A Glance Into the Symbolic Landscapes of Tarzan

By John David Ebert

Descent

If Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his earlier protagonist John Carter, Warlord of Mars, had in 1912 established the pattern of the superhero who arrives on the ground from the heavens above, then with his second creation — Tarzan, Lord of the Apes – he invented the idea of the superhero who emerges, Titan-like, from out of the earth itself. The narrative pattern in which Tarzan is raised by apes in Africa to become a literate, thinking man capable of walking the streets of Western cities is a disguised retelling of the Darwinian myth of human evolution from apes to civilization. For Tarzan, brought up amongst a tribe of African apes, is symbolically descended from beings of the earth, the same beings, no less, who have spent six or seven million years quietly constructing the human physical body beneath an enclosed canopy of African trees. By the time this body was ready, with Lucy and her people, to embark upon the traumas of the open savannah, it was simultaneously prepared for the descent of the human mind which took up its residence in this newly constructed body like a mother bird settling down to brood in her nest.

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The Strangely Distorted, and Weirdly Elongated World of James Bond (Unabridged Version)

By John David Ebert 

1. 

The first James Bond novel, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, just as the Korean War was coming to an end and the C.I.A. was planning the removal of Mossadegh from office in Iran. Within a few years, the U.S. government would begin sending U-2 spyplanes on reconnaissance missions over Moscow, to which the Russians would respond by imprisoning the entire planet within the orbit of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. Thus, in the world into which Fleming’s famous character was born, everyone was busy looking over everyone else’s shoulders. Indeed, Bond himself is essentially an extension of the human eyeball, cut loose from the body and sent roving across the planet to peer through walls and behind closed doors. If the Berlin Wall was Russia’s response to the Marshall Plan, then the West’s response to the Berlin Wall was James Bond, a man who specializes in boring through walls.  

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Blindness: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

Blindness tells a story of the collapse and disintegration of our Western capitalist society into a new Dark Age when a mysterious epidemic of blindness suddenly afflicts most of the human population. Nobody knows the cause of the illness and the course of the film’s narrative never reveals it to us mostly because it is unimportant. What is important here is the idea of an epidemic as a metaphor for the collapse of civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

Babylon A.D.: A Movie Review  

By John Lobell 

While 2001: A Space Odyssey can be regarded as the origin of the modern visionary movie, The Matrix is the origin of the contemporary “luminous transcendent” movie. It is a genre that freaks out the critics, with its deaths and resurrections, virgin births, and suggestions that human beings are capable of manifesting something beyond their material existence. The critics fear archaic Christianity sneaking back into our culture (recall the critical snickering at this aspect of The Matrix, and the total freakout that a lion could come back to life in The Chronicles of Narnia). But with even a little bit of mythological awareness, the critics would know that these themes predate Christianity by thousands of years and are present in just about every tradition, literate or otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Steven Spielberg’s Underrated 2004 film The Terminal is Worth a Second Look

By John David Ebert

A recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s 2004 comedy The Terminal with Tom Hanks inspired me to write a brief retroactive review, since I realized just how rich with significance this film is. At first glance, its premise of a man who falls through the bureacratic cracks to take up his residence at J.F.K. Airport in New York sounds as though it may have been vaguely inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, which retells the story of Robinson Crusoe as a man who drives his car off an overpass and becomes stranded in the midst of a clover leaf of expressways proceeds to make a living for himself as a refugee of post-industrial society. However, when one realizes that the film was actually (loosely) based on the real life story of an Iranian man (Mehran Karimi Nasseri) who lived in Terminal One at Charles De Gaulle Airport in France for nearly twenty years (1998-2006), one begins to realize that Ballard’s novel was actually prescient of a coming situation: the fate of a newly emerging class of post-industrial refugees who cannot find a suitable place for themselves in a world of airports, freeways and office parks.

In the words of Giorgio Agamben, such individuals constitute “a state of exception” unto themselves. They fall under the jurisdiction of no country’s laws and therefore constitute a class of “non-citizens,” or to use Zymunt Bauman’s phrase, they are “wasted lives” that nobody wants around. They are, in short, a form of collateral damage inflicted by globalization. Read the rest of this entry »

The Clone Wars: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

And so after insisting that he would never make another Star Wars film, George Lucas has now given us a seventh Star Wars film.

