslavement of white women via Jewish-run porn, invasion-flooding of the US by Third World immigrants, and highway robbery of the American middle class by Jewish Wall Street sharks, the fact remains that most white Americans have been hoodwinked into thinking Jews are the best people in the world and need to be protected from evil ‘Muzzies’ and ‘Neo-Nazis’ like the ones in GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. White Americans are so pathetic that when Jews pressure them to support ‘gay marriage’, they just mindlessly go along. One could say white conservatives have been more resistant to the Jewish social agenda, but they are no less slavish to Jews in other ways. Though Palestinians haven’t done anything to hurt white American interests, most white conservatives feel nothing but disdain for Palestinians and root for Israeli Zionists — who are ever so closely connected to globalist Jewish supremacists in America — to keep beating up on Palestinians, which is all very ironic since what Jews are doing to white Americans is the same thing they did to Palestinians. Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a recent interview, says he’s happier than he’s ever been before, and why would this be? He’s been passing himself as a left-wing Jew, but if he’s indeed a true blue leftist, why should he be happy in a world where the rich are getting richer while poor are getting poorer — and the middle class is growing smaller? Why should he be happy in a world where communism is all but dead, and no one takes classic Marxism seriously? Why should he be happy when global capitalism is triumphant and when the Davos Man is gaining ever greater power over all of us? Why should he be happy if indeed he’s for the underdog when the Palestinians are being dispossessed even further and seem to have lost all hope of having their own homeland? Why should he be happy when the people of the Middle East, from Libya to Syria to Afghanistan, are going through some of the worst moments in their history? So, why is he happy? He’s happy because his ‘leftism’ has always been secondary to this Jewish supremacism. He’s happy because Wall Street is owned by Jews, and Jews own Obama, their mulatto toy boy. He’s happy because Jews and their homo allies own all of the media and academia. He’s happy because the white race has been nearly destroyed and, as hideous Jews Frank Rich and Tim Wise have said, white people cannot ‘take their country back’.
What has long motivated Jews is hatred of anyone standing in their path to total supremacy. Jews have always hidden their true agenda behind the smokescreen of ‘equality’, ‘social justice’, and ‘diversity’, but do you sees Jews becoming more equal with everyone else? No, Jews get richer, we get poorer. And this doesn’t seem to bother happy Rosenbaum since his Tribe has won and now control the world. In this sense, Rosenbaum and Neocon Jews are all on the same boat. Though Neocons at Weekly Standard and Commentary pretend to be angry with Obama and the Democrats, behind the scenes they are high-fiving liberal Zionists because, all said and done, both liberal Zionists and conservative Zionists are Jews first and ideologues second. If the likes of William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer really had to choose between the likes of Rosenbaum and white gentile conservatives, they’d go with the former.
White people have lost because they put ideology before identity. Though "my country right or wrong" can be stupid and dangerous — as when Germans mindlessly supported Hitler-as-Germany and Germany-as-Hitler — , it’s generally true that a people who put principles before power are eventually fated to lose. Power alone is nihilism, a might-is-right-ness that is dangerous, but power that is slavish to principles will be rendered into powerlessness. After all, if principles should be absolute, white Americans ought to give back all the land to the American Indians and all go back to Europe or commit mass suicide for their ‘historical crime’ of ‘genocide’. Principles mustn’t come before power. Power must come first, but power should be tempered and reformed by principles, as long as principles do not undermine the basic survival and interests of a people. Jews understand this, and so do the Chinese. Whites, with their souls turned into putty in the palms of hideous Jews, are being pressured to sacrifice their power in the name of principles. Though Jewish history has been one of intolerance, stoning countless homosexuals to death, of committing horrible genocides, parasitism, collaborating with Muslim invaders of Europe, slave trade involving sales of whites to Arabs, the mass killing of Christian Slavs under communism, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the main focus of Jews is power, power, power, just like real estate people repeat the motto ‘location, location, location’. Jews are fuc*ers, and whites are suckers. The principle vs power dichotomy must be understood within the context of and in consideration as to the nature of the conflict. There are basically three kinds of people one deals with: the personal, the business, and the enemy. When it comes to the ‘personal’ and the ‘enemy’, principles can be compromised albeit for opposite reasons. Suppose a family member or a dear friend did something wrong and pleads for help. As long as he or she didn’t so something outrageous — commit a felony — , you might grant him or her the favor even if you must compromise your principles a bit. That’s what family and friends are for. Of course, there are limits to this. The Tsarnaev family that professes the innocence of Dzhokhar is just fooling themselves and acting knee-jerk clannish Checheny. Terrorism is terrorism, and even a mother shouldn’t offer protection to or morally defend such a family member. There was honor in the brother of Ted Kaczynski turning him in. But there are occasions when we bend the rules to help out a close one, not least because he or she was there when we needed him or her. When it comes to ‘business’ or neutral strangers, primacy of principles or the rule of law should be the only thing that matters. It’s the Golden Rule, and societies that uphold such values tend to be most functional and efficient. But when it comes to the ‘enemy’, principles go out the window. If with the ‘personal’, we bend principles out of affection, with the ‘enemy’, we reject principles out of aversion/aggression. In war against an enemy that means you harm, the only thing that matters is winning. If principles should be of paramount importance in war, US should never have fought ‘unfair’ wars. The Union shouldn’t have used its industrial and numerical advantage against the Confederacy. The white man shouldn’t have used guns against American Indians. Both sides should have agreed to ‘fairness on the battlefield’. In sports, no matter how big and rich one city and no matter how small and poor another city may be, sports teams of both cities must have the same number of players on the field, and both sides must obey the same set of rules enforced by referees. But wars are not fought this way. Germany used its industrial might to crush Poland, and Russia used its numerical and industrial might to steam-roll over Germany. Japan and Germany sucker-punched their enemies, and U.S. used its industrial advantage against Japan. U.S. and Japan didn’t come to the table and agree to using only 100,000 men on each side and with only so many planes and ships. U.S. built many more ships and planes than Japan and dropped many more bombs. If Japan had 10 guys on the field, US had 1000 guys on the field. But if Japan had the advantage, it would done the same thing. So, in wars, there are no principles. Both sides do whatever is necessary to win. After WWII, Japan was no longer the enemy of US and became an ally. Thus, US relations with Japan shifted from ‘enemy’ to ‘business’. In today’s world, there’s no doubt that Jews are in war mode and attacking white people as the ‘enemy’. Jews don’t care about principles when it comes to crushing and destroying white power in both EU and US. They see it as war. The problem is that white folks don’t see what’s happening. Jews have waged subversive war, but whites treat Jews in the ‘personal’ manner. It wouldn’t be so bad if whites at least treated Jews in the mode of ‘business’, in which case Jews would at least be held accountable to the same rules and principles as everyone else is. Instead, even as Jews attack whites as the ‘enemy’ in war mode, whites feel that they must actually bend all the rules to make things even easier for Jews, as if Jews are our personal friends and family members. When someone is robbing your house, do you offer him extra bags to carry away the loot? Do you tell him where you keep your guns and money hidden? But that is precisely what whites are doing.)
To be childlike doesn’t necessarily mean to be childish, just like being youthful doesn’t necessarily mean being immature. And at his best, Spielberg imbued his movies, no matter how serious or scary, with the glow of childlike spirit. This is the beauty of JURASSIC PARK. It’s more than just a science fiction or monster horror. It has a sense of wonderment that makes us ‘believe’. We know that the cunning Jew Spielberg is pushing our buttons, but he knows which ones to push because he is a ‘believer’ himself who had his buttons pushed by Walt Disney. (The difference between Spielberg and most people, especially goyim, is that Spielberg didn’t merely enjoy having his buttons pushed but wondered how and why they could be so effectively pushed. He wanted to know the power that Disney had and the secrets that he knew that allowed such an overwhelming power over so many children. Thus, even if intuitively than intellectually, Spielberg began to psycho-analyze himself and discover the buttons within his own soul. It’s like ‘child is the fodder of man’, something Spielberg scribbled as a child. The scientist in A.I., upon accessing and formulating the soul of his dead son David, is able to make millions of ‘Davids’. Spielberg, upon discovering the buttons in his soul by meditating on the works of Disney, surmised similar buttons hidden within the souls of everyone. By understanding how he himself was manipulated, he became the master manipulator of others. Jews are emotional but also cerebral, and this gives them a leg up against Negroes who are emotional but not cerebral and against Anglos who are cerebral but not emotional. Jerry Seinfeld said that, as a young kid, he didn’t just laugh at jokes but wanted to figure out WHY jokes are funny and how they work. What is about jokes and what is about human nature that cause laughter? Thus, Jews use the power of rationality to pry into the secrets of irrationality that exerts power over human emotions. Laughter, like sexuality and ‘innocence’, is also orgasm-related because to laugh is to be overcome with uncontrollable pleasure. Civilization also used to have taboos and restriction on laughter in public, but Jews have worked to demolish taboos against laughter as with the taboos against ‘debauchery’ and ‘innocence’. Of course, we are not allowed to laugh at anything. Try laughing at MLK, and you’re as good as finished. But there are no inhibitions against laughing like stupid children anymore. One can tell all kinds of perverted or sick jokes, and people laugh like idiots. The movies of Quentin Tarantino — except RESERVOIR DOGS — are repulsive, but they elicit the shameless laughter of hyenas among full-grown adults. There was a time when adults would have felt ashamed to make or laugh at movies like PULP FICTION. No longer. And Howard Stern and Sarah Silverman have raked in millions with their foul humor. I don’t deny that vulgarity can be funny, and sometimes, vulgarity can add some vitality to a society that is too uptight and repressed. Who hasn’t laughed at the Three Stooges upending the social manners of pompous snobs? The wreckage in the restaurant in PLAYTIME is classic. But mindless and shameless laughter, though seemingly liberating and empowering, can also be used as mind-control techniques. Why? Most people are not funny, and only a relative few know how to make people laugh. And among these handful, many happen to be liberal Zionist Jews. Their control of our laughter translates into political power because we laugh at what they want us to laugh at, just like dogs can be made to bark at what their masters want them to bark at. So, if comedians make more fun of conservatives, Americans come to see conservatives as a bunch of silly clowns. Obama could have been turned into a big joke by the media as he’s nothing but a toy boy of Jews and homos, but most comedians have refused to make fun of him. Also, jokes about homos is said to be ‘homophobic’ by the Jewish-run media, so we must repress emotions that find homosexuality ridiculous, but it’s perfectly okay to crack jokes about Christian conservatives and the Catholic Church. Also, LOL-ness is antithetical to satire. Satire uses humor as a sharp blade to cut through the official blubber of lies and conventions, whereas most of mainstream ‘satire’ is really a French Tickler that reduces people to silly little babies. True satire makes you smile and think about what is being satirized. Most of today’s ‘satire’ is controlled by the system to make us laugh like idiots at whatever the System doesn’t like. It’s like Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD is satire, but the so-called ‘feelies’ in the story are not real satire but means of mind-control. ‘Feelies’ make people laugh — especially the one mocking John Savage in exile — but in accordance with the agenda of the powers-that-be. It’s laughter than confirms than challenges the official truth.) John Williams is Spielberg’s perfect counterpart in music, and together they make an irresistible pair — even when you wanna clobber them for their shameless manipulations. I sometimes wonder if Kubrick suggested A.I. to Spielberg as a kind of perverse joke, as if to slyly imply, "this is the sort of trick you’re pulling with the magic of technology." Whatever the reason, it turned out to be Spielberg’s most remarkable movie, his one true work of art.
The possibility of the crisis in MIRACLE MILE being a dream is further suggested by Harry’s finding Julie in a state of deep slumber at her grandmother’s apartment. Julie, thinking Harry blew her off, took Valium before hitting the bed. So, even as Harry wheels her around in a shopping cart to reach the office building with the rescue copter on its roof-top, she slumbers on and only gradually comes to her senses. Finding herself outdoors pushed around in a cart by Harry, she thinks maybe she’s dreaming. Is she waking into reality or ‘waking’ into another layer of dream? (Incidentally, when the fat old street cleaner guy walked into the coffee shop, he too was talking about a dream, apparently a wet one with Landa. He is precisely the kind of guy Landa would never give the time of day, but the guy blabs of his fantasies as proof of his virility and manhood. In that sense, he is as deluded as the transvestite, a man who dresses and talks like a woman. In a way, our propensity for fantasies makes all of us mental transvestites in the sense that we, in our minds, pretend to be what we are not. The difference is transvestites exhibit their fantasies on their bodies, whereas most people keep their fantasies snuggled in their minds. The street cleaner, however, cannot keep his mouth shut and talks like he’s some slick love-machine when he’s just a fat lout.) Just as Harry and Julie are together again, his waking of Julie’s grandparents in the middle-of-night unwittingly reunites them. It seems as though there was a long-simmering cold war between the old folks, as if to suggest, if two sweet old people who care about another could hold such a longstanding grudge against one another out of ‘stupid pride’(as Julie says), then it’s no wonder that humanity all over the world could aim nukes at one another over who knows what. Though the old folks had vowed never to talk to one another again, they melt when they come face to face. The grandmother’s name is Lucy, possibly an allusion to the skeletal fossils discovered by Donald Johanson in 1974. The grandfather’s name is Ivan, and maybe it has something to do with the fact that so many enemy Russkies go by that name. As Julie’s mind clears, she finds it incredible not only that she’s out in the streets with Harry but her grandparents are together again, a sight she thought she’d never see again. Julie, who went to bed feeling dejected and depressed, wakes up into a state of total bliss. She is back with Harry and so is her grandmother with her grandfather.
The tension between the old couple makes for an interesting contrast with Harry and Julie’s first encounter at the Page Museum. If the grandfather and grandmother are estranged from one another because they know each other too well, Harry and Julie feel attracted to another because they see in each other the promise of love. Familiarity breeds contempt, curiosity spawns affection.
(The special significance of the old couple’s rediscovered love furthers the archaeological motif. In their mutual bitterness, both had sworn to hate the other to their last dying breath. It’s as if their hearts are thawed out from the cold, as frozen mammoth from under mounds of snow.) Julie feels as if in a waking dream on the best night of her life. She thinks Harry has something special planned for them. When they reach the rooftop, Harry finds out the helicopter pilot hasn’t yet arrived(and likely won’t), so he tells Julie to wait there and runs off to look for a copter pilot in what has to be the mother of all fool’s errands.
MIRACLE MILE shares the insight of rare artists such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Dreyer, Luis Bunuel, and David Lynch into the nature of dream reality. Events in dreams are strange but all the stranger for not seeming strange within the dream world itself. In the hypnotic world of dreams, even the strangest images and sounds can seem mundane, familiar, or logical. Many film-makers have tried to recreate the dream world with weird visuals, but they’ve missed the point because movies are seen in waking state. So, if the strange wonder of dreams is predicated on the weird seeming normal, the problem with most dream imagery in movies is than they look obviously weird to the wakened mind. The secret of dreams is that they entrance, seduce, lull, and fool you. They make you accept the unreal as real, the abnormal as normal, the strange as familiar, the nonsensical as rational. Without that element of trickery, dreams would have no power over the dreamer, and the dreamer would know he is dreaming. If strange appears strange, you’re awake, not dreaming. Thus, more often than not, the most effective kind of dream imagery in movies is one that seems normal and mundane on the surface — and fools us that we are observing real reality — but slithers underneath with intimations that something is ‘off’.
There is a psychological similarity in the mechanics of dreams, hypnosis, magic, and con-man tricks. They’re all about slipping through the perceived barriers of reality. In David Mamet’s HOUSE OF GAMES, the Joe Mantegna character constructs a situation that seems and feels compellingly true to his victim, the female psycho-analyst; he is able to fool her because he can look through her but she can’t look through him(except in the way he wants her to think she can); like a pool hustler who loses intentionally a few times to make the sucker play for higher stakes, Joe Mantegna’s character allows her to catch him in an act early on, thereby making her feel she’s his equal in the game, but he’s only setting a bigger trap; he’s hustling her ego. Between them is a two-way mirror where one side shows the reflection but the other side sees through the glass to the other side; Mantegna’s character sees through the trick mirror into the woman’s mind whereas the woman sees her ego reflected in the mirror the guy set up to fool her. (Only at the end does she get close enough to the mirror to peer through to the other side from which Mantegna’s character spied into her heart and mind.) It’s all the trickier because she was led to believe that she was in on the con, as if she was being shown the behind-the-curtain tricks of how it’s really done when, in fact, SHE was the object of the con; and in that sense, even though she was conned, she’s hardly innocent since she’d been willing to participate in their con against others; the guy played and fooled her but also exposed her own dark side, thus justifying the use of his dark side against her. So, when she slowly connects the dots and comes to realize what really happened, the effect is almost like she’s waking from a dream, even though everything took place in real reality. There is, of course, also the emotional factor; she was erotically turned on by the guy, and so her defenses weakened under his oily charms. (Of course, the con is always on the audience as well since we suspend our disbelief and fall under the spell of movies, as if we’re watching real characters and real situations. HOUSE OF GAMES also suggests that reason is no match for hypnotics, and intellect is no match for intuition, a point also made by BULLETS OVER BROADWAY by Woody Allen. It’s harder to access or manipulate another person on a conscious-to-conscious basis than on a conscious-to-subconscious basis. Also, there’s something between the conscious and the subconscious. Conscious mind uses logic and reason to sort through facts and data. The subconscious has no control over itself and is unaware of itself. But there is something between the two modes, and it is this zone that hypnotists and con-men rely on. They are subliminalists. Cass the Ass Sunstein would call them ‘nudgers’. They have a rational understanding of the irrational. And if some people study this aspect of psychology to understand it, others study it to apply it in social reality and gain power over others. A true rationalist learns about the irrational ways of the mind and tries to teach people to be alert to irrational impulses and manipulations. But the likes of Cass the Ass Sunstein, Jewish ideologues, and Jewish advertisers want to play with our irrational zones to manipulate us. It is, after all, much easier to win people over through irrational manipulations than through rational discourse, especially since true rationality may undermine the agenda. If we relied on true rationalism and true factualism, race-ists could well win the debate over the ‘anti-racists’, race-cidalists or racidalists, and race deniers. There’s too much empirical evidence for the existence of races and racial differences. Therefore, Jews prefer to rely on fear-mongering to bully the masses into rejecting race-ist views and ideas. So, stuff like GREEN MILE would have us believe that a mountain-sized Negro only wants to love a little white mouse. Or a movie like PANIC ROOM written by the Jewish David Koepp would have us believe that some fat Negro thief — played by Forrest Whittaker — is really a decent sort and would even risk losing millions to save a white family from a heartless working class white thug — played by country music star Dwight Yoakam. Or movies about the Old South will present whites as simple KKK villains and blacks as the nicest angels. Such cops-and-robbers social spiritualism is more appealing that the true complexities of the race issue. (Politically Correct people would have us believe that ‘race is just a social construct’ since different societies define race differently. So, a person who might be considered ‘white’ in Egypt might be considered ‘black’ in America. A person who is seen as black or brown in American due to one-drop rule may be considered ‘blanco’ in South America. But one can make this argument of species as well. For example, different cultures label species differently. Many people in Latin America refer to the Jaguar as ‘tigre’, or tiger, even though Jaguar is not a tiger. And Americans called the bison ‘buffalo’ though bison is of a different species. And what Americans call the ‘elk’ is really not an elk. Elk is really a European moose. What is called ‘elk’ in America is a form of deer called by Indians as ‘wapiti’. And some early European travelers to Japan thought the Japanese were a race of monkeys in the literal sense, and some whites in their early encounter with Australian Aborigines thought the natives were closer to apes. So, just because people of different cultures labeled certain species differently, does it mean species is also a social construct? However cultures may label or mislabel various species, there is a scientific way to determine the species of animals. Same goes for race. Regardless of how different societies define racial categories, science can now tell us the racial makeup of a person. And if a person happens to be racially mixed, a scientific study of his DNA can tell us what the racial mixtures are and even the respective sexes of his parents. So, even though American society labels Obama as ‘black’, science can tell us he is of mixed-race, half-white and half-black. And genetic science can tell us that Tiger Woods is white, black, Asian, and American-Indian. So, even though different societies may label races different, there is a genuine scientific way to quantify and qualify the racial makeup of different peoples and individuals. Just as there is a cultural use of species and scientific determination of species, there’s a cultural use of race and scientific determination of race. Suppose a drink is made of mixing equal parts of orange juice and apple juice, and one culture calls it ‘orange juice’ and another calls it ‘apple juice’. Does it then follow that apple juice and orange juice are just social constructs? After all, one culture ignores the apple juice in the mixed drink and just calls it ‘orange juice’, while another culture ignore the orange juice in the mixed drink and just calls it ‘apple juice’. But the science of drinkology can prove that it is both apple juice and orange juice. And for such mixed-drink to exist in the first place, there had to be orange juice in reality and apple juice in reality.) Suppose we had a truly rational debate on ‘gay marriage’. People would realize that homosexuality is about men sticking their sexual organs into fecal holes. They would realize that true ‘marriage equality’ should permit polygamy and ‘incest marriage’ as well. But supporters of ‘gay marriage’ overlook all that because they have ‘rainbow in their eyes’ from all the pro-gay Jewish advertising that would have us believe that homos are the nicest, warmest, funniest, most appealing, and handsomest people on Earth. They are so very lovable that denying their any one of their wishes would seem so very mean and nasty!
Marxists came to the realization that most people are never gonna read DAS KAPITAL as even educated people could barely make sense of it; communism’s success really owed to mass propaganda, anthems, rallies, and simple slogans. It had to convert the masses just like Christianity had converted so many people through pomp and pageantry. Fascists and National Socialists understood this and were more candid and honest about it. If Jews and communists manipulated irrationality while officially championing rationality, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels nakedly admitted that they were propagandists appealing to the irrational side of man. But honesty isn’t always a good policy as it gives the game away. A con-man, after all, doesn’t tell people what he’s really up to. He says, "trust me, I’m looking out for you" when he’s really out to rob the other guy. Jews always invoked reason, intellect, and truth, and thus were able to con a lot of people. But in fact, Jews, as master advertisers and propagandists, were always employing subliminal ways to hoodwink and fool the masses. A truly rational look at America would wake people up to the fact of Jewish domination, corruption, and trickery. Why would Jews want that? So, Jews have mastered the science of controlling the irrational through rationally formulated strategies, such as advertising and test-marketing, all of which rely on subliminal button-pushing; it’s like mental acupuncture. People respond less to truth than what-feels-true. Truth can be disturbing and unpleasant, so people naturally tend to block it out. But lies-made-more-true-than-true have great appeal as something people want to believe in. When something is more-true-than-true or too-good-to-be-true, it is likely false, but people crave for that kind of ‘truth’ over real truth. If you want to gain control over people, you tell them lies that seem truthful; you don’t tell them the truth that makes them wake up and feel independent. Truth is like cold water. It’s like removing the blanket and forcing people to weave their own truths. If you want them to rely on your blanket authority, you must cover them with the technicolor dream-coat and make them believe in your manufactured dreams. I don’t know how true the science of global warming is, but true or untrue, a lot of people were ‘converted’ through the appeal of more-true-than-true, as opposed to factually true. Global Warming scare has been promoted in a manner to make its supporters FEEL more intelligent, more caring, more progressive, more conscientious, more etc, etc. Moral narcissism and intellectual narcissism as intoxicating as other forms of narcissism. So, most liberals who don’t really know the science of global warming believe in it with passion because it makes them feel so smarter than those ‘reactionary dummies’ who listen to Rush Limbaugh. Now, it’s true that Limbaugh’s minions are a bunch of dumbasses whose only vocabulary is ‘ditto’, but most liberals really aren’t much better, and in some ways, they are even bigger suckers for the official dogma than conservatives are. Conservatives, while not inherently more skeptical and rational, are forced to be more questioning for the simple fact that the media and academia are so totally dominated by liberal Jews and homos. Liberals, on the other hand, just need to go along with the official truth put forth by Jews and homos in order to feel so ‘intelligent’ and ‘knowledgeable’ even though most of them are hardly more science-literate than most conservatives are. The rise of Obama, for example, had nothing to do with facts or reason and everything to do with symbolism, advertising, hype, cult of personality, neo-messianism, and celebrity culture.) Though differentiating between reality and dream AND between facts and fantasy comes naturally to us, the dynamics of such thought process is never so simple. Reality can be played and lived like a dream, which is why so many people are drawn to miracles of faith and religion. It was in the realm of reality that entire populations were led to believe in witches, in ideologies like communism, in the worship of Hitler or Mao as god-man, in the notion of ‘gay marriage’, in the idea that Obama is some messiah, in the idea that Iraqis will love us as liberators if we invade their nation, in the idea that celebrities are special people, and etc. It was in the realm of reality that the smart and savvy Jewish guy in CASINO decided to gamble his entire life on the crazy notion of turning a female hustler into a dutiful and loyal wife. The waking mind, no matter how rational and logical, can only focus on a limited set of facts and data at any given time, and thus, it can be tricked by all the hidden facts of reality and hidden forces of psychology that one isn’t aware of by ignorance or intention. A degenerate gambler has the rational capacity to understand that he has more chances of losing than winning, but his conscious mind focuses only on the hope of winning. Even when it was obvious that Nazi Germany was going to lose the war, Hitler the degenerate gambler narrowed his focus on possibility of eventual victory. The problem was not Hitler’s lack of intelligence. He was a smart guy, and the shrewdness he exhibited in his rise to power demonstrated his capacity to think far and wide. But once he gained near-total mastery of all of Western and Central Europe, he became so intoxicated with dreams of total victory over Eastern Europe that his conscious mind willfully shut out all facts and possibilities that cast doubt on the viability of his grand plan.
The essence of the magician’s ‘art’ is altering or reconfiguring the presentation while diverting our eyes to another set of stimuli. Magic is performed in the world of reality but violates the rules of reality as the unreal is seemingly made real and vice versa. Thus, we are never in reality-as-a-totality but in reality-as-selective-fragments. So, even if we rationally focus on facts all the time, there are many more facts around us than in front of us, and those outside our direct gaze can be played and toyed in so many ways.
But because of the cult of rationality, so many intellectuals came to the conclusion that they’d figured it all out when, in truth, all they really did was figure out an aspect of reality that came under their narrow scrutiny. The concept of reason and reality gives the false impression that the use of one’s limited reason upon one’s limited experience of reality is THE use of all-reason on all-reality. But if we can experience all-reality, could we be fooled by magic tricks? Why is that the scientist in Bergman’s THE MAGICIAN was tricked in the end with the dead man seemingly coming back to life? (Of course, the problem of rational reality isn’t only that the mind can process only so much data at a given time but that even the most rational minds are easily overwhelmed by emotions. For example, we all know that movie gore is fake, made of rubber, plastic, and paint. Yet, we cringe just the same when we see characters get cut up in movies. Our minds know it’s fake, but our emotions override our minds. We also know that movies have fictional characters in fictional stories, but we react to films like BICYCLE THIEVES and IKIRU as if we’re watching the stories of real people. Our minds know we are seeing actors putting on an act, but our hearts feel the full weight of tragedy. Even a rational scientist can be spooked out of his wits in a haunted house at a theme park. The mind of the scientist in THE MAGICIAN may not believe in the veracity of the dead man coming back to life, but his nerves have a life of their own, and they override his power of reason and make him nearly pee in his pants.) We think we are looking at the ALL of the magician, but we are obviously missing something as the magician slips something past us. In a similar way, so many Americans have been hoodwinked with nonsense like ‘gay marriage’. They’ve been fooled with concepts like ‘equality’, love, and rainbow colors when the real issue should be about homo privilege and the foul act of fecal penetration(that is not the equal of real sex, neither biologically nor morally); and of course, homosexuality has NOTHING to do with rainbow colors. But the media magic trick slipped in the rainbow colors as somehow being integral to homos who practice fecal penetration, men who put on women’s dresses, and women whose idea of sex is rubbing their poons together. Given that political correctness and popular culture have so infantilized Americans, it’s no wonder that so many people are now so easily being manipulated into believing and accepting anything by the controllers of the dream machine of media and entertainment. But conservatives are just as childish, if not more so, than liberals are. At the very least, Jews, gays, blacks, yellows, and Hispanics are clear-eyed that they are working for their own self-interests, whereas so many dumb childish conservatives have been sprinkled with the sandman dream that Jews are their best friends and that the GOP is the natural home of blacks. When people believe stuff like that, they really might as well be dreaming. At least in a dream, one can be forgiven for believing in anything as the faculty of logic has been shut off. But it’s so pathetic that the conscious mind is hardly more logical or sensible than dream-state, at least once it has come under the power of the hideous elites(like the globalist Zionists, Nazis, or communists). The dream-state lowers defenses, which is why Merlin toys with Morgana’s mind when she is dreaming in EXCALIBUR. But for the feeble-minded, ignorant, and/or powerless, even waking reality can easily be penetrated and toyed with. Consider how Morgana manipulated a knight(by casting aspersions about Lancelot and Guinevere) to cause dissension at the Round Table. Though what Morgana told him had more than a grain of truth, he had no idea of the true nature of her agenda — which goes to show that even truth can be used to perpetuate a bigger lie. (It’s like Jews have done to Wasps in America. Jewish criticisms of Wasp abuse of power and privilege had some truth to them. One can find so many examples of white oppression of non-whites throughout American history. But the main agenda behind Jewish criticism of Wasp power was not more equality and more justice for all but more power for the Jews. For Jews to replace the Wasps in elite positions, Jews had to discredit and debunk the moral authority of White America. It’s like the Bolsheviks spoke much truth in their condemnation of Tsarist oppression, but the real truth of their agenda was to gain total power and destroy all their enemies. Both Jews and Bolsheviks used facets of historical truth to conceal the real truth of their agenda: they wanted total power and thus the criticism was more about power than about principles. They used truth to push the lie, just as Morgana did at the Round Table.) Look how so many Germans during the Nazi era fell under the spell of Hitler’s sorcery. Look at all the people of communist Romania and North Korea who came to believe in their leaders as human-gods. Look how so many Americans came to worship MLK who was a violent thug and fraud; look how they came to worship Oprah who’s nothing but a fat-assed black whore who got rich by sucking up to Jews who taught her how to toy with stupid white psychology that has been ‘incepted’ with the poison seed of ‘white guilt’ that says whites have been the worst and most evil people that ever lived. Though, generally speaking, the ignorant are easier to fool than the educated are, the nature of ignorance is always a relative thing. We tend to think of people with college degrees and lots of book learning as Educated and think of people with minimal education as Ignorant, but truth defies such convenient categorizing. An intellectual-minded person may be well-read may still feel himself/herself to be ignorant in relation to someone much smarter, and such perception may make him/her slavishly devoted to the person of superior intellect. There is a pecking order to everything. Many educated people don’t so much learn how to think on their own as learn how to obey and absorb the ‘higher wisdom’ of the gurus. Even or especially many educated people tend to be insecure. They may feel superior to the ‘dumb masses’, but they feel less smart, less knowledgeable, and less charismatic than the top experts, so they become blindly sheepish to the top dogs of the intellectual order. Consider all the lapdogs of Noam Chomsky. Why is it that there’s always only a handful of intellectuals at the top who proclaim the so-called Great Truth while the rest of the intellectual crowd just crow along? There are lots of feminist intellectuals, but 99% of them just bark along with Big Sister. There are lots of liberal intellectuals, but most of them never dared to question the sacred truth as laid down by gurus like Stephen J. Gould, who turned out to be a fraud by the way. To be sure, some just go along or remain silent out of fear of ostracism and being blacklisted by political correctness, but most liberal intellectuals seem to actually believe in whatever ‘truth’ that’s handed down to them by the top intellectuals. So, even if they have Ph.D’s, most of them feel ignorant compared to the real top dog intellectuals and thus feel it’s their duty to obey orders and bark along. (Also, most intellectuals are smart but not very smart. So, they must strain very hard to ‘master’ certain difficult ideas in college or some such institution. As most of their energies were expended in trying to understand the stuff, they never really came to think about what it really means or whether it’s true or false. Academic jargons are useful to PC in this sense. It take years and years to make sense of academic-jargonese, and that means most of one’s energies are expended in understanding the material than critiquing or challenging it. Also, the jargons give the false impression that one is involved in something intelligent even when it could be utter nonsense or simple-minded dogma. If you say, "I hate men because they find me ugly", you sound like a nasty hag. But if you say much the same but with words like ‘patriarchy’, ‘praxis’, ‘capillary’, and ‘subtext’ thrown into the mix, you sound ‘intellectual’. If most of one’s energies are expended on understanding something,, one has little energy left to judge its worth as an idea. Suppose you don’t know English and are learning it for the first time. Suppose you use a trashy John Grisham novel as learning material. You’d be so busy looking up the vocabulary and trying to make sense of the grammar that you’d have little energy left to play literary critic. Of course, if you’re really smart and can master English in a short period of time, you’d see the Grisham novel for what it is. But if it takes many years for you to master English by reading John Grisham, by the time you’ve finally become proficient, you might feel very grateful to Grisham for opening your eyes to a new language. Same goes for intellectuals. Most intellectuals are smart but not very smart, and they must struggle to make sense of difficult theories and labyrinthine jargonese. So, they expend most of their time and energy trying to make sense of the stuff without asking whether it makes sense at all to begin with. Such difficulty, along with the power of taboos, serves to enforce certain ideas and views to be accepted as the iron premise that must never be questioned. For example, a student of 19th century German history would have to deal with the topic of antisemitism without asking certain crucial questions. He would have to accept the premise that antisemitism is simply evil, wrong, and irrational; and since many Germans were ‘antisemitic’, they must have been evil and irrational. But such a view is premised on the notion of Jews as a perfect and faultless people. Could Jews have acted in certain ways and could there have been something about the Jewish character that drove Germans toward antisemitism? Even if we can agree that radical antisemitism — especially the kind that led to Nazism — was evil and virulent, couldn’t it also be true that there were rabid and virulent aspects of Jewish culture and attitudes that antagonized Germans? If Germans could be rabid and virulent about certain things, why couldn’t Jews have been rabid and virulent about other things? Instead of asking such rational questions, Jewish history is taught more like theology than history. We must embrace with absolute faith the premise that Jews have been a perfect people against whom even the smallest hostility could never have been justified. Thus, morally justifiable distrust of Jews is made interchangeable and synonymous with morally unjustifiable hatred of Jews. It’s like the God of the Bible doing as He pleases but demanding that Jews see Him as totally perfect, and since He’s perfect, no criticism of Him, no matter how justifiable, could be anything but heretical. We are all Jobs now.) This mind-set was especially prevalent in East Asia for thousands of years and may still be dominant today. Most Asian scholars never learned to be free thinkers. Instead, the lower scholars were made to feel ignorant and stupid in relation to the upper scholars. Since the upper scholars were supposed to be so much wiser and more knowledgeable, the lower scholars never bothered to question the truth as owned by the upper scholars. So, the dynamics of Comparative Ignorance made for conformity of thought. Even most educated people were made to feel ignorant and unworthy compared to the great masters and top scholars, so there was nothing for them to do but to submit to and emulate the top holders of knowledge and power — even if top dogs were really divorced from reality and full of pompous shit.
