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.

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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 »

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 »