I would like to point out that I saw this film on a Saturday night at eight o’clock, on the film’s opening weekend, and was surprised to find the auditorium largely empty. There were maybe twenty or twenty five other people in the theater, and after the film began, several of the audience members, twentyish looking, walked out. For a Star Wars film, this was a first. I have never been to the opening of a Star Wars movie that wasn’t swarming with eager, enthusiastic people, most of them twenty year olds. And it struck me as a little odd that the film’s cartoonish sensibilities offended the twenty year olds who got up and walked out (one can mentally supply their dialogue: “Dude, this is stupid, let’s get outta here”) since the twenty year olds of today mostly read graphic novels, play video games and collect action figures. Read the rest of this entry »

 The X-Files and the Breakdown of Our Cultural Immune System

By John David Ebert

1.

By now, Mulder and Scully have become almost as famous as their literary prototypes Holmes and Watson. Indeed, in many ways, they strongly resemble this earlier pair of detectives who stand at the threshold of the birth of the forensic genre. Watson, like Scully, was also trained as a medical doctor, and Holmes, like Mulder, was the man of genius for whom solutions to any given mystery would come in a flash of intuition like a revelation from the gods, leaving a bewildered Watson struggling to keep up. But unlike Watson, Scully normally offers an alternative explanation for the given mystery, one that, she typically boasts, is based upon a scientific and rational view of the world. In this respect, she resembles Holmes rather more than Watson, for Holmes was bent upon sterilizing the grimy streets of Victorian London of its human bacterial infections of irrationalism and emotionalism, whereas Mulder applies his intellect to the task of bringing demons and devils, rather than bacteria, into focus.

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The Dark Knight: A Review

By John David Ebert 

Nowadays, after the events of 9/11, the Oklahoma city bombing, the Unabomber and even the AUM Shunryuku nerve gas attack on Tokyo subways in the mid 1990s, we take our villains seriously, because we are well aware that there are a number of disquieted souls out there who wish to destroy Western capitalist society. The creators of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight, likewise, take their villains very seriously, and seem also to be aware that animosity toward our megalopolises and the consumer mentality which they support is alive and well. Read the rest of this entry »

Wanted: A Movie Review

By John Lobell

Myths are a repository of the structures and mores of a culture, a suprapsychology, a system of principles describing the nature and workings of being, the universe, society, and individual development. Movies have become a dominant artistic form in our culture, and are therefore a major vehicle for the presentation of our myths.

The prime myth of Wanted, as of many action movies, is Percival, the story of one of the knights of King Arthur’s Roundtable. A sub myth is the search for the father. While the search for the father is found in the myths of many cultures, the themes of the Arthurian Romances are unique to the European culture which began around 1,100 with these tales and with the laying down of the Western temple form, the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.

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The Incredible Hulk: A Review

By John David Ebert

In a way, Marvel’s new Hulk movie is not so much a sequel to Ang Lee’s earlier (and much better) film about one of their most famous comicbook characters as it is a remake of the first movie, for it tells exactly the same story, and does so with little imagination or attempt at varying the theme. In the new movie, as in the Ang Lee film, the Hulk spends most of the narrative fighting the American military, and then ends up at the climax fighting another bizarre supervillain created as a misbegotten child of a science experiment gone awry. The storyline, then, is formulaic and so one wonders what the motives of the film’s makers could have been in constructing a new movie with different cast members but with exactly the same premiss. The lack of imagination demonstrated here by the filmmakers reminds one of the old Hulk television shows, for television, especially of the 1970s variety, was once virtually synonymous with the phrase ‘lack of imagination.’ Today’s television, however, with shows like HBO’s Deadwood and Rome or Showtime’s Weeds has gone way beyond this old stereotype toward the creation of some really interesting and inventive narratives. Marvel’s new movie, unfortunately, belongs in the dustbin with the old television shows of the 1970s.

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