The Christopher Nolan movie INCEPTION has some interesting ideas about dreams. On the one hand, nothing is as private and secretive as one’s dreamworld. But if a dream can be cracked into, there is nothing more vulnerable and defenseless since the dreaming mind can be made to believe in anything and yield to anything. The soft underbelly may be well-protected by a hard shield, but once you penetrate the shield, you can go deep inside the flesh. This is why Jews understood and appreciated the importance of psychology. Jews knew that they could never defeat and conquer the white race by external means. White race was too numerous, too well-armed, and too united. Jews couldn’t pierce through the outer-armor of the white race. What Jews understood was that whites weren’t entirely about power, might, and glory but also about morality and conscience. The seed of higher ethics had been planted into the white soul with the spread of Christianity. For a long time, Jews saw this as a great disaster because gentiles had ‘stolen’ the God of the Jews, and, thus spiritually armed, they learned the secret of longevity and survival by favoring a spiritual essence/concept over materialized and divided idols of power. One of the problems of polytheism was that the gods of one people were often at war with one another, e.g. while some gods were for the Greeks during the Trojan War, other gods were against them. Thus, polytheism was always an unstable mytho-political system for a culture. In contrast, Jews had one God of one mind. When this idea spread among European gentiles, they too had a powerfully singular and united sense of power. Also, Christianity, unlike Judaism, was a universal religion, so its numbers kept swelling, and Jews found themselves outnumbered by vast gentile hordes who worshiped the same God over vast territories and over a long stretches of history. Jews had faced many formidable pagan civilizations, but as pagan gentiles all worshiped different gods, they could never stay united for long. So, one pagan civilization would eventually be toppled by another and that would be toppled by another. Jews figured that as long as they themselves patiently continued to believe in the one and only God, they would outlast all other peoples who worship false gods/idols and eventually gain mastery over the world. But then, renegade Jews, Jesus and Paul, spread the Gospel to the pagan peoples, and Roman Empire spread the Faith all over. Initially, it seemed as though the spread of Christianity might be fatal to pagan peoples. Romans, the greatest pagan power of the Ancient World, seemed to lose the warring spirit as Christianity spread, and their empire crumbled before the onslaught of the German pagan warrior tribes. But Christianity proved to be the greatest asset for the Europeans because of its secrets of survival. Just as Jews had managed to survive through many defeats with their Faith in God who could never be defeated — since His essence was not manifested through idols that could be smashed — , European Christians managed to survive through the mayhem and destruction of barbarian invasions. With faith in Christianity, they believed that they could be defeated in flesh and possession but never in spirit. Jesus had shown how one could be whupped real bad and crucified but still triumph over those ‘who know not what they do’ and enter the Kingdom of Heaven and be with God. So, the seed of Christianity eventually grew into the foundation of the greatest civilization the world had ever known. Jews were both deeply impressed/awed and shocked/horrified by this development. As the Christian order spread and prospered, Jews figured they could do business with Christian communities and make a lot of dough, especially they all worshiped the same God. But Jews were now faced with a gentile power that might never fall, never go away as pagan civilizations had all done. Worse, Christian religion said Jews killed Jesus the Son of God. And yet, Christians had to begrudgingly acknowledge Jews as the original Chosen People and the New Testament as having grown out of the Old or Original Testament. So, Christians had a dualistic view of Jews: as filthy killers of Jesus and as the fellow Children of God whose conversion was necessary for the eventual return of Christ. Though Jews bitch and complain about Christian antisemitism, in truth, Christians were far more tolerant of Jews than they were of Muslims and especially pagans who weren’t merely the targets of occasional pogroms but targets of outright ‘cultural genocide’ for their deviltry. Jews were stained with the blood of Christ but still seen as the Children of God whereas pagans were seen as vile followers of Satan himself. Pagans had to convert right away or be burnt at the stake. (To be sure, when weak Christians came upon powerful pagan peoples, Christians went for the soft approach by appealing to brotherhood, love, and peace. Christians would try to convert the leaders of the pagan community, but once the leaders were converted, Christians advises the converted rulers to use ruthless force to convert everyone else within his domain. Jews have operated the same way in the West. When they didn’t have total power, they smiled and acted gentle and appealed to the powers-that-be. But once Jews became insiders and changed the official dogma of the state, they came to insist that everyone must bow down to the new ideology. So, it’s not enough that Americans are now free to admire MLK, remember the Holocaust, hate white people, or worship gays. They now MUST do those things or be labeled a ‘racist’, ‘anti-Semite’, or a ‘homophobe’. And you better be for ‘free’ birth control pills at Georgetown University because, if not, you are waging a ‘war against women’. Jews act like this but bitch about the ‘hysteria’ during the ‘McCarthy Era’.) The real poison seed planted by Christianity in the minds of white gentiles was the idea of universal conscience + moral narcissism + guilt and atonement. Christianity was supposed to be about the Brotherhood of Man, feeling holier-than-thou, and being racked with guilt. So, there came to be a certain vulnerability inside the white Christian soul. But as long as the soft white Christian soul was protected by the iron armor of white pride and glory, the white Christian soul belonged to the white Christian body. And a powerful armor shielded the body. Though Jews could come up with powerful weapons too — such as the atomic bomb, the most awesome weapon of all time — , Jews saw them slip from their fingers over to the far more numerous and unified white gentile population. Even as Jewish Oppenheimer and his tribal brethren played a crucial role in the making of the Bomb, several of them were banned from the nuclear program(for their suspected communist ties) because white gentiles held the political power. In the past, Jews were so resentful of this white gentile power in America that they even secretly worked with the Soviets to undermine white American power. Indeed, only part of the reason for Jewish atomic espionage had to do with sympathy for communism; the more important factor was that Jews didn’t want white American gentiles to become masters of the world. They figured that if Russians had the Bomb too, the world would be divided into a system of white gentile power vs white gentile power. Just as Jews loved to see Nazi Germany pitted against Soviet Union, Jews wanted to see the US pitted against the USSR. Make white fight white. Also, if the USSR were to become the other superpower with nukes that could inspire and lead the Third World, white American power would have to make concessions on racial and social fronts to win over the hearts and minds of the Third World. White Americans would have to reduce their ‘racism’ in order to win the publicity battle with the Soviets who were, at least ideologically, committed to ‘anti-racism’ and ‘brotherhood of man’. Even so, there were still too many whites and too much white power and unity. And most of the military was in the hands of whites, and whites had lots of guns, and most cops were white too. So, what were Jews to do? Jews increasingly gained control of the media and academia and selected and shaped information and knowledge. But that alone couldn’t really accomplish the trick of gaining control of the white soul. Though Jews found the chinks in the white armor to get inside, Jews could have succeeded only if the flesh was soft than made of tough hide. If the white soul was as tough as elephant hide, Jews would have had a rough time even slinking in through the chink in the armor. Take the Japanese and Chinese for example. Both were defeated nations. China was encroached by Western powers and Japan in the 19th century. And Japan was defeated and its political system was entirely changed by Americans. Even so, the Chinese soul remained proudly Chinese and Japanese soul remained prickishly Japanese. Neither Chinese history nor Japanese history filled the souls of its people with feelings of excess guilt and penitence, especially when it comes to the issue of outsiders. A Japanese might feel he must take his own life for the sake of Japanese honor, but Japanese don’t feel that way about non-Japanese. Similarly, Jewish conscience is about what Jews owe to other Jews — especially the Rabbinical authority — and to God; it’s not about what Jews owe to non-Jews; if anything, Jewish culture taught Jews to feel mostly contempt and hate for the filthy goyim. If Christians are ideally supposed to save fellow mankind by bringing to them to Faith in the Lord, Jews are ideally supposed to see dimwit goyim as little more than donkeys to use and abuse, indeed rather like how the pigs in ANIMAL FARM manipulate and use the other animals. To most piggish Jews, gentiles are nothing but work horses; it’s like how Spielberg regards the animal in WAR HORSE. Jews don’t care one iota about all those white gentiles who fought, died, and got maimed in wars for Israel, and the Jewish media especially don’t care about all those Christian Arabs who’ve been displaced, robbed, raped, or murdered as the result of social crises stemming from America’s invasion of Iraq. Indeed, powerful Jews have manipulated American Christian conservatives to care more about Jews in Israel — who routinely mock and spit at Christians — than about Arab Christians who are being persecuted by both Muslims and Zionists. The fact that so many white Americans can be suckered by the Jews only fills Jews with more arrogance and contempt for the dimwit goyim. But if Jewish conscience is about Jewish power and Jews doing right by other Jews, white Christian conscience has been about universal love and doing right by all of mankind. Since whites hadn’t acted like perfect Christians through the ages, it means the white heart/conscience can easily be burdened with guilt and need for repentance, and indeed, this aspect of Christian-ism was evident long before Jews gained total power of US. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Abolitionists were not the product of some Jewish plot. Even so, back in those days, white guilt was also a feature of white pride. Whites were proud that they were decent enough to want to end slavery, and after the Civil War, many whites took great pride in the fact that, unlike most slave-civilizations around the world, whites had fought a noble war to end an evil institution. And British Anglos were awful proud that they took drastic measures to end the slave trade. So, guilt was wedded to pride(at its best, producing a robust moral sensibility, and at its worst, creating a preening moral narcissism), and that pride was wedded to power. White guilt led to white reform that led to white pride(in progress), which further buttressed white power. But then, Jews came along and sneaked through the chinks in the armor of white power. Using psychological means, Jews accessed the softest and most vulnerable part of the underbelly of white conscience and stuck it with needles. Since Jews couldn’t attack and destroy white power by external means, they used something akin to the Trojan Horse — and later used the Brojan Horse of MLK. Altered from within, white soul lost the elements of its pride and will-to-power. As the white soul caved in with pangs of guilt and self-loathing, the white mind thought of nothing but apologizing and sucking up to Jews and any group Jews put forth as ‘victims’. Since the white soul came under control of Jews, it didn’t become less morally hypocritical but differently morally hypocritical. After all, if the white soul were to be totally pure/consistent in its application of Christian morality, it would have to call out on Jewish abuses of power and privilege, sympathize with long-suffering Palestinians, defend the right of Arab Christians whose lives have been ruined by Wars for Israel, call out on the sheer hypocrisy of ‘affirmative action’ — even favoring rich white Hispanics and recent African immigrants whose ancestors captured and sold slaves over poor white folks whose ancestors never knew privilege and never owned slaves in America — , look into how Jews are using Wall Street and Ivy League to rig the game for their tribal interest, and etc. Of course, Jews don’t want whites to do that, so Jews are not really interested in whites being truly good people with pure conscience. Rather, Jews wanna toy with white conscience so that the white mind will never sync with the white body to challenge Jewish power. At any rate, Jews were able to toy with the white soul because the Christian seed of universal brotherhood and moral narcissism and guilt-ridden penance had been planted long ago. The White Christian soul wants to believe it is spreading truth and justice all over the world — even the white secular soul has been shaped by this mind-set or soul-set. Such pathos fills the white soul with moral narcissism. But no civilization has even been able to square theory with practice, so Christian hands are stained with lots of blood, and that fills the white soul with guilt and shame. But white Christian moral narcissism desperately wants to feel good again, and so, penitent whites believe they must go the extra mile in denouncing ‘racism’, worshiping Negroes, sucking up to Jews, and bending over to homos. But Jews know that using only sticks leads to depression, which then leads to bitterness and anger. Jews know they must use the carrot along with the stick. Thus, Jews beat whites with the stick of guilt but hold forth the carrot of redemptive euphoria(of moral narcissism) if whites were to weep like babies over MLK, vote for Obama, hysterically hallucinate KKK sightings everywhere — even in the campuses of liberal colleges like Oberlin — , and attack other whites who aren’t as ‘redemptive’ and ‘conscientious’.
Regardless of whether MIRACLE MILE is a great movie or not, its specialness provides some clues as to the paradoxical nature of creativity and innovation. There’s been a long-held tradition of dividing everything into camps of worthy or unworthy, of serious or frivolous, of high or low, of mature or immature, of meaningful or meaningless, and etc. Generally, we like to believe that serious people lead while frivolous people follow. And the world would appear that way since leaders of nations are supposed to be serious with serious credentials. Ideally, best high school students go to best universities, and they become the leaders in education, law, finance, government, and etc. However, being intelligent and erudite is not the same as being serious and heavy. One can be serious and heavy but dumb and slow; and one can be light and frivolous(and even trashy) but brilliant and innovative. The most cartoonish demonstration of this reality can be seen in AMADEUS where the laughing clown Mozart is a greater composer than all the serious ‘masters’ in high positions the royal court. To an extent, the movie, as directed by the Jewish Czech-American Milos Forman from play by Jewish-English Peter Shaffer, was meant as a dig at the Order of White Privilege. Thus, Mozart of the movie/play was meant to represent the dazzling brilliance of the Jew whose obvious superiority(that flows with such natural ease) has been either dismissed or suppressed by the envious, flustered, or uncomprehending goyim. (Mozart’s father who tries to restrain and discipline his son could stand for the traditional Jewish authority that feared the secularization of Jewish culture. He’s like the father in THE JAZZ SINGER who doesn’t want his son to sing ‘nigger music’.) The rich, powerful, and established goyim see the young upstart Mozart as a threat. Some really don’t understand his genius, but even the man who turns out to be Mozart’s biggest admirer, Salieri, tries to destroy him and his legacy; and the prematurely dead Mozart is dumped into a pit that invokes images of dead Jews in Nazi death camps. Salieri, unlike some of his peers, believes that Mozart is the greatest composer that ever lived, but he simply can’t abide by the fact that such a young irreverent outsider could be the Chosen of God. Though Mozart wasn’t Jewish, he represents the brilliant and zany Jew in the movie/play, and, for that reason, the work has special significance for the Tribe. For some, it could be seen as an allegory about antisemitism, i.e. how the goy envy of Jewish genius led to the Holocaust. Milos Forman might have seen it as an allegory of how Czechoslovakian communist gentiles clamped down on the brilliant and creative Jewish artists. There were lots of Jewish artists and film-makers involved in the Czech New Wave and Czech Spring in 1968, and they were crushed by the Old Guard made up of grey bureaucratic types who welcomed the arrival of Soviet tanks. Though Jews had played a crucial role in the spread of communism, during the Cold War, many Jews in the Communist East were having second thoughts about communism as Jews were often swept from power or even prosecuted as Zionist spies of American Imperialism. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, the French Jewish actress Simone Signoret, who’d been a lifelong defender of the USSR, changed her position. And people like Milos Forman found new life in Jewish-ruled Hollywood. (Of course, there is a political/ideological aspect of creativity as well, which explains why liberals are so much more creative than conservatives. Artistic expression comes in two forms: critical/complain-ish and idealistic/utopian. Many novels and films have criticized what is wrong with society, and the liberal mind is more likely to find fault with society than the conservative mind. The liberal mind is more sensitive to all the perceived wrongs of society, and so, films like BICYCLE THIEVES were made by people of liberal and leftist persuasion. Related to dissatisfaction with current reality is a longing for a better society. This side of liberalism is idealistic and utopian, and many fictional works tantalize us with visions of a better world/future. One might say liberals tend to dream more of utopia, but there is an element of utopianism in creativity itself as one of the appealing facets of art is the power to imagine things that are not of this world. If Jesus had been an ardent conservative, He wouldn’t have bothered with vision of better things. This is the paradox of liberalism. On the one hand, it is more acutely sensitive and aware of all the ills of social reality. It pries into aspects of reality that most conservatives pretend don’t exist lest such matters upset their sense of well-being. Thus, liberals were at the forefront of social reform; they worked to raise consciousness about problems of inequality, injustice, poverty, and repression. But such intense distress with the problems of the real world hint at the other side of the liberal mind that wants to take flight from reality and create/live in a ‘perfect world’, and communism was the most extreme manifestation of such hopes. Communism was, at once, intensely sensitive to social ills and fantastically idealistic for a better future. Artists tend to be liberal because they tend to be more sensitive about reality and more dreamy for something better. Novels and films allow artists to expose social ills of society, but they also allow artists to dream of something too-good-to-be-true. Thus, art is intrinsically a liberal form of expression. To be sure, there is a conservative aspect to art as well. Conservatives also dream, often of a lost golden age of the past, and nostalgia has been one of the major themes in art. Andrei Tarkovsky even named a film "Nostalghia". One could argue there’s element of conservatism in all nostalgic works of art, even if made by liberals. Indeed, virtually no one is 100% conservative or 100% liberal. Rather, what we call a ‘conservative’ is most often 70% of conservative and 30% liberal, and what we call a ‘liberal’ is 70% liberal and 30% conservative. Just like US never votes 100% Democratic or 100% Republican, most Americans are not purely one thing but a mix of both liberalism and conservatism, though given the power of labels, many people don’t realize this, as if indeed the world can be divided neatly into the ‘right’ and ‘left’. Nostalgia fills conservatives with dreams, but nostalgia is generally a more passive kind of dreaminess than utopianism is. Nostalgia makes one want to sit in a quiet room and think of the good ole days whereas utopianism makes one wanna march in the street and lead a cause. Because the past is a done deal, there is nothing conservatives can do to change it; at most, they can try to preserve aspects of the past. In contrast, utopianism is always in the future, and as such, liberals can forever look forward even if their dreams are forever unattainable. Nostalgia, however powerful, keeps fading from memory, whereas utopianism, however murky, always comes clearer into focus even the images turn out to be series of mirages. The adventurousness of liberalism explains why most liberals supported imperialism in the 19th century. It seemed the forward-looking outlook at the time. In contrast, the arch-conservative Asian societies were not interested in worlds outside their own. Japan had be forced open by American and British Imperialists. There is an element of idealism in conservatism as well, and conservatism serves art well with the principle of canon-ically preserving the best of human achievement. However imperfect canons may be, they educate new generations with what is essential as opposed to what is trivial. If you’re a newcomer to the cinematic art, the film canon teaches you that CITIZEN KANE and DR. STRANGELOVE are more important and worthier of appreciation/preservation than HAPPY GILMORE and FRIDAY THE 13TH. But the conservative ‘idealism’ in art is like that of a museum curator. It is mostly concerned with pre-existing art and culture, believes that the best of human achievement is behind us, and focuses mainly on appreciating what has been established as the ‘best’ — often unquestioningly — instead of dreaming of new art and culture as yet to be created. Thus, while conservatism plays a laudable preservationist role in culture, it tends not to contribute much to the creative and innovative aspect of art. In many cases, conservatives are not only unwilling to dream but afraid to dream, lest the dream upset or overturn what they hold dear in their lives. Also, there are two modes of conservative attitude/behavior that are also not conducive to creativity. One is complacency, which is common among affluent conservatives who grew up in idyllic communities. Insular and indifferent to the world outside their bubble, complacent conservatives believe themselves to be living in a world of milk and honey and don’t wanna be bothered by anything that upsets their sense of equilibrium. But not all conservatives have been privileged or affluent. Many deal with hardships and come face-to-face with reality on a daily basis. Their mode of conservatism is practicality. They accept the hardships of the world as a given and don’t believe things could be much better. Therefore, they are well-aware of tough/rough reality, but they’ve grown accustomed to it, like the backwoods family in SHY PEOPLE. So, when they see brutality and ugliness all around them, they see it as an inescapable part of reality than react to it sensitively and try to improve things to make for a better world through art or activism. Though such conservatives are often tough men with thick skins, they are passive in accepting the world as it is. Indeed, their pride derives from bearing the harsh cross of reality. And in some cultures, especially Middle Eastern and East Asian, pain and cruelty have become virtues in their own right, as illustrated in the Chen Kaige film FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE. It’s as if life is one long beating, and the only way to deal with it is to grin and bear it. So, if dogs are tortured and maimed horribly, just turn your heart into stone and resist sensitive feelings, at least toward those deemed as ‘inferior beings’. Of course, liberalism threatens to become conservative when liberals gain dominance over society, which has already happened in the West. Once liberalism produces its own orthodoxies, it is no longer truly liberal, and this explains the neurosis at the core of current liberalism. Though it still pretends to be sensitive to social problems, liberals turn a blind eye to all the havoc caused by blacks and illegal aliens. It’s still stuck in the rut of seeing the world in terms of ‘white privilege’, even though most white folks are NOT privileged and even facing very tough times. And given the hierarchy within American liberalism, the new liberalism has essentially degenerated into serving the interests of elite Jews and neo-aristocratic homos. Its dream of ‘rainbow gays’ prancing around in lingerie is hardly an inspirational utopian vision for mankind. Given that conservatives are the outsiders in a social order dominated by liberals, one might think conservatives would become the new creative force, but old habits die hard. Conservatives are, by nature, used to taking orders, submitting to the prevailing orthodoxy, and hunkering down, and so, conservatives are gradually, one by one, conforming to liberal orthodoxies since it is the nature of conservatives to go along with the dominant powers-that-be. Conservatives don’t know the meaning of resistance. Resistance has been at the core of liberalism, and so, even when liberals are in power and dominate much of everything, they still think and act in the spirit of resistance and thus create the impression that they are still the underdog fighting for the little guy. Given that two third of the superrich are Democrats and most billionaire globalists are behind Obama, you’d think the GOP would be the party of the middle class and working class. But the likes of Romney and Gingrich, in their slavish conservative fashion, just wanna suck up to the super-rich on Wall Street and in Las Vegas even more. In this sense, Adolf Hitler was truly a remarkable figure on the Right. He understood many of the problems of conservatism. He understood its failure to dream, to look forward, to rouse up the masses, and to inspire people with utopian dreams. Not surprisingly, he began as an artist. Alas, Hitler’s taste in art was pedestrian and his views on race virulently insane. If he had better taste in art and a more tolerant view of race, he could easily have been the greatest man of the 20th century. He would have united the key elements of the right and left to reconcile the thrust of the future with the gravitas of the past. Given the domination of liberalism, one would expect more dissent from the right. But ‘conservative dissent’ is, at least psychologically, an oxymoron, as is ‘liberal censorship’. While conservatives do dissent against the prevailing liberal domination/orthodoxy, they just don’t feel comfortable or natural in dissenting mode, which is why most conservative critics lack fire in their belly. They are accidental dissenters than happy dissenters who relish in the art of dissenting. It’s like a timid guy finding himself having to stand up and speak out. This isn’t to say conservative guys like John Wayne were ‘timid’, as meaning dorky. They were big tough guys. But John Wayne and even Elvis Presley — who was psycho-culturally conservative despite his penchant for ‘nigger music’ — preferred to take orders from their social superiors. Wayne was the dutiful son-figure to John Ford even though Ford often mocked him mercilessly on the movie set, indeed even before the Negro Woody Strode. Ford even ridiculed Wayne’s manhood by telling people on the set that the muscular Woody Strode is the ‘real athlete’. Wayne just grinned and beared it. And Elvis Presley was slavish to Colonel Tom Parker well into the early 70s. The King of Rock n Roll’s southern boy sense of loyalty to Parker was almost impossible to overcome. So, when conservatives play the role of dissenters, they feel kinda odd and unnatural. Also, as they’re strangers to culture of dissent, they offer no program except for going back to the old ways. They dissent not for something new but for something old. So, even people who don’t like Obama feel no inspiration when they hear the same old stuff from conservatives about ‘smaller government’ and ‘lower taxes’, all the more so because conservatives were silent when George W. Bush was expanding the size of government and invading Iraq. But ‘liberal orthodoxy/censoriousness’ is also an oxymoron. True liberalism is supposed to be about more freedom, more debate, more discourse, more liberty, more controversy. In the past, America was under the power of conservative cultural correctness. Today, it’s under liberal ideological/political correctness. Cultural correctness forbade many expressions related to sex and violence in the arts, especially movies, radio, and TV. College coeds had to be chaperoned around, and college students could be expelled for lewd expressions. But liberalism resisted the power of cultural correctness, and America became a much freer place beginning the mid-60s, culminating with the unprecedented freedoms of late 60s to late 70s. But radical leftist elements took over the core of American liberalism, and thus ‘liberalism’ became an Alinskyite mask for various radical agendas. Political correctness has no problem with most vulgar language and has no beef with porn and violence in movies. But, it is highly intolerant of any view or expression that doubts or challenges the leftist orthodoxy about the equality of races, the normality of homosexuals, and ‘evils of white privilege’. Worse, what goes by the term ‘leftism’ no longer even champions the masses of lower class Americans — deemed ‘less evolved’ because they think fecal penetration between men is gross — but caters to the agenda of super-privileged homos and their main patrons/allies the globalist Zionists. What will become of America where conservatives are now the dissenters but don’t know how to dissent and where liberals are now the rulers but don’t act like rulers?) Anyway, while one aspect of Jewish tradition was very seriously intellectual — very intense and heavy about matters of God and the Laws — , another side of Jewish tradition was light, irreverent, and funny. Paradoxically, this zany aspect of Jewishness may partly have been a byproduct of ultra-seriousness of Jewish religion. Because there were so many rules and taboos about what Jews could and couldn’t do and because the Jewish concept of God was so profoundly labyrinthine, the Jewish mind became aware of many layers of meanings and contradictions. Though Jews were supposed to take the Sacred Texts very seriously — and they did on a conscious level — , their subconscious could have been cracking up at much of the stuff. What set Judaism apart from most religions and mythologies was the sheer complexity and the endless implications of its meanings, all the more contradictory because Jewish religion was outwardly the simplest: it had only one God as opposed to other religions with many; yet, this one God was not some simple god but the most unknowably knowable God. Some myths are folkloric; they may have symbolic or allegorical meaning, but their meanings tend to be rather simple or obvious. Also, many pagan religions tended to focus on idols than on ideas, and material things are always simpler than conceptual things with greater psychological implications. One can find funny stuff in any religion or folklore, but the funny aspect of the Torah go off on many more tangents. Also, the great contradiction in Jewish culture was the supreme emphasis on Faith and the great insistence on logic and reason. On the one hand, Jews were never to doubt the existence and perfection of God, but they were use all their mental powers to pore over every word in the Torah and use logic and reason to discuss the meanings. So, there was an element of craziness in the Jewish tradition, and this gradually evolved into a kind of Jewish humor. That something can be so utterly grave and serious yet also conceal something so riotous and funny was evident in the personage of Franz Kafka as related by David Foster Wallace. Though I never read Wallace, what he said in his lecture, "Laughing with Kafka" is rather instructive. Kafka was known to have laughed out loud while writing some of his most grim stories(according to his neighbors), and this neurotic form of humor has its roots in Jewish tradition. Jews were the most moralistic people, but, as they often led a wandering existence, they had to survive as wily and cunning middlemen playing fast and loose with ethics. So, the prophetic people with God on their minds were also the profit-driven people looking to lay claim to extra shekel.
