Star Trek Into Darkness

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Star Trek Into Darkness is a perfect specimen of what I have termed “post-classic cinema,” which refers to the characteristic nature of the cinema of the past decade or so, which is a type of cinema with a completely different ontological status from that of the Classic period of the 1970s and 80s. Post-classic cinema eschews all forms of originality, and proceeds by means of Cloning, Grafting, Folding and Hybridizing all previous forms of cinema. Star Trek Into Darkness essentially “folds” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan into the inside of its narrative topology (in the same way in which Derrida said that he could have “folded” his book Of Grammatology inside Writing and Difference), and then, using that as its basic narrative skeleton, proceeds to Graft and Sew onto its anatomy various scenes and motifs from previous films. The helicopter assassination scene from Godfather Part III, for instance, is “cut” from that film and then “grafted” onto the new Star Trek narrative in a sequence in which the film’s primary antagonist, Khan, attempts to assassinate all the heads of the Federation who are present at a single meeting. The look of the futuristic San Francisco, likewise, has been cut and grafted from the city of Coruscant in The Phantom Menace. (For some reason, these films never take sea level rise into account: by the 23rd century, most of San Francisco is going to be under water).

There is, then, nothing “original” about Star Trek Into Darkness, but then originality no longer matters to anyone in the days of “post-classic” cinema. Films are now like genetically modified organisms that are produced through hybridization processes in lab-like conditions. The resulting product is clean, sanitary and gleaming, but wholly, completely and thoroughly artificial. While Star Trek Into Darkness may be the most entertaining Star Trek film since the days of the early films starring the original cast, when one looks more carefully at the film with microscopic circumspection, one can find the tiny serial number with the words “Made in L.A.” which stamps the product with all the prefabrication of one that says “Made in China.”

Take, for example, the cast of the two J.J. Abrams films themselves: once the original cast members are too old to be put into these movies, under the conditions of  post-classic cinema, they can be simply “cloned” by replicating the original cast with younger look- alikes which, like clones, physically resemble the originals but, also like clones, have something “not quite right” about them. The chemistry between the original cast members, for instance, is now gone, for their clones have replaced them with a stiff and unfeeling ersatz quality that destroys the sense of camaraderie, irony and wit that made the original television series and the first movies so much fun to watch in the first place.

The directorial style of J.J. Abrams, too, is equally ersatz, for he is also a perfect exemplar of post-classic cinema, in this case, of the new ontological status of the director as forger, for his style is a perfect imitation of a “hybridization” of the visual styles of Steven Spielberg (especially his use of light) and George Lucas (with his “eye candy” touch for handling machines). Abrams is the perfect director for the upcoming Star Wars sequels because he can copy the works of the masters with such faithfulness that it is almost like trying to differentiate an original Rembrandt from equally convincing works by whole schools of his imitators.  Star Trek Into Darkness looks like it could have been directed by either Spielberg or Lucas, and if one didn’t know who the real director was, one might be hard put to tell the difference.

The story, as I said, “folds” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan inside of it because it is basically a retelling of that film: here we see Khan once again awakened from cryogenic slumber (as in the original TV show) and let loose upon the world (as in the original movie) looking for vengeance, only now he is recoded with a layer of post-historic semiotics that recall the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In this film, it is Kirk instead of Spock who must “die” as an attempt to save the Enterprise, but who is revived through a miraculous technology of using Khan’s genetically engineered blood cells to save him (which is a significant clue to the nature of this GMO version of Kirk).

The battle scenes are spectacular and fun to watch, but they too have been cut and spliced, in this case, from the opening battle sequence of Revenge of the Sith. (And this film, too, like Sith and Return of the Jedi, has an opening prologue with its own mini-plot that involves a sci-fi “humanitarian intervention,” but it is a sequence that is rather lifeless by comparison with Lucas’s skillful prologues).

Everything certainly looks great in this film: the costumes, the sets, Abrams’s perfect imitation of Spielberg’s glistening rays of light that go slicing prismatically through every frame. But it is, in the end, merely a genetic hybrid of films, as well as Star Trek plots, that we have seen many times before.

As with all post-classic cinema, it is backward-looking in its orientation, full of admiration and reverence for the sci-fi classics of the 1980s. But it proceeds along the Asiatic agrarian model — different from the West, which has always planted with seeds which produce new plants — of using “cuttings” taken from other plants to simply grow new clones, or else hybrids of preexistent ones.

Let’s face it: the days of cinematic originality are now long since behind us.

Film, with the present shifting of its ontological status from celluloid to digital, has now become an art form that resembles the corporate patenting of genes by corporations like Monsanto that are force-fed to farmers, which they have no choice but to use, or else give up their ancient, agrarian way of life altogether. Star Trek is a patented gene that can be used to grow, harvest and regrow new clones and hybrids, just like the coming wave of Disney sponsored Star Wars films. When the inception of new prototypes is no longer the goal, you can simply transform the originals into spores that can clone themselves into endless copies, each with but slight and subtle differences from their originals. Hence, the similar fate of the Alien, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones and Mad Max franchises, and soon also Blade Runner. We can expect a whole harvest of coming Blade Runner films, too, that will paint their digitized images onto future IMAX screens as so many “replicated” images.

Thus film in the age of digitization and genetic engineering: it is all part of a monocrop culture that has come to stamp out all other varieties and forms of indigenous species that might escape the overcoding of the big corporations and their patented characters, codes, lines, globes and flows.

Endless seriality and repetition without Difference.

I

Iron Man 3:

Reviewed by John David Ebert

In ancient Mesoamerican myth,the superhero was the figure of the Aztec eagle warrior: with the jaws of the eagle wide open, the hero’s costume revealed him as a human being swallowed up into the gullet of an astral creature, for the great superhero of Mesoamerican civilization, from the Olmecs to the Aztecs, was the shaman who could shape-shift into an eagle or a jaguar and commune with the earth’s elemental spirits.

In Marvel’s new Iron Man 3, the equivalent image is that of the opened face plate of the Iron Man suit, revealing Tony Stark’s human features staring back at us from out of a mechanical exoskeleton. The image signifies that in our civilization, the human being has been swallowed up by the machine, not by the astral spirit. The ontological problem is an entirely different one, and so the superhero of our civilization must be able to slip in and out of biological communion with the machine. But in Iron Man 3, the hero’s ability to flip in and out of a cyborgian mode becomes beside the point, for in this film, the human being is becoming excluded from the machine’s closed circuit feedback loop, which no longer requires his services. The human being has now become a superfluity in the age of drone operated global warfare.

The plot of the movie concerns a villain named Killian who has appropriated a formula from one of Tony Stark’s old girlfriends called “Extremis,” which enables the human being to retrieve the plant, worm and lizard-like ability to regenerate lost limbs. Initially, Killian uses this to restore the lost limbs of war veterans, but in a plot to assassinate the President of the United States, he creates a fake Islamist character known as the Mandarin whom the U.S. government assumes to be behind a series of terrorist attacks. But the attacker is really Killian and his army of super-regenerative veterans, and Tony Stark is one of their main targets. They blow up his house and Stark finds himself thrust into the ocean, from whence he emerges. He has lately been suffering from panic attacks due to the attack on New York City in The Avengers movie, and so he has put himself to creating a sort of Iron Man army of drone operated suits that can be remotely controlled, exactly like drones, and so no longer require his physical presence.

