The Teeming Brain

I seem to have hit a winning streak with my movie choices lately. So much so, in fact, that I’m really starting to think in terms a new golden age in American filmmaking, or at least in films that are achieving wide release in American theatres. Yes, that might seem to run counter to my generalized diagnosis of mass entertainment culture’s death spiral into a dystopian dark age, which I have explored at length here at The Teeming Brain. But in fact I don’t think these two viewpoints are mutually exclusive. I am left with a bit of a philosophical dilemma, though, since I can’t decide whether these great movies are worth the gargantuan entertainment culture of excess that gives rise to them.

Movies that I have really loved lately– some in recent days, some in recent weeks and months — and that have really impressed me with their maturity, intelligence, artistic quality, and emotional depth include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Brave One, Munich, The Lookout, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, 3:10 to Yuma, Babel, and Syriana. I’ve watched a couple of them more than once. And I can’t help sensing in their collective presence a kind of “hot streak,” a whiff of the creative momentum or running energy that indicates a real upsurge of excitement and artistic vision in the culture that’s giving rise to them. These movies are achieving wide theatre releases and easy access plus prominence in the DVD market. The same thing, minus the DVDs, happened in Hollywood in the 1970s, when a streak of genius-level movies found their way into America’s collective consciousness. Dare we let ourselves think that something comparable is happening today?

Anybody who pays attention to entertainment industry news is aware that there’s been increasing talk over the past few years of a new era of responsible and “important” filmmaking. The current issue of Time, for example, which sits beside me as I type these words, carries an article titled “Can a Film Change the World?” which the contents page describes by saying, “Hollywood wants to change the world — but can films make a difference?” Films like Babel and Syriana, with their global scope, multiple languages, multiple storylines, and nonlinear narrative approach are cited especially often in the current press as examples of this new “important” cinema. But these qualities aren’t the sine qua non of the recent streak of filmic fire. 3:10 to Yuma, for example, feels almost classical with its straightforward narrative approach and American old West setting. But it carries the same creative energy, intelligence, and sense of being “in the zone” that one finds in Babel etc. So what exactly is up? Not just “message” films but more conventional ones, too, seem to be on a hot streak.

Normally I would wax cynical about claims of an important new era in filmmaking, since I would find myself unable to divorce my thinking about these films, and also my experience of watching them, from my knowledge of the rancid culture of greed, excess, narcissism, and corruption that is the modern entertainment industry. But damned if the movies I’ve named, along with a few others, haven’t blown right through this attitudinal wall. I trust my own judgment here. I can aver without a whiff of self-importance that I am an uncommonly sensitive and informed watcher of movies. Both my academic training and, more importantly, my personal emotional/intellectual leanings have brought this about. And I’m convinced that something important is going on at the movies. When a film carries the power of, for example, The Assassination of Jesse James, which literally left me on the verge of tears at its emotionally devastating conclusion, then I know something’s really afoot. All art forms cycle through fallow and fertile periods. Presently we seem to be in the early or perhaps early middle stages of a particularly exciting example of the latter.

What all of this really leads me to ponder at length is the question of whether the films are worth the entertainment culture that gives rise to them. Does the artistic success of a movie like Jesse James or Syriana somehow “redeem” the fact that its very existence is predicated on the existence of the entertainment business with its excesses? Thinking about the matter in light of one of my favorite subjects, peak oil, does the artistic success of Syriana or any other movie somehow redeem the fact of the gargantuan energy investment that’s required for it to exist at all? Entertainment has always been a business and a culture as prone to corruption as politics. This goes back farther than the existence of Hollywood or the United States. But like everything else, entertainment operates today at a higher level of sprawl and consequence than it ever did before. The scope and stakes of every movie are so high, and the level of effort and coordination among filmmakers and businessmen so mind-bogglingly intense and complex, that it’s a miracle any movie gets made at all. This raises the question of whether it’s ultimately worth it, of whether there can be anything virtuous about devoting so much to the producing of entertainment on such a massive scale, regardless of the relative inherent worth of the final product.