The Jewish intellectual tradition was as formidable as that of any great people in history, but for thousands of years, the Jewish mind was not allowed to venture outside the certitude of the existence of the one and only God deemed to be perfect. In a way, those who have problems with political correctness realize the same kind of horror/humor. Though they wanna speak the truth — about racial differences and the power of Jews — , they must always speak around those matters since the great religion of our age is the sacred taboo that forbids any honest discussion of racial science and Jewish power. While some people just go along with the system(because the alternative is to be blacklisted and disgraced), others can’t help seeing the crazy humor of it all. Of course, one’s mocking/humorous views of PC are generally kept under the radar since uttering the wrong sentiment or idea can lead to trouble. This was even more the case in communist nations where every comrade was supposedly free, equal, liberated, rational, and scientific, but if he, as a free thinker, muttered anything critical of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, he could end up in a labor camp. Though Orwell’s 1984 is a terrifying tale, an undercurrent of humor can be gleaned from the layers of official ‘truths’ and mandatory self-deceptions.
Though humor is universal, different cultures developed different kinds of humor, and Jews developed perhaps the most complex and neurotic kind of humor, perhaps the only kind of humor that could be said to be profound. The Ancient Greeks were a brilliantly funny people, but their humor wasn’t as neurotic because Greeks were allowed to openly laugh at lots of things. Greeks put on tragedies and comedies. Also, Greeks made a distinction between theology and philosophy, so people of Reason could think freely lots of things about the cosmos without fear of being stoned to death for blasphemy. So, Aristotle could go off on his own and try to figure out what the world was as it was. And Plato could peer inside his mind to access the perfect solids or forms or something or other. Greeks could even be critical or make fun of their gods. So, while Greek priests were carrying out their special duties, Greek artists and philosophers were following their own muses and insights. Also, as time passed, Greeks and later Romans didn’t take the mythology very seriously. By the time Ovid wrote METAMORPHOSIS, most educated elite people in the Empire didn’t really believe in the stuff. They kept it up as tradition, as source material for creativity.
Christianity had a certain consistency. It said there is one and only God and He was for everyone. And it said Jesus revealed the ultimate moral truth, and so, we don’t need to think too much. Also, Jesus’s
pain and suffering, as related in the New Testament, are no laughing matter. One can kinda laugh at the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah(with God smiting the homos), Samson and Delilah(with all the salacious details and Samson doing Rambo with the jawbone of an ass), and Moses(especially when he drives the Pharaoh crazy), but the death of Jesus simply isn’t funny — though there is an element of humor in how the ignoramus Disciples sometimes drive Jesus up the wall. Though a great intellectual tradition grew out of Christianity, the gist of Christianity was something on the order of ‘If you have Faith, you will go to Heaven.’ You can think if you want to, but you don’t have to because Jesus already did all the thinking and dying for you. Just have Faith in Him and you shall be saved.
In contrast, Judaism placed a great emphasis on thinking. For a Jew to win respect, he had to be knowledgeable and thoughtful. So, Jews couldn’t just get by with earnest Faith; Jews didn’t respect the idea of the ‘holy fool’ or ‘holy ignorance’. Instead, Jews had to know as much as possible about the Torah — and later Talmud — and think about it and discuss it with the Rabbis. But the thing was Jews were only allowed to think within the perimeter of what was allowed by God in the sacred texts. Thus, Jews had to both obey dogmatically and think individualistically. They trapped themselves within a box, but as they were required to think and think and think, they turned the inside of the box into an endless hairsplitting pathways of mazes. (It’s like the Vortex in ZARDOZ, which is, at once, a boundless mystery and an enclosed trap.) And this aspect of Jewishness shows up in the works of Kafka and Kubrick, which explains why some people have driven themselves crazy trying to figure them out, when, in truth, there offer no way out. If indeed there is a key to unlock the mystery, the works of Kafka and Kubrick wouldn’t be half as fascinating.
When Jews were finally emancipated from their old cultural restraints, the mental structures remained intact nevertheless, and in a way, the stories of Kafka could be said to be about people who are both expelled and liberated from the paradise/prison of old certitudes AND both seeking and eluding a new kind of certitude. In contrast to Jews, most Asians never developed much of a sophisticated sense of humor since their culture came to be mostly about Obedience. Though East Asia did develop a long and complicated intellectual culture, the main emphasis was on rote learning and respecting the master-teacher. So, even though Chinese students worked very hard to learn, they were told to listen and absorb than think and figure things out on their own. In contrast, Jews through the ages were encouraged to think and question — like the young among the Ancient Greeks — , but they were not allowed to step outside the box of the absolute truth of the one and only God.
Even so, among East Asians, it seems Japanese have something closest to a sophisticated sensibility in humor because Confucianism was never as dominant there as in China and Korea(and maybe Vietnam). Japan was a land of great contradictions where Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto-ism, militarism, and vibrant merchant-ism all co-existed side by side, despite the ruthless rigidity of the social system. The brilliance of the Japanese was the manner in which they managed to be so hard and rigid AND so fragile and delicate at the same time. In a way, the two modes complemented one another. Since there were barriers and hierarchies that had to be respected among very different social, economic, spiritual, and political groups, everyone had to know the rules and manners, much of them unspoken(and transmuted through hints and signals ranging from subtle to brusque), that guaranteed that they wouldn’t get in each other’s way. This was why Japanese society could be so calm and yet so violent. It was so calm because people minded the minute do’s and don’t’s, but if anyone got out of line, it was regarded as a major breach of propriety, whereupon a samurai would chop off the offender’s head as in SHOGUN. Japan produced its share of artists of special comic sensibility such as Kon Ichikawa, Yoshimitsu Morita(the director of FAMILY GAME), and Juzo Itami, as well as fascinating modernist sensibilities such as Kobo Abe and Hiroshi Teshigahara, who made one of the most interesting writer/director pairs in cinema. And the subtle humor in the films of Yasujiro Ozu is well beyond that of most Asian sensibilities. Hong Kong has made many funny movies but essentially in the simple mode of slapstick, essentially variation of the pie-in-the-face-and-slip-on-the-banana-peel shtick, and one would be hard-pressed to find in HK cinema the peculiar kind of sensibility that hasn’t been uncommon in Japanese cinema. Generally, at least in the 20th century, most Asian artists seem to understand the separate modes of seriousness, funniness, sincerity, fantasy, and etc. without being particularly keen on to the hidden links among those categories. Japanese artists have been the exception, though not quite on the profound level of Jewish artists.
Perhaps, the people with the most advanced and sophisticated kind of humor other than Jews are the Anglos, but Anglo humor, no matter sly and subtle, is bigger on style than substance, more a form of tailoring than laying bare. It hints at things while averting one’s gaze from it, as if not to notice. Anglo humor relies heavily on irony but within the boundary of strict rules. If you know how the game is played, you can see the signposts and add up the score, and win-or-lose, be a good sport about it. British humor can be very nasty while seeming very genteel, but the thing is never to ruffle the feathers. The other guy can snidely put you down but in an off-handed way. Anglo humor will often mock someone while pretending to flatter him, aka damning with faint praise.
Of course, we are talking of Anglo humor among the elites and status-seeking educated middle classes, not among the lower orders whose idea of humor was calling everything ‘bloody’ and ‘shupid’. Because of the emphasis on manners and form — absolutely crucial to Anglo humor — , it has to remain within the designated playing field. Even the crazy Monty Python adhered to these rules. No matter how wild and crazy, the basic idea revolved on the primacy of form, with stiff upper-lip and all that. Things could be falling apart in the Monty Python universe, but there’s always someone pretending to be oblivious to all that’s happening, or the idea that there is a jolly good logic behind it all. So, despite the vulgarity of Monty Python, it too was very much in the tradition of form-centered Anglo humor, essentially a series of slapping people with velvet gloves.
The thing about Jewish humor was it was more wittily sophisticated than other kinds of humor, but it could also be audaciously bawdy and disruptive, radically anarchic; it tossed bombs than slapped with velvet gloves. Anglo humor, even when most offensive, had to remain within agreed-upon boundaries, though it might occasionally step out-of-bounds to raise eyebrows, only to step back inside to allow everyone go on as if nothing untoward had been said or done. In contrast, Jewish humor undermined boundaries and rules of what was funny and what wasn’t funny. It undermined the boundaries of what was high and low. So, Jewish humor could be very brilliant, but its effect could be like being grabbed in the nuts, fingered in the poon, or fisted up the ass. Anglo humor was tied to class, and it was expected that the upper classes had the right to talk down to the lower classes. Also, Anglo humor, as it was so fussy about rules, was something that had to be gradually mastered by absorbing certain mannerisms, attitudes, bylines, and reflexes. Since educated people had more access to books, learning, and proper manners, they had a humor-advantage over the lower masses. Anglo humor was rigged so that those with better form would beat those with cruder form, and so, most lower class Anglos took the snide insults — though dressed up as compliments — from their social superiors, tipped their hats, and said "aye guv’nor" and just walked away. Indeed, even when the social superiors were rather dim, they could put on airs of brilliance and sophistication with learned manners, haughty attitude, and few well-rehearsed lines they borrowed from their cleverer peers. They could rely on witticism than real wit. (Of course, UK today is a very different society where class divisions of old have been replaced by new social modes. Changes were already afoot in the 1950s with the Angry Young Man dramas and movies. But it was there in the music and comedy too, as in the 1963 film A HARD DAY’S NIGHT where the Beatles joyously poked fun at everything. Even so, the Beatles did it in good cheers, and no real offense was taken. Indeed the Queen even awarded them with something or the other.) Class privilege had been such an entrenched social reality in UK for so long that the upper classes became somewhat complacent in their social status. Within their circles, they were very mindful and conscientious of keeping up proper appearances and attitudes, but they disdained the lower orders as pesty flies that could be swatted away with a few witticisms and sneering looks. As long as the class system seemed a permanent fixture of British society, the upper classes took no real notice of the problems simmering amongst the lower orders. And as long as the lower classes felt browbeaten and downtrodden and over the many centuries, they figured it was just how things were, and that was that.
But Jews were different. Though Jews aspired to rise socially and did learn and play by the manners of the upper classes, they thought themselves smarter and wittier, and they regarded many upper class Anglos to be nothing but a bunch of pampered and spoiled dimwit poseurs pretending at refinement.
Also, if most lower class Brits thought that their lot in life was to remain in the social station into which they were born, even poor Jews had other ideas. Even a Jewish peddler figured he could make more money and rise higher. Paradoxically in many cases, it may be easier for aspiring outsiders to gain entry into the upper realms of society than it is for the lower elements. As both upper class Brits and lower class Brits were part of the Inside realm of British Civilization, one might assume the upper order of British society would have been open and welcome to the lower order of British society. After all, they were all British, of the same race and national family. But as long as the rules of British civilization was divided along class lines, most lower order Brits were raised to accept their station on the bottom and not complain. For lower order Brits, the essence of their Insider-ness was to accept their semi-caste lot, just as the duty of lower caste Hindus within the Hindu order was to accept theirs. For lower order Brits, remaining in the bottom was seen as part and parcel of their Britishness.
In contrast, Jews arrived as outsiders and weren’t really a part of the British family. So, one would assume that they would have been suppressed and stifled even more by higher order Brits. But since Jews didn’t really accept the class rules of British society, they didn’t feel a sense of soci-economic obligation to accept any particular lot in life. So, a poor Jew might dream of making a lot of dough and making it to the top. Since form was so much a component of British society, the British elites weren’t keen to be so forthright to say, "Fuc* off, bloody Hebes!!" It would have been uncouth and vulgar, a sign of ill-breeding and lack of manners. So, as Jews gained in power and wealth in British society and pushed into realms of upper class society, Anglo elites expressed their displeasure with subtle slights and sugar-coated venom. Of course, Jews were not bloody shupid and could see through all of this. Unlike browbeaten lower classes who just slunkered away when the upper classes insulted them, Jews would outmatch the upper class manner for manner, form for form, and attitude for attitude. Like the character of Zelig in Woody Allen’s film, Jews could imitate and outdo anything. But in imitating the Anglo upper classes, Jews were also slyly lampooning them. And if Anglo elites confined nastiness to the level of slapping people with velvet gloves, Jews would make a remark that had the effect of making its target feel like being grabbed in the nuts, fingered in the poon, or fisted up the ass. But the remarkable thing was ghastly ‘faux pas’ was still, in some odd way, within the playbook of manners since it was done with such wit and brilliance, the hallmarks of Anglo humor. It’s like ‘Zuckerberg’ act like a total ass in SOCIAL NETWORK but still commands respect with his superior wit; he’s a jerk who can outwit and outtalk the princes. Jews used vulgarity mixed with higher wit against the dryly sophisticated Brits, just like Muhammad Ali combined the clown sambo act with harder punching power. (Both Jews and Negroes were especially hurtful to white power, pride, and privilege because their success upended not only racial hierarchy but modal hierarchy. For example, the white ideal of the male warrior was the tough guy acting heroic, and the white ideal of the superior man was the intelligent guy acting dignified. Losing to Joe Louis wasn’t so bad since he upheld the standards of sportsmanship. But Ali, like Jack Johnson before him, was especially hard to take because he acted like a sambo monkey ape clown but whupped all the ‘white boys’. It’s one thing to lose to a black man, quite another to lose to a black clown punk. And Jews were especially frustrating since so many were short, ugly, and vulgar but also so much smarter, wittier, and sharper than even the most well-educated white gentiles.) A witty Jewish remark might imply and insinuate something infinitely foul and dirty but in a manner so devastatingly brilliant that one had to acknowledge the genius behind it. Furthermore, the insulted and beaten Anglo would pretend as if no offense was given since doing so would only be an admittance of having been fisted in the ass. It’s like the exchanges between James Mason and the various guises of Peter Sellers in LOLITA. Sellers’ character slyly but mercilessly fiddles with Mason’s character’s balls, but the latter just goes on pretending it’s nothing.
There are various modes of cognition and communication: seriousness/solemnity, lightness/comicalness, sincerity/earnestness, deceptiveness/deviousness, good faith, bad faith. We know what it means to be really funny, and we know what it means to be really sad, just like we know what’s hot, what’s cold, what’s sweet, what’s bitter. But bittersweet-ness is a trickier quality, as is sardonic humor. A certain crisis flares from the fusion of different modes, so the measure has to be handled with irony, insinuation, allusion, and/or elusion. You can’t just bluntly mix sadness and happiness. It takes a certain sensibility to formulate and understand sardonic humor, which is some cultures don’t really understand satire. All cultures can see the humor of someone slipping on a banana peel or someone breaking wind, but not all get the joke of DR. STRANGELOVE, especially as so many funny lines are delivered with straight faces; and they might not understand what is so funny about the world blowing up in the end.
If you simultaneously act refined and boorish in equal measure, you just come across as nuts.
If you wanna be sophisticated and cruel, you must master the chemistry of fine-tuning emotions and the art of timing so that your nastiness has all the trimmings of fine manners. It’s like a chef must control the temperature and know what ingredients to add and when. One doesn’t cook with a bucket of ice and a blowtorch. One must know how to braise and simmer. One must know all the gradations between hot and cold.
British elites found a way around this problem by trimming and clipping the edges of emotional modalities so that they would brush against one another but just slightly. As a more open and liberal society, there was more contact among free individuals in Britain than in more traditional societies, and therefore, cultural signals had to be devised in such a way as to preserve certain privileges and barriers without making them obvious. As manifestations hierarchy in UK wasn’t as brazen in other nations — where lower orders physically prostrated themselves before the superiors who acted like lords of the universe — , people had to know their stations and lot in life by picking up on the hints and signals. As the restrained British elites tended to eschew grand pomposity, their superiority had to be emanated and acknowledged through subtler means. In Japan, a brusque-acting samurai lord made it clear as day that he was boss, especially as anyone who didn’t bow down to him got his head chopped off. So, Japanese commoners got on the ground bowed before their lords. The British gentleman didn’t act so obvious and overbearing, but he still expected social inferiors to show him respect. Thus, both his display of superiority and the lower element’s display of inferiority were communicated through subtle gestures of, for example, him walking with his head held high and the lower element tipping his hat and saying ‘aye guvnor’.
The upper classes in Britain were supposed to be well-bred and well-mannered; therefore, many things were beneath them. Therefore, there were lots of things they couldn’t say and do. But one cannot say nice things to everyone at all times. But the upper classes couldn’t just go into crude & vulgar mode and speak their minds like the Burl Ives character does in BIG COUNTRY. They had to maintain their poise and dignity while broaching matters of a more troublesome nature. But how does one maintain one’s facade of gentility while digging at the dirt? As it was unbecoming to dig too deep and soil one’s hands, one put on white gloves, touched a little dirt, and then calmly dusted the gloves to show one’s displeasure with the expectation that others, especially the less well-bred, would get the message; if they didn’t, it was sure sign that they belonged nowhere near respectable society.
Perhaps, Americans made better Christian missionaries than the British did because the former were less obsessed with dignity. An American missionary might bellow about the message of Jesus the brother and shout Hallelujah, but the Brits weren’t supposed to act like that. Consider the dignified British missionary athlete in THE CHARIOTS OF FIRE. Because the lives of missionaries were often difficult in poor and underdeveloped areas of the world, a person with too much pride, dignity, and fetish for manners couldn’t get very far. One subject that the British became to be especially uneasy about was sexuality, especially during the Victorian Era. Perhaps, the contact with non-British cultures intensified the problem. Consider BOUNTY with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins where British order and discipline come face to face with bare-breasted tropical ladies. Brits condescendingly try to win the hearts and minds of the natives, but the natives shake their tits and ass at the British. (Of course, Negroes via American pop music culture finally turned the tide in the U.K., whereupon, instead of the Brits spreading order and discipline around the world, Negro influence spread chaos and mayhem all over British society.) The British became awful proud of their naval dominance and power, but they also felt insecure because Britain itself was so small. Therefore, for such a small people to gain and maintain control over the vast world of ‘darkies’, the British had to be mindful of maintaining their cultural and racial essence, as well as values of order and discipline. If the British became sexually wild and went off with the naked native ladies, their superiority would soon be undermined with their dissipation of discipline, especially as Britain was so small in land mass and population relative to the world. Also, Britain was a class society where the upper elements were very conscious of its differences from the lower elements. If the British got sexually wild and ‘liberated’, the lower orders would be shaking their titties and swinging their dongs, and the principle of dignity that was so integral to the British class system would be fatally weakened, and then class privilege would also be lost. Because of the nature and power of sexuality, it especially had to be controlled. During the Victorian Era, it couldn’t even be alluded to, intimated, or joked about in respectable settings. Though PASSAGE TO INDIA technically takes place after the Victorian Era, we can see how the British were still very repressive about sexual matters — to be sure, so were the Indians in their own way — , not least because it was essential in the preservation of the class system and imperialist control over the natives. To be sure, the Hispanic elites in South America proved that the dominant people could mix with the natives and still maintain control over them, but then, they pretty much ceased to be connected to Spain; however, it’s interesting how the Hispanic empire in the New World became racially less like the mother country yet remained loyal to it for considerably longer than Anglo-Americans did with mother Britain, especially given that Spain was a weaker power than Britain by the late 18th century. For the British Empire to remain whole, the Anglo elites ruling over the natives throughout the empire had to maintain their racial distinction from the natives, and of course, race is essentially synonymous with the sexual habits of a people, i.e. a race continues to exist because the men and women of that race continue to have kids together. If the British imperialist elites got too intimate with the natives sexually, they might grow closer to the natives culturally and racially while growing further apart from British authority and identity. With race-mixing, Brits in India might feel closer to Indians, Brits in Malaysia might feel closer to Malaysians, and Brits in Kenya might feel closer to Kenyans than they would toward one another as pure-blooded Anglos. And as the children of British overlords and native women would have been of mixed race, the former’s allegiance to and identification with the empire centered in U.K. might grow weaker. Thus, the conflict in BOUNTY isn’t just about sexual liberation and sexual repression. It is about the control of sexuality to secure loyalty to the empire; perhaps, if Great Britain was a huge nation with lots of people, the Brits might have been more relaxed about mixing with the natives; instead, UK rose as a little giant, a small island nation with a fixed population, and so every British person counted as the bearer of British glory. If British mixed with their subjects, they could easily be swallowed up as there were many more subjects than British people. So, the British came to feel that it wasn’t worth discussing sexuality at all. Also, manners became so important to the British that they became an 24/7 affair for anyone who thought of himself or herself as respectable. Even if a British person broke wind all by himself or herself with no one to hear it, he or she might feel embarrassed — just like Japanese girls were anxious to hear the sound of their own urine sheeshing out even when they were all alone.
Anyway, in order for British men to rise above raunchy sexual passions, they adopted the air of gayishness as if they were unperturbed by their animal hormones and couldn’t care less about tits-n-asses. British were simply not allowed to be like Beavis & Butthead in "The Mystery of the Morning Wood". Though Anglos, as they became Americans, became less inhibited about such things, in some ways certain Americans in certain regions became even more obsessive about sexual manners. At the very least, the British art of manners and wit allowed some degree of clever banter about all sorts of ‘off’ topics and subjects. So, even in respectable societies, clever fellas could have fun with double entendres and such. But the prissy Puritans who founded New England were suspicious of wit itself. Indeed, they were even suspicious of dignity as a form of sinful pride. The British upper classes could be purist and proper but they were not puritanical, whereas the New England types often were — just like the Max Von Sydow character in HAWAII. Another reason why white Americans became sexually anxious, especially in the South, was because there were so many Negroes. While Anglo-Americans were more into racial purity than the Latin French and Latin Spanish, the attitude grew graver as the South was filled with a lot of big strong Negroes. If white man were to lose sexual control in the South, the Negro men would whup the white boy’s ass and go after the white woman, and the traitor white whore might develop jungle fever and might want the ‘racially superior’ Negro jungle cum to fertilize their white wombs. Though interracism has been sold as some kind of love equality, it’s never been equal throughout history. In the case of the Spanish and the French — and white American slave owners who boffed their Negresses — , interracism was overwhelmingly a form of domination/conquest by the master race over the slave race. In more recent times, interracism in places like US and UK happens to be overwhelmingly black male on white female. If black women in the past went with white men because the latter monopolized the power based on economic, military, and political might, today’s white women go with black men because they believe that black men are racially-sexually-masculinely superior to the dorky, ‘faggoty’, flabby, and bland white boys. White cheerleaders applaud black athletes, and even as white wives watch football with their white husbands, they fantasize about being banged by some muscular Negro athlete with a gorilla penis. Thus, so many white guys have been so beta-male-ized and racially castrated that they fantasize about their own wives or girlfriends having sex with the Negro. The white boy, having been pussified, identifies with the white girl and wants to be ‘fuc*ed’ by the Negro too. As the Negro pumps the white boy’s wife or girlfriend, the white boy fantasizes that he’s the masterful Negro who can give white women super-orgasms; but he also identifies with the white girl and feels like he’s being humped by a ‘real man’. There’s no other way to explain Chris Matthews’s remark about Obama sending thrills up his legs. It’s almost as if he’s an honorary white woman whose leg is a giant clitoris. As for the Negro, he can’t believe that the white boy has fallen so low. He loves plowing the white ho because she’s prettier than some loud ugly Negress, but he also takes pleasure in the feeling of conquest. But the conquest is extra-sweet since he’s no longer a lowly Negro banging a white woman behind the white man’s back but the Negro banging the ho in front of the ‘faggoty’ white boy who’s reduced to supporting ‘gay marriage’ and whanking off to the sight of a Negro doing his wife. He feels about the white boy as Obama feels about Chris Matthews. The Negro is filled with contempt for the white man who is no longer even called a man but a boy, as in ‘white boy’. In the past, whites used to call black men ‘boys’ to keep them down lest they get uppity and challenge the authority of the weaker white guy who had power over Negroes through larger numbers, unity, organization, technology, and weapons. But in the post-race-ist era, whites are not allowed any special protection or privilege over blacks. So, one might say things are legally more equal now, but there’s the biological factor that gives the edge to the Negro who can kick the white boy’s ass. When the Negro sees all those metro-sexual white liberal boys cheering like ‘faggots’ for Obama, they are not filled with gratitude or goodwill. They just feel that white folks must be a bunch of ‘faggoty-ass’ pussies. And when Negroes see all those conservative males cower and pee in their pants(and apologize profusely) whenever they are called ‘racist’, Negroes know that the right-wing white man is as wussy as the liberal white boy. They all be a bunch of ‘faggoty-ass mothafuc*as’.
Of course, the Jews are loving this. Indeed, one major difference between Anglos and Jews is that the latter were willing to fuse different modes in fundamental and substantive ways. (One reason why Jews were able to challenge the Anglo upper class order much more effectively was they had the brains — even superior to that of the Anglo elites, not least because many aristocratic types earned privilege through inheritance than merit — and the money. The lower classes in UK generally didn’t have the means to get a good education to advance themselves much, and for the most part, the upper classes had higher intelligence than the lower orders. So, it was natural for the lower orders to accept their lot in life and accept the social divisions as, more or less, just and natural. That there were superior classes, middle classes, and lower classes seemed to be the natural order of things. In contrast, many Jews were very intelligent, so they had the means to academically outperform the Anglo elites. Also, as many Jews were businessmen, they could afford higher education for their children. So, armed with higher intelligence and money, Jews made inroads into the upper classes, and, of course, there was some degree of discomfort on both sides. Some Jews very much wanted to be accepted, and they were charmed by English manners and dignity — in contrast to the open hostility toward Jews in other parts of Europe — , and these kinds of Jews sought to assimilate. But other kinds of Jews saw through the facade of English manners and were well aware of the thin veil of arrogance and snobbery toward the Jew. But, as Jews depended on the English to stand up to Hitler as the Nazis rose to power, the relations became very complicated. Jews were clearly gaining over the Anglos in business and finance, and yet, if Jews alienated Englishmen as they’d done Germans and other Europeans — many of whom willingly collaborated with Germans to at least ‘get the Jew’ — , Englishmen might side with Hitler, and then Jews would be finished in all of Europe. Whether Britons sided with cosmopolitan Jews or with their racial cousins of Germany could decide the fate of European Jews forever. If UK had joined up with Hitler, it might have been possible for Hitler to topple the USSR as well. It was because UK opposed Hitler and called upon US to join the fight against Germany that the Germans couldn’t win in the East. But suppose UK had signed a deal with the Germans. With even UK on the side of the Axis Powers, US would have seen no point in getting entangled in the European war or with sending aid to the Soviets. So, one might think that Jews would have been forever grateful to the Anglos. Instead, Jews used the Holocaust to remind Anglos in the postwar order that any ‘micro-aggression’ against Jews by Anglos was also a form of mini-Nazism. In other words, even an off remark about Jews could be seen as an instance of mini-Nazism. So, even though US and UK saved Jews from Hitler, Jews only decided to spit in their faces. And even though the USSR lost anywhere from 15 to 25 million in WWII to defeat Germany, most Soviet Jews after the war had greater affinity for Israel and US. Even though USSR played a more supportive role in the creation of the Jewish state, Zionists sided with the US as the better bet. While Stalin felt betrayed by Jews and moved against them, UK and US gradually fell into the hands of the Jews. The only attempt to hold back the rise of Jewish power was through the front of ‘anti-communism’ by Joseph McCarthy. Though McCarthy didn’t brazenly go after Jews — and indeed was allied with some powerful conservative Jews like Roy Cohn — , there was a sense during the ‘Red Scare’ that International Jews were secretly working to undermine the authority of White Christian America. Ironically, Soviet gentiles felt the same way. If American Jews were slipping secrets to the Soviet Union, Soviet Jews were working secretly to send Soviet secrets to Israel and to the US. Jews were Yojimbo-ically playing all sides, their ultimate goal being Jewish Supremacist Power. So, even the so-called communist Jews in the US weren’t so much working for communism as using communist subversion to weaken the power of the Anglo-American elite. But then, Soviet Jews were pretty much playing the same game to undermine gentile authority in the USSR and Warsaw Pact nations. Ironically, even though communism was created by Jews, it was the communist nations that succeeded in rooting our Jewish influence and infiltration whereas US and UK increasingly became dominated by International Jewish Power. One might say that the West won the Cold War because it was nicer to the Jews, i.e. freedom and liberty provided to Jews in the US and UK made for greater advances in economic expansion and innovation whereas goy-ruled communist nations were left behind in the dust. While there is much truth to the role Jews played in the rise of the democratic capitalist West, the success of Germany and Japan after WWII suggest that perhaps the West’s winning the Cold War had less to do with Jews than with capitalism and democracy themselves that can perfectly thrive and succeed without Jews. After all, Jewish power was more prominent in UK than in Germany after WWII, but Germany did better economically. And the recent rise of China owes much to the Chinese themselves — though by borrowing ideas and attracting investments from the West — as China has virtually no Jews.) Anglos, ever so obsessed about manners, worried that it might be uncouth or undignified to discuss or make mention of certain things, and therefore, they perfected the means of brushing different modes together without making them collide and cause a ruckus. Jews were different. They welcomed the collision between the high and the low, the serious and the burlesque, the ‘vulgar’ with the proper, the rude with the cerebral, the iron fist with the learned words. Just look at how the formidable Jewess Susan Sontag walks all over the English interviewer of fine manners. She has the style of a lofty academic but also the venom of a street-fighter with knife in hand. Or look at Bob Dylan trample all over the Time Magazine reporter. Dylan combined everything: Folk, Rock n Roll, Woody Guthrie Hobo-ism, intellectualism, poetry of literary world, hipster-ism, etc. (Dylan played fast and loose because he felt superior to all his influences. He juggled everything and more since he understood them so well, could master them all, and do them ‘better’ or take them further than the originals ever could. He didn’t have to be stuck with any single mode of thought or manners as a crutch. He didn’t have to be country or blues or folk or rock n roll or whatever. Of course, Dylan could get away with it because of his great intelligence, talent, and chutzpah. If he had been a low IQ white gentile stir-frying everything, the result might have been just messy and pointless, just like a slow white boxer would have been pitiful imitating the style of Muhammad Ali without the requisite speed and coordination. Though style and attitude did matter with Dylan’s art and persona, they did so in relation to his real talent. Without talent, specialness isn’t very special.) Or consider Ayn Rand, the formidable libertarian intellectual Jewess who, despite her erudition and air of superiority, was always ready to fight like a professional wrestler: down and dirty, growling and grabbing, as if she was Norman Mailer in drag. She was mind and muscle, a theorist and a thug. It was this force of personality that won so many people over to the Jewish gurus, artists, and prophets. It wasn’t just the ideas or theories but the energy, power, and guts behind them. If Marx had laid out his ideas in a dry academic way, he wouldn’t have changed the world. Instead, he wrote THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO that blew off the pages like a hurricane. Freud was an intense personality willing to go where most dignified people dared not tread. He wanted to connect the dots between the dark subconscious and the conscious, between the groins and brains. Though many respectable people initially turned away in disgust or distaste, they had to admit that Jews were touching on matters that they too were fascinated with but were too afraid to admit. Thus, Jews must be credited with breaking down many of the walls erected against honest and open discourse. To be sure, the Jewish gurus, even as they pushed the envelope in broaching subjects and topics most people were afraid of — and often in a way that seemed wild, uncouth, and even deranged — , were demanding more freedom not so much out of love of freedom perse but out of love of power. They needed more freedom to put their ideas across, but the ultimate goal of their agenda was to gain more, then most, and then all of the power. It’s like Neocons initially came over the conservative side to be heard with an open mind, but once they gained control of American conservatism, they did everything to purge other kinds of conservatives. So, Jewish wildness and uncouthness, which had once served to break down the walls and bring forth more freedom, are now being used to erect walls to shut out views hostile to the global Zionist agenda. We are all Palestinians now, and walls are going up all around us to secure the permanent power of Jews. Political Correctness is a combination of neo-mannerism of Anglos and Northern Europeans AND the pushy virulence of the Jews, though the Jewish element/agenda has power over the Anglo element. At one time, Jews pushed against the Anglo-American wall of manners and propriety because Anglo-American power regarded Jews as hostile and dangerous upstarts. But as Anglo-Americans were into dignity and fairness, they couldn’t go all out and denounce the virulence of Jews. If anything, whenever Jews pointed out the hypocrisies of Anglo-Americans who invoked fairness but guarded their own privileges, Wasps became red-faced and embarrassed and sought to please, appease, and ease the Jews; they failed to realize that appeasing Jews is like appeasing Hitler; it’s a fool’s errand. (Anglos should have aired all the dirty laundry of Jewish history and demonstrated that the Jewish community is exclusive and tribal in its own way.) Jews may sometimes smile and act like they’re nice — just as Hitler put on the ‘nice and reasonable guy’ act prior to invading Poland — , but the core of Jewishness is to never give an inch unless you really really have to. Anyway, if in the past, Jews smashed the walls of manners and propriety as hallmarks of the Anglo/American elite power & social control, the dynamics is markedly different today. The current Anglo/American upper crust is composed of worthless whores of Jewish power. If Jews tell them to go kiss Israel’s butt, they do so. If Jews tell them to support ‘gay marriage’, they grovel and get on their knees. So, Jews now regard the norm of manners and dignity as being to their own advantage. They can now control it to aid and abet political correctness. Thus, Jews don’t merely attack the politically incorrect as ideologically wrong or intellectual stupid but as ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’, as if they don’t have the proper manners of enlightened and ‘progressive’ people. Neo-puritanism and neo-proper-ism are no longer in the control of conservative and/or proud Anglo/Americans; instead, they are now modes that keep the Anglo/Americans slavish to the Jews and homos. So, all the mainline Protestant churches think their main priority is to suck up to Jews, homos, blacks, and illegals since Jews said that is the only correct way to be a good Christian person. The cult of dignity that used to be on the side of white power is now used to undermine white power. If you’re politically incorrect, you’re not dignified enough to be part of the discourse on political and social matters. You are so ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’, so ‘less evolved’. So, the very Jews who once acted so noxiously and odiously to grab our attention are now saying that propriety is very important. Jews have essentially usurped the art of manners and cult of dignity from Anglo/Americans to be use against them. So, if in the past, the Anglos used the art of manners to fend off the loud and uncouth Jew who said ‘just the most horrible’ things, today’s Anglos, whose hearts & minds are putty in the hands of Jews, follow the cult of neo-manners where it’s oh-so-odious-and-noxious to mention the fact of racial differences, the truth of Jewish power, the dangers of the radical gay agenda, and the utter filth of black popular culture. Today in the UK, if a black rapper sings about violence, celebrates murderous hatred, and insults/mocks white people, the dignified Anglos are supposed to ‘understand’ the Negro and celebrate the jigro’s wonderful creativity. It would be impolite and bad manners to do otherwise. But if you merely point out that most of rap music is jungle jive ape noise from a bunch of thugs whose DNA was woven by dark forces in Africa, it’s not only ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’ but it’s a ‘hate crime’ against the state, and you must be dragged off to prison — and notice there’s not outcry about human rights violations or suppression of freedom of speech from Jewish liberals around the world. Jews want us to support the Pussy Riot in Russia against Putin, but they don’t say a peep about Britons who were dragged off to jail for spouting negative sentiments about blacks or gays OR for making a racial joke on Twitter. So, it’s terrible manners not to appreciate and praise some disgusting foul-mouthed jigger-jiving rapper, and it’s downright horrible manners to point out that most of what passes for ‘rap music’ is utter filth by a race of people who’ve never demonstrated the ability to develop complex civilization. So, Jews waged war on manners and propriety when the powers-that-be stood above Jews, but now that Jews have gained near-total power, they’ve altered the rules of manners and propriety so that whoever sucks up to Jews is considered to have good manners while whoever opposes or displeases the Jewish agenda is defamed as ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’. So, Lady Gaga can put on her filthy act all over the world, and we are supposed to praise her and call her wonderful. But if you point out that ‘gay sex’ is a matter of filthy fecal penetration, which it really is, then you are called ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’ and reviled as a barbarian without any manners and decency. So, Jews can act in the ugliest, vilest, most offensive, most insulting, and most obnoxious way — like Sarah Silverman, Tim Wise, Howard Stern, Bill Maher, Frank Rich, etc. — , but we are supposed to honor and praise them for their chutzpah, courage, daring, boldness, and freshness. But if you speak truth to Jewish power even in the calmest and gentlest manner, you are just the most ‘odious’ and ‘noxious’ creature on Earth, and you have no right to speak in public ever again, you should be blacklisted from your job, your business should be boycotted, and your whole reputation should be ruined. These are the same Jews who keep telling us that Joe McCarthy was a bad guy for using bullying tactics to silence certain voices.