The powers of Killian and his war veterans, however, are those of fire: their genetic superpowers allow them to summon up vast reserves of heat in their bodies in order to melt things, burn holes through people, spew fire and so forth. But these were precisely the abilities of a mythical creature known to the alchemist Paracelsus in the 16th century as the Salamander, an elemental spirit which Paracelsus imagined as the indwelling being inside fire, just as he saw Gnomes in earth, Undines in Water and Sylphs in Air. (When you cut off a salamander’s tail, of course, it grows back). And these elemental spirits, common actually to all the world’s mythological traditions compose the very architecture of the earth’s “etheric body,” that is to say, its regenerative abilities.

And it is precisely the earth’s etheric body personified by these elementals that Killian and his army represent, for they configure an etheric attack against the attempt to overcode the earth by the global capitalist consumer Anti World, which has imprisoned the planet on the inside of a mechanized global geo-dome.

In my earlier book, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, I developed the argument that the superhero, in origin, was part of the immune system of New York City, designed to repel astral attacks on the city by creatures from the mythical consciousness structure. But with Tony Stark and his army of Iron Men suits, operated by a central A.I. which he calls “Jarvis,” it is apparent that the superhero of Post-Classic cinema is really part of the immunological structure of the Anti World, which scans the surface of the planet, through the digital eyes of its roving drones, for anyone it regards as not fitting on the inside of this geodesic planetary sphere, people too closely tied, say, to their local soils and their ancient traditions.

The film’s climax shows Tony Stark remote controlling his army of Iron Men drone suits, using them to battle Killian’s army of genetically souped up war veterans: it is the battle of the ancient alchemical Salamander, spirit of fire (which melts metal) and the World Vision Machine of the global order of free trade and corporate interests, which it is now the superhero’s job to protect. Today’s superhero, like big government, is working on behalf of corporate interests, not against them.

In the final climactic battle, in which Tony Stark, for the most part unadorned by his cyborgian exoskeleton, remote controls them to finish off the Salamandrian army, it becomes clear that the ontological status of the superhero is now shifting, for drones are really today’s immune cells in the global world order of Empire: they represent the enclosure of the machine back upon itslelf, a closed-circuit loop that renders the human being outside the loop completely superfluous, just as Stark himself is superfluous in the film’s final battle sequence.

And as though to insist, in a kind of Freudian Verneinung, that Stark is still part of Iron Man, he says in the film’s last words, “I am Iron Man,” but it is no longer convincing and we don’t believe him and we know that he doesn’t really believe himself, either. His drone suit technology has rendered his own deeds unnecessary. He does not even need to be physically present any longer in order for an Iron Man Deed to take place.

He has become his own ghost.

And so, like the army of empty suits of armor that Mephistopheles builds for the Emperor in Faust Part II, Stark now finds himself in command of an army of drones that no longer need him anymore than our real drones any longer need physical human soldiers. It is war at a distance, in which the soldier has been removed from the battlefield, and the superhero, paralleling him, has been removed from the scene of the action.

This is a huge crisis for the superhero mythos, because it undermines the very essence and notion of the concept of the superhero as an originally localized human presence tied to the specific pavements of New York City. His actions were never deeds done from a distance, which minimized the danger to his own body. That would have been regarded as cowardice and unheroic.

As, in fact, it is.

The presence of shadowy authorities who are no longer on the scene is a ubiquitous and widespread development in what Zygmunt Bauman has termed “Liquid Modernity.” Bosses are never on the scene, there to troubleshoot the employee’s problems and to interact with him. They are always “somewhere else,” ensconced in a High Castle, where they give remote orders like Walt Disney or Citizen Kane from somewhere in the depths of their shadowy castles, where they can no longer be reached, and so no longer held accountable for their actions, either. This is the Chinese Mandarin model of governance, for in the days of the great Chinese Emperor T’sin Shihaungdi, he too was unreachable, never to be seen, wandering the labyrinthine corridors of his palace, forbidden for anyone to see him.

And so, the aptly non-existent character in Iron Man 3 known as the Mandarin is quite appropriate to this new form of Mandarin governance, in which the Emperor can send out commands that he never actually has to be held accountable for because he was never on the scene in the first place.

His army of shadow robots, conjured up by the smithy of Mephistopheles, is there in his stead, doing the work for him. The rest of the world is simply expected to comply.

But of course, as Killian’s army suggests, the powers of the localized inhabitants of the earth’s gritty places will mostly, and more and more increasingly as time goes by, fail to comply with such irresponsible dictatorial authority. More shadow warriors, in ever larger and larger profusion will be required to execute these Mandarin-like commands and orders to quell an ever-rising multitude of terrorist attacks and rebellious actions that are cries for accountability to those who are no longer on the scene locally and can afford to use their wealth to rule in their cybertronic fortresses from a distance.

How soon before that army of fire-blown Salamanders comes calling at the gates of these cyber fortresses, looking for accountability?

Oblivion

A Film Review

by John David Ebert

Oblivion is a film directed by Joseph Kosinski, based upon his own unpublished graphic novel, which is deliberately retro in its backward-looking orientation at the various science fiction films of the past four decades. It reiterates the master signifier of the science fiction films of those decades, namely Dave Bowman’s battle with HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, in a certain sense, attempts to provide Kosinski’s solution to Bowman’s problem at the end of that film regarding what to do about HAL. (The artificial intelligence in this film is known as “Sally”).

Kosinski’s film draws motifs and signifiers from science fiction films like Dune, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace, A.I., Minority Report and most recently, perhaps, Moon. It is therefore, in its backward-looking orientation to the past part of a larger movement in today’s contemporary “post-classic” cinema, which is conscious mostly of the greater “classic” period that is now fading off over the horizon behind it (a fading off that began with the CGI special effects of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993), the same way in which the Renaissance was backward-looking at the great wonder of the Greeks and the apogee of humanistic culture to which they had brought their civilization, an apogee which, it was thought, could never be equaled, but only looked up to. The difference, of course, between the Renaissance and today’s currently debilitated cinema is that the Renaissance had a great future before it: much to the surprise of North Atlantic civilization, it was found that the Greeks could not only be equaled in their greatness and majesty, but actually, perhaps, surpassed in the achievements of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. Film, as I have stated many times before, has no such future in front of it as a medium. Its future has disappeared. Hence, the current backward orientation evident in films like the various Star Wars prequels and forthcoming sequels, Ridley’s Scott’s Prometheus, J.J. Abrams’s Super 8, and so on (more such nostalgic films are on the way, such as Scott’s Blade Runner sequel, George Miller’s Mad Max 4: Fury Road, etc. etc.)

The plot of Oblivion concerns the apparent decimation of the earth and its moon by an alien race known as the Scavengers. A man named Jack Harper (or Tech #49) has been stationed in a dizzying tower in the clouds along with his assistant Victoria to help overlook the final phases of an exodus from the earth by the remaining humans, most of whom, as far as Jack knows (his memory has been wiped clean) have been transferred to a space station in orbit above the earth known only as the Tet, where they will be transferred to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Jack’s job is simply to repair the drones that are responsible for harvesting the last of the earth’s resources.

