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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Howard Hughes: Prototype For the Global Citizen

By John David Ebert 

1. 

Howard Hughes was the prototype for a new kind of human being: nomadic, uprooted, cityless, wandering, Hughes prefigured the coming inhabitant of our global aeropolis, the transurban world of “no-place” that has come to displace the traditional container of the geographically bounded cities which have, for the most part, composed the textile of human history. This new world of “No-Place,” however, is historyless, for in dislodging the human being from the city that has formed his environment for millennia, the airplane has carried him up into the sub-stratosphere beyond the reach of the temporal metabolisms of civic life, where he has entered a quiet but frenetic world of shopping mall airports, Styrofoam meals and plastic coffee cups in which everything, everywhere is denuded of local identity and cultural authenticity. Furthermore, the sub-stratosphere into which the human being has been relocated – for at any given time there are one hundred thousand people up in the air – has traditionally been regarded as the realm of the gods and the home of the winged eternal soul exempt from the changing vicissitudes of corruption and generation which take place upon the surface of the earth down below. To live in the world of the skies, then, is to exist in a landscape carved out by Eternity, beyond the reach of historical rhythms of change, culture and ethnic identity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Maltese Falcon: An Archaeology of Ancient Images

By John David Ebert

1. 

Every noir narrative begins with a corpse, and in the present case, we are confronted with the dead body of one “Miles Archer,” a man whom, we soon discover, was the partner of Sam Spade. Together, the pair ran a private detective agency in San Francisco, and as the narrative opens, they are retained by one Brigid O’Shaugnessy to investigate a man named Thursby. Brigid had come to Spade’s office under the ruse that she was afraid her seventeen year old sister had run off with this Thursby and was anxious that Spade and Archer investigate. By the novel’s conclusion, we learn that Brigid had approached Archer in a dark alley and murdered him with Thursby’s gun, a British-made Webley revolver, in an attempt to frame Thursby for the murder. It turns out that she had wanted Thursby, who had been her business partner, out of the way, for both she and Thursby had been hired by a man named Gutman to obtain a golden falcon made by the Knights of Malta and given to Charles V of Spain as a gift during the seventeenth century. The falcon had made its way to Constantinople, where Brigid and Thursby had obtained it and then, instead of giving it to Gutman, had fled with it to Hong Kong, from whence, as the novel opens, it is on its way, by boat, to San Francisco.

Read the rest of this entry »

Saving Private Ryan: A Reassessment in Light of an Iranian Myth

By John David Ebert
While reading Dick Davis’s excellent new translation of the Shahnameh the other day, the insight came to me that one of its stories, the tale of “Bizhan and Manizheh,” tells essentially the same tale as that of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a film which I had watched only about a month ago for the first time since its release in the late 1990s. And since Spielberg is so often dismissed as a merely facile, shallow inventor of roller coaster style entertainment with no other purpose beyond that of thrill-seeking, I thought it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment on this blog in order to demonstrate the thoughtlessness of such a view. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Zemeckis’s New Agey Beowulf

By John David Ebert 

Beowulf was a great patriarchal classic. Robert Zemeckis’s celluloid version of Beowulf, however, is a great matriarchal entertainment. Though Zemeckis’s film appears to follow the contours of the Anglo Saxon epic, the point that it makes is exactly the opposite, for the point of Beowulf had been the celebration of the manly deeds of a single mysterious warrior who appeared out of the bogs and fens of Denmark, defeated three monsters and then disappeared back into the mists of song and legend. Beowulf’s deeds, moreover, were accomplished almost entirely by himself, on his own – with a little help in the dragon battle from Wiglaf – and he essentially put himself on the throne only after his king Hygelac and Hygelac’s son had died. There are almost no women in the epic, and on those few occasions when they do appear, it is only as barmaids to serve the ale that keeps the men happy and ready for their next adventures. This was one of the reasons why Tolkien undoubtedly loved the epic so much, for he claimed that the Norman invasion of England – bringing its admixture of French Celtic ways – spoiled Anglo Saxon mythology. Beowulf is one of the few surviving examples of a pure and undiluted, pre-Celtic Anglo Saxon myth world. Tolkien did not like Celtic myth. And it is safe to say that he most likely would have found little to appreciate in Zemeckis’s film. Read the rest of this entry »