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

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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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Howard Hughes: Prototype For the Global Citizen

By John David Ebert 

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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.

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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.

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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 »

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 »