Jack spends his time roaming across the earth in his air speeder, and also, on occasion, visiting a private little cabin (unbeknownst to Victoria) in the mountains where has collected various scraps and bits and pieces of culture in the form of books, records and various works of art that he spends private time enjoying and pondering. (In this role, he is the posthuman atop the midden heap; readers of my Beksinski essay will know what I am talking about).

But when a spaceship named The Odyssey crashes to earth and all its occupants but one are killed, Jack fishes out the survivor, a woman named Julia, who eventually turns out to be his wife from the time before his memory was wiped. Eventually, Jack realizes that the invasion of the earth by Scavs was a cover story invented by an alien intelligence known as “Sally,” which is what the Tet really is: a monstrous being like Galactus who travels the cosmos sucking the life out of planets with living forms on them. There are no humans on this space station. The Tet itself is a monster from the Unknown who invented Jack’s cover story. The “Scavs” are actually a small group of remaining human survivors living underground who capture Jack and Julia and then release them to find out the truth, namely, that Jack is a clone of an astronaut named Commander Jack Harper who was sent, along with the original Victoria, to investigate the Tet, and was taken captive by it and then cloned into an army of Jacks and Victorias who were then sent to earth to invade, conquer and destroy it. There is, in short, nothing authentic about him. He is One of Many, a pure manifestation of Seriality and Repetition.

The surviving humans eventually convince Jack to strap a nuclear warhead to a spaceship to carry it up into orbit in order to detonate it and destroy the Tet, who has used the avatar of Sally, the NASA official who had presided over Jack’s mission, as a persona to communicate with the Jack clone, Tech #49. Hence, Kosinski’s solution to Dave Bowman’s problem with HAL: Bowman has essentially returned four decades later as Jack Harper, armed with a nuclear warhead, to blow him out of existence.

Jack Harper is, of course, the Last Man at the End of History: he is stationed aboard a clean, white, pristine tower that  is purely high tech and designed with glass Mies van der Rohe-type walls in a sci-fi version of the International Style of Modernism. There is no clutter, no mess, and above all, no wet biology aboard the tower which he and the Victoria clone share. The semiotics of their world is that of the Anti-World of mass global consumerism: culturally homogenous, deworlded and inauthentic; cut off from the earth and the local and tradition; and substituting the technologized mass produced human together with his Walmart and Ikea-inspired prefabricated ‘culture” for actual cultural authenticity. It is transcendent because it is “worldless” in Heidegger’s sense: it is the same culture wherever you go, a collection of ahistoric non-places: shopping malls, gas stations and parking lots. Its culture is the mass produced “product”; its religion is the electronic simulacrum; its politics non-existent (replaced and displaced by corporate interests presiding over the politics of global free trade agreements).

Countering this is Jack’s little Heideggerian cabin in the woods, where he has spent time gathering products of cultural authenticity: books, records and works of art. It is the cultural midden heap of the metaphysical age scrapped by the rise of the global Anti-World, and atop which Jack sits, pondering through the discarded signifiers. Jack may be a mass-produced clone living in the circumstances of the Anti-World, but his interest in the previous world of cultural authenticity indicates that he is not as “inauthentic” as one might think. There is still a spark left in him, a spark that, if rekindled sufficiently, could reactivate a kind of Unabomber terrorist rage in him against the Anti-World, causing him to serve as a terrorist against it (hence, Jack’s cabin is not only Heideggerian, but also recalls the Unabomber’s cabin in the woods of Montana).

And so he has to be recoded by contact with the Scavengers who live in the Underworld, who represent the world’s indigenes and locals: the Mexican farmers, say, furious at the decimation wreaked upon their local economies by Clinton’s NAFTA; farmers in the American Midwest who have been shoved aside by big, arrogant corporations like Monsanto;  or Islamic radicals who don’t want Coke and Pepsi vending machines in Mecca.

And indeed, Jack as the global consumer clone is recoded by these indigenes of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude to become a suicide bomber on their behalf against “Empire.” His detonation of the nuclear bomb against the Tet is simply a coded sci-fi image of a terrorist attack, and his victory against the megamachine tantamount to a blow struck against global free trade.

Thus, the semiotics of the film sympathize with terrorist acts, perhaps to the surprise of the average viewer who thinks he is watching some sort of story about the triumph of the human over the Machine. Those were the semiotics of yesterday’s science fiction. Kosinski’s semiotics are more up-to-date and consistent with our current global problems.

On the other hand, the main problem with the film is that it is mostly a pastiche composed out of elements from so many other science fiction films of the past that the film scarcely has an identity of its own. It contributes nothing original to science fiction as a genre, although its aesthetics are pleasing, and its transcendental “top-down” viewpoint refreshing. One almost has the sense of the film taking place entirely “in the air,” as it were.

Basically, it is The Matrix recoded for the age of the Multitude against Empire.

Room 237

Reviewed by John David Ebert

Rodney Ascher’s documentary film about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece is an amusing, if insipid, attempt to make Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining “make sense.” He calls on the wits of five exegetes — whose faces we never see — to analyze the film as though they were giving Biblical commentary of chapter and verse. One exegete insists that the film is “really” about the Holocaust: this is “obvious” because of the repetition of the number “42″ in the film, the year that the Nazis began to apply the Final Solution. An extra is spotted wearing a shirt with the number 42 on it; Shelley Duvall is seen watching the film Summer of ‘42 on the television while Danny plays with his trucks; and of course, 2 x 3 x 7 = 42. Therefore, the film is really “about” the Holocaust. This is the sort of parody of the hermeneutical process which the film routinely takes for granted as somehow “illuminating.”

Or, even more absurdly, Kubrick is seen as somehow having concealed references in the film to his “role” in faking the Apollo Moon Landing: Danny, after all, is seen wearing a shirt with an Apollo 11 rocket on it, while room 237 refers to the distance of the moon from the earth (in reality, it is not 237,000 miles, as the commentator insists, but rather 238,900 miles). The same commentator insists that the reason Kubrick changed the number of the haunted room from the book, where it is 217, to the movie, where it is 237, is because the owners of the hotel the film was based on were afraid that its customers would not want to stay in room 217. But since, the commentator insists, there is no such room in the Timberline Lodge (upon which the shots of the film’s exterior hotel are based), this must not have been the reason, and this gives him the opportunity to expand our minds with his Apollo 11 nonsense. Of course, when you’re saying the “hotel” the film is based on, you need to specific: is it the original hotel, the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King stayed and which gave him the inspiration to write the book? Or is it the Timberline Lodge, upon which the film’s exterior hotel shots are based? Or, is it the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite Park, California, upon which the film’s interior shots are based? The Stanley Hotel certainly does have a room 217 because it was the very room King stayed in while residing there.

But such details, of course, involve taking the time and trouble to do the research to verify them and that’s not what Ascher’s film is about. Ascher’s film belongs to the same category of rumor-mongering and urban legend building as the myth that Paul McCartney was killed in a car accident and subsequently replaced with a look-alike, which one can find “proof” for if one examines the details of the images of such album covers as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or listens to songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever.” There is, of course, not a shred of proof for such an assertion, and it is well known and well documented that this urban legend was invented by a bored college student while writing his review for the album Abbey Road.