Anyway, the interesting thing about creativity is that the seemingly unserious, unimportant, and unworthy can serve as the basis for something serious or at least deserving of serious consideration. Perhaps, it’s like the dynamics behind ‘greasing the treads of our tanks’. For hard and weighty things to work together without grinding and wearing/tearing each other apart, they need to be lubricated. This is something Mozart instinctively understood but which Salieri did not. Salieri may have been more reverent and appreciative of serious music, but it was all about pomp and grandiosity(at least according to AMADEUS the movie as I know next to nothing about the real Salieri). At his core, Mozart also loved music as a serious art form, but he — intellectually or not — grasped that creativity comes alive from the friction of reverence and parody, from kneeling before the masters but also from kneeing them in the balls, intuiting comedy as the flip-side of tragedy. Marx Brothers in NIGHT AT THE OPERA riotously mocked the world of classical music, but one could argue Mozart actually went the one better for his music, even as its gravest, had comedy built into it. Perhaps, the opera was more Mozart’s forte than Beethoven’s, who composed only one, because there’s something inherently funny and ridiculous about it. Opera is probably both the noblest and the most laughable of the arts. Beethoven’s one opera, FIDELIO, is regarded very highly, but it isn’t as beloved as the works of Mozart and others. Other than the popularity of AMADEUS the movie, Mozart may have eclipsed Beethoven as the favorite composer of the masses because of his interplay of lightness and darkness, of gravity and groove. Beethoven may have been a greater composer, but much of his music sounds hard and stern(unforgiving), though, to be sure, he composed light and sunny works as dark and gloomy ones. (In some ways, the character of Mozart in AMADEUS isn’t only something of an ersatz Jew but an ersatz homo. Though a straight gentile character in the movie, he embodies many qualities most closely associated with the two most powerful and privileged minority groups: Jews and homos. The play/movie might even be called ‘homodeus’ or ‘amajudeus’. Tom Hulce plays Mozart especially as a kind of prancing fluffy, fruity, and flamboyant sort of fella with a funny laughter and a thing for colorful fashions. Fruiters in the audience would certainly have gotten the joke. And the fact that Mozart became THE classical composer for the masses demonstrates the power of the media. The shift from Beethoven to Mozart didn’t happen because the masses suddenly decided to listen to Mozart and came to appreciate his music more than Beethoven’s but because Mozart grew in name recognition as a fun and funny guy on the big screen. This illustrates that the masses, without thinking, can be led to favor one thing over another purely as the result of hype. Indeed, the fact that Al Gore might have won the 2000 election if he’d only kissed Oprah on the lips is a sure sign of the kind of trashy society we are living in. It’s not like the old days where there was the family and a cultural, spiritual, and social sphere separate from popular culture and MSM. The family and local communities were strong, and children were told of and connected with the stories of their forebears. People attended Church as a reminder that there is something grander, bigger, and more eternal than their all too short lives and the faddishness of pop culture. And culture wasn’t just about the latest music and movies but a sense of tradition and identity organized around rituals and ceremonies. But pop culture now permeates every corner of our lives. In the 50s, kids began to have their own record players and TVs. Now, no matter where you are, you could be hooked up to some device that is feeding the latest ‘twit’ from the latest celebrity whose mush-brains are essentially the putty in the hands of rich Jews and gays. Just consider the lemming-like behavior of all those programmed-progressives who changed their avatars on Facebook to ‘gay marriage equality’ sign since everyone else was doing it, and it was the hip and ‘must’ thing to do. Pop culture is the only culture, and political correctness is the only value system.)
In our age of Pop Culture, we don’t like things to be too heavy and grave, which may explain why most cinephiles now prefer Alfred Hitchcock over Ingmar Bergman. Even when Bergman worked in light or comedic mode, he worked very consciously as an artist, whereas Hitchcock, as meticulous and control-freakish as he was, worked in a spirit of perverse fun. And it may explain the high regard for Yasujiro Ozu and Fellini’s 8 ½ in Sight and Sound magazine’s The Greatest Films Poll. Fellini’s magnum opus invokes the ideas and fashions of 20th century modernism through a musical-ish Marx Brothers sensibility, and the films of Ozu have a lightness and ease lacking in films of Robert Bresson. (It is then somewhat surprising then many still regard THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC very highly. Maybe many critics added it to their lists to show that there is a serious side to themselves — just as many included MAN WITH MOVIE CAMERA to show off their ‘intellectual’ side. Or maybe many critics chose JOAN OF ARC as a ‘feminist’ film, which it is not.) And even though Jean-Luc Godard has made many films since the late 60s, the films that cinephiles return to most often are the lighter and funnier ones from 1960 to around 1966. Godard without humor is like a dancer without music.
So, even though it’s convenient to divide the world between intelligent and stupid or between serious and silly, it may well be that intelligence feeds on stupidity and that seriousness needs some silliness. By stupidity, I don’t mean total mental retarded-ness that surely has no value. And by silliness, I don’t mean just acting goofy and ridiculous. Rather, I mean exploring and allowing the range of human existence, human nature, human needs, and human tendencies. It’s like one cannot be well-mannered and proper all the time, and even fine things grow out of rough things. (Also, if the purpose of an intelligent artist is to honestly delve into the truth of society and psychology, much of his intelligence will have to deal with stupidity since humanity is mostly stupid. Art is essentially an intelligent commentary on human stupidity, perhaps the central paradox of art. If all people were intelligent, sane, and balanced, there would be no tragedy and comedy. Similarly, though doctors are committed to health, they must work on the sick. Without disease, there would be no medicine.) There’s a time for everything like Ecclesiastes says. Certain truths can only be accessed/expressed through unpretty means. Think of films of Lina Wertmuller, Shohei Imamura, and Emir Kusturica. While obsessing with vulgarity and lewdness can be pointless and disgusting — as with Ken Russell, Kevin Smith, makers of THE FAMILY GUY, later Fellini, and Lars Von Trier — , a heady brew of blood and sweat fermented properly by a genuine artist can rouse the senses. It’s like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are part of geological reality. The forces within the human heart and body are like the magma beneath the Earth’s crust. Despite our best efforts to make sense of things and maintain order on the surface, there are forces all around us beyond our control. Humanity has tried to create the perfect society since the beginning of time, but it was often easily be swept away by floods or destroyed by earthquakes and volcanos, as was the case with Pompeii. It’s like the Tower of Babel that took yrs to build but was destroyed in a day. Man thought his mastery of power was invincible only to confront greater forces beyond his imagination, as happens in every Kubrick film, which is kinda like a Babel story where man’s hubris for order(or even disorder, as in the cases of Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and, to some extent, Jack in THE SHINING) is destroyed by a greater force of disorder(or greater force of cosmic order). Tragic as these ‘disasters’ may be, they are also necessary as violence is part of the natural process; after all, volcanos may destroy civilizations, but they reestablish geological equilibrium and unleash lots of elements, such as water, that are so essential to life. In physical terms, it means we have to excrete all sorts of liquids and gases. Mentally and verbally, it means we sometimes blow up with raw emotions. Some would say that the arts should be reserved for only the noblest, the most beautiful, and/or the most inspiring expressions of man, and there’s something to be said for that kind of art, as it’s preferable to be surrounded with and be reminded by expressions of beauty and nobility than ugliness and vulgarity. But, one could argue that art is also about truth, and the truth of life is multi-faceted, made up of ugliness as well as beauty, of ignobleness as well as nobility, of hate and distrust as well as love and bond.
Even so, truth is a high ideal and certainly preferred over lies. Thus, even when the artist works with low and ugly reality, we expect him to approach and handle it with higher understanding, intelligence, and responsibility. Good examples would be GOODFELLAS and TIME OF THE GYPSIES, films about very lowly and/or scummy characters yet done with empathy, insight, and artistry. Quentin Tarantino had this touch with RESERVOIR DOGS but not in his subsequent films where low grade stuff is handled in a low grade way(albeit with a high level of wit and cleverness, but then such qualities, no matter how high, are only vapid and corrupt in the service of junk sensibility). Sometimes, I ask how Tarantino could have made something as remarkable as RESERVOIR DOGS but then make nothing but demented retarded crap.
Anyway, if truth is a higher value, then ugliness can — and in some cases, must — be an element of art. But ugliness as ugliness is mere ugliness. To transform it into truth, the artist needs higher sensibility, morality, and integrity. But then, what if there is an artistic value to lies as well? First, couldn’t one say that the traditional ideal of art was a lie to begin with? In presenting the ‘best’, ‘highest’, noblest, and/or most beautiful, it created a false impression of life and the world. In traditional art’s service to the mythology of God and gods that don’t exist, wasn’t much of art drawing inspiration and meaning from things that weren’t true or didn’t even exist? In idealizing human beauty in sculpture, painting, and movies, hasn’t art often given a false impression of beauty? (Cinema cheats time or constitutes the lies of time because it preserves in pristine form how people looked and sounded at a specific time and place. Actors age and wither, but they are forever young in movies, like vampires that never age in TWILIGHT.
There’s an element of this in photography also, but the stillness of the image and the lack of sound prevent us from mistaking it for reality or truth. Cinema, especially sound cinema, makes us believe we are seeing dead people as forever young. Joan Crawford has been long dead but is as luminous as ever in her movies. The only thing that ages in film is the film itself as it accumulates scratches, gathers dust and stains, or loses/changes colors. With digital remastering, even that element of time has been wiped clean from films on DVD.) From the very beginning, Greek philosophers worried about the ‘nature’ of art. It ‘mimicked’ reality, and therefore it wasn’t the real thing that it mimicked. And yet, the power of art was that it made people believe they were seeing something that was more real than the reality it was imitating. By creating ideals of beauty, art made most people feel deformed or misshapen in one way or another as they fell well below such ideals; also the promise of permanence in art — sculptures that last centuries or millennia for instance — made people acutely aware of their own impermanence, especially as human beauty lasts but for a few decades; the appeal of becoming a vampire for Bella in TWILIGHT is the possibility of being young and beautiful forever, i.e. a living work of art. Humans are, by nature, idealistic in an instinctive sense. We are surrounded by reality and interact with real things in every way every day, but we are always looking for the ‘right’ thing. So, at a flower shop, we look for the ‘perfect’ bundle of flowers when such idea of perfection is only in our minds. Who is to say this flower is more perfect than that one? We eat what we can, but something in us always wants to eat the more perfect version of the thing. So, even though spices make the taste of meat less pure, we think it brings out the ‘real’ flavor of the meat. Though cosmetics make a woman more fake, we believe it brings out her ‘real’ beauty. Thus, our relations with art illustrates that the lie can be just as valuable to us as the truth. Thus, even when an art work uses the lie to mask the truth, it doesn’t necessarily lose its value as art. If anything, the lie paradoxically draws out another aspect of psychological truth. This was one of the themes of VERTIGO. Scotty(James Stewart) was fooled by the lie of ‘Madeline’ and later tried to recreate ‘Madeline’ by turning Judy into something/someone she isn’t. VERTIGO is layered with lies and illusions, but the flip-side of each lie is a kind of truth: it bares the truth of how the human mind/heart creates its own ‘truth’. (There is also a hypnotic aspect to art, one that is drawn from the very nature of perception itself. Perhaps, the most dangerously magical moment is when a pair of eyes stares into another pair of eyes. In the opening credit sequence of VERTIGO, swirling patterns form as we gaze into an eye staring straight at us. Eyes-looking-at-eyes is different from eyes looking at other things. When you look at a box, you’re looking at a box. When you look at a building, you’re looking at a building. When you look at a tree, you’re looking at a tree. When you look at hands, you’re looking at hands. When you look at someone’s eyes averted from your gaze, you’re looking at his or her eyes. But when your eyes meet someone’s else’s eyes, you’re no longer merely looking at the person’s eyes. Purely in physical terms, it’s eyes looking into eyes, but in psychological terms, the effect is strange and hypnotic. You feel as if you’re gazing into the person’s soul and the person into yours. The process is beyond physio-perceptual. It may even be beyond psycho-perceptual and take on an element of ‘spirituality’. Eyes-looking-into-eyes is like mirror-facing-a-mirror, which doesn’t just reflect one another but reflect one another reflecting another and reflect one another reflecting one another reflecting one another and so on. The voyeur seeks to overcome this vertigo-effect by watching the other person in secret. The voyeur looks directly at the person, but the person’s gaze is averted from the looker. Scotty in VERTIGO begins in voyeur mode. He thinks he’s looking at the woman while he himself is hidden from her. But as their gazes meet, he falls deeply into her soul. Thus, when ‘Madeline’ dies, it’s as if a part of himself died with her because his soul had been vertiginously pulled into her. When their eyes met, they weren’t just two people looking at another but two people sharing souls through the mutual gaze. So, a part of Scotty died along with ‘Madeline’, and a part of ‘Madeline’ is alive within Scotty. In this sense, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice could be about the realm of the mutual gaze. A similar dynamics occurs in TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART 1. Jacob the Indian is grief-stricken by the apparent death of Bella caused by her birthing of a half-vampire kid. One part of him is angry at the baby for Bella’s death, and he also knows that as long as the baby is alive, there will be a bloody confrontation between vampires and werewolves. So, he goes to find the baby, perhaps to kill it, but when the baby’s gaze meets his, he falls into a kind of vertigo-trance and unconsciously — beyond his will — ‘imprints’ on the babe. TWILIGHT also has some of the bewitching eyes in all of cinema, and the final moment of BREAKING DAWN PART 1 when Bella’s eyes re-open is almost heart-stopping. The eye-to-eye contacts leads to a kind of sharing of souls. Eyes are both the most private and the most universal/egalitarian organs. Every pair of eyes stores its own trove of personal memories and secrets, but eyes often betray’s one’s hidden feelings. Also, all eyes are equally beautiful though all faces aren’t. It’s like what David Bowie says of Takeshi Kitano in MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE: "What a funny face. Beautiful eyes though." It is often through the eyes that a man can fall in love with a homely girl or a woman can fall in love with a dweeby guy. And even an ugly dog or cat, as it stares right into your eyes, can tug at your heartstrings. It’s like it imprints on you, and you can’t resist the spell. If Scotty in VERTIGO thinks his soul has blended with that of ‘Madeline’ through their mutual gaze, things get somewhat crazier later when Scotty meets Judy who really played ‘Madeline’. They are both afraid to look into each other’s eyes as both are hiding a secret. Judy hides the fact that she was ‘Madeleine’, and Scotty hides the fact that he’s trying to remake Judy into ‘Madeline’. Scotty thinks he has the advantage over Judy as he looks over her while she only wishes to be looked at with affection. It’s like the unequal power between a drill sergeant and a private. The former stares directly at the private, but the private must keep his eyes looking straight forward and averted from the sergeant. In the Old South, blacks were not supposed to look straight at whites, and in feudal Japan, a peasant had to keep his eyes averted from the samurai or else have his head chopped off. Scotty stares at Judy and notices everything he doesn’t like. He looks her over but is reluctant to stare directly into her eyes. He saves that for the moment when Judy will have been remade into ‘Madeline’. Though eyes are crucial to the sharing of souls, they have meaning only in context with the face/body. It’s like the window of a building facing another window of another building has the power to allure in relation to the structure that surrounds it. Why is the light in window in the opening scene of CITIZEN KANE significant. Because it belongs to a great mansion, inside which is a ‘great man’. That single lit window is like the single eye in the opening credits of VERTIGO. We are not merely entering physical space but psychological or soul space. Even before we know who Charles Foster Kane is, the film ‘imprints’ us by making our eye meet the ‘eye’ of the mansion as portal to Kane’s secret soul. The snow globe also serves as a kind of eye or eyeball, especially as it slips out of Kane’s hand and bursts into ‘tears’, though ironically enough, it also leaves the impression of a womb ‘breaking water’. Anyway, just as a drill sergeant tries to remake the private into a real soldier, Scotty tries to remake Judy into ‘Madeline’ with a kind of mercilessness all his own. And when he finally recreates ‘Madeline’, he is finally able to gaze straight into her eyes and makes himself believe their souls are reconnected through the mutual gaze. But soon after, he realizes he’s been duped when he notices "Carlotta’s necklace" on Judy. It’s worth asking why Scotty wasn’t alerted by Judy’s eyes? If Judy must be ‘Madeline’ since she has the very necklace that ‘Madeline’ wore, why wasn’t Scotty suspicious about her eyes? Surely, when he remade Judy into ‘Madeline’ and stared into her eyes, he must have realized that her gaze is uncannily like that of ‘Madeline’, especially as her eyes were one thing he couldn’t mess with. He could make her wear new clothes, put on new kind of make-up, and redo her hair in a new way, but he couldn’t touch her eyes. But then, why would he? It was probably through her eyes when they first bumped into each other in the street that he glimpsed something about her that was ‘Madeline’-like. But why didn’t it ever occur to him that Judy might be ‘Madeline’ since her gaze was so much like hers? Judy has both the same eyes and same necklace of ‘Madeline’, but he was fooled by the eyes but not by the necklace. When one looks at a necklace, one is looking objectively at an object. When one looks into another’s eyes, one is looking subjectively into a soul and pulled into a trance. Ironically, even though Judy’s eyes probably caught Scotty’s attention in their first encounter, he’s unwilling to stare directly into them until she has been remade properly into ‘Madeline’. He loves her gaze but will not give himself to it unless everything about her is made to ‘serve’ the gaze. When Scotty finally discovers the truth, he’s both repulsed and moved. Repulsed because he’s been used in a murder plot and toyed with. Yet, when Judy professes her love for him, Scotty is confronted with a key question. When he and ‘Madeline’ looked into each other’s eyes, did he share souls with ‘Madeline’ or with Judy? With a perfect goddess haunted by mythic neurosis or with a lonely soul not unlike his whose dreams and fantasies, however tawdry and pathetic, have the stuff of real poetry? In a way, they newly bond into one, not as mythic knight in search of mythic goddess but as two wounded souls who could only find one another by losing one another. It’s like what the Beatty character says in MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. He’s a cheap hustler in love with a junkie whore, but he feels ‘poetry’ in his soul. Paradoxically, ‘Madeline’ is both the bridge and barrier between Scotty and Judy. If not for the myth of ‘Madeline’, Scotty would never have known Judy. But it’s ‘Madeline’ that Scotty wants to see in Judy and thus comes between him and Judy. In a way, there is an element of this in all movies. More often than not, the movie audience falls in love with the characters played by actors than the actors themselves. The real person is so much less than the persona on the screen. Tom Cruise is badass in movies but just a putz in real life. Clint Eastwood is indestructible in movies but mortal like the rest of us in real life. Audrey Hepburn was radiant in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S but aged and withered in real life. TWILIGHT fans wanna believe that Kristin Stewart and Robert Pattison in real life are like the ‘forever’ characters they played in the movies. Actors and actresses are Madelines on the big screen but Judies in real life. But this dynamics also operates within the realm of life itself. A woman doesn’t just play herself in real life. When she goes out on a date, she puts on perfume and makeup and acts in a manner to heighten the ‘mythic’ side of her; and the guy tries to be as cool and hip as possible. Every woman is a Judy trying to be Madeline. Even naturally beautiful woman must be worked on to look especially marvelous, and they need to act in such a way to come across as ‘goddess-like’ — and since homos aid them in this vanity, it’s no wonder that so many women can’t resist the fruiters. And even naturally handsome men must master certain manners and poses to come across as truly cool. Eastwood and Newman had to practice at being ‘Eastwood’ and ‘Newman’. Thus, there’s a certain insecurity in everyone as he or she is a Judy trying to be ‘Madeline’. Even though we know this to be true on the conscious level, certain personas are so magical on the big screen that we wanna believe in the ‘Madeline’ side of them. Take Pierce Brosnan as Ian Dunross in NOBLE HOUSE or Ashley Gere as Alice Cullen in TWILIGHT. They are irresistible, and such roles are few and far between even for the biggest stars. Warren Beatty surely knew this as he was one the hottest stars of the 60s and 70s, but only a handful of his roles really made a difference with the public. Though HEAVEN CAN WAIT is pretty much a forgotten movie, the scene where Beatty stares into Christie’s eyes is one of those rare moments in cinema. It’s like the scene where ‘Madeline’ stares into Scotty’s eyes for what she thinks will be the last time before she climbs the stairs to ostensibly commit suicide. When a movie actor or actress becomes a star with a movie, we all fall in love with him or her, but no movie is forever, and so, the actor or actress feels dead/forgotten and wants to be discovered and loved all over again, as Judy wished to be rediscovered and re-loved by Scotty.) The truth is that we are born liars, and lies are so integral to the workings of the human mind that we simply can’t be purged of them, anymore than our bodies can be purged with germs that actually comprise a substantial part of our bodies; some studies say that up to 80% of us is actually made up of ‘foreign material’. When we watch a film like HOUR OF THE WORLD by Ingmar Bergman, we get the sense of an artist trying to tear away all illusions to expose the raw nerves of truth. In contrast, VERTIGO adds more and more layers of illusions and lies to reality, and yet, VERTIGO is fascinatingly truthful in its own way because the essence of human psychology is composed more of lies than truths. This is also what makes FACE OF ANOTHER(by Hiroshi Teshigahara) so interesting. The face may just a mask of the human soul, but there’s no understanding the soul without the mask and vice versa. The lie and the truth cannot be separated in the realm of the human mind or human community. Psychology, culture, history, society, and identity... they are all interactions of myths and truths. Not surprisingly, many intellectuals and scholars take their cues from figures such as Jacques Derrida. I never read Derrida — and probably wouldn’t know what I’m reading if I tried — and, therefore, not a value judgment of the man or his ideas, but the very idea of ‘truth’ has become suspect in our times. Even modernism had an element of Truth or counter-Truth, but now we live in a time when everything is supposed to be taken as yet another narrative, another ‘lie’. From such an angle, the older notions of Right and Left make less sense. Or the notion of freedom vs tyranny. In IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and WOMAN IN THE DUNES, the main characters find freedom through a kind of tyranny(of hostile forces or fate). George Bailey can’t go anywhere and is trapped in Bedford Falls. The character of WOMAN IN THE DUNES is trapped inside a sand pit. But in the end, they find their own kind of personal freedoms within the tyranny. Thus, freedom and tyranny are rendered relative.
(Of course, lies also have a kind of therapeutic value or padding effect as the truth may be too hard to swallow — just like bitter pills are coated with sugar — or too subversive of certain agendas. Thus, even those who wish to tell the truth almost always prefer not to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Suppose telling a certain truth may undermine your power, agenda, or career. The principled side of you wants to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but the realistic side of you knows that the risks are too heavy. Or even if you have nothing to lose, the truth may cause discomfort to others, and you simply don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. You don’t want to tell lies, but you don’t want to tell the whole truth either. What is to be done? It’s like the dilemma of the character in Sidney Lumet’s PRINCE OF THE CITY based on Bob Daley’s book. The narcotics officer feels a degree of shame over his involvement in police corruption and wants to come clean, at least partly. He wants to confess, at least to the point where he feels better about himself without jeopardizing his career and hurting his partners. But he discovers that for him to truly cleanse himself, he can’t just wash behind the ears. If you wanna be spiritually saved, you have to go all the way. He has to come clean totally and confess all the sins, even if his partners are brought down. But here’s the rub. Even if he were to come forth with the total truth, those truths undermine other truths. We would like to believe that he is a honest hero standing against the corruption of his partners. He is good, they are bad. But it’s so simple. Even the corrupt cops are honorable in their way, good decent men with families, and not without their own conscience. And there’s a reason behind their code of silence as cops depend on other cops in the toughest situations. It becomes a case of one set of ‘truths’ vs another set of ‘truths’. PRINCE OF THE CITY is a good deal more complex than the black and white morality tale of SERPICO. It’s somewhat comparable to ON THE WATERFRONT, where the protagonist also has to make the tough decision to ‘do the right thing’ even if he has to ‘betray’ his friends.
Anyway, MIRACLE MILE is stimulating precisely for its blend of serious and silly elements, of tragedy and ‘trash’. In this, it has shades of LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL, great movies made of pulp material. The remarkable thing about Welles — and few others like Fritz Lang — was the uncanny deftness of reworking ‘trash’ with such ingenuity as to turn it into treasure. In the first several decades of cinema, there had been a quota of ‘serious’ productions of ‘respectable’ movies — often based on classic literature — in any given year to impress the world that Hollywood wasn’t just about ‘crass’ populist entertainment and profits. So, there were movies like the adaption of ANNA KARENINA. Or Hollywood might import British actors whose accents added ‘class’ to costume dramas. And through such works, moviegoers who generally didn’t like to read might feel they were getting some ‘culture’, though, to be sure, highbrow critics were often more offended by middle-brow aspirations that diluted the most exceptional characteristics of art into kitschy formula than by popular movies that, however vapid and shallow, were honest in their lack of pretension.