Should we celebrate the artistic successes that arise out of modern cinema culture? Should we praise the George Clooneys, Alejandro Gonzalezes, Steven Soderberghs, Brad Pitts, and Jodie Fosters who manage the miracle of conjuring something worthwhile out of the steaming flux of the show business world? Or should we instead support the downsizing of the whole thing? Is there perhaps something inherently wrong with life in the movie industry being conducted at its current level, and with the American and other publics investing such enormous amounts of time, money, and attention in the whole thing? Can any movie, even one of the current crop of great ones, ultimately be worth what it takes to get it made?

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m glossing over a few distinctions that really ought to be drawn. In particular I’m equating movies with entertainment, which is to conflate a necessary distinction between entertainment (the attempt to arouse emotion) and art (the expression of emotion). Some movies may be pure entertainment and some art, while some are both. All have their place. But recognizing this distinction can be helpful in the issue I’m considering, because I’ve been talking as if all movies are intended as entertainment, and this just may not be true. The current crop of “important” films appear to be intended at least partly as a cinematic form of social activism. And that may cast a whole different light on the matter.

But for now I’m riding roughshod over it all because my thoughts are still unformed. One of the few things I’m certain of is the power and beauty I sense these recent films. So for a while, at least, I’ll just enjoy the rush and let the thoughts sort themselves out on their own schedule.

A couple of months ago I began catching wind of a new documentary film titled What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. It sounded intriguing so I started reading pretty much everything I could find about it on the Internet. At this point, having informed myself as much as I can by means of secondary sources, I’ve decided I definitely need to acquire a copy.

The thing that attracts me to What a Way to Go is not just the subject matter but the deep emotion that’s apparently layered into its overall sensibility. A particularly informative review by Dan Armstrong at Mud City Press describes this vividly:

“A personal commentary on the direction of modern society in the twenty-first century, WHAT A WAY TO GO is described on the back of its DVD package as ‘a middle-class white guy coming to grips with peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, population overshoot, and the demise of the American lifestyle.’ It might also be described as the non-Hollywood version of Al Gore’s documentary on climate change. This is not meant to be dismissive. Not at all. It’s an accolade. If what Gore offered was an ‘inconvenient truth,’ WHAT A WAY TO GO gives us the ‘whole truth.’ That is, Gore’s story with peak oil, unsustainable agriculture, and our mass assault on the community of life added in to fill out the picture of climbing atmospheric carbon concentrations and melting ice caps.

. . . . “Little by little, as the narrator expanded this metaphor [of a runaway train] to climate change and the economics of peak oil, I gradually understood that T.S. Bennett was not just recounting the Club of Rome’s scenario of unchecked industrial expansion and his own awakening to the meaning of it. He was revealing what he felt about the condition of our planet in a very visceral way. We all have an intellectual side that allows us to put the pieces of this story together. And we can hold this out, away from us as an abstract analysis. But there must also be a psychological response, perhaps held muted within, to the prospect of vast social upheaval brought about by egregious mismanagement of the planet. There must be deep emotions within all of us connected to this sad socio-biologic unfolding. We’re watching, to some large extent the world, but more specifically the United States face a brutal fact of life. Cheap oil held this nation together economically. The wealth, the lifestyle, our dreams. Cheap oil is now a thing of the past. America as we once knew it is dying. And there is real reason to grieve. And yet it seems denial or evasion is the more common response. That’s the problem. And perhaps why we have yet to really confront the problem head on. We aren’t truly feeling the sadness and frustration that destroying ourselves and our planet home should impart. WHAT A WAY TO GO is one man saying what he really feels about the insanity of it all. One man letting out a deep primal scream. How could this have happened while we were watching so closely? How could this have happened at all? We just filled the skies with carbon exhaust until it suffocated us and all of life with it. AGGGRHHHH!

“America has changed. It’s become a caricature of itself. The democracy has been compromised. We are a country gone to war to defend burning fossil fuels–and a way of life that has proven wasteful, foolish, and disastrous. And to face that, you must also accept that you are no longer who you thought you were, because the social premise that provided you with a belief system has proven to be false. Grief is called for. Grief is justified. We face a great turning in the ways of earthlings, and there is good reason to scream–or cry.”

So according to Armstrong (and also a number of other reviewers), the film gets its power as much from the narrator’s palpable sense of shock and grief as from the inherent gravity of the subject matter.