But despite the silliness and insipidity of the various interpretations which Ascher offers up for the film, it does point to an interesting fact: namely, that the film is a masterpiece precisely because of its hermeneutic complexity. That’s what the word “masterpiece” means: a work of art that is so complex that scholars and exegetes will go on talking about it for centuries. That’s why we’re still talking about Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare and Joyce. Because those men created masterpieces that defy the kind of pigeon-hole, line-up-the-dots simple-mindedness of Ascher’s not particularly bright or erudite exegetes. As Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, the true work of art is hermeneutically inexhaustible. There is no One Final Interpretation hidden within a great work that is just waiting for some genius interpreter to come along and provide us all with the Code for. Art doesn’t work that way, despite the insistences of Ascher’s simpletons.

What, then, is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining really about?

Well, I can tell you what it’s about for me, and that’s all I can tell you. The simple-minded scholar with the herniated ego who thinks he’s found THE interpretation to beat all others is really a kind of literary fundamentalist and a literalist who is out to make a grandiose impression at cocktail parties. The squashing out of all ambiguities is the aim of such interpretations. These are the kinds of nut cases who write books about Bible Codes and Illuminati conspiracies.

The first point to notice about the film (and indeed, one of Ascher’s commentators, Juli Kearns, gets at least this much right), is that the image of the labyrinth is its main  metaphor. Indeed, the hotel itself is a kind of vertical labyrinth, with multiple floors, like the old, very old, cosmologies of the Mythical Age in which the Underworld was imagined with multiple levels, as in the case of the Aztec image of Mictlan with its nine (sometimes thirteen) levels. Indeed, labyrinths, in the ancient world, were associated with the realm of the dead: in the Malekulan journey of the soul through the afterlife, for instance, the dead person was expected to memorize and complete a drawing of a labyrinth in the sand or else suffer the fate of being devoured by a demon. The Egyptian underworld was essentially a labyrinth in which one followed, not a Yellow Brick Road, but a single river that led one past all sorts of obstacles: demons, closed gates, threshold guardians, etc., which one could only fend off by pronouncing the correct magical spell.

And the other thing about labyrinths is that, in origin, they were designed and built for the purpose of trapping and capturing monsters. This was the sole and single reason for why Daedalus built the famous labyrinth for King Minos in the first place: to house the Minotaur that had been borne as the fruit of Pasiphae’s indiscretion with a bull. Daedalus himself could only trace a line of flight from this labyrinth by creating wings for him and his son, whereas Theseus had to go in, kill the Minotaur, and retrace his steps using Ariadne’s thread.

The labyrinth, in other words (and to use the language of Deleuze & Guattari) is an Apparatus of Capture. Whatever you do, the ancients seem to be saying, don’t get caught inside one. And if you do, you must trace a Line of Flight to escape it.

So we can think of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s film as a sort of vertical labyrinth that functions as a nexus point at which the realm of the living intersects with the realm of the ancestral dead. And the thing about the dead is that they represent the past and the claims of the past: the one thing they do not point to is the future, least of all any sort of future in which the New can make an appearance. The dead exert a sort of gravitational weight against the claims of the living. They pull down, in other words, with an entropic insistence that refuses to allow the living to move forward until their claims are addressed.

In his book Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze makes a distinction between three different syntheses of Time: the first synthesis is that of habit, which is a passive synthesis that contracts time; the second synthesis is that of memory, an active synthesis that reproduces the former simultaneously with the reflection of the new; but it is the third synthesis of time which interests us here, for in the third synthesis, time as repetition is ruptured by an Event that introduces difference into repetition with the advent of a novelty that leads to a new temporal series (this, of course, becomes the Event ontology of Alain Badiou). But now take note: it is precisely this third synthesis that the Overlook Hotel is designed to prevent ever taking place. It is an Apparatus of Capture that seizes control of the present by capturing the lives of the living and slowly regressing them back to the past, or Deleuze’s first two syntheses of habit and memory.

In the age of the post-metaphysical ego, we are left with a model of the self that is poorly defended by a weak membrane. The Fichtean Self, on the contrary, was a miniaturized model of Spinoza’s God, a Transcendental Self that was constructed through the firm positing of the Ego as A = A. The self-identical ego was able to construct a very strong, metaphysically sealed partition between itself and the Other, which allowed it to exist in a kind of Heideggerian Vorhandenheit, or transcendental space in which it could look out over objects with absolute certainty. This was, accordingly, the age of metaphysically certain propositions. The self was well-defended by this membrane against any sort of astral invasions.

Not so with the Subject after World War II: the Subject now has been weakened by deconstruction on the one hand and electronic technologies on the other. Immunologically, it has been ruptured, and the microsphere that once protected it has collapsed and dissolved. The self is now prey to astral invasions of all sorts. Hence, we are living in the age of alien abductions, poltergeist hauntings, bizarre phenomena and the like.

Jack Torrance, in The Shining, is a perfect embodiment of this contemporary weak Self who, because he has little in the way to protect him against the influence of transpersonal forces, falls prey to them when he is placed inside a haunted hotel. These transpersonal spirits grasp control of him rather easily and slowly, bit by bit, begin to erode, efface and dissolve his singular personality. That is, they perform a reverse Individuation process on him. Instead of the self evolving and changing and growing, in The Shining, the self devolves and disintegrates, losing its singular individuality and regressing back to the level of a mere archetype.

Jack Torrance’s story is the description of the reversal of a Badiouan truth event: instead of a singular personality built up as something new and original, Jack devolves and regresses back to the level of a cliche, a mere archetype. The Overlook Hotel is the place where no singularities are ever allowed to emerge. It is a place governed exclusively by the past, exclusively by Jungian archetypes which dissolve and destroy all attempts to move on into the future.

The longer one remains at the Overlook Hotel as an Apparatus of Capture, the more slowly one is transformed back into a living archetype that loses its grip on the present and becomes a mere walking cliche of the past. This is why Delbert Grady tells Jack in the red bathroom that he has “always been here.” The archetype, like Plato’s Forms, always are and never were. Hence, the solution to the puzzle of why we see him in the black and white photograph hanging on the wall at the end of the film: he has been completely absorbed back into the archetypal midden heap of the past and robbed of all individuality and uniqueness as a three dimensional person. For an archetype is a two-dimensional cliche that robs the present of its singularity and prevents the emergence of anything new.

Danny and his mother (the Christ Child and the Virgin in their modern incarnation) are allowed to escape the hotel because the child is the future. The future is the way out of the sucking vortex of the labyrinth of the past, which is doomed merely to an eternal repetition of cliches, repeated, with the myth of the Eternal Return (characteristic most strongly of Indian Mythology) over and over again, without anything new or original ever emerging. Danny as child is the key to the future in which new lines of flight are traced out for new pathways of Becoming that give rise to Deleuze’s third synthesis of time: the emergence of Difference out of the Repetition of the past.

The true fascination of the film is that in the poles represented by Jack (the past and the dominance of metaphysical cliches) and Danny (the future and the possibility for the creation of new Forms) is that we contemporaries nowadays are stuck at a crossroads (the Overlook Hotel) in which the future of civilization could go either way: are we going to devolve back into a metaphysical obscurantism dominated by Jungian archetypes and the sickly murk and morass of myth? Or are we going to move onward into the next structure of consciousness that moves us beyond the mere Modernism of Gebser’s Integral consciousness structure and into something truly unprecedented? Indeed, each one of us taken as an individual must today face this exact dilemma. Repeat the past or somehow find the energy to create something new?