The general idea was that a work should succeed as art or as entertainment; it should be genuinely elitist(or avant-garde) or genuinely populist. So, one could admire RULES OF THE GAME and LOS OLVIDADOS as art, and one could admire THE WIZARD OF OZ and STAGECOACH as entertainment. Ideally, those committed to art took a personal approach, and those committed to entertainment took a professional approach. When Hemingway wrote seriously, he produced works like FAREWELL TO ARMS. When he wrote entertainment, he wrote stuff like TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT(which became a fine movie) or screenplays for Hollywood. Both could be good in their own ways, but one was good as art, the other was good as entertainment. And Orson Welles entered cinema on the side of art with works like CITIZEN KANE, MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, and MACBETH. Like them or not, Welles was working in the serious and personal vein, as artists were ‘supposed to’. And THE STRANGER was clearly made in the entertainment vein. But what was one to make of movies like LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL? On the one hand, they might appear to be genre exercises with caricatures than characters and plots that were hoarily pulpy in their convoluted twists and turns. And yet, the styles and moods were so unique and visionary, bold revelations of cinematic possibilities that others hadn’t even dared to imagine. They had all the exaggerated attributes of a circus and all the obliquely mind-bending aspects of psychological exploration. TOUCH OF EVIL feels like a whirlwind combination of Kazan and Hitchcock, but then, Welles laid the groundwork before Kazan and took bolder leaps than Hitchcock, who preferred a careful step-by-step approach, which may be why stairways are featured so prominently in his movies; his most unique and personal movie VERTIGO is where the methodicalness of tip-toeing up-and-down the staircase breaks down, where finally Hitchcock abandons all inhibitions and lunges his imagination into that dark place where his secrets are hidden; Scotty’s(James Stewart) crazed breaking into the top-level of the bell-tower carries the same kind of sensual/emotional power as Ethan’s(John Wayne) phallic thrusting into Scar’s teepee atop a well-hung horse; it’s like sexual penetration, a kind of metaphorical ‘rape’, a moment when it’s finally laid bare what it’s really all about: the pud pounding the poon, and there’s no going back; this sexual element may be why VERTIGO and THE SEARCHERS are regarded so highly by cinephiles; Hitchcock and Ford had dealt with romance and sexual themes before, but it was with these autumnal films that they finally ‘pulled it out’ and came all over the virginal pretensions of American cinema. Anyway, Welles, as a giant-leaper, tended to be more ‘hit and miss’ than a meticulous director like Hitchcock, but when his cinematic trapeze act made all the right moves, there was nothing else like it in cinema. One could study and learn Hitchcockian-ness, but Wellesianness was like a musical gift that one either has or hasn’t. (I wonder if Welles had a thing for low angle shots because he came from Theatre. Audience in the several front rows look UP at the stage. Of course, Welles wasn’t the first Theatre person to make the transition to cinema, but maybe he was among the first who consciously thought of attributes of Theatre that could be translated into full cinematic effects.)
While MIRACLE MILE is clearly not in the same league with the works of Welles, it has something in common in its nimble yet bold juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible elements and emotions. It too embodies a multi-layered and multi-faceted sensibility toward art and entertainment. Some may note similar qualities in Tarantino and his imitators, but a key deficiency renders most of their works meaningless. There is a core vision and search for meaning(driven by genuine human emotions) in MIRACLE MILE that is mostly lacking in most post-modernist-drenched movies. While both De Jarnatt and Tarantino clearly watched a lot of movies(bad as the good), De Jarnatt used his knowledge of cinema to convey deeper anxieties whereas Tarantino simply makes movies out of other movies. De Jarnatt is a diver before water-skier whereas Tarantino is water-skier all the time and nothing else(with the notable exception of RESERVOIR DOGS). Thus, De Jarnatt is closer to Lynch(or Cronenberg or even Kubrick and Coppola) than to Tarantino. David Lynch knows a lot about cinema, but he makes films about something other than cinema: his personal obessions, the psychology of sexuality and fear between realms of mundaneness and megalomania. Even if cinema had never been invented, Lynch would have a vision and a meaning of life. Tarantino would be nothing without cinema. He looks like Frankenberry — the breakfast cereal parody of Frankenstein’s monster — , and one could almost believe he was created in a lab by a crazy scientist whose experiment was to revive a dead brain with interest in nothing but movies.
Tarantino and his ilk and clones, in contrast, don’t seem to have any core vision, angle, or perspective on anything outside cinema. They’ve just seen a lot of movies and can regurgitate bits and pieces of them in the form of homages — more like hemorrhages — on the screen. No matter now clever or quirky some of their movies may be, everything is on the surface. One could argue Tarantino has a passion for cinema and a unique take on reinvigorating them, but I would argue it’s more an autism than a passion. Passion connotes either an expansiveness(to know and feel more) or depth(for greater commitment and devotion), whereas Tarantino’s ‘passion’ is really a form of narcissism for his own hipster-nerd or hipsterd cleverness of playing with cinema as a big box of toys. He’s like the nasty boy in TOY STORY who likes to pull toys apart and reconfigure them to satiate his pop sadism. And his ‘vision’, if it could be called that, is purely second-hand and second-rate, mostly a grandiose but tawdry revamping of the achievements of other directors.
As some of later Coppola films like ONE FROM THE HEART and RUMBLE FISH demonstrated, you can’t make a decent movie out of nothing but style, mannerisms, and winking homages. Of course, Orson Welles knew this, which is why LADY FROM SHANGHAI isn’t RUMBLE FISH. While Welles indulged in the exuberant acrobatics of film-making, he had a psychic connection to his characters who were something more than gargoyles or clowns; thus, he wasn’t merely putting on a show but trying to show something. The bravura opera sequence in CITIZEN KANE isn’t merely a technical feat but illuminate psychological interiors that cannot be conveyed through words or gestures. LADY FROM SHANGHAI may be characterized as a ‘romance thriller’, but it has all the richness of Lang’s M and Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE parts I & II. The later Coppola, like Terry Gilliam through most of his career, thought he could make a great movie just by messing with surface pyrotechnics, but it was the lighter fluid than the wood that was burning. We know that the works of Welles smolder from within; a dash of lighter fluid here and there rouses the flames, but the fire, searing throughout the wood, has an independence of its own. But in ONE FROM THE HEART and RUMBLE FISH, the moment Coppola stops spraying on the fluid, the flames dim and the fire threatens to go out. THE GODFATHER and at least half of APOCALYPSE NOW burned with inner fire — as Coppola respected the narrative/thematic premises of Mario Puzo/John Milius and added his own creative fuel to the work — , but once he decided his creative fuel was enough to set any non-flammable thing on fire, he wasted much of his precious energy in his later movies. Welles, who got a start in theater as actor, director, and prop designer, understood the totality of the artistic process. Coppola, the product of film school at a time when the ‘auteur’ theory was coming into vogue, eventually developed the nutty idea that the great auteur could transform anything into gold with the cine-Midas Touch. In his greatest films, THE GODFATHER I & II, he closely collaborated with Mario Puzo and first-rate actors. When he made ONE FROM THE HEART and RUMBLE FISH, he thought his own ‘auteur’ genius was enough.
One wonders what kind of career De Jarnatt might have had if he’d continued as a feature film director as MIRACLE MILE is something special. Its interplay of various modes makes it considerably more interesting than TREE OF LIFE. This may sound rather odd since TREE OF LIFE is so grand and epic, spanning billions of years, whereas MIRACLE MILE is an 87 minute movie that mostly takes place in the course of a single night. Yet, the organizing principle and the emotional range of TREE OF LIFE are exceedingly simpleminded and narrow. It comes across as especially ludicrous because it makes so big a claim with so small an imagination. It’s like Oprah selling commercial soap as sacred balm. Malick’s sincerity is irrelevant because he’s obviously conned himself into mistaking his own urine for wine. All the outlandish special effects about the beginnings and the formation of the universe don’t add up to a plate of beans. It doesn’t matter that he spent yrs working to ‘perfect’ a form of voice-over narration hovering on the precipice between the infinite and the intimate. It doesn’t matter that he meticulously experimented with a new visual style that flitters and flutters through the clutters of life. All they amount to is a mind-numbing bag of cliches about ‘grace’ and ‘nature’, aka fluffy duff and tuffy ruff. Despite all the work he did with the actors, they are little more than stick figures. It doesn’t matter how fresh a loaf of bread looks and smells if it tastes like cardboard.
The problem isn’t so much that they’re archetypes than characters. Many characters in Kubrick’s films are also archetypes embodying broader themes than characters burning with individual quirks. The problem is the blaring discrepancy between the conception and the presentation. The characterizations are too fragmentary to serve as larger symbols and too emblematic to form into individualities. They are like tattered flags. Brad Pitt is Man as Nature who’s always trying to control things, everything from his own emotions to his son’s development. (He wants his sons to grow up big and strong but also fears the challenge to his authority as boys turn into men.) Jessica Chastain is Woman as Grace, glowing with sunlight and warmth. The son is Kid with Fear of Pa and Love for Ma. The younger brother is Darling Boy with Smile. The son as adult(Sean Penn) is Mr. Alienation. The characters seem too personally significant to Malick’s personal biography to be rendered into Ideas AND too intellectualized and metaphysic-ized to be develop into people who could care about.
Kubrick, Ozu, and Bresson understood something about this, i.e. formalistic characters belong in a formalistic universe; Tati understood it too, as in MON ONCLE and PLAYTIME. But the visual style of TREE OF LIFE is restless, energetic, and vibrant; it sings the song of life and calls the characters to ‘come out and play’ as flesh-n-blood characters, but they are not allowed to leave Malick’s prison-house of archetypal-ity. So, the camera wants to play with them, but they aren’t allowed to play. And on the occasion that they do play — as in the scene where kids chase mom with a snake or lizard — , it’s more like an elaborately preconceived and choreographed routine. No matter how much they scream or scamper about, it’s about as spontaneous as a TV commercial or MTV music video.
And I highly doubt Malick was going for expressive irony either, as there isn’t a hint of irony throughout TREE OF LIFE. One could argue that the wild roaming(or roam-antic) visual style is less meant to capture the rhythm of the characters than reflect the wandering soul of Malick himself, a kind of cosmic LASSIE COME HOME. Thus, the whole thing is a kind of memory-play and cosmic-contemplation. So, characters are really nothing more than phantoms, mental snapshots being flipped through within the soul of a man trying to piece together the puzzle of his life and fit that puzzle with the hidden puzzle of the soul and the grander puzzle of the universe. If photos in BLADE RUNNER ‘remind’ replicants of the lives they never lived, cinematic images allow Malick to revise and reinvent the world he’d known.
All said and done, it doesn’t rise above New Age solipsism because Malick uses cinema as little more than his escapist paradise, his neo-spiritualist Xanudu. Howard Hughes eventually hid from the world and lost himself inside movies he watched over and over. It’s as if Terrence Malick makes movies to create an ideal reality for himself, his own fantasia.
While there’s an element of escapism in every act of movie-making and movie-watching, the hyper-solipsism in Malick’s works beginning with THIN RED LINE has blown into malarial delirium. It’s like George Harrison composing "Within You, Without You" and "Blue Jay Way" as profound statements about who-knows-and-who-cares? In P.T. Anderson’s THE MASTER, a lost and lonely veteran of WWII finds his great guru and savior. Malick has finally found his master, and he turns out to be none other than himself. He’s like the wizard in THE WIZARD OF OZ auto-hypnotized into believing his own sorcery. TREE OF LIFE is the most lavish act of self-worship in cinema, a New Wage one-man Nuremberg Rally and Woodstock. It’s as if Malick’s doppelganger — like Clu in TRON: LEGACY — inside his fantasy world created a perfect vision of truth. If Fellini made 8 ½, Malick’s magnum opus is like 8 ½ BILLION YRS. Malick experienced a "Close Encounters with My Big Fat Ego". Galileo may have disproved the Ptolemy-ian system in physical astronomy, but in metaphysics, Malick’s soul is the center of everything. Though TREE OF LIFE pretends to examine the totality of everything from the topper-most leaves to the deeper-most roots, it’s really just Malick’s technicolor Tree House. Malick may have a Ph.D in philosophy, but he’s turned into a snake-oil salesman like Oprah, Deepak Chopra, and Rick Warren. It doesn’t matter that he’s the first and foremost victim of his own hype, as tripe is tripe. TREE OF LIFE might as well be called ‘Song to Myself’, or better yet, ‘Symphony to Myself’. The childish heart of TREE OF LIFE isn’t much different from MAGNOLIA, another bogus symphony to one’s own gasbag ego. Notice how both pretend to be so sensitive and embracing(and empathetic) but hardly exhibit anything beyond self-pity as self-aggrandizement. TREE OF LIFE’s central theme might as well be "Why aren’t I the Star Child of the universe, but then, who says I ain’t when I’m Malick the one and only!" Thus Spake Malickustra.
And what’s MAGNOLIA about? A bunch of namby pamby whiners so full of self-pity and self-tragickery as to be blind to everything else in the world. The problem isn’t the subject of human stupidity and frailty per se as small problems loom large in our lives. The problem is in unconditional indulging and endorsing of such attitudes and behavior. It’s one thing to understand that life is often tripped up by stupid and silly problems, but it’s quite another to turn flea bites into flesh wounds.
It’s no wonder our society has been moving toward something as trivial and stupid as ‘gay marriage’. During the great humanist era after WWII, people in Europe, Japan, and other places were faced with hard & serious questions about life, society, and values to live by. And during the Cold War, there was a genuine debate about the meaning of freedom and the nature of equality: equality of freedom and opportunity vs equality under government coercion(as in a prison system, and indeed, communism was one vast prison network where everyone was forced to be equal while the guards and managers of the system were ‘more equal than others’). Faced with war, poverty, and basic moral issues, the central concerns involved matters of substance, as in the films of Kurosawa, Bresson, Rossellini, early Fellini, Resnais, and many others. But with the rise of prosperity and narcissistic/hedonistic popular culture, it became possible for most people to imitate if not attain the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous. As a result, more and more people became obsessed with trivialities and nonsense. So, everyone in MAGNOLIA turns a molehill into Mt. Everest. They are utterly myopic in their blindness to anything bigger than their own big little hangups.
P.T. Anderson, ever so eager to be loved by his actors/characters as he pretends to love them, simply refused to pass any kind of judgment or take a hard look at their insipid and inane personalities. Indeed, as BOOGIE NIGHTS illustrated, Anderson prefers the narcotic over the truth. When the Burt Reynolds character beats the crap out of a young guy for calling out a whore for what she is, it’s supposed to be a heroic act of a noble paternal figure who cares about his flock. Anderson favors the comfortable lie over the stark naked truth. He feels the Burt Reynolds character is a good guy because, despite stripping his actors and actresses and using them as sex meat, he dresses them up with the warmth of his ‘parental’ caring. It’s the fusion of ‘innocence’ and ‘debauchery’, of infantilism and sexualism, and hardly surprising from Anderson, who is to feature film-making what the schmorky Ken Burns is to documentaries.
Martin Scorsese and Philip Kaufman didn’t pass judgment in MEAN STREETS and THE WANDERERS, but they didn’t get mushy and gushy either. They made tough movies about rough realities filled with all kinds of characters, mostly louts and leeches than lions and lambs. They hit hard and rolled with the punches of life. And Robert Altman did the same with NASHVILLE. But what is MAGNOLIA? For all its pretensions of delving into the sordid side of life, it’s a nonstop hug-fest and weep-a-thon, a pee-in-the-pants-a-thon, a baby shower for the fellas. It’s like a G-rated orgy where a bunch of guys suck each other’s penises not out of homosexual lust but for mutual support; they are like testicular cancer survivors in THE FIGHT CLUB. And at the end, when the characters are finally shaken out of their pathetic doldrums, what new reality or consciousness are they awakened to? A copout toad-strewn Alice-in-Wonderland. To some degree, Anderson seems aware that too many contemporary people suffer from a lack of genuine crisis to snap them out of their impasses. Individuals gained unprecedented freedoms in modern America, but what has all this freedom wrought in the lives of many people? Instead of using freedom to solve problems, many freely fixate on problems as the rationale for their victim-hood. (The dramatic premise of THE MASTER is strikingly different from MAGNOLIA since the central character is a veteran of WWII who surely witnessed unspeakable horrors that continue to haunt him. But what THE MASTER has in common with BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA is Anderson’s sentimental attachment to therapeutism that, as often as not, has nothing to do with the truth. While some forms of therapy are organized to gradually make one face up to the truth, other kinds of therapy ‘heal’ the patient by making him feel good under the spell of certain myths; it’s like what the future beings do for David in the final scene of A.I. It’s as if Anderson believes that there is a child within us that never grows up and always needs fairytales, always need to be hugged by a ‘master’ or ‘protector’. So, even a porn ‘actress’ needs to be assured that she is ‘part of the family’ and loved. She finds her ‘master’ or ‘patriarch’ in the Burt Reynolds character. So, even as Anderson shows the tawdry side of the L-Ron-Hubbard-like figure in his latest film, he can’t help feeling a certain affection for the man for his desire to ‘help’ people and make them feel better, even if he has to fool them and himself to do it. Similarly, the fairytale ending of MAGNOLIA has a dual quality. It is, on the one hand, a shocking event that slaps people out of their silly hangups. But it’s also a ‘miracle’ that makes them believe in the magic that the frog can turn into a prince.) If some people freely choose to play at ‘victim’ — it certainly worked for Obama — , others market the false hope of beating victim-hood with a surefire formula, but that con also feeds on the victim mentality of others. Tom Cruise’s character — just about the only interesting person in MAGNOLIA — pretends to be strong, manly, and above self-pity, but just like the fantasy figure of Tyler Durden in THE FIGHT CLUB, he relies and feeds on the beta-male wimpery of men who just can’t figure it out for themselves. So, he too is a member of the culture of self-pity and victim-hood, and of course, L. Ron Hubbard channeled this very psycrisis in the soul of modern man, especially as so many men were returning from WWII. WWII had a dualistic effect on many men. On the one hand, it scarred their souls for life as they’d witnessed so many horrors. The war defeated a part of their souls. But the war also made them feel like real men, especially as gung ho American guys defeated the Germans and the ‘Japs’. So, just as the war defeated yet also built up their manly souls, the peace bolstered yet also battered their male egos. After the war, as victorious heroes in a free and peaceful America, many veterans finally had the chance to make it and rise up the social ladder. But the civilian peace was just too wimpy for many men who’d been trained in war; they couldn’t be manly men as they’d been during the war. So, L. Ron Hubbard, at least according to his alter-personality in P.T. Anderson’s THE MASTER, toyed with this duality of manhood. He understood the part of man that feels defeated and wants to be embraced AND the part of man that wants to attain the mastery of destiny and the universe. Anderson seems fascinated with this kind of psychology. Not only did he get Tom Cruise — the most famous Scientologist in the world — to play the role of Macho Master in MAGNOLIA, he expanded on this theme in THE MASTER, which is drawn loosely from the life of L. Ron Hubbard. A lot of people mock Scientology — probably for good reasons — , but they should also take a close look at Malick’s TREE OF LIFE for it’s really Malick’s own Scientology.
Though Malick’s TREE OF LIFE and Mel Gibson’s PASSION OF CHRIST are very different, they have one thing in common: they rub our noses in the stuff. Gibson guilt-baits us with bloody flesh of Jesus, and Malick guilt-frees us with the cottony softness of his mother as New Age Mother Mary. TREE OF LIFE may be more pleasant on the surface, but it’s the same wallowing in the totality of sensation and sentimentality with hardly any thought between them. In 3D(as I only watched the 2D version), I’m sure TREE OF LIFE would have felt even more immersion-ary. Gibson makes us share the intense pain, misery, and guilt while Malick makes us share the warm glow of hope and redemption, but there’s hardly much else. One breaks your thumb and other makes you suck on it.
MIRACLE MILE offers a more mature vision, odd as it may sound given its marketing as a romance-thriller to a target audience composed mainly of 80s youth. But like original THE WICKER MAN(which turned out to be anything but a throwaway horror flick), De Jarnatt’s movie plays on many levels in so many ways, turning sudden curves and screeching out surprises in plot and our emotional responses. Those who went to see PASSION knew what they were getting and got it. And in the first few minutes of TREE OF LIFE, you know what it’s going be about, all that stuff about fluffy duff and tuffy ruff. When movies are this simple-minded and mono-toned, you feel trapped inside an expressive and emotional prison. TREE OF LIFE is like a choral symphony insanely played with just one chord, repeated over and over, sometimes loud and sometimes soft, but always the same tune.
MIRACLE MILE, like THE WICKER PARK, is delightfully and darkly a tricky piece of work and not simply due to the twists of plot. If it were only about the plot, the fascination would fade with the conclusion of the story. But, as with VERTIGO, LA JETEE, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, and L’APPARTEMENT, the element of ‘surprise’ remains even when we know the outcome because it taps into a part of our psyche that can never be resolved. In some movies — such as the vapid PRESUMED INNOCENT — , we watch just to know what happened or who-dun-it, but once we know, we don’t care because the revelation is trite — and the style and form weren’t much to begin with. We finally discover that the killer in PRESUMED INNOCENT was the man’s wife because she was jealous of the other woman. It’s about as interesting as finding out the dog ate the pie because it likes to eat. PRESUMED INNOCENT plays on our subconscious fears, but its revelation is easily understood by our conscious mind; it evaporates in the light. This is probably why a lot of mystery stories, even very good ones, are worth reading or seeing only once. It’s like playing a pictorial maze to go from point A to point B. Once you know the solution, you don’t wanna play again. Plot-centric mysteries evaporate in interest once we know who-dun-it. But there are some films that tap into areas of the mind that trigger certain responses that can never be resolved. These films are less like plot mazes than psychological mazes — like mandalas used by Buddhists to meditate — , and of course, the mind is an endless maze. Even if you know the plot of LA JETEE, there are things in the film that keep provoking a part of your psyche. It has such a hypnotic effect that you can almost believe that things will turn out differently in subsequent viewings, something that can also be said for Gilles Mimouni’s L’APPARTEMENT. It’s like certain recurring dreams that always end the same way but lulls you into believing it could be otherwise every time. This was achieved by Chris Marker in LA JETEE through hope and poetry as well as with fear and dread; the negative elements make you want to escape from the film’s world, but the beautiful elements pull you in, all the more ironic since the protagonist is seeking escape from his world into ‘our world’ but through a device held by the controllers of his world; the prison guard’s key that holds him in the prison is also the key that lets him out of the prison, but even the ‘free world’ of his psychic-furlough could only be hallucinations induced by the powers-that-be. (Dreams are often presented in art/entertainment as the realm where all our hidden hopes and fears come alive, but dark matter and black holes exist in the subconscious as in the cosmos. It’s like how the Leonardo DiCaprio character cannot see his children’s faces in his dreamworld. It’s like how people can never dream the dream they want to dream. Suppose they lost someone special and wanna meet that person again in a dream, but he or she never appears, never shows his or her face. Often in dreams, we keep seeing what we don’t want to see but never see what we most wish to see. Phantoms play hide-and-seek in the subconscious.) Though MIRACLE MILE is no masterpiece, it has a certain greatness. As cinematic achievement, it’s on the level of THE WICKER MAN, which has one of those endings that you can never shake off and not simply for its physical horror. It’s like Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." At the end, the chieftain of the village explains everything, and yet it explains nothing. Like Shirley Jackson’s short story THE LOTTERY, it makes sense but no sense. The pagan townsfolk are modern people yet also superstitious murderers yet also happy children of nature. The police officer is a hero, a knight in the quest for the grail in the form of a lost girl but also a priggish coward unfit for martyrdom who prays to Jesus as much out of fear as in faith. Our conscious mind processes the final revelation, but our subconscious mind remains confused and/or fascinated. It’s like what Sergio Leone said of the garbage truck scene in ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA as related by James Woods: "Leone obviously wanted to keep this ambiguous. The pages relating to it in the screenplay are missing and an actor other than James Woods was hired to play the scene. Leone's reasons are not known but it does start the audience to think about the movie, talk about it and view on more than occasion. ‘Did I die in the garbage truck?’ is said to be the most frequent question James Woods is asked and even he doesn't know. Woods says that Leone's comment was ‘It's like Jimmy Hoffa. We know but we don't know but we know.’ And Woods adds ‘There's one thing we know. He won't be coming to dinner tomorrow night.’" But it’s not just the matter of the plot. Even if we knew for sure the WHAT with Max and the garbage truck, we would never really know the WHY. (Similarly, Karla remains a mysterious figure even with his capture in SMILEY’S PEOPLE. We learn he was lured with the promise of reuniting with his daughter, but we’ll never know why such a ruthless figure who sacrificed everything to the revolution, the power, and the game could finally be undone by something so personal and sentimental.)
Of course, in the cases of THE MIRACLE MILE and THE WICKER MAN, we do know for sure what happens at the end, but psychomotionaly, they too are like "We know but we don’t know but we know." Instead of presenting an answer that unties every knot, we are left with threads winding into new patterns of puzzlement. In certain dreams, just when you’ve solved a seemingly insurmountable task, it transmogrifies into yet another problem. And this is why many critics almost never tire of VERTIGO. They know all the twists of the plot — especially as Hitchcock gives away the secret two thirds into the movie(just like he ‘violated’ the convention of the main character in PSYCHO by having her killed one third into the movie; incidentally, both VERTIGO and PSYCHO involve the disappearance of the main female character in the first half of the film, and the second half is about trying to reclaim the woman. Scotty tries to reclaim her by recreating her through someone else, and the sister and boyfriend in PSYCHO try to reclaim the woman by finding out what happened to her. But in a strange way, Scotty has something in common with Norman Bates as well. Each lost the woman who meant most to him, and each has recreated her. We later learn that Bates dug up his mother’s body and imbued the corpse with his own life, and eventually, made a part of himself into herself and vice versa. Scotty isn’t so macabre, but there is a kind of necrophilia in what he does as well, for he tries to bring back the ghostly essence of ‘Madeline’ through another woman who, ironically, turns out to be the woman who was indeed ‘Madeline’. He does it by imbuing her with his idea of ‘Madeline’, which means he’s not only remaking Judy into ‘Madeline’ but into himself as well, as the ‘Madeline’ of his dreams is partly a creation of his own obsessions — sort of like the double of dead wife in SOLARIS. It’s like the ‘mother’ in PSYCHO is not the real mother but Norman Bates’s idea of his mother; thus, ‘she’ is largely him or his projection of his mother. Thus, a certain degree of psychological cross-dressing takes place in both movies. Perhaps, PSYCHO is a sicker and starker addendum to VERTIGO. Maybe through the character of Bates, Hitchcock was secretly trying to confess and exorcize his own sickness of trying to recreate all the beautiful leading ladies he lost. VERTIGO romanticized this process whereas PSYCHO, especially in its harsh b/w, stripped it bare. Scotty recreated ‘Madeline’ only to discover he was the dupe and victim, and then he loses her again. Even so, there is a romantic charge and beauty to the tragedy of VERTIGO. In contrast, the lingering images from PSYCHO is the dried out skull of the mother in the cellar and the vertigo-inducing stare of Norman Bates in the mental hospital. VERTIGO is about wanting the woman one cannot have; PSYCHO is about wanting to be rid of a woman who cannot be rid of, out of guilt and need for security, and maybe in that sense, the ‘mother’ also represented Hitchcock’s homely wife, Alma, who didn’t stir Hitchcock’s romantic imagination but was someone he couldn’t do without and was the one certain woman in his life. Maybe Hitchcock was feeling that he better control his obsessions as he might go from Scottyism to Normanism. And in a way, his next two films offer some kind of resolution. The woman in THE BIRDS does survive and arrives at some kind of understanding of her dark sexual forces. And the woman in MARNIE finally gets to the root of her sickness and walks out into the new day. Though the recent movie HITCHCOCK isn’t much, it had one arresting image, that of Hitchcock peeping at the audience from inside the projection booth. The image, of course, invokes the scene of Norman Bates peeking into the room where Janet Leigh’s character is undressing. We tend to think of watching movies as a form of ersatz-voyeurism — we ‘hide’ in the dark and sneak a peek at the lives unfolding on screen — , but the provocative scene in HITCHCOCK suggests another layer of voyeurism where the audience who are ‘hiding’ in the dark are also being peeked at. Thus, there is a double layer of peeking: audience at the screen, and Hitchcock at the audience. And there’s a third layer if we consider ourselves peeking at ‘Hitchcock’ peeking at the audience. Though movies make us feel as though we’re prying into the lives of ‘others’, film-makers are out to manipulate us for delight, profit, and power. So, even as we ‘peek’ at the glamorous bodies on the big screen, it’s as though film-makers are peering into our souls to see what buttons can be pushed to bring out certain responses; moviegoers are like guinea pigs in a mass laboratory experiment of pop-psychological manipulation. The film industry and other members of the elites came to better understand what makes us happy, sad, angry, inspired, guilty, etc. by studying our relations with and responses to mass entertainment. Many movies and TV programs gleefully push sado-pathosistic buttons. A reality show will have people do horrible things to one another — one show even had a father dump giant cockroaches into a container holding his young son —, and the audience is turned on by the sadistic thrill of it all. But there’s also the element of pathos, of rooting for the father and son to meet the challenge and walk away with maybe $100,000. Or consider HUNGER GAMES where the audience is filled with both vicious sadism and gushy pathos as they scream for blood-n-guts but with bleeding hearts for their favored players in the game. And there is a blend of sadism and pathos in the Crucifixion of Jesus as well, which explains why PASSION OF THE CHRIST raked in so much cash. So, the idea of ‘total cinema’ as expounded by Hitchcock may have implications bordering on the sinister. The scene where ‘Hitchcock’ — played by Anthony Perkins — goes from the projection booth to the lobby and eagerly waits for the shower scene to do its trick — with equal measures of anxiety and confidence — is the best thing in the movie. Hitchcock mastered the art of finding and pushing the right buttons, and Spielberg learned from him — as well as from Disney and Capra — the art of playing the audience like an instrument. Thus, when an audience watches a Spielberg movie, they are not a separate entity watching another entity called the movie, but instead, their very responses are part of the movie. If VERTIGO is Hitchcock’s strangest movie, it’s because, at some point, he no longer knew if he was pushing the button on others or on himself. It was one time his mastery got lost in the mystery. But then, as Burt Reynolds said in DELIVERANCE, "Sometimes you have to lose yourself to find anything." It’s like Perceval in EXCALIBUR finally comes upon the Holy Grail when he surrenders everything to the mystery. It’s like the character in THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE finally gets some water when he surrenders his fate to God. With VERTIGO, "we know but we don’t know but we know." HITCHCOCK the movie would have been better as a straight narrative of how PSYCHO was made. Instead, it pretends to peer into the secrets of his soul, but the revelations don’t go far beyond the tired cliches about Hitchcock’s obsession with tall blondes. It pretends to show something new about Hitchcock but peddles the hoariest rumors and speculations. It is also a kind of reductionism that would have us believe that the ONLY animating emotion in Hitchcock was his resentment toward the women of his life — the recent documentary about Kubrick’s THE SHINING called ROOM 237 has the same problem, highlighting various personalities who believe that they have the secret key that unlocks everything about the film and about Kubrick as well while they’re at it. But such an approach would have us believe that Kubrick wasn’t really an artist but some gimmicky maze-maker. If THE SHINING can be solved like a crossword puzzle, then there’s nothing more to be said after all the blanks has been filled with the ‘correct’ answers. HITCHCOCK pretends to be a movie for adults, but it offers nothing that might challenge the audience’s approach to Hitchcock. Those who know something about Hitchcock will roll their eyes, and those who know nothing will think Hitchcock was just some sexually frustrated fat body flailing around at the world, using the camera as his bludgeon or knife. What saves the movie somewhat is the performance by Helen Mirren as Hitchcock’s wife, so good that it even rises above the overt sentimentality at the end. Oddly enough, the film that comes closest to brushing up against Hitchcock’s sexual darkness is FELICIA’S JOURNEY by Atom Egoyan. Though not about Hitchcock per se, it touches on Hitchcockian themes through the backdoor of Hitchcockian formulations. It is counter-Hitchcockian if not anti-Hitchcock. Egoyan is an admirer but also a deconstructionist. If Hitchcock added glamour and romance to the macabre world of deceit and murder, Egoyan runs the same tropes through a different filter to capture the gross and tawdry. Egoyan is somewhere between Hitchcock and Todd Solondnz, and indeed made his name after the one and before the other. Almost certainly, the figure of the serial killer played by Bob Hoskins was a nod to Hitchcock. Art is funny in the way it works and doesn’t work. It’s like target practice. Often when you shoot directly for the bull’s eye, you miss the target and hit something else; but sometimes, when you shoot for some other part of the target, you end up hitting the bull’s eye. Thus, FELICIA’S JOURNEY may be the best film about Hitchcock though it’s not about Hitchcock, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA may be the best ‘adaptation’ of THE GREAT GATSBY, certainly more so than the several direct adaptations, though it is an adaptation of another book — THE HOODS by Harry Grey. By aiming for something straight on, one is liable to miss all the things around the central story that support its emotions and meaning. It’s like a curve ball or a slider can be more effective than a fastball. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA has a very different story than the one is THE GREAT GATSBY but picks up on much of the ambiance of Fitzgerald’s novel, at least more so than the various adaptations of the novel have done), — but the psychological shadings of Scotty’s obsessions cannot be explained by plot devices. Most mystery stories are content to play strip tease until the flesh is finally bared and declared as truth-uncovered. VERTIGO is more about the heart beneath the flesh; it’s not so much about who-done-it or even why-who-done-what-he-did but about how-he-feels-about-why-he-does-what-he-does. It is, at once, Hitchcock’s most ‘intellectual’ and most emotional work; at once, the most rationally elaborate and the most irrationally murky. The rational cannot solve the irrational in VERTIGO, and the two elements cannot be reconciled yet cannot be separated either, no more than the need for truth and the need for lies in the human psyche.