Armstrong notes another important point: “[T]he material is put together so artfully, with such attention to detail and with such clear emotion that it becomes something more. Mixed in with the interviews of thoughtful commentators like Richard Heinberg, Daniel Quinn, Jerry Mander, Ran Prieur, Chellis Glendinning, and Derrick Jensen, is a wonderfully edited docu-collage and prose poem. There is enough footage from the 1950s, cuts from televisions shows, commercials, movies, and grainy home movies to remind us of our own lives, our own evolution from believing baby boomers to disillusioned young adults to lost pawns in the grand chess game. Add to this, T.S. Bennett’s lyric writing, its depth, its tragic irony, his clear frustration, voiced over clips of film Americana and current events, and the viewer gets a very powerful psychological make over from the 123 minute film–with one very disheartening conclusion. The life we have just lived, the last fifty years, the height of the fossil fuel era, is headed to a dead end, a collapse. And so is the psychic infrastructure of the personalities created in that great gush of comparatively free energy. We now enter a tenuous time of social revolution. That will be impossible to dodge or ignore. And while the presiding powers are hanging on to every last penny of profit with denial and propaganda, the middle-class American sees it happening day by day. A definitive pinching in, gas prices, medical insurance, food costs, daily news of young men and women’s lives lost to war. And all the while, no one is letting up. The highways are more tightly jammed than ever. We burn more and more petroleum with each passing day. This insane lemming-like race to the edge just continues. Blindly. A contradiction to life and reason. That merits human grief and anguish. And if you don’t feel that, if you’ve missed that critical point, Bennett and Erickson’s documentary brings it into focus for you and does this powerfully, with emotion, a measure of derision, a certain resignation, and a sad refrain, ‘what a way to go.’”

I can’t help but read all of this in light of my “Doomerism and Realism” post from last week, in which I talked about my recent inner move toward toning down the shrillness of my ongoing critique of the imperialist theme park culture America has become. Armstrong’s observation that America has “become a caricature of itself” — which may or may not come directly from the film; I guess I’ll find out when I watch it — expresses my own feeling perfectly. Nor do I think the point he’s making is shrill or histrionic (something I’m sure I’ll be watching for in myself and others for a long time to come). Although I’m not a boomer but a member of Generation X, having been born in 1970 and come of age in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I feel temperamentally at one with the outlook and, at least as importantly, the emotion being described here.

Considering all this, a possible critique of the film occurs to me. Some time in the past year I read an essay — whose author and title I have now forgotten — in which the author opined that America’s mounting sense of doom, which in the past five years or so has swelled to become a distinct chorus, may be nothing more than a transient and subjective cultural moment that’s being unconsciously perpetrated by members of the boomer generation. The author speculated that since the boomers’ attitudes have come to define American culture over the past several decades owing to the sheer demographic weight of their numbers, the nation’s growing sense of doom is simply a case of boomer sensibility writ large. We’re well into the era of mass communication, in which our collective sense of self derives primarily from the mass media. The boomers are presently the gatekeepers of these media. As they enter old age and begin to sense their own mortality with newfound vividness, these people project that sensibility onto the general culture and amplify it via their control over so much of what we see and hear. So according to this analysis, what a lot of us are now sensing is not our own imminent collective death but theirs.

It’s a fascinating bit of cultural-psychological analysis, and for months now I’ve regretted my failure to note where I read it. But presently when I’m told by the reviews of What a Way to Go that the film erects its argument on the narrative backbone of a middle-aged boomer’s awakening to America’s rush toward collapse, I can’t help thinking of that other writer’s idea and wondering whether it might be in play.

Having said that, what inspired me to blog about all this is a post I discovered last week at the blog maintained by Sally C. Erickson, who produced What a Way to Go. It’s found at the film’s official website. I didn’t even know such a blog existed until last week, although I had visited the main site several times. A post from last Wednesday (June 14) titled “The Hard Bullet for Progressives to Bite” describes some of Ms. Erickson’s thoughts and emotions as she and director Timothy S. Bennett are currently preparing to take the film on the road. These thoughts dwell on the actual felt experience of life in America right now, and they ping my own thoughts and feelings so directly that I’m going to quote them at length. I especially like Ms. Erickson’s non-hysterical tone as she expresses her honest observations and accompanying sadness over what we Americans have become, since this resonates nicely with my own newly adopted resolution to pursue such thoughts in a similarly honest, as opposed to overblown , manner. In my own view this approach carries a ring of truth that largely undercuts, sidesteps, or at least qualifies the charge of psychological projection mentioned above.