That is what Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining is about.

The Hobbit

Reviewed by John David Ebert

I saw this movie in IMAX 3D, and while watching it realized that the drive-in movie hasn’t disappeared at all, it has actually been placed inside of the movie theater auditorium and crossed with the stadium-style seating of the old dramatic theater houses. But instead of being gathered around in tiers like the Greeks gazing out at their own fellow citizens reenacting their ancient myths, in the IMAX theater, we contemporary citizens of the electronic state have gathered to watch ourselves perform an updating of the myth of Plato’s cave, in which to be means to be an electronic phantom on a screen somewhere. McLuhan’s insight that the movie screen shares in common with the old printed page the phenomenon of light on a surface rather than the self-illuminated light through of the electronic screen seems to have been obsolesced by this new medium of light in, in which the 3D effects open up a fissure into Being and shed light down into the crevice below, in which two-dimensional phantoms live and breathe in another parallel universe that attempts to engulf the viewer inside of it. One has the impression, while watching an IMAX 3D film, of actually falling horizontally — sliding, that is to say — into the image.

And that’s not a bad trope to characterize Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the classic children’s novel by Tolkien: the film’s predominant signifier, its “master signifier” as Lacan would call it, is the image of sliding and falling constantly into cracks and crevices and fissures in the earth. Heidegger characterized the work of art — the great work of art, anyway — as a tension between the cosmic principles of World vs. Earth, in which a work of art functions by opening up an entire world horizon within a culture (providing it, precisely, with a window into Being), while Earth is the work’s very ambiguity, its oracular-like nature to constantly evade capture by any one totalizing hermeneutic or aesthetic theory, which is precisely what makes it a great work of art, since there is always an abyss of meaning left over after the application of any particular theory to the work. Great works of art can never be semiotically exhausted, which is why we are still discussing Aeschylus and Dante to the present day.

What Jackson has captured in Tolkien’s classic, however, is Tolkien’s penchant for folding worlds inside of other worlds. Just as Derrida said that when an author cites a text, he is actually folding that text inside his own work, so Tolkien folds Dante and Wagner, as well as Scandinavian myth generally, inside of his own cosmology. The sequence of the film’s climactic finale, for instance, takes place in the bowels of the earth, where the orcs have burrowed their way into it to create a dim and dark city underground that is not too dissimilar from Dante’s descriptions of the City Beneath the World in his Inferno. Jules Verne, in like fashion, had folded Dante’s hollow earth inside of his science fiction narrative Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Tolkien, with his night sea journey in The Hobbit, has done something similar. (Bilbo’s symbolic “slaying” of Gollum with the power of the Word, likewise, is a retrieval of Oedpus’s slaying of the Sphinx by solving her riddle). As Dante’s descent downward, furthermore, is countered by his ascent upward into the heavens with his Paradiso, so the film’s climax carries the heroes up into the heavens as they ride on the backs of eagles, assimilated to the powers of the Spirit in opposition to those of the Earth and its internal organs.

Folding worlds inside of other worlds is a way of capturing and preserving them, the way the entire prehistoric world of the Jurassic is folded up inside the DNA of an insect in amber. The “vanished” world, in other words, is still there: you only need to know how to make the Derridean mark, like Gandalf’s inscribing of the rune on Bilbo’s door at the film’s opening, in order to cross over the threshold to enter it.

Heidegger, in his work, was paying farewell to the metaphysical age — that is to say, in the language of Jean Gebser, the epoch of the rational consciousness structure, or in that of Karl Jaspers, the Axial Age — whereas Tolkien, in the 1950s, was paying farewell to the age of the mythical consciousness structure which he saw as threatened by the rationalism and machinery of the Industrial Age that had come to surround it on all sides. The orcs in his narratives are associated with mining and metallurgy, and they are a coded inscription for the Industrial powers generally speaking. Tolkien’s narratives are an attempt to create a kind of reservation, or public park in which the mythical landscape is preserved unspoiled for those who still want to visit that world to see what it was like.

The Hobbit, like Jurassic Park, is a wonderful zoo in which other worlds, like a natural history museum, have been put on display for our own edification. The 3D effects contribute to this sense of a moving diorama of the kind you might encounter in the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, in which wax figures of Neanderthals have been assembled in such a way as to reenact their vanished world as public spectacle. The high projection speed of Jackson’s opus, likewise, gives to the characters a kind of wax museum-like effect that is appropriate to Jackson’s and Tolkien’s project of fossilizing ancient Anglo-Saxon myth in electronic amber.

But though the film is a showcase of marvels, I think we have to admit to ourselves that this isn’t really cinema anymore. The days of great cinema are disappearing over the horizon behind us, along with all the other structures of the Late Period of the metaphysical age. The Hobbit, with all its great technical electronic apparatus in IMAX and 3D and high projection speeds (electronic technology is essentially foreign to the very nature of cinema as an electro-mechanical medium) is too polygeneric and multimediatic for it to be any longer an example of great cinema. Instead, it is a kind of moving wax museum, a modern updating of P.T. Barnum’s houses of spectacle and amusement, full of stage tricks and gimmickry to draw gasps from the crowd.

Film is returning, full circle, to its origins in the dimly lit vaudeville stages and noisy attractions of carnival culture.

Step right up.

The Walking Dead

Reviewed by John David Ebert

As I have pointed out elsewhere, television is now the great new medium that is taking over the role once occupied by cinema, especially the role of miniaturizing ancient and long forgotten cosmologies. And so, from now on, I will be including reviews of television shows on this site, along with contemporary films. Frank Darabont’s television show, The Walking Dead, based on a series of graphic novels, is one of the best of these new shows and I want to say a few words about it here.

The Walking Dead is a sort of experimental laboratory for probing utopian societies, and the evolution of the show thus far — currently in its third season — has progressed through a series of such miniaturized societies. In this respect, the show is continuing where the great utopian / dystopian narratives of classical literature, from Plato’s Republic to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (and then onward into such celluloid narratives as The Truman Show and Dark City) left off. Film has currently traded the exploration of multiple utopias for precisely one utopia, that namely, of comic book Gotham, and has left the exploration of other utopic / dystopic possibilities for television.

The show’s first season explored, and then rejected, the modern megalopolis as ideal society, finding it a corrupt world of the walking dead, an old, very old metaphor for the spiritually asleep and ignorant human being locked into the mode of forgetfulness of Being. The first season polarized the corrupt and decadent metropolis against the exospheric nomadic society, privileging the latter social formation as a stateless mode of wandering and exile in which experiments with new social structures no longer bound and constrained by the City as a pressurized apparatus of social capture were undertaken.

The second season moved from the city and the nomadic tribe to the farm as ideal society, capturing an Andrew Wyeth nostalgia for a primordial American way of life as idealistic. During the Industrial Revolution, populations in the West migrated from the countryside to the great new cities, but nowadays, the city is precisely the place to escape from. Hence, the subtext of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and also The Truman Show. Whereas in the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, the city, too, was infested with the dead (in that case, with those killed by the plague) and had to be escaped from into the countryside: hence the characters of Bocaccio or Chaucer who leave the city behind on their way to greener pastures. But now, once again, on the turn of the historical spiral, the city is infested with a new kind of dead, the walking dead, that is to say, consumers entranced into hypnotic states who have had their upper brain functions zeroed out by new technologies and consumer advertising that have turned them into zombies. The authentic life, that is to say, must be found elsewhere.