A spirit of creative freedom runs through MIRACLE MILE for its lack of adherence to any particular genre or message. Harry’s love for Big Band Jazz speaks loudly about the contradictions within himself and within the movie. Jazz came to be associated with freedom and improvisation(as well as blackness), but Big Band Jazz was often a watered-down cross-over form(of white Jazz) marketed to the mass audience. Thus, it appropriated the energy of Jazz for non-Jazzy purposes; it padded the punches and smoothed out the curves. Harry is old-fashioned in many ways, and ‘Jazzy’ simply doesn’t apply to him, and yet, the mad adventure of that eventful night forces him to improvise and be resourceful; it’s like someone who used to play for the Glen Miller band suddenly having to play bebop. Yet, Harry goes through all this trouble for an old-fashioned and sentimental reason: he wants to save Julie or at least be with her in the end. The movie is marked by a similar strain, being, at once, a standard 1980s commercial movie and a delirious improvisation of cinematic possibilities. It’s MTV and Coltrane.
Its lack of overt auteurism was also to its advantage, i.e. while De Jarnatt worked in a personal vein(serving as both writer and director), he put characters and the narrative at the center, making MIRACLE MILE a more generous and thoughtful work than AFTER HOURS, which, for all its virtues, has Scorsese’s overly intrusive and exhibitionistic camera stylo signature written all over it, as if with every scene and every frame of every scene, Scorsese wanted us to be dazzled by his cam-manship. Well, at least AFTER HOURS is funny and well-acted(mostly), whereas ONE FROM THE HEART and RUMBLE FISH are cases of overt maestro auteurism so out of control that Coppola didn’t even bother with the story, characters, songs, and dance. He thought, just by brandishing his camera like a magic wand, lead could be turned into gold. While overt auteurism can be a thing of wonder in masterworks like 8 ½, ANDREI RUBLEV, PLAYTIME, and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, it’s the humbler auteurism that usually works better because the humbler director knows his limitations as well as his strengths.
Perhaps, had MIRACLE MILE been a great success and De Jarnatt praised as a hot new talent, he too might have lost his head and made movies like ONE FROM THE HEART and TREE OF LIFE. Maybe, he too would have been tempted with playing the role of grand maestro. Usually when a director falls under such spell, he comes to see everything and everyone — especially honest critics — around him as a hindrance or obstacle to his greatness or destiny. Same goes for politics. When men of power are on the rise, they understand they must work together with others, share the credit, give as well as take, and so on. But once they become the ‘great man’, they don’t wanna be bothered by any advice or criticism; they don’t wanna share any credit. Instead of working with others, they wanna lord over others. Others are seen as pawns than as partners. Advice is seen as annoyance, and criticism is heard as condemnation.
In 8 ½, we saw the beginnings of Fellini’s megalomania(albeit sweetened with self-deprecating humor). It still turned out to be a magnificent work because Fellini tested the limits of his genius than took it for granted. He knew he had to do heavy-lifting with his creativity than merely ride it as a hot air balloon. His alter ego Guido played by Marcello Mastroianni was endlessly irritated by having to work with so many people and answer so many questions but still lent his ear to and dealt with the reality around him. So, there’s a duality to everything in 8 ½; everything is a thing in itself and a thing of fancy. Guido has fantasies about everyone around him, but he also acknowledges their stubborn independence as individuals refusing to follow behind the pied piper of his muse. But in his later films, Fellini turned everyone into a fantasy severed from anything resembling reality, and the imagination got staler with every picture. If you sever a tree from its roots, the leaves will dry and the tree itself will die. You can paint the leaves with bright colors, but dead leaves are dead leaves. Perhaps, it would have been better for Fellini the artist if everyone had dumped on 8 ½. The accolades convinced Fellini that he must be the greatest film artist that ever lived, so why not let the fountain overflow with water from his creative well? Never mind that the water ran out and was substituted with hot air. (If Fellini got on a fantasy balloon and drifted away like the wizard of Oz — key to Victor Fleming’s movie is the ‘spiritual’ tug-of-war between the fantasy of Oz and the reality of Kansas — , Tarkovsky’s problem was the opposite. He dug and dug into the soil of Mother Russia until he was surrounded by with nothing but ‘depth’ and ‘meaning’. Soil or soul, you couldn’t tell the difference in some of his films. The beginning of ANDREI RUBLEV mocks the hubris of a Felliniesque figure who would defy gravity and fly into space. The air runs out, and he falls to the ground and presumably dies. At the end of the film, there’s a unity of the ground realm and higher realm. A giant bell is cast in the soil and then painstakingly lifted into the air, and finally rung. Tarkovksy showed nothing is simple in this world. Even the simplest thing, like the sound of a bell, is a great product of vision, genius, chance, labor, and pain, the implication being that every blade of grass is the product of eons of creation in the cosmos of God. We witness the birthing of the bell from the soil of mother Russia. When the bell is lifted aloft and rang, it’s the cry of the newborn baby, a kind of miracle. We tend have this idea that miracles are easy, but they are not. According to Christianity, Jesus was the greatest miracle worker in history. But for Jesus to appear before mankind, there had to have been thousands of years of Jewish ancestry, lineage, and tragedies. And for Jesus to rise even higher, He had to be whupped real bad and nailed to the cross. Some might say that Tarkovsky’s view was typically Russian. If Fellini the Italian became too flamboyant and flam-buoyant after 8 ½ (ANDREI RUBLEV even shows an Italian aristocrat making snotty comments about lowly Russians in the final scene), Tarkovsky the Russian got too heavy and sullen near the end; NOSTALGHIA and THE SACRIFICE are not the easiest films to sit through.
Tarkovsky dug so deep, he ended up burying himself. Fellini flew so high, he lost sight of real people. It’s like what Harry Lime says on Ferris Wheel in THE THIRD MAN. He says, "Look Down there, would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" In 8 ½ and ANDREI RUBLEV, Fellini and Tarkovsky found the perfect balance between reality and imagination, between earth and sky.
Incidentally, some Jews didn’t care much if at all about the seriousness of of Tarkovsky. Pauline Kael refused to review any of his films. Her attitude was like Woody Allen’s toward Russians in the opening scene of LOVE AND DEATH. Consider the scene where an old Russian holds a small clump of earth in his hand and says, "This land is not for sale. Some day I hope to build on it." And later, Allen narrates, "... there was old Gregor and young Gregor. Oddly enough, young Gregor’s son was older than old Gregor. Nobody could figure out how that happened." Allen’s jokes succinctly and brilliantly summarize Jewish feelings about Russians, i.e. Russians aren’t merely dim-witted but profoundly dim-witted, capable of spending all their lives contemplating pure nonsense. (If one bunch of Russians are hearty and strong and only know how to drink vodka and dance on tables, another bunch of Russians, the ones who ‘use their minds’, meditate on why something that can’t be true is true though it clearly isn’t true. One might say Jews did likewise, worshiping and thinking across the millennia about God who doesn’t exist, but Jews explored their faith with wit, erudition, and lively discussion whereas Russian spiritualists knelt before their faith in silent and stony devotion. Jews used faith as the basis for thinking about stuff even if the faith restricted their range of discourse, whereas Russians embraced what might be called faith-in-faith. They began and ended in faith.) The cult of mystic nature, Russian soul, and Christian Orthodoxy all conspired to produce the sort of mentality that often confused stupidity with profundity. So, Pauline Kael probably saw THE STALKER as nothing more than three dull Russians trekking through a wasteland to arrive at some dilapidated house with a leaky roof. She mocked the notion that the journey might be meaningful and profound because of the philosophical and spiritual mumbo jumbo spoken and emoted along the way. What may have been especially off-putting for someone like Pauline Kael was Russian spiritual culture’s emphasis on innocence and purity.
While Kafka and Jewish artists often confronted the confounding and strange, they left alone the strange and absurd as strange and absurd. Though Jews didn’t exactly learn to stop worrying — far from it — , they learned to love and laugh at/with the strangeness. In contrast, Russian artists who traversed similar mental territories were more likely to forgo skepticism, aloofness, and/or humor in favor of faith as the hope and redemption for mankind. This aspect of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is still problematic to the modern sensibility that’s been shaped by Jews.
Of course, Jews like Spielberg and others do offer a kind of simple-minded faith, but it’s all centered around money and power; it’s showbiz toying with faith, not an earnest devotion to faith. Spielberg may be sincere in his love of the magic of movies, but he’s never sincere about how he manipulates the audience — Pauline Kael, wink wink, understood what the fellow Jew was really up to. Spielberg was more a child psychologist than a child; it was the goyim who were being played like children.
In contrast, many Russian artists were deeply invested in simple soulful faith as the meaning of life; they transformed the fascinatingly strange into something simplistically holy. (If Kafka had been Russian, he might have ended THE CASTLE with the protagonist kneeling before the Castle at the house of God. In a way, this is why the Polish-Jewish Stanislaw Lem and the Christian Russian Andrei Tarkovsky didn’t see eye to eye on SOLARIS. In Lem’s novel, the mystery remains the mystery, forever something for us to think about. Tarkovsky presents the mystery but ultimately turns it into a sermon about faith and motherland.) Especially given the problems between Russian Christianity and Jews in Russia, Jews could never accept the Russian Soul thing as the premise for moral or spiritual truth. Besides, Jews were too proudly smart and witty to believe such ‘simple-minded childish nonsense’; Russian spirituality was to Russian Jews what Christian Fundamentalism is to contemporary American Jews. Jews were also too angry with the violence of Russian history to place their trust in Russians. Especially because Jews were such great wits, they tended to favor the kind of talent and creativity that came easily and slid off the tongue. Meditation is about silence, but Jews need to talk, and their religion is one long conversation with God. Thus, Jews never developed a meditative mind, the kind found in Buddhism(meditation of the mind purged of words, a paradoxical notion as the mind requires words like guns requires bullets) or Russian Orthodox(meditation of the heart, also paradoxical as the heart is associated with emotions than thought). Other religions also communed with gods, but pagan idols, usually in their stony forms, stood still and silent while their worshipers paid tribute and made offerings and sacrifices; ‘stingy’ Jews mostly kept their stuff for themselves and offered God a conversation, especially through the great Prophets and Rabbis. (If many pagan folks were peoples of stone and iron, Jews were a people of blood and ink. While clannism was rife in all cultures, Jews sanctified their own blood as especially blessed by the one and only God. And if other peoples worshiped gods as stony and silent idols, Jews worshiped their God through ink and paper, and thus, their faith became more conversational, discursive, intellectual. Also, while stone monuments can be awesome, words are more likely to be awe-inspiring. After all, it takes years and years to build a tower whereas one can use words to erect a thousand towers in one’s imagination. Before CGI, for a movie to have a cast of thousands, it really had to hire thousands of people. But on the pages of a book, one can create and describe millions of people; also, words inspire people’s imagination to create their own mental images. And, it is through words that ideas and values are best expressed and transmuted from generation to generation, and the ink-centrism of Judaism made Jews more mindful of moral and spiritual issues than other people who merely gazed at their stone gods who never seemed to say anything but ‘Feed Me’, like the Negro Plant in the remake of A LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. It is then no wonder that among all the ancient peoples, Jews are the only ones who really remained intact culturally and spiritually. Blood and ink are surer bets for survival than iron and stone.) Most Jews have little patience and/or appreciation for something that is willfully difficult for difficulty-sake. For instance, suppose some guy places a pumpkin seed inside his ass cheeks and tries to crack it with his anal muscles. Difficult to be sure but a pointless pain in the ass and total waste of one’s precious energy. I mean just use the stupid teeth. Or imagine if someone asks that we put some object inside a box and not tell him what’s inside. Then, he tries to figure out what it is by shaking the box around. If he really wants to know, he should just open the stupid thing. For Kael, the films of Tarkovsky may have been like the crack-the-pumpkin-seed-inside-the-ass-cheek scenario. It was as if Russians willfully turned off entire regions of their mind and dimly pondered the meaning of things — and excess vodka didn’t help either — and believed things to be profound simply because they were confounded, but the reason for the confoundment was their willful choice to remain in the dark and confuse/conflate their dimness with holiness, sacredness, and mysteriousness. It’s not that Jews aren’t fascinated with mysteries, strangeness, and things that cannot be solved. Indeed they are but with problems that remains difficult and mysterious in spite of all the efforts to figure them out. It’s like Einstein spent his entire life trying to reconcile the Theory of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. He struggled against the truly unknown and maybe unknowable than against the simple/obvious made ‘unknowable’ thru willful complication and ignorance. This is the main difference between Tarkovsky and Kubrick. At some point, Tarkovsky turns off the intellect and goes into prayer mode whereas Kubrick is always thinking and working the maze. Tarkovsky was essentially meditative whereas Kubrick was contemplative. Kafka was not a pumpkin-seed-in-the-ass-cheek-er.
Nevertheless, there is an element in the tradition of Jewish thought that isn’t entirely free-seeking, and it has carried over into modern Jewish thought. It owes to the Jewish taboo around the one and only God. Judaism encouraged much thinking, questioning, and probing, but Jewish scholars could never ever question nor deny the existence of God or say that there might be other gods than Him. Thus, the Jewish mind developed a kind of duality: the passionate will to think freely and raise all sorts of questions AND the taboo-riddled fear that if they think the wrong thought or ask the wrong question, they’ll be stoned to death, exiled from the community, and/or cursed by God. The modern Jewish mind operates under the same kind of duality verging on duplicity. Thus, one side of Jewishness has been a fierce defender of free speech and controversy. Many Jews have been at the forefront of dissent and speaking-truth-to-power. Yet, other Jews or the very same Jews could also have zero tolerance for those who offended or violated modern Jewish truisms, which is why almost all Jews support ‘hate speech laws’ in Europe and want to expand it in America. (Indeed, if conservatives hadn’t come to power in the 1950s and there had been no anti-communist ‘witch-hunts’ — if liberalism had been continuously triumphant since FDR — , American Jews may have pushed politically correct speech controls much earlier. The Cold War and anti-communism put a lot of leftist Jews on the defensive in the 1950s, and it was that ‘accident’ of history that made Jews especially close to organizations like the ACLU. Jewish support of unfettered free speech was just a ploy, to buy time and protection for radicals among their own kind and to counter the power of white majoritarian power.) Just consider the Neocon Jews with their Trotskyite origins. They came over to American conservatism and asked to be heard as the dissident voice on the Right, and indeed, other conservatives heard them out. But once the Neocons gained more power, they went into purge mode and pushed other kinds of conservatives out. Jewish Neocons requested that they be allowed to lay their intellectual eggs in the conservative nest along with other kinds of conservatives, but when the Neocon chicks hatched and grew bigger, they began to push out all others in the nest. Jews say they’re all about free speech, but when they hear free speech they don’t like, they attack it as ‘hate’ — the secular version of ‘satanic’ — and insist there is no place in our world for such ideas and thoughts. (But Zionism, predicated on the ethnic cleansing and subjugation of Palestinians and on Jewish racial identity isn’t ‘hate speech’.) So, the modern Jewish mind continues with the duality of passion for freedom and obsession with taboos. This aspect of Jewishness can be found in the stories of Kafka. On the one hand, characters really want to break through the walls to attain the truth, but there’s an undisclosed or sub-articulated sense that the wall mustn’t be breached. In Tarkovsky’s STALKER, the ‘holy fool’ believes he has the knowledge of the ‘Room’ and accepts its sacredness with total faith. He needs no more questions for he believes he’s discovered the truth, something he wishes to share with others he deems worthy.
In contrast, the characters of Kafka keep seeking the truth, all the while fearing to step through the door. Jews simultaneously chisel away and fill in the cracks of the wall.
Historically, Jews faced three main barriers. There was the Truth of God that could not be questioned. Jews could study the sacred texts and discuss matters to hairsplitting detail, but they could not ‘go there’ and ask if God was for real or if He was indeed the one and only God. Another barrier was the elite world of the goyim. Jews aspired to challenge its authority but also feared the consequences of rocking the boat and suffering the consequences. One advantage of Jewish humor was it allowed Jews to mock goyim but have the goyim laugh than get angry; also Jewish humor was masked with just enough self-deprecation to fool the goyim that the joke was on the Jews when it was really on the goyim. It’s like Woody Allen’s jokes about himself only make him more endearing and sympathetic whereas his jokes about goyim are truly nasty attacks on their character. The third barrier was of a more internal nature, i.e. the Jewish resistance against fully assimilating into the goy world lest Jews completely lose their sense of identity and unity. As Jews were talented, many goy societies found them useful, and some Jews rose up the ranks and were even appointed by royal courts to serve as financiers or advisers. Even so, Jews remained outsiders since the keys to the real domain of power remained in the hands of goy elites. Jews were hirelings who could be rewarded handsomely and even rub shoulders with the powerful, but they couldn’t really be on the inside-inside(and a part of them didn’t want to be, as it would mean forsaking their own proud identity). They were outsiders allowed half-way in for their talent. They were outside-inside. So, for centuries or even millennia, Jews imagined what the true inside-inside world of the goy elite power was really like, and this fascination informs many of Kubrick’s films(as well as those of Blake Edwards, another Jew) where some outsider seeks a way to sneak inside to the inside-inside world(politically, socially, sexually, etc). When something cannot be accessed, it takes on the aura of mystery and mythology. It was because God couldn’t be seen or fully known that He became a fascinating figure to Jews. It’s like the cult of the wizard in the land of Oz. Until relatively recently, Jews sometimes rose very high in the power structure, but they couldn’t enter and own the inside-inside world of the goyim, so Jews came up with all sorts of feverish imagination, sometimes romantic & dreamy-eyed and sometimes virulent & paranoid. Jews imagined the inside-inside world of elite goyim to be the most wondrous and paradisiacal sanctum flowing with milk and honey, a world of beauty and nobility and etc. Such obsessions were expressed socially, culturally, and sexually. Consider PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth where a hook-nosed Jew fantasizes endlessly about ramming his hairy kosher sausage into the pristine ‘Aryan’ poon of the white blonde ‘shikse’. (A cross-over version of this is Neil Simon’s BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS that watered down Jewish sexual neurosis into just another All-American pimply faced horniness fun-for-everyone.) Not even all the Jewesses were the same in the eyes of Jewish boys. In ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Debra is supposed to be both a Jewish beauty and a ‘Aryan-ish’ beauty, a kind of ‘Jewish Aryaness’, like Paul Newman was the ‘Aryan Jew’. The fat Peggy, who looks like Miss Piggy or Lena Dunham, is supposed to the typical Jewish girl with homely features and coarse manners. Debra, in contrast, wants to be different and be a member of the respectable society of elite goyim. And it turns out Max is the same way. He made his cash as a ruthless Jewish gangster, but his grand ambition was to change his identity and become a member of the Wasp elite. In a way, Max and Debra make a perfect match even though their love isn’t personal because they love the same thing — power, privilege, and respectability — over all else. There was a time when Jews looked up to the white gentile elites with both endless admiration/fascination and resentment/hostility. The rich wasps were like a race of gods to the Jews. Wasp elites seemed so clean, handsome, respectable, dignified, and etc. whereas Jews had the reputation of being uncouth, hairy, noisy, pushy, and obnoxious. Thus, Jews desperately wanted to enter the elite goy world and be accepted, but they also wanted to murder and rape the elite goy world because of the paranoid sense that the goy elites still viewed rich Jews as vulgar climbers pretending to be what they were not. It’s like what Senator Geary says to Michael Corleone in THE GODFATHER Part II: "I don't like your kind of people. I don't like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourselves off as decent Americans. I'll do business with you, but the fact is that I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. Yourself and your whole fucking family." And no doubt, such feelings did exist among certain wasp elites. Though we tend to condemn such people in the past as ‘antisemitic’, a honest assessment of what has become of Western Civilization ever since Jews gained elite power in the US and EU would indicate that ‘anti-Semites’ had a point. In REVERSAL OF FORTUNE and SOCIAL NETWORK, there’s the notion that rich goyim will allow the Jews into the ‘lobby’ but not into the main hall. In REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, the rich goyess says, "I made him hire you, ‘get the Jew,’ I said..." In other words, hire the Jew because he’s got the smarts but always remember that Jews are not ‘one of us’. Though Jews are into their own tribalism and do everything to guard it, they seethe with hatred against the ‘one of us’ mentality among both goy elites and goy masses. ‘One of us’ mentality among goy elites means Jews can be hired as ‘guests’ but never accepted as full-time residents. ‘One of us’ mentality among the goy masses means that Jews are forever to be distrusted as alien/cosmopolitan outsiders than as members of the national family. So, even though Sarah Palin was far from filthy rich, Jews hated her for she stood for a kind of volkish ‘one of us’ mentality. White conservative masses saw her and thought, "she’s one of us", implying that New York Jews are not "one of us".
I don’t know how truthful REVERSAL OF FORTUNE is. Probably mostly baloney. For starters, the movie has Dershowitz trying to save two young BLACK inmates from death row when, in reality, the inmates were white. But what do Jews care about the truth? Jews have their own myths, and one of the biggest is the notion that snobby wasp elites look down on Jews and keep them out. So, we had a REVERSAL-OF-FORTUNE-like moment in SOCIAL NETWORK where the ‘Aryan’ clone-twins won’t allow ‘Zuckerberg’ inside the elite club and keeps him standing in the lobby. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t happen that way at all. The only thing that matters is it perpetuates the myth of Jewish victim-hood at the hands of snobby white elites. While such slights may not have been uncommon in the past, it’s downright hilarious that SOCIAL NETWORK would have us believe that Jews are still outsiders in today’s Harvard. But the Jewish way is to never abandon the fighting mode. Even after they’ve won, they still act like they’re David going against Goliath. And Jews encourage blacks to keep up the same heat against ‘whitey’. So, even though blacks dominate most of NFL, there’s still much controversy about there not being enough black quarterbacks — though there isn’t much about all kickers being white, but then kicking isn’t a prestigious or symbolically significant position. But we don’t hear about how it’s so ‘unfair’ that all the running backs are black instead of white, brown, yellow, red, or whatever. (If liberals were honest, they could argue thus: it’s only natural and right that power positions should be dominated by blacks since blacks are stronger, more explosive, faster, and have better hand-eye coordination. But since whites are athletically inferior to blacks, there’s no reason why most quarterbacks should be white, and it can only be the result of the ‘racist’ notion that blacks aren’t smart enough to play that position. Personally, even though the quarterback is the most intelligent position in football, I don’t think you need much smarts to be a good quarterback, and therefore, intelligence is probably not the main factor. The main reason why whites tend to dominate the quarterback position — as well as the kicking position — is probably due to the fact that whites can’t excel at much else. So, most of white talent in football concentrates on either throwing or kicking the ball. Also, even though everyone in football is a tough guy, the quarterback and kicker positions are, by far, the least physical. Blacks, in contrast, are athletically so talented that they can qualify for just about any position, so black talent tend not to be concentrated in only one position but spread across various positions... except kicking because blacks consider it as ‘gay’ and only few notches above waterboy. Anyway, liberals cannot have a honest discussion on football because they won’t admit that racial differences account for black domination in football and other sports.) So, even though Jews own Harvard and all the Ivy League schools, they still act like they’re victims left waiting in the lobby. Though Jews treat Palestinians like dirt, Jews still act like they’re being mass-murdered by all-powerful ‘terrorist’ Palestinians. Though Israel has over 300 illegal nukes, they foam at the mouth about how Iran, a nation hasn’t a single nuke, is about to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. If Jews treat Palestinians and Iranians in such hysterical way, why wouldn’t they treat white gentiles the same way? And so they do. Jewish-controlled media cover up most stories of black-on-white mayhem — we are told ‘youths’ and ‘teens’ did it — , but we hear national headlines about how the KKK is terrorizing colleges like Oberlin. Jews have the radical personality, and radicals never give up. If they defeat the enemy, they must then wipe out the defeated enemy. If they wipe out the enemy, they must then revive the ghost of the enemy and sound the alarm day in and day out. It’s like how Maoism operated in China. First, it went after the capitalists and landlords. Once such elements were dead or in the gulag, Maoists found ‘capitalist-roaders’ among the communists and went after them. Indeed, the whole political correctness thing can be funny at times. If there’s no KKK or neo-Nazis to find and burn, the PC ‘leftists’ will often turn on one another to satiate their radical rage. It’s like if wolves kill and eat up all the prey, they get hungry and attack one another for food. It’s no wonder that so-called ‘liberals’ sometimes attack one another for deviating from the PC line. Lena Dunham, aka Miss Piggy, was reviled for racial insensitivity over some throwaway remark on Twitter and regained ‘respect’ only by opening a new season of GIRLS by having sex with some jigger-jiver and joining the hysterics chorus over the ‘KKK incident’ at Oberlin, her alma mater. If there aren’t any more KKK and ‘racists’ to hunt on college campuses, which are almost entirely the domains of political correctness, how do you satiate your self-righteous desire to combat ‘evil’? You nitpick and go into a mad fury every time you hear something even slightly ‘off’, as with the woman in the film OLEANNA. So, if a movie star or musician says something that might be construed as even slightly ‘sexist’, ‘racist’, or ‘homophobic’, there’s a wild frenzy to grab and purge him of his ‘evil’ heart. The lemming-like mentality of the progs is amazing. If some ‘liberal’ outfit promotes a gay sign on facebook, all of a sudden tens of millions of useless and mindless drones use it as their avatar. There’s much sociological lessons to be learned by observing such herd behavior that simply can’t tolerate or even ponder ambiguity and complexity. According to such mindless tards, there is no middle ground, no other way of looking at things. So, if you oppose ‘gay marriage’, they’ll seethe and gripe that "you hate gays!!" Such Manichean view of everything colors their world-view. It doesn’t occur to them that we can tolerate homos for their sexual deviance WITHOUT acknowledging their obviously weirdo and gross form of ‘sexuality’ as being of equal value or worth as real sexuality. (Similarly, a Christian can tolerate an atheist without endorsing atheism, and vice versa. A Mormon can tolerate Islam without approving it, and vice versa. But Jews and homos have rigged our hearts and minds so that it’s ‘not enough to tolerate’ them. We must WELCOME them, respect them, and revere them, or else be attacked and demeaned as ‘hateful’ or ‘less evolved’.) If homosexual men have ‘sex’ by sticking their sexual organs into the fecal holes of other men, it is clearly and obviously gross. It is gross objectively and irrefutably. Anus is a ‘shithole’ and nothing else. But if some guys are born weird and wanna do weird stuff, we can tolerate them since sexual desire is a powerful drive and homos need their jollies too. (It’s like sado-masochism is some weird stuff that we can tolerate without endorsing, but imagine if the sadomasochistic lobby, with the full backing of Jewish academia and media, promote sadomasochisto-sexual pride parades, make kids read books like "Heather Has Ms. Leather and Ms. Whip as Mommies" in schools, and attack anyone who expresses disgust or pokes fun at sadomasochism as ‘sadomasochophobic’ or ‘less evolved’. A lot of Americans, being so stupid — they easily bought into ‘gay marriage’ or ‘marriage equality’, didn’t they? — , will surely go along like the lemmings that they are.) But why go all the way and pretend that homosexuality has the same value as real sexuality? But even to raise such question is to ‘hate gays’ according to these demented politically correct types who hate the truth, complexity, and compromise. Their minds have been infected, twisted, and turned into carriers of the radical virus. They have become insipid and retarded. They are like Red Guards in China, Hitler Youth in Germany, the Manson family, Jonestown freaks, or Oberlin college students.
Movies like SOCIAL NETWORK are mostly bull, but Jews have their useful myths, and they have the power of media to spread the myths all over the world to tenderize and prepare hearts for stabbing by the Jewish blade. If Jews make themselves come across as the most lovable people on the planet, they make certain others seem like the scum of the earth. One reason why billions of people around the world hate white American conservatives is because their impression of white American conservatives comes from Jewish Hollywood movies. (Ironically, American conservatives, who are so vilified by Jews, try to serve the foreign policy agenda of American Jews. American Jews make white American conservatives look bad all around the world, but white American conservatives wanna win the affection of the Jews by playing the role of attack dogs of Zionism. It can’t get any more pathetic than that.)
