A Response to John Ebert’s Review of Cloverfield

By William Irwin Thompson

As always, John, an interesting spin on the ordinary.  Yes, catastrophes are coming our way, which is why I feature them so strongly in my essay on “Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.” 

But another point is that our culture has been kept in arrested development by the media at the stage of the 13 year old–the age of the comic book for my generation–witness the recent acne outburst of comic book movies.  The 13 year old is not a child and is not yet an adult capable of dealing with threats.  So it imagines itself to be a superhero in the same way Piaget once noted that 13 year olds generate life histories of fame for themselves and already see their statues up in the park.  So the superhero is a preteen mythic unconscious projection. Read the rest of this entry »

Cloverfield as an Omen of Things to Come

By John David Ebert 

The new film by director Matt Reeves, Cloverfield, shows us an attack upon Manhattan by giant monsters out of a 1950s B movie. It is filmed in the fake documentary style pioneered by the Blair Witch Project and so the whole story is told from the point of view of the guy on the ground with the camera who has no idea what is going on, as would be the case, more or less, in real life. Also, as in real life, we never find out who or what these monsters are or where they came from or what they’re doing in the city, as the director rightly senses that in electronic society such things as plot and storyline are antiquated relics of our literate past. In the age of “secondary orality,” as Walter Ong has termed it, narrative structures can afford to be loose and haphazard since it is no longer the story “line” that counts but rather the all inclusive and immersive immediacy of the events themselves. The film’s cameraman point of view suggests that the events are taking place in “real time,” that mediatized nowness that has come to engulf us all in a shower of photons and which has eliminated the deferred time and space necessary for the processing of experience by the human mind. There is no time for such processing when everything happens at the speed of light, all at once. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tribal Cosmology of James Bond

By John David Ebert 

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. Read the rest of this entry »

 Andy Warhol: Prophet of You Tube

By John David Ebert

1. 

Andy Warhol was the first great icon painter of electronic society. In contemplating his gallery of celebrity portraits, we are struck by the possibility that some Medieval icon painter, an Andre Rublev, say, had died and been reborn in the twentieth century as a poor kid from Pittsburgh with no memory of his former life, but with all his artistic skills still intact. Warhol was the first painter to subliminally intuit the emergence of a new religion of celebrity demigods, and he became not only its first icon painter, but also its first High Priest. His famous paintings from the early 1960s, the Elvises and the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors and the Jackie Kennedys, are one and all portraits of the newly emerging saints and demigods of the age of electronic stained glass. (It is no coincidence that he was raised in the Byzantine church and regularly attended mass on Sundays all his life, for his religious upbringing helped prepare him for his life’s task.)

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