But the farm turns out to be merely an illusion of safety and is very quickly infested with the dead, just as nowadays there is no quiet place on earth left where one can be free of the noise of the beer-swilling, barbecue-grilling mob.

In the third season, the archetype of the prison as dystopia is polarized against the new utopia of the ideal American small town. Neither isolated farm nor crowded metropolis, the American small town is held up as a potential ideal, at least by contrast with the hell of the prison, but it, too, is found wanting. We are not told yet, but it is clear that the small town is merely the surface facade — like Smalltown America at the entrance to Disneyland — of a bizarre and sinister social experiment of manipulation and crowd control.

The prison which the wandering band of protagonists holes up in is, of course, a kind of updating of Dante’s Hell: it is an Anti-Sphere, to use Peter Sloterdijk’s term, not an ideal society at all, but a place where the social remainder, the supplemental excess of those who do not fit in, as it were, spills over.

When the protagonists, at the end of Season Three, make their way from the prison to the small town in order to rescue their abducted friends, we realize that the show is replicating Dante’s ascent from Hell to Purgatory, for the small town is a kind of purgatory where one must remain stranded, like Andrea, until one’s karmic debt is worked off.

Dante’s Hell, though, was a foreshadowing of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society, for it clearly prefigures the Great Confinement of the 17th century, in which the mad were for the first time gathered into asylums, an institution whose sequel was the advent of the prison at the end of the eighteenth century. Foucault is thus revealed as a kind of disguised science fiction writer who picked up from where Dante left off, for his retroactive portrait of the European institutions of discipline and confinement is a vision of Europe as a Hell to be escaped from, a dystopian place in which a hidden power elite manipulates the individual from behind the scenes, as it were. Dante’s Hell is Foucault’s prison, in which Foucault stands in for the reader as a sort of modern Virgil guiding him through the dark journey.

But the myth of the world as a giant prison is, of course, an old motif of Gnostic mythology, for the Gnostics, too, imagined that the world was a grand prison manipulated by a power elite known as the Archons, who constructed human bodies as material prisons for souls as fallen sparks of light. The world as a whole was imagined as a physical hell to be escaped from at any and all cost, precisely through the process of gnosis, or the remembrance through anamnesis of one’s celestial origins in the Plenum of Light.

Those who had forgotten their soul’s own origins in the realm of Light, however, were regarded as “sleepwalkers,” or, in other words, the walking dead, cut off as they were from any remembrance of the Kingdom of Light.

The image of the zombie as a figure of devolved consciousness, in which the neocortex and the mammalian midbrain have been shut down, with the human individual reduced to operating merely at the state of the reptilian brain stem is an image of spiritual degeneration back to the motive economic concerns of a merely animalistic way of existence, a way of existence, of being thrown, as Heidegger would say, that is not at all a proper and efficient use of the human being’s potential as Dasein.

The risen dead was an image, in Biblical times, of the Last Judgement: all the paintings of the Last Judgement, especially of the fifteenth century Netherlandish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden and Jan Van Eyck, show the dead rising from their graves as a sign of the End of History. The image of the risen, homeless dead, then, has actually been with us as a sort of hidden Western iconotype all along. Its present popularity, however, is linked with the fact that we have indeed, as Steven Spielberg pictured it for us in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, reached the End of History in which the realized utopian consumer paradise as the modern equivalent of the New Jerusalem has descended from the realm of metaphysics to become actualized on the plane of the real. The task of history has thus reached completion.

We can all rest now, and go home.

Or just become zombies, robbed of a historical eschaton, wandering without aim or place in the ruins of the capitalist mega-paradise at the End of History.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln

Reviewed by John David Ebert

The German Romantic literary critics of the age of Goethe used to accuse French playwrights of writing bloodless, cerebral plays in which all the significant action took place off stage. Hence, in the plays of Racine and Corneille, you will find no violence or passion, but only French hyper-intellectualized rationalism, whereas Shakespeare, with all his dark, Seneca-inspired violence and stormy emotions, was held up as the model for German playwrights like Schiller and Goethe to imitate.

Steven Spielberg’s life of Lincoln, I am afraid, suffers from similar flaws: it is a bloodless (literally) cerebral drama in which all physical action and visionary imagery have been (inexplicably) eliminated. There are no Civil War battle scenes; no stormy passions; and worst of all, Lincoln’s assassination takes place off stage, exactly as it would have done in a play by Racine. Consequently, we are left with a stiff, lifeless narrative that has come from Tony Kushner’s laptop, in which all the visionary dimensions have been carefully sheared away from the bones of the story. The film is not much better than a 1970s made-for-television miniseries, and worst of all, it watches as though it could have been directed by anybody. There seems to have been no particular reason for Spielberg, of all people, to have directed the film since any Johnny-come-lately director could have been hired to do the same job and would have done it just as well.

In many ways, Spielberg has deliberately made an anti-Spielberg film, and this might be admirable if such an endeavor actually opened up new dimensions in the director’s repertoire of skills, but unfortunately, this is not the case. Instead, the director’s effort to deconstruct his own style has resulted in a betrayal of himself and all the things that make his cinematic vision unique: breathtaking wide shots of vast, distant landscapes; sprawling images of armies; huge, Panoramic vistas and gigantic, David Lean skies. But, alas, there is none of that in Lincoln. Instead the film seems to suffer from a claustrophobic diminution of horizons. Exterior shots are few and far between, while the dialogue, some of which is interesting, chatters on endlessly, dragging tediously from one scene to the next, exactly as in a bad play (Kushner, it should be kept in mind, made his fame primarily as a playwright). The viewer waits and waits for something interesting to happen, but nothing ever does. And when the climax of the film comes, he is even cheated of a staging of Lincoln’s assassination.

This just isn’t very cinematic material for a Hollywood movie about Abraham Lincoln done by Steven Spielberg.

But there is an even worse problem: the film’s portrayal of Lincoln, brilliantly executed by Daniel Day Lewis in one of his finest performances, is merely a celluloid equivalent of Disney’s Animatronic Lincoln. You just plug him in, flip the switch, and listen to him spout Christ-like parables and American Proverbs. There is no depth to this Lincoln. We learn little to nothing of his personal life; nothing of his bad habits; nothing of his melancholic bipolarity or his racism; nothing, indeed, worth knowing, save a few platitudes of common coinage fit for printing on the back of a dollar bill. It is a film that perpetuates cliches and commonplaces and does little to challenge our views of this very complex man.

Indeed, the film suffers from a flattening and reduction of Lincoln to a two-dimensional walking stereotype, shorn of complexity or reality of any kind. It is, indeed, a form of hagiography that is left over from the metaphysical age in which narratives of this sort, with all their proverbial wisdom, were common. But with the mediatic transformation of our society — and aside from the postmodern mistrust of all things Grand and Venerable — we simply know too much about historical individuals for anyone to believe that anyone in history was ever this grandly simple. The Great Man Theory is dead and gone. The Age of Geniuses, from Leonardo through Kant’s aesthetics — in which genius is equated with a force of nature — to Nietzsche, has had its run. Walking stereotypes of Great Men of Genius are no longer interesting precisely because the metaphysical foundations of the Grand Narratives supporting, and making their existence possible, have disintegrated.