If Jews in the past felt a genuine fascination with the elite goy world, things began to change gradually in the 60s and then rapidly soon after. This shift was perhaps best evinced in Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID. In it, a Jewish guy(Charlies Grodin) marries a gross-mannered Jew-girl but then eyes a wasp blonde(Cybill Shepherd). He becomes so fixated with the waspess that he dumps his Jewish wife(who not only eats egg salad on the honeymoon but has it smeared all over her face) and does everything possible to be accepted into the wasp world. But once he makes it in, he finds it’s no big freaking deal. The movie ends with him feeling like, "So, THIS is it?" An earlier film THE GRADUATE ended on a similar note. Benjamin Braddock is like a Jew in shyster armor obsessed with winning the girl. He does battle with the blonde wasp dragon family in a church and even defiles a Crucifix. It’s like he broke into the sanctum of wasp privilege and took the most valuable object, but sitting next to his trophy in a bus, he feels "So, this is it?" There’s a similar sense in Woody Allen’s films like ANNIE HALL. Allen the grubby New York Jew in invited into the home of a rich wasp family — he is finally inside! — , but he doesn’t feel the wonderment that he might have expected. Jews discovered that while wasps may be better-looking and have a longer cultural/historical pedigree in America, their world isn’t necessarily all that impressive or interesting. One senses something similar in 10 by Blake Edwards, another Jewish director. Dudley Moore plays a Jewishy if not Jewish music composer who spots an ‘Aryan’ woman in the form of Bo Derek(though, made up with corn-rows, she looks kinda like a white jungle queen negress than an icy blonde; she is nordic goddess gone tropical). He becomes totally obsessed and sees her as the goddess of his dreams, as his Bathsheba, as the one who can deliver him to ultimate bliss. But when he finally rolls in the bed with her, he discovers she’s just an airhead bimbo who likes to ‘fuc*’. His penis may still be erect, but his dream is deflated. She turns out to be human(and not a very interesting one at that), not a goddess. If it’s just ‘pussy’ that he wants, he could find tons as a famous music composer in the Hollywood community. He was after the goddess of his dreams, but she turned out to be just another tart. Her sensual soul or sensoul doesn’t match her beauty. The problem isn’t that she sleeps around but has no feelings of love and romance; she doesn’t cheat on her husband out of any passion but simply because having another man do her further stokes her narcissism. (It’s sort of like the moment in ANNIE HALL where the short ugly Woody Allen stops a tall and good-looking wasp couple who say how happy they are being empty. Wasps may look better, but they’re not only shallow and empty but content to be shallow and empty.) There was a time when Jews did look upon the Wasps and German elites as a kind of god-race — Gustav Mahler wept like a madman when Wagner died and why Hannah Arendt was loyal to Martin Heidegger to the end — , but disillusionment eventually set in. There was the horror of the Holocaust to be sure, but the bigger factor was that Jews finally made their way into the inner sanctum of power in the post-war order and found wasps to be nothing special. (Of course, this is all very relative. Compared to most peoples around the world, wasps are still very special. But the smarter Jews couldn’t help but notice their own decisive intellectual edge over the wasps. It’s like whites are still very special athletically when compared to Mexicans, Asians, Hindus, and etc. but they’re nothing special when compared to blacks. When blacks look at whites, they feel, "I can take him." They feel no respect for the ‘white boy’.) As Jews got inside the goy elite world, they discovered that wasps could easily be cajoled, manipulated, and pushed around. Just consider dweebs like Rich Lowry. Wasps were indeed a great people who built British civilization, British Empire, and America, but they’d ‘cheated’ by relying on unity, violence, favoritism, and exclusion of others. Also, Wasps had been up against pushovers like Muslims, blacks, Asians, and etc. But in America, a land founded on the ideals of democracy and meritocracy, Wasps would eventually have to compete on equal footing with Jews, especially during the Cold War when white Americans wanted to win the hearts and minds of non-whites all over the world. Though Jews bitch and whine about how right-wingers inflamed the Cold War, the fact is Jews relished in the Cold War that pit white American against white Russia, thus providing Jews with a chance to undermine the power of both. If US had been the lone superpower in the postwar era, the white/wasp elites would have felt less pressure to make concessions to non-whites. But with the USSR as the other superpower declaring to the whole world that US was ‘racist’ while the USSR was a workers’ paradise for all people regardless of race or color, US had to undergo drastic changes at home to win the propaganda warfare as the ‘freest’ and ‘most equal’ place on Earth. Jews needed a powerful Russia to apply international pressure on the US. So, Jews were eager to slip atomic secrets to the USSR. Jews at the New York Times eagerly aided Fidel Castro’s rise to power. While many Jews lent support to the USSR out of sincere leftist idealism, there was undoubtedly a tribal factor. Jews neither wanted White America to be the sole superpower nor wanted white US and white USSR to be friendly nations, as either scenario would have undermined the agenda of applying moral pressure on Wasp America. After all, Jews were never so afraid as when white Germany and white Russia had been allies from 1939 to 1941. If perchance Hitler had not invaded the USSR and if the UK had finally come to the table and cut a deal with Germany, Jewish power and influence would have been finished forever on Europe and possibly even in America, as it too would have had to make peace with the new world order dominated by the White Right in Europe. With a powerful Europe stretching from UK to Russia against the power of Jews, American whites likely would have had no choice but to accommodate it. But what saved the Jews was that white UK waged war on white Germany, and then white Germany waged war on white Russia. Though German invasion of the USSR set off the Holocaust, it was because of this folly that Germany was defeated, and along with it the guarantee of white dominance as a near-permanent global reality. So, Jews didn’t want to see a unipolar world after WWII, especially since both US and USSR then were firmly in the control of white gentiles. For American Jews to undermine American wasps, it needed the bogeyman of the USSR to spread revolution around the world. And it was because white America came under social/moral pressures to embrace massive social ‘reforms’ that Jews were able to make their move to take over key institutions in America. And by invoking ‘racism’ as the ultimate evil, Jews morally browbeat white America into kneeling down and apologizing and never daring to criticize the Jews as any such view could be construed as ‘racist’ and ‘neo-Nazi’. It would have been much better if USSR and US had come to the table after WWII and hammered out a deal so as to prevent the Cold War and check the power of pesky Jews. But once it was on, both US and USSR were trying to win the hearts and minds of the Third World made up of Latin Americans, Asians, Arabs, and Africans, and it became essential for Americans to show that they didn’t or no longer had a single ‘racist’ bone in their bodies. In the new and more meritocratic order, Jews made greater and faster gains than ever before and soon found themselves not only on the inside of the goy hall of power but acutely aware that the goy hall was turning into a Jewish hall. Jews went from entering the goy palace to turning it into a Jew palace. If the Jewish takeover had been like the Turkish invasion of Constantinople, the nature of the transformation would have been loud and obvious. The Turks invaded/sacked Greece and became the new elite overlords. But Jews took over the elite power silently and smoothly(even if dramatically). It happened so slipperily that most Americans didn’t even notice what happened, especially as Jews controlled the media and turned discussion of Jewish power into a taboo. It’s like a couple of scenes in Woody Allen’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. In one scene, Allen’s character goes for a job interview and plays something like a game of 20 questions. The interviewer, after a series of questions, cannot guess what Allen’s character does for a living, and so, he relinquishes his job to the interviewee. In a way, Allen was just being goofy, but he was also spoofing the wasp adherence to rules, no matter how stupid the rules may be. So, as long as Jews mastered and manipulated the rules to outwit the wasps, the wasps would accept defeat, not resist, and step aside. In the final scene, Allen’s character is the victim of such a trick. He pulls out his gun and tries to rob someone. But this ‘someone’ turns out to be an old friend, and they get to talking like two long lost pals. When Allen’s character asks what the friend does, the latter says he’s a cop and therefore Allen should hand him the gun, which Allen does. It all happens so smoothly and quietly — and according to the rule of proper conduct — that Allen’s character doesn’t even think to resist or complain. If you control the rules of the game, you can easily defeat the enemy who won’t dare cry foul. Jews did this with wasps. Jews understood the wasp mind, studied its rules and how it works, and then outplayed the wasp game of power-tricks using wasp rules, and when the wasps lost, they just meekly handed over the key and the gun.
Rules exist in relation to the real world and to gain advantage from the real world. Rules divorced from reality have no value, but Wasps came to favor rule-centrism regardless of whether the rules made sense in relation to reality or not. This was partly the product of Anglo gentleman culture where formality came to be favored over actuality. This mind-set seeped into the ideological and intellectual spheres as well, which is one reason why UK continued to support Free Trade even when it was doing more harm than good to Britain. You see, it was all about rules! Or consider that so many Anglo imperialists in India kept their suits buttoned on even through the hottest weather. Never mind the reality of hotness; it was all about rules! Many Anglo minds prefer to lose on the basis of rules than win on the basis of reality. It’s like rules in the name of honor can make the British do really stupid things in GALLIPOLI and THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. The focus on proper conduct sometimes blinded the British to what they were really doing. Thus, Alec Guiness’s character in RIVER KWAI, though aiding and abetting the enemy, thinks himself serving the British way. Adolf Hitler manipulated gentlemanly Anglo-rule-centrism when he stepped all over Neville Chamberlain, and ironically, Jews have done to the entire British people what Hitler did to Chamberlain. What both Chamberlain and the postwar British elites didn’t understand was that rule-centrism only works with a full assessment of the true nature of reality and only with people who can be trusted to act in good faith. Neither Hitler nor Jews could be relied on to work in good faith; they have extreme personalities.
If at least the rules were fairly and equally applied to everyone, they wouldn’t be so bad. But rules in modern America and modern UK are controlled by Jews who play fast-and-loose to always favor Jewish power over all else. The concept of rules connotes fairness, and Anglos and Northern Europeans, generally being more conscientious about principles, are more willing to play by the rules on the premise that rule-centrism makes the world a fairer place. Little do they know that rules are molded and twisted by venal Jews in America, EU, and Israel. After all, if rules are indeed fair and same in the entire Western world, how come Israel can oppress Palestinians as it pleases but South Africa had to end Apartheid? Why is it that people who oppose ‘gay marriage’ are demeaned as ‘homophobic’ and ‘less evolved’ — less human — , but the media can no longer use terms like ‘illegal’ or ‘alien’? Rules are controlled and manipulated by the powers-that-be, and one must also be careful to read the fine print on the bottom. Many white Americans think ‘gay marriage’ or ‘same sex marriage’ is justified because the issue has been promoted as being about ‘fairness’ according to rules. They’re completely blind to the true agenda of homo privilege because they miss the holes of reality in the argument for ‘marriage equality’. If indeed marriage should be redefined in any manner to accommodate the demands of non-normal consenting adults, why is there no brouhaha about ‘incest marriage’ or multiple-marriage? On the one hand, the proponents of ‘marriage equality’ subvert the true meaning of marriage but still insist that it must involve two partners who are not of the same family.
‘Gay marriage’ is not about rules in relation to reality. Real sexuality means the attraction between man and woman; it means life created by the act of love between man and woman. Homos cannot produce a single life-form no matter how many homo men bugger each other or how many homo women rub their poons together. Yet, rules have been rewritten so that we must pretend that children can have two ‘homo parents’. Rules have been rewritten so that the moral institution of marriage must recognize the ‘value’ of a man sticking his sexual organ into the fecal tunnel of another man. Anglo mind is so rule-centric that it doesn’t notice that these new rules have nothing to do with reality. No matter how absurd the rules, Anglos follow them because ‘playing by the rules’ is the Anglo ideal. Very few ask, "but who made up the rules and why?"
The ‘dirty secret’ of dream-reality is things are strange but ‘feel’ normal. In this respect, INCEPTION got it wrong as most of its dream space ‘felt’ either too real or too strange rather than a subtle wrapping of one around the other. On occasion, crazy things happen, like the sudden appearance of a train in the middle of a street — maybe a homage to both Lumiere and Magritte — , but then, even the outlandish things are rendered crystal clear in detail and dynamics, as if an iron law of physics governs the dream world and could be programmed like the very CGI that was used to illustrate its powers in the movie.
In one scene, the DiCaprio character explains to someone that you don’t know you’re in a dream in a dream. True enough, but the truly remarkable thing about dreams is things around you are strange and illogical but you accept them as normal and mundane. If dreams looked like perfect mirror reflections of reality, there would be nothing surprising about our mistaking them for reality. What is truly strange about dreams is that they are not like reality but make us accept them as reality. The real secret of the nature of dreams is not in the details but in the mental state. If we could see the dream world with conscious minds, we would know that it’s a dream; we would know it’s strange and we wouldn’t be fooled into believing it as reality; indeed, most people, the moment they begin to dream lucidly and realize they’re in a dream, abruptly wake from the dream. We see the strange as normal in a dream because dream-consciousness works differently from normal consciousness. The implications of this are huge. If even the most brilliant and intelligent person can be made to accept the unreal as real and strange as normal in his dream state, it means the human consciousness is unstable; it also means there may be elements of dream-consciousness even in normal consciousness, and those zones could be manipulated by the powers-that-be to make people believe in anything, such as the fantasy of the Magic Negro and ‘gay marriage’. It can make rational people believe in deities and angels; it can make secular communists worship men like Stalin and Mao as demigods. Even in conscious state, people can be made to feel ‘dream’ emotions.
INCEPTION is about how a person’s conscious mind can be profoundly altered by having his hidden subconscious/dream state tweaked secretly. Actually, you don’t need anything as elaborate as ‘inception’; all you need to do is control Hollywood and TV shows and make people dream that homo are perfect angels, the worship of whom shall cleanse people’s souls.
Or consider the smudges of ripening-into-decay colors and the murmurs of grumbling sounds — like squirming noises emanating from the stomach — in MULHOLLAND DR. that suggest we are ‘inside’ the character’s bruised heart and mind. In contrast, despite INCEPTION’s dream within a dream within a dream within a dream structure, we are always aware of how the various layers are neatly folded together. (Also, if we can never be sure where the truth is buried in eXistenZ, the ‘secret’ in INCEPTION is always conveniently hidden within obvious places or objects like safes or vaults, as if dreams could really be that neat and literal.) Thus, INCEPTION works more as sci-fi fantasy than as an understanding of the dreamworld. To be sure, one could argue that INCEPTION wouldn’t have worked as a story if it had been more like eXistenZ or MULHOLLAND DR., films where dots connect but only in the most unexpected ways.
The final part of MIRACLE MILE confirms that the strange phone call that Harry Washello received accidentally was no prank in the middle of the night. A real nuclear war is on the horizon. The angry cops who surround the department store(into which the mortally wounded Wilson the Negro crashed a stolen police car) stop barking orders, and when Harry and Julie walk out of the store to surrender, the cops are nowhere to be seen, briefly restoring a sense of normality. But, it’s a chilling ‘normality’ as why would cops give up pursuing a cop-killer? It’s not long before the streets start filling up with panicked citizens of L.A., and it appears the rumors of war have spread throughout the city. Harry and Julie make a dash for the rooftop of the office building to get on the helicopter. But they are separated when Harry, thinking he saw the helicopter pilot — the gay guy in tights — run past on the other side of the street, instructs Julie to get to the rooftop first. It is part of a recurring pattern in MIRACLE MILE: how one’s trajectory in life is constantly deflected or diverted by missed signals, conflicting agendas, mutual suspicions, or pure chance. It raises the question of how much our lives are willed or random. The zigzags in the trajectory eventually lead to tragedy, but maybe the tragedy was meant-to-be because, in a crazy way, Harry and Julie couldn’t have met a more meaningful(equally personally tragic and cosmically absurd) death in a world about to end. There’s a kind of weird logic in how they face death in the same place they found each other for the first time: the La Brea tar pits. It’s almost as if Harry and Julie are living ghosts of fossils past who, in the end, revert to their fossil-ness. There was also a certain logic, at least a dream logic, in how Harry and Wilson went separate ways but then ended up together in a department store. It’s as if there’s some magnetic force that constantly pushes and pulls people together and apart. Harry was supposed to meet Julie at midnight to go dancing, but the blackout made him sleep way past the agreed time. He made his way to the coffee shop in the hope of finding or contacting Julie, but instead, got a phone call from hell. He thinks the Negro restaurant owner is going to pick up Julie, but the Negro is headed straight to the airport, and there’s nothing Harry can do about it. (It could almost be called the plot against Harry.) Then, Harry gets a ride with the thieving Negro Wilson, but the problem with cops at a gas station seriously complicate matters, and later, Wilson takes off with the stolen cop car. Harry finally finds and wakens Julie and takes her to the rooftop, but when he discovers there’s no helicopter pilot, he goes looking for one. He miraculously finds a pilot, but then he notices that Julie is in the streets looking for him and runs after her. Had she remained put, they might have flown away to safety. He catches her, and they’re about to go to the rooftop, but just then, seemingly out of nowhere, Wilson the thieving Negro crashes the stolen cop car through the windows of a department store. Harry and Julie could have ignored the incident and gone to the rooftop where the helicopter awaits, but they go to inspect the accident, and Harry discovers it’s Wilson with his sister Charlotta, both of them mortally wounded. Soon after, Harry and Julie again make a run for the rooftop, but Harry thinks he saw the gay helicopter pilot running across the street, possibly looking for him. So, again he gets separated from Julie. It turns out that the guy is not the gay pilot, and so, Harry heads to the rooftop, but then, by this time, all hell has broken out in the streets and the streets are jammed. When he gets on top of a car, the angry driver pulls out a gun and shoots at him. The world is about to blow up, and the driver is filled with petty and insane road rage. Harry finally gets to the elevator of the office building(through the sewer system that evokes both the missile silo and the tar pits, as well as THE THIRD MAN), and he nearly misses Julie again as just when he’s about to take an elevator up, there’s another elevator opening with Julie inside. (Harry is kinda like the pigeon with the smoldering cigarette in its beaks. The pigeon stuck the cigarette into the nest to make it more secure but only ended up burning it. Similarly, Harry’s best intentions and efforts often have the opposite effect.) In the beginning of the movie, Harry and Julie were in the same museum picking up each other’s signals but hesitant to declare their intentions. Thus, they almost never got to know one another as the result of their reticence. (Ironically, both love and hate operate via mixed signals and the uncertainty principle. Harry and Julie like each other in their first encounter, but neither is sure about how the other feels. Harry’s antics amuse Julie at the museum, but Harry isn’t sure if she likes him or just finds him childish. Harry knows that a woman’s smile could mean affection, but then, maybe not. Similarly, US and USSR during the Cold War were locked in mutual hate not only due to ideological differences and global competition but mixed signals. US was convinced that USSR was filled with hatred for it and vice versa. There’s offensive hatred and defensive hatred: offensive hatred is to really hate someone while defensive hatred is to hate someone because he hates you or you think he hates you. If some leftists underestimated the antipathy of the Soviet Union for the US — or possibly shared and sympathized with the hatred — , some Americans overestimated Soviet Union’s hatred against America. Reagan declared the USSR to be an ‘evil empire’, as if Soviet leaders were a bunch of Darth Vaders and every Soviet citizen was a brainwashed communist zombie ready to conquer the world in the name of Lenin. As it turned out, the Soviet leadership, at least in the 70s and 80s, weren’t as hostile against the West as many Cold Warriors presumed. Often, the politics of hatred isn’t so much about responding to real hatred but perceiving imagined hatred — which may be real or unreal — in order to justify one’s own hatred of the other side. Not uncommonly, those who accuse others of ‘hatred’ could really be looking for an easy excuse to hate others and to justify their own hatred. Thus, even when the Cold War had pretty much wound down, Cold Warriors in the US still maintained that Russians were filled with grand evil designs to control the world. And neocons have exaggerated the passions of the Muslim world in order to inflame, justify, and execute American hatred against Arab/Muslim nations. Of course, Jews do this to white goyim as well, what with the ADL and SPLC fuming all the time about the ‘hatred’ of ‘white supremacists’ when it is Jews who are really filled with supremacist ambitions and hatred for white gentiles. Christians have done the same thing over the millennia, often hating others in the name of love and justifying their own hatred in the idea of combating the hatred of others, especially pagan folks; but then, Catholics and Protestants did this to one another as well, slaughtering millions of one another in religious wars, accusing the other side of ‘hatred’. Thus, it is dangerous to see hatred where there isn’t any or to exaggerate it when it could be more a matter of disagreement or misunderstanding. Someone who disagrees with you doesn’t necessarily hate you, but the gay lobby has convinced many stupid Americans that those who don’t sign onto the ridiculous ‘gay marriage’ are filled with ‘hatred’. Neocons would have us believe that Iranians are seething with nothing but murderous hatred for all Americans. They’d have us believe that terrorists attack the West because the Muslim world ‘hates our freedoms’. But Japan has a pretty decadent pop culture. Why don’t Muslims attack Japan? Anyway, not seeing hatred where it really exists is also dangerous. Stalin had no idea of the extent of Hitler’s contempt for Russians. He knew Hitler was a gangster but failed to take seriously enough Hitler’s ideological view of the world revolving around hatred or contempt for certain races, especially if those ‘races’ happen to occupy lands that Hitler wanted for the ‘Aryans’. And white Americans have no idea how much hatred Jews feel for them. Most Jews share the rabid and virulent sentiments of Tim Wise, Frank Rich, and David Sirota, but white Americans have this crazily sentimental notion that Jews are their best friends. This love-and-trust is so blind that even when Jews spit in white folks’ face, the latter think they must have done something to deserve it and look for ways to appease the Jews. Appeasing Jews will do more damage to the West than appeasing Hitler. Hitler was foul, but his aim was not to racially and culturally eradicate Europe, but that is the very agenda of the Jews. Hitler’s triumph would have meant a Europe dominated by an evil regime, but it would still have been Europe. If Jews get through with their agenda, there won’t be any Europe left, good or evil. If paranoia is seeing hatred where there isn’t any, something that might be called ‘pistinoia’ is seeing love where there is real hatred. White Americans are the most pistinoid people in the world. They embrace the Magic Negro when so many blacks are hostile to the white race. They sympathize with illegals even though illegals, especially Hispanics, have anti-gringo sentiments and their own tribal agendas. The fact that overwhelmingly white and culturally conservative Iowa went with Obama in 2008 and 2012 shows that the white race doesn’t have its head screwed on right. Pistinoia will be the death of the white race. Bible says there’s a time for everything. Time to love, time to hate, etc. White race has forgotten how to hate except itself and those ‘enemies’ — Muslims, Iranians, Chinese, Russians, etc. — who happen to be on the shit list of the Jews.) But later in the movie, Harry and Julie desperately seek one another but keep missing each other’s path; it’s almost like what happens at the end of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO when the lovers almost meet again but don’t. The mounting frustration is realistic but also dreamy because, despite the seeming randomness of events, a strange pattern keeps unfolding and repeating. How likely is it that Wilson would drive off on his own but then meet up with Harry again? How likely is it that Harry and Julie would meet for the first time and embrace for the last time at the La Brea tar pits?
There is an element in MIRACLE MILE that is all-too-common in stories, even or especially ones that involve the horrific deaths of countless millions. The world is about to blow up, but we only really care about Harry and Julie. It’s like in INDEPENDENCE DAY when N.Y. is getting blown up and presumably millions are dying, and but we are relieved to know that the DOG survived. In MIRACLE MILE, we don’t care about all those panicked citizens of L.A. We only root for Harry and Julie. Of course, almost all movies make us feel like this, which tells us something about human psychology; human sympathy is never universal and egalitarian despite our ideological pretensions; it always favors certain individuals or groups over others; many leftists identified more with Castro than with Cubans who had no freedom under him; Oliver Stone roots for ‘great men’ over little men despite his leftism; liberals prefer blacks over Hispanics when it comes to ‘coolness and hipness’, but they prefer Hispanics when it comes blacks when it comes to neighbors; Americans sympathize with Tibetans over Chinese but sympathize with Jews over Palestinians. Of course, the nature of power is never egalitarian since the very concept of power means to have control over others. Thus, even leftism wasn’t really about equality of power but having unequal power to impose the ideology of ‘equality’ on the people, and so, western leftists identified with great leftist thinkers and leaders than with the masses who needed to be controlled and led, who needed to be ‘taken care of’ and forced to be ‘equal’. Also, people naturally feel the pull of personalities, and some personalities are simply more magnetic, charismatic, and interesting than others. The Che Guevara cult illustrates how important the cult of personality has been to the Left.
Naturally, we all care more about our close/dear ones than about strangers, but why do we care so much about fictional characters on the screen? In INCEPTION, the DiCaprio character says to Ariadne, "You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on." Fiction and movies are like that. We are dropped into the middle of a world filled with strangers whom we don’t know at all. And we may not know much about their world either. But instantly, we feel it’s ‘our world’, and we feel as though we’ve known the characters all our lives. And we come to care about certain characters/personalities almost immediately and become anxious about their safety and interest — even if they’re criminals or gangsters. Why do strangers become so dear to us so suddenly? Why do we care so much about Harry and Julie — though we’ve known them for hardly more than a hour — while we don’t care about what happens to the rest of L.A filled with millions of people? Partly, it’s the power of faces. As far as most of us are concerned, the world is filled with faces and legs, and we care for those with faces(or at least pleasant faces). Why do we care more about Jews than about Ukrainians who died miserable deaths in the millions under Stalin and his Jewish henchmen? Jews, via control of the media, gave faces to the Holocaust victims. In the Holocaust museum there’s a wall filled with Jewish faces. Thus, Holocaust victims have faces whereas Ukrainian victims merely have legs. This is why the cult of Anne Frank has been as much focused on her face as on her writing. Many more people haven’t read her diary than have, but almost everyone recognizes her face as the poster-child of ‘innocent Jewish girl who died under Nazi cruelty and oppression’. (National Geographic once published a photo of a crying Latin American boy whose sheep had been killed by a car. It led to an outpouring of sympathy and donations from readers. But if a newspaper dryly report that a thousand people died horribly in the same nation, they victims would merely be statistics, and no one would have donated a penny.) But if one mentions the Ukrainian famine or the Great Leap Forward, what face comes to mind? Jews have faces since they control the media and have filled our eyes and minds with Jewish faces. Same with homos. Many Americans now care so much about homos becaue they have faces — often pretty, pleasant, or mainstream-looking — on TV and movies. PHILADELPHIA even turned a gay boy into an martyr-angel because he lost his job by buggering too many butts and ending up with AIDS. And BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN will have you believe that gayboy cowboys are the true men of the West because they cowpoke each other in the bunghole. Ludicrous you say, but the power of face is undeniable. When a baby opens its eyes, one of the first thing he or she attaches to is the face of the mother. Ducklings imprint their sight on the first thing they see. Jews have filled the media with tragic Jewish faces, angelic gay faces, and even the holy face of a mountain-sized Negro who wuvs a wittle white mouse. And Oprah’s face of maternal affection of a mammy-mama with big fat titties chuggling with chocolate milk turns so many white folks into butter. And Obama has the face of ‘command and control’ that makes many white boys and girls wee wee in their pants, whereas the goofy-loser face of George W. Bush made the GOP look like the dumbass party that it really is. There are lots of Jewish, homo, black, and liberal white faces in pop culture, and as a result, so many American youths associate positive values and virtues with Jews, homos, blacks, and liberal whites, but there’s almost no positive face in pop culture that white conservatives can identify with, admire, or look up to, but then, much of the fault must go to the Right for having no culture of creativity and expression. Conservatives always talk of cultural values but have no clue that cultural values are often continued, extended, strengthened, enriched, and justified through cultural expression in arts and entertainment. Culture is like the body. Unless it is exercised, it grows flabby and soft. (Another reason why so many folks attach to individuals — fictional or real — other than dear ones is due to the real vs ideal dichotomy in our psychology. Everyone is less than perfect but drawn to perfection. Ugly women look up to beautiful women, weaker men look up to tougher men, less intelligent people look up to very intelligent people, poor people look up to successful people, untalented people look up to talented people. Sometimes, the relations among various groups are symbiotic as no one is good at everything. A beautiful person may look great on the big screen but may have no aptitude for writing screenplays or directing. Stephanie Meyer is no looker, for example, but imagined beautiful characters in her fiction. The beautiful actors of TWILIGHT probably have little or no creative imagination and depend on writers like Meyer and Stephen King. The movie SHANE was one of the most memorable about how we feel the tug-of-war between the real and ideal. The young boy loves his father because sons feel closer to fathers. But the boy worships Shane who is handsome, striking, and fast with the gun. The powers-that-be control the ideals, and this explains why so many white people, though feeling close to their dear ones, really worship Magic Negroes, holy homos, and bejeweled Jews.)
Though the best part of MIRACLE MILE is the first act — up to panic session at the coffee shop — , the ending is one of the most memorable in my film-viewing experience. Its power partly derives from reverse-expectation as, after all, most people who went to see MIRACLE MILE expected a romance-thriller, a genre that usually ends happily. And when the helicopter returns to the roof top, we could almost believe that some miracle is going to save Harry and Julie. And yet, MIRACLE MILE has one of the bleakest endings in 80s cinema — even more so than the ambiguously depressing ending of John Carpenter’s THE THING. The original ending of BLADE RUNNER was ‘audience-tested’ as too downcast and dispiriting, so it was altered to have Deckard and Rachel flying off to paradise.
The ending of MIRACLE MILE is so profoundly and morbidly harrowing that I suspect De Jarnatt may have been inspired by a dream. Many people have certain recurring nightmares haunted by a set of particular demons. For me, it’s been zombies, though, to be sure, I haven’t had a zombie dream in ages. One particular zombie dream was rather like MIRACLE MILE. In this dream, which I had in college, I was in some zombie-infested world where flesh-eating ghouls were rummaging all around; I feared for my life, so when I came upon a big vat of tar, I threw myself into it, and according to dream logic, something like 1000 yrs passed, and I then rose out of the tar and found myself hovering a mile above the city scape — like in the opening shots of WEST SIDE STORY — , looking all around for any sign of life or the living-dead. The area seemed utterly desolate, devoid of both people and zombies, as if I was the last person left on Earth. Then, I was back on the ground inside some room feeling safely alone. But then, zombie kids rushed at the door, and I was using all my strength to hold them back. I then awoke with my hands pushing against the wall. I say it’s like MIRACLE MILE because of the sense of apocalyptic horror and the element of the journey across the vastness of time. And there was the vat of tar, similar in some way to the tar pit in MIRACLE MILE. So, I suspect some ideas of MIRACLE MILE may have come to De Jarnatt from a dream; and indeed, sleeping is a major motif in the movie. Maybe he was haunted by nuclear holocaust dreams like I was stalked by zombie dreams. I found the movie transfixing for its dreaminess bordering on nightmarishness. It put me in a kind of trance, and on the night I watched it, I had one of the most ‘evil’ dreams I ever had. I don’t remember most of it, but it just felt evil and sinister yet alluring and seductive, as if my dream consciousness had turned into a slithering serpent coiling into the nether regions of the soul and chancing upon a vilely beautiful creature with smooth velvet skin and black eyes of drowned child. So, something about the movie got under my skin like some parasites that bore through the skin and worm inside organs or brains. Too be sure, different people will react to a movie like MIRACLE MILE very differently. Generally, movies that play on the subconscious have this effect on the audience. It’s like some objects are what-you-see-is-what-you-get whereas others are what-it-is-is-what-it-makes-you-feel. Anyone can look at a gold necklace and admire it as jewelry, like it or not. Its value as art or craft is obvious. But certain other object may hold no apparent value or may even seem ugly/worthless to some people while having infinite value, even higher than that of gold or diamond, to other people. It’s like the box of toys in AMELIE is just a box of toys to us but has infinite value to the man for whom it is a magic box of lost childhood memories. It triggers responses within him that it doesn’t within us. A family heirloom, though of little market or artistic value, has great value to a member of the family. But such responses can be triggered and shared even amongst and across strangers as similarities of personalities and experiences exist all around us. So, even though the box of toys in AMELIE is not our box of toys, the scene may trigger certain similar feelings in us.