Erickson writes:

“[W]e know that, besides the most clueless and insulated of the very wealthy, everyone else knows that things are not right. We all feel it. The weather’s not right. Our collective paychecks don’t go far. Our collective debt is huge and getting huger. We try to keep up a hopeful attitude. But we know things are not good. We see only the very rare politician that we like and trust, and almost never see one of those make it to Washington.

“People want to be hopeful. We want to believe what we learned in school about the miracles of science. We want to believe in the American values of innovation and progress; that we are indeed pursuing progress; and that progress will eventually make life better for everyone on the planet. People want to believe these things because people are basically good.

“What people actually experience, if they stop shopping long enough to notice, is the opposite. Lives are stressed. Work is unsatisfying. Children are unhappy. What most have to look forward to is going out to eat. Think about it. It’s a place where someone will take care of you and treat you with a modicum of respect. At least in a chain restaurant, the average person has some power. You can leave a nice tip. Or not.

. . . . “Is it possible that we can innovate enough new technology to meet the current human energy demand with non-polluting, renewable sources? None of the sources I’ve seen with reliable, holistic data say we can. William Catton, author of Overshoot, says in What a Way to Go that the way we are living now, we overshot the carrying capacity of the planet with the population size we had at the time of the Civil War. Yikes. That’s like five and a half billion people ago. Five and a half billion! That’s a lot of people. More than will fit in your new Prius. More than the local co-op grocery can feed with organic food. That would be a lot of organic ramen to come up with. This is serious.

“Even if we could find a magic energy elixir that would keep things going as they are, there are other gigantic questions that follow. Could we pull off a mass consciousness change that would ensure that we utilized that energy elixir in fair, sustainable, life-supportive ways? I don’t think so. Look around. Look at the world that has been created since the discovery of the last magic energy elixir humans got their hands on. Do you like this world where the rich get richer and richer and spiritually sicker and sicker while the poor get poorer and poorer and the shrinking middle class works longer and longer and longer? I don’t.

“We don’t need more energy. Looking for a technofix is a distraction. We need something else entirely. If more energy were going to create a saner, more spiritual, more just world, that would have happened in the last two hundred years. We’ve had our high dose of magical energy. It hasn’t helped. It’s made things worse. We’re teetering on human-caused extinction of our own species, to say nothing of the human-caused wreckage to the rest of the species already in progress. That hasn’t happened before.

“No. It’s not more energy we need. It is a consciousness change, a radical reconnection to life itself, and to one another, that we ache for.

“Some of us are kind of aware of this. We want a bunch of people to wake up, quick. We hope for that. We carpool to our jobs and we shop locally and we do the best we can. Some of us participate in protests and write emails to our congresspeople. Some of us have changed every single light bulb in our houses and recycle every scrap of paper and every aluminum can and resist all unnecessary driving. We’re hoping there will be a mass consciousness change.

“We want that so much.

“The sad possibility that Tim and I have chewed on these past three years is that there may be no mass movement. As much as we want it, there may be no gentle transition to an ecologically viable way to live harmoniously with the rest of the non-human world. We’re on a crash course and there doesn’t seem to be any widespread move to stop.”

* * * * *

If it is at all possible in plain, everyday thought and discourse to “see around our own corners,” as Nietzsche might have put it — that is, to gain a real sense of what’s happening in the world outside the boundaries of our self-enclosed subjectivities — then the above combination of calm observation informed by authentic emotion strikes me as one of the most likely ways to achieve it.

As for Ms. Erickson’s speculations about a change in consciousness, these remind me of some things said by one of my favorite writers, contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, and it’s with these that I’ll conclude this long, rambling, patchwork post. Tolle is, for my money, simply the best spiritual teacher around today. His books present the message of nondual/mystical insight with a depth, clarity, and power that I’ve rarely encountered elsewhere, and that’s really saying something since I’ve studied literally hundreds of books on religion, religious history, spirituality, consciousness, etc. Never mind that his endorsement by Oprah a few years ago, followed by the predictable marketing overkill his American publishers engaged in, may have generated the unfortunate impression that he’s just a faddish guru of the insipid New Agey/self-help variety. Never mind that Jim Carrey and a few other Hollywood celebrities have lent a superficial glamour to him by becoming prominent students of his (Carrey has actually traveled to Canada for the express purpose of learning from him). Aside from these things, this guy is the Real Deal. He not only explains the fundamental human problem — mistaken identification with thought, the mental world, the ego self — and its solution — seeing through the mistake and identifying with one’s true self in Being — with uncommon clarity, but also offers penetrating advice on how to accomplish this in actual experience (aside from which the whole thing is just one more idea, one more mental abstraction that perpetuates the problem).