And though Lewis’s performance is good, it too suffers from a diminution: one has the sense of a tired Lincoln who is on the verge of falling asleep most of the time, but only manages to keep himself awake just long enough to spout out a parable or two and then wander away. He, too, is as lifeless as the rest of Spielberg’s turgid narrative.

There is, furthermore, nothing visceral about the film, which I think, for a movie about America’s bloodiest war ever, is a serious failing. There is no sense of the tremendous human costs of this war, no sense of the misery and suffering and struggle that made the passage of the 13th amendment possible. One has the sense from watching this film that it was a war fought, not on the battlefields, but argued out in the House of Representatives. The blood never flows anywhere near Lincoln himself, and consequently, one has the sense of a Lincoln who is detached and removed from the real tragedies of this conflict.

But then, none of this comes as much of a surprise, since Spielberg’s talents in general have been on the wane for the past decade. Indeed, Munich may have been his last truly exceptional film. One dreary, mediocre film after the next has followed ever since, but this is, of course, a pattern that can be found in all the Great Masters nowadays, from Martin Scorsese and John Carpenter to David Cronenberg and Francis Ford Coppola. All these directors seem to be losing their ability to astonish us with the kinds of celluloid miracles with which the 1980s, and even the 1990s, were adorned like the ornaments on a Christmas tree. Each one, in his own way, is exhibiting all the manneristic tendencies of a great artist’s Late Period.

Film, it seems, is now plagued with an illness that has progressed very far along into its Post Classic phase.

But when a fire dies down, it does not do so all at once. It flickers and sparks, here and there, while the overall flames die down. And so, while film itself as a whole is on the wane — television now seems to be the great medium which has taken its place — there are still a few gems left to be found floating around out there.

But Lincoln is not one of them.

The Dark Knight Rises

Reviewed by John David Ebert

“As above, so below.”

–Hermes Trismegistus

There is an ancient Indian myth in which the gods Brahma and Vishnu contend against each other to see which is the mightiest. A cosmic pillar of light suddenly appears, and Brahma, transforming into a swan, flies upward to find out where it ends, while Vishnu turns himself into a turtle and swims into the depths. Neither god ever manages to reach the ends of the pillar, for the pillar is actually the cosmic lingam of Shiva himself, who steps forth as the mightiest of the three gods, to which the other two are then forced to bow. In ancient Mayan cosmology, meanwhile, the earth was thought to rest sometimes on the back of a giant turtle, sometimes on the back of a huge caiman. The bumps on the back of the caiman were thought to be the various hills and mountains of the earth, while the Qetzal bird was the celestial morning star, Venus. But Vishnu, too, of course, had a double valency, since he rode on the back of a cosmic sun bird known as Garuda from which, as a personification of the sun, he did battle with the various naga serpents of the earth; but he was also linked with the serpent, for he rested upon the back of Ananta, the endless serpent who formed the bed upon whose coils Vishnu reposed in sleep, dreaming the world.

This gives us a nice set of archaic transcendental signifieds upon which we can inscribe the semiotics of The Dark Knight Rises, as though we were inscribing ciphers on the very back of the cosmic crocodile himself, for whereas in The Avengers we had seen Manhattan attacked from above by a rip in the world ceiling, in The Dark Knight Rises, the attack comes through a hole in the earth that is blown into the middle of Manhattan at a sports stadium. Through this portal to the Underworld, Batman’s antagonist, Bane, erupts together with his private army, who then seize control of the city and put it under martial law.

Bane is an interesting villain: on the plane of political signification, he is a sign that stands in for the ubiquitous contemporary terrorist (his attack vaguely reminds us of the original attempt to blow up the World Trade Center by Ramzi Yusef in 1993 by detonating a bomb in the building’s basement, an attack from below, in other words, whereas 9/11 had been an attack from above); but on the plane of mythical signification, the mechanical prosthesis that covers his mouth and through which he speaks vaguely resembles the snout of an aggressive animal, a wolf, perhaps, or better, a crocodile, for as Deleuze and Guattari point out, the human mouth is a deterritorialized snout. In reterritorializing it back into the mode of a snout, Bane takes on animalistic signifiers that recalls the Greek myth of the Titans, who erupt from the underworld below in order to launch their attacks upon the upper world of the Olympians who reside upon the dizzying heights in the clouds of Mount Olympus. (Perhaps the ripples of Bane’s muscles are like the bumps on the back of the Mayan caiman?)

The myth of the sleeping beast upon which the cosmos has been erected is a very old, very widespread one: for the Greeks, the cosmos was surrounded by Okeanos, the world-encircling serpent biting its tail; in Scandinavian myth, this became the Midgard Serpent which Thor one day, while fishing, managed to capture using his hammer as a hook and inadvertently put the entire earth into jeopardy with earthquakes; in the tale of “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” the ship carrying its crew members lands upon what it thinks is an island and as they begin to perform Mass upon it, the island, in reality a giant fish, begins to awaken, just like Finn, Joyce’s cosmic protagonist in Finnegans Wake, whose body comprises the very land itself.

The image of Bane’s attack on the city, then, evokes the myth of the awakening of the sleeping behemoth upon whose back the city as world-island has been carefully placed. This beast, like Vishnu asleep on Ananta, must, at all costs, be kept sleeping, otherwise his awakening will precipitate a cosmic catastrophe in which the dream of world history will end and go spiraling down the drain into a historical singularity.

Today’s terrorists, too, are but a modern manifestation of Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth,” those various Titans and chthonic powers who are now assaulting the dizzying world of hi-tech finance and global capitalism with primitive arrowheads recoded as passenger airliners.

Batman, like Vishnu, is a signifier whose associations are linked with both above and below: in his identity as Bruce Wayne, he is the corporate executive at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper who has a hand in the dizzying realm of high finance and abstract late capitalist speculation. But in his identity as Batman, he is an inhabitant of the World Below, whose realm is that of caves and the cavern of the night sky. He is therefore a more complex signifier than Bane, who merely personifies the Below and, like the serpent nagas that Vishnu fights, has only a single plane of mythical signification.

But the Trimurti, i.e. Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, became the highest gods of India, just as the Olympians in Greece did, precisely by absorbing and appropriating the various gods of the local cults, so that they contained multiple signifiers. Vishnu is a god of both above as well as below, as is Shiva with his cosmic lingam, or Apollo as the sun god with his conquest over the Python of Delphi.

So, whereas Bane only comes up from below, Batman, in The Dark Knight Rises, must complete a full mythic cycle of death and rebirth. He must be dismantled and deconstructed, as he is in this film, as well as reconstructed and reborn. Batman, like Bane, crawls up out of the pit of a miserable prison, but unlike Bane, he is in command of the powers of the above, as well. (Hence, his mechanical flying machine in this film known only as the Bat, which corresponds to Vishnu’s sun bird vahana).

Thus, the imagery of the film seems to be saying that New York City is in a precarious position, since the Great Beast upon whose back it rests is now beginning to stir from its eternal slumber, moving toward wakefulness. Assaulted both by the Wretched of the Earth as well as the meteorological forces of the biosphere, the city’s future seems delicately poised on a balance that may cause it to slide off the back of the Beast and go plunging like a modern day Atlantis into the yawning abysses of the depths below.