This may explain the logic behind the so-called cult movies. For many people, certain cult films have no appeal whatsoever and may even seem stupid, weird, or offensive. But other people have a sixth sense for such movies. Consider HAROLD AND MAUDE, which, I once read, ran in one movie theater for over two years, until people of the community finally picketed the theater to play something else. Clearly, the Harold-and-Maudites who came to the screening again and again — in some cases, day after day — saw and felt something in the movie that most people did not. It was like their lost box of toys. I had a friend who became so obsessed with MULHOLLAND DR. that she had to go see it every night as long as it showed in theaters, even if it meant driving to theaters further away when nearer ones programmed new movies. Different ‘cult movies’ have different effects on people, with some picking up signals others don’t. Such films may even give us a few clues about mental illness, i.e. why is it that some people respond so powerfully to certain things and see ‘so much more’ or ‘so much more differently’ than others. Consider Lodge Kerrigan’s CLEAN SHAVEN where it’s like a mentally disturbed individual is LIVING in a cult movie reality, as his experience of reality is strikingly different from that of most people sharing the same spaces. It’s not enough for a movie to be outlandish or strange to be a cult movie. After all, most sci-fi or fantasy movies are unreal and far-out, but they only dazzle the eyes without triggering deeper responses of a personal/psychological nature that are harder to ascertain, define, or articulate. For a lot of people, HAROLD AND MAUDE is nothing but a sick comedy where some weird young guy boffs a very old woman. But for some people, certain sounds and images in that film serve as an unlocking mechanism to some hidden corridors of their psyche. Kevin Reynold’s FANDANGO, especially the final segment, has the same kind of effect on some people. Some feel it, some don’t. It’s like the psycho-drama of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Those who were struck by The Light see, hear, and sense things around them differently than those who weren’t. Our psyches have been created and molded by different genes, different experiences, different lessons, different dreams, and different fantasies. Thus, especially if the film happens to be of a strange nature, some respond powerfully while others feel nothing.
Of course, movies are part of the experience that changes our psyches in subtle ways, and so, even when we think we’ve resisted the power of the movie and haven’t been affected, we could have been in some way that has either softened or hardened our hearts to future experiences in culture and life. In the most obvious sense, our senses could gradually become acculturated to something that our mind continues to oppose; but if the senses become so used to something as the ‘new norm’, the resistance of the mind may eventually fade or remain only as an empty shell. For example, while many Americans resisted the push for ‘gay marriage’, the ceaseless flooding of gay imagery, gay symbols, gay propaganda, and gay whatever had a way of weakening and wearing down their sensory defenses. It’s grown so familiar, so part of the cultural landscape that one comes to recognizes it as something normal even when it isn’t. Also, if one had originally opposed ‘gay marriage’ with full backing of moral confidence, one may eventually arrive at a point where he or she increasingly feels defensive and apologetic in his or her resistance to the gay agenda, indeed as if he or she has to prove that he or she is still a good person and means no harm or ‘hatred’ toward anyone by refusing to get along with the program. Those who push ‘gay marriage’ don’t have to explain but merely shout slogans, whereas those who oppose it must explain why they are not monsters.
But, the process can also be subtle and strange, shifting and altering one’s psyche in ways that one may not even recognize. So, one might still think that one’s view of a particular work remains as before, but it may have planted a seed that is slowly but surely changing how one sees not only that particular work but the culture, even life, in general. It’s like the rich son in INCEPTION will never know what really happened within him to make him decide to break up his father’s company in order to do his own thing, the irony being that his decision to ‘do his own thing’ is the product of manipulation by others. (Incidentally, we’ve all heard that the argument has been won for ‘gay marriage’ since majority of Americans are now for it and made up their ‘own minds’. But was there really an argument? To be sure, the argument from the Christian Right was rather weak and dim-witted, invoking the Bible when American laws must separate church and state. But there are compelling secular and rational reasons to oppose ‘gay marriage’, but why weren’t they expressed by secular conservatives? Because people with such views feared the consequences of expressing them: demotion or lack of promotion or even firing, blacklisting, shunning, mass hysteria and condemnation, constant ostracism. Fearing such pressures, there has been no real debate or argument on ‘gay marriage’. The ‘left’ would make all the arguments while the ‘right’ would mostly hunker down and make some feeble noises about ‘tradition’. Of course, the problem is twofold. Many conservatives believe in the ‘dignified style’ rooted in Anglo manners and restraints and, as such, fear to discuss matters of ‘vulgar’ nature. Thus, conservatives are unwilling to discuss the nature of ‘gay sex’ that is downright gross. Also, many elite conservatives tend to be genteel and are afraid to give offense to anyone. But even if they were to change their tune, the liberal media play double standard. It’s like liberals can make all sorts of ‘sexist’ remarks about Sarah Palin, but a conservative will be in hot water if he did the same about liberal female politicians. It’s like Jews can say all sorts of foul and nasty things about Catholics and Christian Right, but conservatives better not say such things about Jews or homos. So, it’s a case of "damned if you, damned if you don’t" for conservatives because liberals control the media and the rules of the game. Also, homos have been enabled by Jews. Just as Tataglia was backed by Barzini in THE GODFATHER and the Rosato Brothers were backed by Hyman Roth in THE GODFATHER PART II, homos are protected by Jews. Without Jewish backing, homos could not have ‘won the argument’. Homos ‘won’ because Jews engineered the laws, media, and governments to favor and protect the gay lobby while sending a not-so-subtle message to the other side that there will be serious consequences if they dare speak out forcefully and rationally against the gay agenda. Thus, conservative opposition to ‘gay marriage’ has been wimpy, tepid, and dweeby. It’s like the auction scene in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Goons in the auction hall send not-so-subtle signals to everyone that they better not bid up the price. So, the goons ‘win the bid’ for Frank by subverting true competition. Likewise, there was no real argument on the issue of ‘gay marriage’. One side got to use its fists and feet to kick and punch whereas the other side was only allowed to stand its ground. But if you don’t fight back, how can you stand your ground? Fighting requires offense as well as defense. You mustn’t only defend your turf but lob bombs at the enemy’s turf. But conservatives have been so wimpy to give offense to homos, especially as Jews let conservatives know that "if you insult homos, you insult us, and we will be very very unhappy with you guys." Conservatives, ever so slavish to Jews, have been acting like pussy-whipped dogs. Also, many Americans were won over to ‘gay marriage’ not by argument but mindless pageantry, propaganda, hype, celebrity populism, and hysteria. Stealing people’s hearts in such way is not winning the argument. Nazis won over the Germans with hype and pageantry, but that didn’t mean that Nazism won the moral argument. At one time, most Russians were hysterical in their praise of Stalin and would have torn limb from limb a heretic counter-revolutionary like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but that didn’t mean communism ‘won the argument’ against truth-tellers like Solzhenitsyn who rotted in the gulag. During the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, what with so many Chinese chanting Maoist slogans, one would have thought Mao ‘won the argument’ on issues of ideology, culture, and economics, but there had been no real argument as anyone who spoke sense against Maoism was either imprisoned or shot. In the late 70s, the Hollywood blockbuster prevailed over the ideal of personal ‘auteur’ film-making, but that didn’t mean it morally, artistically, or intellectually ‘won the argument’ in cinematic art. Blockbuster movie-making won because of the mass hype, crass populist manipulations, and mindless hedonism. TRANSFORMERS raked in gazillions while BLADE RUNNER died at the box office. That doesn’t mean fans of Michael Bay ‘won the argument’ against fans of Ridley Scott. The only ‘argument’ it won or demonstrated is that people are childish and stupid and can be manipulated to go apeshit over the dumbest things, whether it be Hitlerism, Stalinism, Maoism, ‘gay marriage’, Holocaustianity, Magic Negro, and etc. The success of Oprah doesn’t mean any kind of intelligent victory of Oprah-ism in the world of culture; it only means the triumph of mass stupidity that can easily be made to support and go nuts about anything, whether it’s the Great Leap Forward or Obama as messiah shtick. Jews rig the rules of the debate, allow only one side to fire all its engines, smother the populace with emotionally manipulative hype, and then declare that it ‘won the argument’. It’s like how this nation got into the Iraq War, with 80% of Americans supporting the invasion. But how did the neocons and liberal Zionists ‘win the argument’? They manipulated American rage lingering from 9/11, they gave special coverage to certain politicians and pundits, they willfully repressed skepticism about the claims about WMD, and made the war sound like a cakewalk. How it ‘won the argument’ for the Iraq War is no different from how it ‘won the argument’ for ‘gay marriage’: via hype, politics turned into mass marketing, silencing or sidelining opposing voices, and etc. In politics, arguments are generally not so much won as sold, and those who get to sell are those who control the laws and the advertising, and the mass media have become nothing but part of the Jewish advertising network. When even manly athletes have been silenced and coerced to salute the gay agenda — or else face serious consequences in contract renewals, face fines, or face hostile media fury — , the message is loud and clear. You better salute homos like Germans once saluted Hitler or Chinese once sang praises to Mao. Supporters of ‘gay marriage’ think they are acting out of free will, but little do they know they have no choice in the matter because if one doesn’t sing praises to homos — the favorite allies of Jews — , one is pretty much toast. Even in middling professions, you could be fired or demoted for not being sufficiently pro-homo. Of course, many Americans are so brainwashed that they think there shouldn’t be a choice on the matter at all, as if it’s simply inconceivable that anyone could be against ‘gay marriage’ that became ‘same-sex marriage’ that became ‘marriage equality’. In our amnesiac social order, Americans are too stupid to even imagine an America that did just fine without the silly and trashy gay agenda. Btw, since when is ‘equality’ always a good thing? If it is, shouldn’t Harvard practice ‘admission equality’ and not discriminate against dumb people? Didn’t communism prove, once and for all, that ‘equality’ isn’t necessarily a good thing? What was communism but an hatred for intelligent and talented people? It’s natural that smart people will achieve more, make more money, find more success in life. Smart people of talent and industry naturally rise higher. Communism hates such people because they violate the principle of ‘equality’. And superior artists make real art, and of course, communism hated such people since their art wasn’t ‘for the people’. Why create art that only people of higher intelligence and taste might appreciate? Why not only make mass art that can be appreciated by everyone equally? The great historical irony, however, is that the anti-intelligence agenda of communism was overlooked by many intelligent people in the West because, oddly enough, so many genuinely intelligent and talented people in the West were Marxists or communist sympathizers. Indeed, Marx the founder of modern communism was a man of great intelligence himself. Thus, the ideology of the stupid became associated with intelligence and creativity. Many of the best talents in the West were singing praises to communism just when communism was destroying so many intelligent and talented people in Leninist nations like Romania and China. Anyway, it appears that American politics today is like a triangle that diverges widely at the base and converges significantly at the top. The bottom of the Democratic Party is filled with angry blacks and anti-gringo Hispanics and trashy welfare mothers. At the top of the liberal power structure, you have Jews, gays, and liberal wasps. The bottom of the GOP is filled with ‘rednecks’, Evangelicals, ‘gun nuts’, and white power folks. At the top of the conservative power structure, you have Neocons and guys like Lindsey Graham. Elites are much closer to one another than the masses are in this triangle. Things might have been different in the past when your average white liberal and average white conservative would at least have agreed on securing national borders, mainstream values centered around family, and a basic patriotism, especially as 90% of America used to be made up of white folks. Whatever the differences, no one would have supported an idiocy like ‘gay marriage’ in the past. But there is a huge divergence in cultural attitudes and values among the lower elements in today’s America. Rules of success are narrower than rules of failure, which is why elites of both sides have more in common in the political triangle. If you’re a Negro without much, you’re free to think or say anything. But if you wanna be a successful Negro, you have to read from the rule-book written by Jews, which is what Obama did to rise in the world. If you’re a white person without much, you can spout off just about anything. But if you wanna be a successful white person, you better be like Charles Murray and suck up to Jews and sign onto ‘gay marriage’. Of course, the top of the political triangle doesn’t have two sides converging perfectly at the center. Rather, one side leans more heavily against the other side, pushing its agenda onto the other. So, liberal elites pressure conservative elites far more than vice versa.)
The final moments of MIRACLE MILE pile on the nightmare imagery, something darker and deeper than genre scare-tactics. There’s no short supply of end-of-the-world movies where humanity faces extinction from attacks by giant insects, space invaders, big monsters, nuclear war, pandemics, and etc., but most work on the level of spectacle, i.e. we fear for our bodies than for our souls; we fear the instant than feel the infinite. In MIRACLE MILE in contrast, we are made to feel both the instant and the infinite as the ultimate hell and ultimate heaven. The LA of here-and-now has turned into hell under nuclear attack, and only chance for Harry and Julie’s ‘survival’ is to become trapped in the tar pits; as fossils, they can ‘live forever’, perhaps to be discovered in the future and placed in museums like artifacts as in the Page Museum. But the infinite is a hell too; as animate and cyclical beings, something in us resists being turned into stone; consider the shocking moment when Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt; it’s worse than death; or consider how Han Solo is turned into a giant chocolate bar at the end of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK — a very disturbing image. So, paradoxically, the nuclear hellfire of L.A. becomes a kind of heavenly hope for Harry and Julie; the very hellishness they were running from becomes their dream ticket of being released from the tar pits and turned into cosmic energy. Thus, heaven is hell and hell is heaven, a bittersweet paradox that probably upset a lot of viewers.
Most zombie movies just make you wanna run for your life, but George Romero’s first two zombie movies — especially the first — lurched into nightmare territory not so much because of the gore but the shock of incredulity at the unthinkable events; the semi-documentary style made it even more so. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is grimly realistic with an idea that is fantastically ghoulish. It makes the unreal seem all too real. It feels less like we’ve entered the world of horror than the world of horror has entered our worlds, and in that sense, it was one of the most influential films ever made for it divorced horror genre from overt stylization and branded the horror right onto the flesh of realism or, more accurately, realisticism. Though NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is not without a certain grubby gothicism, most of it’s in realist mode, as if the zombies we are watching could be right outside our homes. To be sure, Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS(based on Jack Finney’s novel) was something of a progenitor of this kind of horror.
"DAWN OF THE DEAD is one of the best horror films ever made — and, as an inescapable result, one of the most horrifying. It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling. It is also (excuse me for a second while I find my other list) brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society. Nobody ever said art had to be in good taste... If you have seen NIGHT, you will recall it as a terrifying horror film punctuated by such shocking images as zombies tearing human flesh from limbs. DAWN includes many more scenes like that, more graphic, more shocking, and in color. I am being rather blunt about this because there are many people who will not want to see this film. You know who you are. Why are you still reading?... George Romero deliberately intends to go too far in DAWN OF THE DEAD. He's dealing very consciously with the ways in which images can affect us, and if we sit through the film (many people cannot) we make some curious discoveries. One is that the fates of the zombies, who are destroyed wholesale in all sorts of terrible ways, don't affect us so much after awhile. They aren't being killed, after all: They're already dead. They're even a little comic, lurching about a shopping center and trying to plod up the down escalator. Romero teases us with these passages of humor. We relax, we laugh, we see the satire in it all, and then -- pow! Another disembowelment, just when we were off guard. But, even so, you may be asking, how can I defend this depraved trash? I do not defend it. I praise it. And it is not depraved, although some reviews have seen it that way. It is about depravity... The depravity is in the healthy survivors, and the true immorality comes as two bands of human survivors fight each other for the shopping center: Now look who's fighting over the bones!"
Now, I’m sure all of us have come across similar sentiments expressed by other critics about other movies, but as a child, I just kept reading Qbert’s review over and over, trying to get my head around what Ebert was saying. I understood the idea of good movies being praised for their goodness and bad movies being trashed for their awfulness. And I even understood that a serious movie can be very bad and that bad movies can be lotsa fun. But the way Ebert described DAWN OF THE DEAD, it sounded like the sickest and vilest trash ever made — a movie with graphic scenes of ‘zombies’ tearing and devouring living human beings — , and yet, Ebert was praising it as some kind of masterpiece, as ‘one of the best horror movies ever made’. I recall Gene Siskel was less effusive in his praise, but he also recommended it on Sneak Previews. At any rate, Ebert’s review sounded as crazy as the movie, what with all the hyperbole and hysteria. He watched something utterly depraved but was convinced that it was a brilliant statement about society and morality and all that. This kind of sensibility was new to me — as I was mostly ignorant of the seismic cultural shifts that had taken place in the 60s. The review was so insane yet ‘thoughtful’ that it became a must-see movie. What especially fired up my imagination was that the movie was rated between something between a R and X. It wasn’t exactly X but rated as ‘no one under 17 will be admitted’. If not for the fact, I probably would have convinced my dad to take me as he wasn’t the censorious type and preferred taking me to R-rated movies even as a child than having to sit through family/children movies that he detested. But the rating said even children with parents/guardians would not be admitted to DAWN, which was a real pisser. One of the most famous critics in the nation called it a ‘depraved’ masterpiece, ‘one of the best horror movies of all time’, and I couldn’t even see it! There was no justice in the world! So, what could I do but have dreams/nightmares about seeing it? In one of these dreams, I was sitting in a theater showing the movie — at least according to my imagination — , and a zombie was gnawing on what seemed like a G.I. Joe doll’s head and then flung it at the audience, whereupon, in 3-D manner, the decapitated body of a US army soldier really flew across the seats. Day in and day out, I couldn’t get the movie out of my head, and then, a break in the clouds! Our local second run theater had a more permissive policy. Generally, it allowed kids to see any R-rated movie without adult supervision. Since DAWN was rated ‘no one under 17 admitted’, the theater tightened its policy to kids-allowed-with-adult-supervision. I was ecstatic, and me and my friend got someone standing in line to pose as our adult guardian and we got in. I’d been to that theater many times but on that day I felt as if walking into the bowels of hell, and when the movie began, I was overcome with the most intense combination of fright and fascination. Here I was seeing a movie I was officially forbidden to see, a movie described by Ebert as "gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling" and "brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless" — I had to look up some of the words in the dictionary. I braced for the worst and the best, and when, few minutes into the movie, the zombies appeared and tore into human flesh and the SWAT team blew off a guy’s head and a fat zombie without a foot began to move and a young soldier shot his head off and a horde of zombies came crashing through a wall and a Negro used a pistol to shoot a bunch of tied up zombies in the cellar and etc., I understood what Ebert was talking about. It was the most extreme stuff I’d ever seen, absolutely appalling but also mind-blowing, literally as well as figuratively. It put me in such a state of shock and sick elation that I didn’t even question the plausibility of the scenario — in this sense, its effect was kinda like CLOSE ENCOUNTERS’, another movie so overwhelming on the senses that you just surrender to the delirium. To be sure, prior to DAWN OF THE DEAD, I’d seen THE DEER HUNTER with the harrowing Russian Roulette scene, but the violence in DAWN was unrelenting and without moral context. As Ebert said, "The zombies in DAWN OF THE DEAD are not the ones who are depraved. They are only acting according to their natures, and, gore dripping from their jaws, are blameless." There was no hope of coming to any understanding with the zombies. They were just out to eat you, and so, you had no choice but to kill them before they could kill you. Also, if there was some secret to the monsters in other horror movies — the source of their evil and the means to eradicate or pacify them — , there was no discernible logic or secret to the zombies. You had to deal with them as bluntly as they dealt with you. The only ‘secret’ was you had to crush their skulls to kill them, but it was a brutal fact than a special/secret knowledge necessary to kill vampires or werewolves. Watching DAWN was like finding oneself stuck in the hellish camp of Colonel Kurtz(of APOCALYPSE NOW), Jonestown, or the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia. It was like a world without souls. Monsters in horror movies often have dark souls, but even evil souls are souls of a kind. Zombies have drives but no souls; they are like the dumb version of the Terminator. They act according to ‘programming’ and nothing can change it. This programming makes them want to endlessly consume and devour. Some people think it’s a satire on consumerism, i.e. how the TV culture has turned or programmed all of us into shoppers who raise their children into mall rats, and we keep consuming and consuming and consuming regardless of whether we need something or not. We consume just to consume. In a way, one could say that the only real difference between the people and the zombies in DAWN is that the former consume consciously whereas the latter consume unconsciously.
In this case, ‘consume’ doesn’t mean eating and buying things out of need but consuming just for the habit of consuming. Zombies are like that. They don’t seem to eat out of hunger. Even if their bellies are full, they keep consuming some more because that’s their programming. They eat just to eat. (By the way, what happens to the stuff they eat? They must shit it out somehow, right? But we never see them pulling down their pants to take a dump, so do they just take a dump in the pants? What happens after the pants fill up with zombie poo?) Personally, I think DAWN is rather stupid satire — and why would any real satire rely so much on mindless gore? — , but it was a one-of-a-kind movie adventure when I didn’t know any better. I’m not a fan of horror, I don’t like gore(and I closed my eyes through some of DAWN), and I don’t enjoy watching mayhem and cruelty on screen, but DAWN the movie and Ebert’s review were probably one of the most formative cultural experiences of my childhood. Good influence? I don’t know, but it did hint at a new way of seeing movies. I suppose the impact for me was like Susan Sontag’s "Notes on Camp" to the 1960s generation. It taught — or misled — me on the notion that the seemingly mindless could have a mind behind it, and something didn’t have to be Masterpiece Theater to be worthy of serious appreciation.
Some movies slip through the pores of the conscious mind and seep into a deeper/darker place, and MIRACLE MILE is such a movie. When Harry and Julie sink into tar pits, it feels like we’re submerging into nether regions of our own mind that we fear to acknowledge. (The mind is like the digestive system in this sense: We focus on the mouth and stomach; we love the taste of food and like the feeling of a full stomach. But the digestive system continues through the long digestive tract that absorbs nutrients and passes the rest of foodstuff as waste material that ends up in the bowels as dead feces until it is finally ‘liberated’ through the anus. Food ‘lives’ as flavor in the mouth and lives as fullness in the stomach. But, as it passes through the intestines, it loses its nutrients and finally ‘dies’ in the bowel, like dead animals in the La Brea tar pits. Thus, the human body has places where food is ‘alive’ and where it’s ‘dead’. Similarly, though we like to think of ourselves in terms of being alive, there’s a ‘dead zone’ in the mind as well. We’d like to believe that the living is alive and the dead is dead. But as JACOB’S LADDER illustrated, there is a part of the human psyche that serves as the bowels of and portal to death. This zone is emotional and physiological. Every part of our body is in a constant process of death and life. Cells keep dying and must be eliminated and replaced. Also, as we are well aware of the possibility and eventuality of death, there is a part of the psyche is always processing such anxieties. When we are safe and healthy, the dead zone is hidden and controlled, but when our health begins to falter or when our lives are at stake, anxious energies from the fear/dead zone began to spread and try to prepare us for death. But as we are used to being alive, most of our mind and body resists the process with panic and desperation, like the soul/body that doesn’t wanna let go in JACOB’S LADDER. The living part of us ‘sees’ the forces emanating from the dead zone as our mortal enemy, as demonic forces; but if we let go and accept the inevitable, they turn into natural and angelic caretakers, like the chiropractor says to Tim Robbins’ character in the movie. Thus, even while we are alive, there is a part of our soul that is like the lower part of the digestive system. It deals with death and elimination. Usually, it deals with eliminating dead brain cells or fading thoughts, but when The Moment comes, it readies our entire souls/bodies for elimination. Because the dead zone is so repressed while we are healthy and alive, we don’t sense its existence. But a movie like MIRACLE MILE can trigger certain responses in that deeper-most part of the fear/dead zone and make us feel emotions we never encountered or feared to encounter. Harry and Jule are in the bowels of the earth and in the bowels of the dead zone, and they want to be finally eliminated and liberated through the cosmic anus. Harry is able to accept this outcome, Julie initially panics but comes to accept there is no other way. It’s like Tim Robbins’ character accepting the inevitable at the end. They must make peace with the zone of human sub/consciousness related to fear, terror, decay, and death. We don’t merely see Harry and Julie trapped in a bad place but feel ourselves trapped within the dead zone of our own psyche, the horrible sense that our own body and soul is in the prison/purgatory between life and death. Harry and Julie’s horrible end fossilizes into a turdy metaphor of our most abject fears and the last desperate hope to be ‘liberated’, like poop out of the poop-shoot. It’s a scene worthy of the best of Lynch and Bunuel.)
We’ve all seen massive explosions and doom-and-die scenarios in movies, mostly as grand spectacles, at the end of which awaits a catharsis, triumph, tragedy, or something that offers some kind of emotional resolution. DEEP IMPACT is like that. Win or lose, there is clarity before the closing of the curtain; even the deaths are heroic, triumphant, or beautiful in some way. But there are also movies like THE LAST WAVE by Peter Weir with strange/eerie endings that offer little in the way of deliverance or rapture.
The thing about dreams is their intensely personal nature, which helps to explain the nightmarish undertones of MIRACLE MILE. In DEEP IMPACT, the daughter chooses to die with her father, but they understand the score; they also chose their fate, both the place and the manner, rendering it a clean death, a genre death that saddens but also reassures the audience. It’s all out in the open: the event, the act, and the emotions.
In MIRACLE MILE, however, it’s neither like watching reality nor watching a movie but like going from a dream to a dream. L.A. is blowing up in what looks like a surreal fantasy, but Harry and Julie don’t perish in a ‘clean’ heroic/tragic way but sink into the tar pits that might as well be the dark recesses of the subconscious. They are like the couple in THE VANISHING, both of whom were buried alive. They are like the men trapped in the submarine in DAS BOOT. Up above is death and destruction, and down below, there’s peace and calm but slow suffocation worse than death by hellfire and brimstone.
Harry and Julie may never be recovered since it could very well be the end of humanity forever.
Besides, what is more frightful than being buried alive? One of the most harrowing passages are the final chapters of Emile Zola’s GERMINAL where a man and a woman are trapped in a mine shaft for a long spell. Nightmares can be extra paranoia-inducing because you don’t only feel hounded by hostile forces but feel as if there is no escape from this world, every wall and corridor of which is slithering porously with those hostile forces; and even when you come to realize it’s a nightmare and try to break into waking state, dream consciousness keeps you strapped down. (The area between the nightmare and waking state is the most harrowing. At least when you’re fully in the nightmare, you can move around freely in dream space. But once you realize you’re dreaming and try to wake up, you become aware of your limp body on the bed. Thus, you lose physical movement within the dream since your physical awareness in your half-awakened state is connected to your actual body on the bed. Yet, you can’t move your limbs because your mind is still linked to dream state. So, the hounds of hell keeping coming after you but you can no longer flee. You can only wait for your mind to finally set from the dream.) So, when Harry and Julie sink into the tar pits, the very place right above which where they first met, it feels like a sick cosmic joke. And then, finally, Harry has one wish, a hopeful dream in what may be a dream within a dream, and it is that a direct nuclear strike will hit the tar pits and liberate him and Julie, whose carbon molecules, in the heat of nuclear heat and radiation, may turn into diamonds. And the final blinding image that fills the screen suggests Harry’s wish came true, but we cannot be sure as nothing is for sure in the logic of dreams, if indeed the ending of MIRACLE MILE is a dream.
Dreams/nightmares can push us to the limits of our fears; panic-stricken, we hope for some kind of release, resolution, or even death within the dream to be liberated from the horror, but rarely is this wish fulfilled. Instead, we wake up. Thus, the horror isn’t so much resolved as erased, yet to recur in another dream. It’s like the bitterness, the fear, and recriminations in LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, THE SACRIFICE, PERSONA, and FANNY AND ALEXANDER resolve nothing. The new day arises and the darkness lifts, but the doubts all return in the night. The light of day merely distracts us from scars that never heal. In MIRACLE MILE, the nightmare scenario begins in the dark of night, and we hope that maybe the whole thing will be exposed as a hoax and evaporate with the new day, but the nightmare continues into the day. Then finally, Harry and Julie sink into another kind of ‘night’ in the darkness of the tar pits, and finally they hope for another kind of ‘day’ in the direct nuclear hit that could illuminate the darkness they’re trapped in and transform them into glittering diamonds. Though there’s no surefire clue that MIRACLE MILE is a dream, a sort of dream logic pervades the entire movie, and the final moments especially make sense through dream logic. In extreme situations in nightmares, one either escapes by waking up or slipping into yet another level of dream where one feels awakened but may actually have sunk deeper into the dream world. This aspect of dream was explored in WAKING LIFE by Richard Linklater — and SCANNER DARKLY did for hallucinations what WAKING LIFE did for dreams. So, one could argue that Harry isn’t just dreaming but falling into deeper layers of dreams, albeit ones through which the narratives are all loosely connected. When Harry jumps out of the Negro coffee shop owner’s van and hits the ramp, he loses consciousness for awhile and upon regaining it, thinks he might be dreaming. But when he fires a gun, he realizes he’s still in the same world, or is he? Could different layers of dreams still maintain a narrative connection?
Though MIRACLE MILE has gained minor cult status, many people will probably dismiss it as a confused thriller or a piece of trash, opinions I can understand if not agree with. If some films are indisputably great, some are special for different reasons. Certain movies affect different people differently due to the vagaries of personality, sensibility, peculiar fears, private obsessions. So, I can understand some people feeling nothing for MIRACLE MILE. Some might say it’s a poor man’s Scorsese and Lynch filtered through John Hughes and other 80s hack directors. I disagree, but like the title of a Who song, I can’t explain. It’s like some people can be hypnotized while others can’t. Some people are allergic to certain things while others are not. Some are susceptible to certain germs while others aren’t. Some become obsessed with a certain guy or gal while others see nothing special about him or her. Some might say it’s a matter of taste, but it’s something deeper. It’s a matter of trigger, and we all have different triggers. Even the most rational person can be offset by an unexpected trigger, like with the intellectual played by John Hurt by LIFE AND DEATH IN LONG ISLAND. Or the German professor in THE BLUE ANGEL. Or Humbert Humbert in LOLITA, a sane and clever man who loses everything because some young girl triggered something within him that he hadn’t even known existed. It’s also a matter of contagion, and we are all contagious to different things. We may abhor or welcome the contagion that happens to us when we watch a certain movie, listen to a certain song, or read a certain book, but we know that it’s suddenly familiarizing us with a strange part of us that had remained latent, dormant, or hidden. We feel both taken back and liberated, as if a stranger is emerging from within us while also recognizing this stranger as the ‘real me’ that I hitherto hadn’t known. It’s like the writer in LIFE AND DEATH IN LONG ISLAND discovers and feels something utterly new and alien emerging from inside him, but this new side becomes his all encompassing passion and ‘true self’.
Let’s just say I happen to be somewhat contagious to MIRACLE MILE, a movie that plays to the human heart but also strikes at the nerve zones of the mind.
It is to be expected from a love story set in a night when the world is conspiring to blow itself up. DR. STRANGELOVE is immeasurably a greater film, but MIRACLE MILE is the one that really messed with and continues to haunt my mind.
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