Another part of his being the Real Deal is his willingness to address painful topics like, you guessed it, the sickness of modern culture. Unlike the execrable rehash of New Thought that is The Secret (which Oprah has also famously endorsed, and which teaches that Everything Is Great and You Can Have Whatever You Want), Tolle specifically and pointedly addresses the very same issue of societal-cultural collapse addressed by What a Way to Go. And like Sally Erickson in her recent blog post, he links the issue of collapse to the pressing need for us to change our collective consciousness since our present political, social, and economic institutions are direct expressions of the ego’s dysfunction. He also takes the extra step of drawing a connection between natural environmental trends — not just global warming but things that might otherwise seem unrelated to human involvement — and the collective human dysfunction.

Here’s a portion of how he says it all in his most recent book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005). For me these words, with their simultaneous recognition of the inevitability of collapse, the reasons behind it, and the paradoxical hope it portends, pretty much say it all:

“The ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet Communism. How deeply entrenched, how solid and monolithic it appeared, and yet within a few years, it disintegrated from within. No one foresaw this. All were taken by surprise. There are many more such surprises in store for us.

. . . . “A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension in consciousness.

. . . . “Ego means no more than this: identification with form, which primarily means thought forms. If evil has any reality — and it has a relative, not an absolute, reality — this is also its definition: complete identification with form — physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms. This results in total unawareness of my connectedness with the whole, my intrinsic oneness with every ‘other’ as well as with the Source. This forgetfulness is original sin, suffering, delusion. When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world to I create? To find the answer to this, observe how humans relate to each other, read a history book, or watch the news on television tonight.

“If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

“The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of ‘a new heaven and a new earth.’ We need to understand that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. ‘A new heaven’ is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and ‘a new earth’ is its reflection in the physical realm.’ Since human life and human consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old consciousness dissolves, there are bound to be synchronistic geographic and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of which we are already witnessing now.

. . . . “So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore are not arising at all. What did Jesus tell his disciples? ‘Heaven is right here in the midst of you’ (Luke 17:21).

“In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes a prediction that to this day few people have understood. He says, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ In modern versions of the Bible, ‘meek’ is translated as humble. Who are the meek or the humble, and what does it mean that they shall inherit the earth?

“The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all ‘others,’ in all life-forms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the earth.

“A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!”

In case you haven’t gathered it from some of my previous posts, I’m convinced that right now in this first decade of the twenty-first century C.E., we’re living at the dawn of a new dark age.

One of the most nightmarish things about a dark age is the degradation of life’s tone that it entails, the dehumanization that occurs when a people’s intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, political, social, and cultural life in general is reduced to a ghastly level of brutishness and ignorance. As is now plainly evident all around us in the industrialized world of present-day info-technocracy, this coarsening of life can occur even in circumstances of relative material prosperity. It doesn’t always have to be a dark age like the one that gripped Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, when starvation and plague were rampant and most people barely scraped by at a miserable subsistence level.

Sometimes it’s oddly comforting — if only in the sense of providing a pleasurable experience of “Aha! Yes! That’s it!” — to dwell upon the words of other people who have also seen today’s dark age of dehumanization unfolding. When it seems like the world is full of robots instead of people, or when it begins to feel like we really are living on the planet of the apes as Robert Anton Wilson used to like to say, it can be a powerfully affirming experience to see that other people have observed the same thing.

A few of my favorite articulations of the matter, as found in various books and films, are as follows.

(Incidentally, please note that I’m typing this blog post after having attended yet another faculty training meeting, this one titled, “Investigating Data to Determine Depth of Knowledge.” It’s another entry in the ongoing series of seminars devoted to promoting the “new” way of teaching public school students and assessing their achievement levels based on the outcome-based model. As such, it is a blatant manifestation of the ongoing push to transform America’s public education system into the nation’s human resources division. This isn’t conspiracy theorizing; it’s just the plain facts. Do a Google search for John Taylor Gatto, and for Marc Tucker, and for helpful combinations of words like “history compulsory schooling,” in order to be exposed to the wonderful underside of the American public education enterprise. My current cynical mood is a result of my having been obligated to attend a meeting where this educational apocalypse is being implemented. Teachers and schools are now contributing, and for a great many decades have been contributing, to manufacturing the empty-headed, soulless, flesh-colored robots that have replaced almost all of the people in America. But that’s probably a subject for another, later post.)