The superheroes comprising its immune system have been immunologically compromised and are sick and in need of medical attention. A city that built itself upon scaling dreamlike spires into the clouds has failed to root itself by stretching down into the depths and as a result, is in danger of toppling over.

But then, how would the city grow down into the depths, thus rooting itself more axially with the strength of a mighty oak rather than a delicate willow tree?

Aeschylus, in his Oresteia, has already given us the answer: if you want to get rid of the Furies that are plaguing you, then you must build a temple for them in the very midst of the city. Their wrath is a function of their disinclusion from World Events, and only by including them, finding a role for them, can they be appeased. Just as the Greek and Hindu gods became so complex through absorbing all the local cults, so New York, too, can only survive by incorporating alien elements into its metabolism.

New York has a very difficult task ahead of it. Building a mosque near Ground Zero may be a step in the right direction, but this will not appease the other antagonists comprising Earth’s disturbed immune system. For that, it may be time to begin thinking in terms of modern equivalents of the Roman limes in the form of sea gates and elaborate storm surge protections.

But in any case, Batman’s dismantling in this film, i.e. his loss of his fortunes, his beating and imprisonment at the hands of Bane, is an analogue, a mythic compression, as it were, of the more complex process of the dismantling and reconstruction of New York City itself as it prepares to weather the storms, both political and meteorological, of the coming century.

In my discussion of The Chronicles of Riddick on this site (which I have retitled The Evolving American Myth, Part 1: The Chronicles of Riddick), I refer to the story of Percival, one of the Arthurian Romances, and to the vision of an inner moral sense in each individual. I trace this inner moral sense through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stage Coach, The Natural, Wanted, Contagion, etc., and then Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder:”  Read the rest of this entry »

The Avengers

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

If Star Wars is the creation of an American national epic by other means (than literary), Marvel’s new superhero film The Avengers brings into visibility before us how the superhero is becoming part of an unofficial American polytheism, or in other words, paganism by other means (than cults and liturgies).

The seven superheroes of the film’s pantheon are, of course, drawn from Old World prototypes: Thor, the giant killer, has been lifted out of whole cloth from Scandinavian mythology; Iron Man is a retrieval of the Medieval knight in shining armor capable of great deeds; the Hulk is the ancient Green Man, also a Medieval myth character; Captain America is a transformation of blonde Achilles with his magical shield; the Black Widow, played by Scarlet Johanssen, is the archaic Spider goddess; and Nick Fury, with the patch over one eye, reprises the role of one-eyed Wotan (or Odin) as the head of the Scandinavian pantheon. (Hawkeye is Egil the Archer).

However, these Old World mythic figures have been recoded with another semiotic stratum on top of them which makes their vectors point specifically to the American plane of signification: Thor is simply a modified version of the American jock hero football player; Tony Stark captures the American Howard Hughes / Ted Turner type of tycoon; the Hulk is the Bad Boy whose temper, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One or James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, always gets him into trouble; while Captain America is simply the compliant American Soldier and Black Widow a retrieval of the muscle-flexing Rosie the Riveter.

The film’s characters thus constitute a specifically American pantheon which we can see emerging as a kind of unofficial American polytheism. But it is a polytheism with a purpose, as the mythic structures in the story amply demonstrate.

The plot concerns the anti-god Loki’s attempt to use a glowing cube of energy called a Tesseract to open up a portal in the sky to another world, through which armies of demons come pouring through into New York City, smashing it to pieces. The specific myth invoked here is that of the cosmic catastrophe which involves the shifting of the earth off its axis and a consequent tearing of a hole in the world ceiling: in its Chinese variation, a war between the god of fire, Zhu Rhong, and the god of water, Gong Gong, leads to Gong Gong’s smashing his head into Mount Buzhou, the cosmic pillar that holds up the sky. This event knocks the earth off its axis and tilts it toward the southeast, ripping a hole into the sky, a hole through which hordes of demons and evil spirits pour through, while the Chinese goddess Nu Wa desperately attempts to repair the hole using the four legs of a tortoise as cosmic pillars to replace Mount Buzhou as the central axis.

In the Chinese myth, the hole in the sky is a rupture of the membrane of the Chinese macrosphere, an immune system which protects the Chinese cosmos against the chaos of invasions from beings Out There. But in its American variation in The Avengers, New York City is a city that does not have a protective macrosphere of any kind (as 9/11 illustrated), for it is both a city without walls (gone since the invention of high explosive shells) and without a sky (the age of metaphysics as applied immunology which ended with the Death of God). Indeed, Nietzsche’s annunciation of the death of God, as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has pointed out, was tantamount to the beginning of the end of all grand metanarratives whatsoever, but metanarratives are precisely a civilization’s metaphysical immune system that protects and immunizes it against the impacts of the Real by using metaphysical ideas to build a sort of translucent membrane both around civilization and around the individual Self.

Whereas Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis demonstrated the results of the Self without a protective membrane, The Avengers shows what happens to civilization in the absence of an immune system, for civilization now requires superheroes to take over this role, and that is precisely why American comicbook superheroes came into being in the first place, namely, to serve as immune cells to defend New York City against attacks by beings from the astral plane.

It should be pointed out that New York City has been pictured in superhero movies ever since the first great Christopher Reeve Superman films as being under attack by astral entities from other worlds. With 9/11, the attack became a reality; and the recent hurricanes, both Irene and Sandy, have made it impossible to think of New York as anything else but a cosmic Target for aggrieved Titans. Art, whether high brow or low, is always a generation or two ahead of developments in the Real that actually come along later, and I think we are now being forced to the conclusion that these apparently “worthless” superhero movies have actually been functioning as oracles all along, oracles with an ear open to Being that we have paid scant attention to, but which have proven to be correct in the dire implications of their imagery.

After all, can it really be an accident that New York City was pictured in our pop culture narratives for the past two or three decades as under attack by astral forces that subsequently became manifest in reality as aggrieved terrorists and a disturbed biosphere?

Maybe.

But I don’t think so.

Fantasy always precedes the horrors of actuality — the Columbine killers, for instance, filled pages and pages of notebook fantasies of killing people before it became an actual reality — and so I think we need to pay a little more attention to the semiotics of our popular narratives. They do come from the folk, after all, and the folk are closer to the Real than us “learned city folks.”

The imagery of such narratives functions in a way that is analogous to the imagery of dreams (since, in essence, they come from the same Source), a point that I made seven years ago in my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons. I think that Events since have tended, more or less, to bear out the strength of those insights.

The future always casts its shadow backwards in time, which is why oracles and dream interpreters like Joseph were such big hits in the ancient world, which knew to take Imagery of all kinds, from dreams to omens to stories, seriously. The literature of the ancient world, too, though, took a cosmopolitan turn of Cynicism that ridiculed the old narratives in the invention of the Greek novel, a perfect example of which is Lucian of Samosata’s True Story, a title dripping with sarcasm and which makes fun of all the old myths. Meanwhile, the earthquakes kept coming, and soon, the Romans too arrived to subjugate the Greeks.

Suddenly, novels like Lucian’s weren’t so funny anymore.

And I think that, nowadays, few people are laughing any longer.