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 »

Reviewing an archetypal movie, 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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