The War Between Eye and Ear in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy

By John David Ebert 

If one considers the possibility that it was indeed the CIA — or certain elements within the CIA — who decided to assassinate Kennedy, one is struck by the suspicion that the act itself was an indirect condemnation of television and televisual culture. The act has the feel about it of a rejection of the very idea of a televisual president, of the notion of a man’s being put into the White House largely as a result of beaming an electronic image of himself at lightspeed to millions of homes. And furthermore, when one considers that the power of this new medium was far from being politically neutral, but rather crippled certain individuals, like Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, then one can begin to understand the kinds of resentment that the very idea of a man favored by television being put into office might have generated. Read the rest of this entry »

Etheric Ghosts and Virtual Doubles: John Hinckley’s Attempt on the Life of Ronald Reagan Considered From the Viewpoint of Media Studies

By John David Ebert 

The whole drama of Reagan, John Hinckley, Jr., and Jodie Foster is symptomatic of a culture in which history is being replaced by virtual images manufactured in silicon circuits and sent beaming around the planet. A word or two about Hinckley’s psychological situation may not be out of order here, since Hinckley forms such an interesting counterfoil to Reagan, the first celluloid president in history who was nearly assassinated by a man obsessed with a celluloid image.  Read the rest of this entry »

Elvis Presley’s Televisual Clone

By John David Ebert

The crucial year in the generation of Elvis Presley’s first electric clone was 1956, the year in which his agent Colonel Tom Parker helped him make the switch from the tiny independent Sun label to the stellar RCA corporation through which he proceeded to mass produce his first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” released on January 27. The very next day, he appeared on television for the first time on an obscure little program known as Stageshow, hosted by the Dorsey brothers. He made repeated appearances on this show up until March, when RCA released his first LP record, Elvis Presley, whereupon the album sold an immediate 300,000 copies. Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Darabont’s Parable of the Collapse of Civilization

By John David Ebert

The idea of a mist full of monsters which traps a group of people inside of a small grocery store is a wonderful image of hyper-rational late capitalist society coming up against the world that it has excluded and repressed in order to be built up: the realm of gods, demons, devils and archaic matriarchies which demand human sacrifice. As Jane Ellen Harrison writes in her analysis of early Greek religion, the primary offerings that were made to the cthonic gods were not made in order to get the gods to come down and do their bidding, but rather to make them go away. This was the early idea of religiosity in pre-Homeric Greece, and it is also the idea suggested in this film by one of its lead characters, a wacky, female Christian fundamentalist who believes that the mist has been sent by God as a punishment for the sins of atheistic capitalists. Read the rest of this entry »

Walt Disney’s Shrunken Ancestors  

By John David Ebert 

The various optical tricks and spatial distortions which Walt Disney utilized in the making of his theme park often conceal ideas and philosophical views about the world. Take, for instance, the spatial distortions of Main Street, USA. “Main Street was a function of clever foreshortening,” Neal Gabler writes in his masterly biography of Disney. “The lower floors of the shops were nine-tenths scale, the second floors eight-tenths, and the third seven-tenths. As for the rest of the park, Walt wrote an old acquaintance that the “scale of objects varies according to what and where they are’– what he called a ‘matter of choosing the scale that would be practical and still look right.” This kind of miniaturization “underscored the sense of nostalgia because it associated the past and the fantastic with the small and quaint. ‘[P]eople like to think their world is somehow more grown up than Papa’s was,’ he said.” (Gabler, 533) Read the rest of this entry »

Marilyn Monroe, or Venus Redux  

By John David Ebert

It could be said that Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the non-reproducibility of an actor’s aura misses a certain point, since it was by means of the very technological process of filming and then projecting upon a gigantic screen the images of actors like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando that conferred upon them auras of mythic grandeur which they would not otherwise have possessed. Benjamin, it seems, did not understand the essentially myth-making power of film. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunshine: A Review by John David Ebert

The director of this film, Danny Boyle, is no believer in technological progress. Indeed, the film concerns an ever increasing series of technological disasters and systems failures that grow more urgent as the plot unfolds, each disaster giving rise to the next like a series of Russian dolls placed one inside the other. On the ship’s mission to deliver a payload that will reignite a dying sun, anything that can go wrong does go wrong. Boyle does not leave us with any confidence that our technologies will save us, despite the film’s Pyrrhic victory at the end. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by John Lobell

As the liberal arts in universities comes to be dominated by critical and visual studies, the ability of mainstream academia to respond to movies, particularly visionary movie, is diminished.

Critical and visual studies, while providing insights into some cultural issues, fails to penetrate deeply into the individual narrative psyche or the cultural narrative psyche.  Indeed, there is no recognition of the existence of psyche in the field.  In response to this, I propose a course on mythology and movies, which I am posting here. 

While this posting is in the form of a college course outline, it is meant as a primer on how to think about myths and movies.  Comments, criticisms, additions, and deletions are welcome. Read the rest of this entry »