1. From the movie Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefky, directed by Sidney Lumet

THE SETUP:

Howard Beale has gone from being a normal network news anchor to being “the mad prophet of the airwaves.” The dialogue below is his impassioned rant to an eager television audience, in which he implores them to wake up from their television-induced trance. What he says reflects screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s real, personal views. Note that Chayefsky was one of the most revered writers in the history of television, a man who wrote during the early years of live dramas and then later became deeply and utterly appalled at what the medium of television had become.

HOWARD BEALE’S ANTI-TELEVISION RANT:

“Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was chairman of the board of the UBN Broadcasting Systems and he died this morning of a heart condition. And woe is us. We’re in a lot of trouble.

“So a rich little man with white hair died. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people and million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube.

“Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America. There’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?

“So you listen to me. Listen to me. Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business!

“So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves. Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. However much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, look at your watch, at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here, you’re beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing, we are the illusion!”

* * * * *

Later, in another televised rant, Howard changes his tack and gives in to his generally grim view of things. Once again, the dialogue reflects screenwriter Chayefsky’s real-life views.

HOWARD BEALE’S SERMON ABOUT DEHUMANIZATION:

“At the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decayed political concept writhing in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a world power. It is the richest, most powerful, most advanced country in the world. I don’t mean the communists are going to take over. They’re deader than we are.

“What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished.

“Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.

“Well, the time has come to say: Is dehumanization such a bad word? Because whether it’s good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid – creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world. We’re the most advanced country so we’ll get there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered.”

2. From the movie My Dinner with Andre (1981), written by Wallace Shawn, starring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, directed by Louis Malle

THE SETUP:

Wally and Andre, playing themselves, sit together in an expensive French restaurant and discuss many things. At many points the conversation turns to the palpable sense of wrongness that characterizes so much of modern life.

ANDRE’S THOUGHTS ON THE DEHUMANIZED FUTURE:

Andre: Things don’t affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something!

Wally: [Quieter] Well, why…why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they’re bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking, “Well, what can I do?”

Andre: [After a pause] Okay. Yes. We’re bored. We’re all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question ofindividual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”?

See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines. He’scompletely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. He’s eighty-four years old and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York! Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes!” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all. I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said, “Escape, before it’s too late.”

You see, actually, for two or three years now [my wife] Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out, that we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. You see, I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And thatthis is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

3. From The Twilight of American Culture (2000) by Morris Berman

If the redistribution of wealth . . . reflects a “seismic shift” in American society, a similar kind of shift can be seen in the tenor of American attitudes and intellectual abilities (nor are the two trends unrelated). Thus, for example, in an interview with Peter Coyote on National Public Radio (circa 1995), the actor matter-of-factly alluded to the great “hostility toward intelligence” that was now a part of American culture. Or consider the repeated, and accurate, use of the phrase “dumbing down” in everyday discussions and in the press. The celebration of ignorance that characterizes America today can be seen in the enormous success of a film like Forrest Gump, in which a good-natured idiot is made into a hero; or in the immensely popular TV sitcom Cheers, in which intellectual interest of any sort is portrayed as phony and pretentious, whereas outright stupidity is equated with what is warm-hearted and authentic. If my colleague at Midwest U now has a student who never read a novel, how long before he has a student who asks him, “What’s a novel?” (In fact, millions of Americans already don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction.) If the students don’t recognize Browning now, how long before they have never heard of Shakespeare? How long before the New York Times and the Washington Post fold for lack of subscribers, or until the English language becomes as inaccessible to the majority of Americans as Chaucer’s Middle English is to them now? How long before intellectual excitement is regarded as a historical phenomenon, or a bizarre frame of mind, or just — not regarded?

In his introduction to the book Dumbing Us Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture, John Simon notes that a whole world of learning is disappearing before our eyes, in merely one generation. We cannot expect, he says, to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people. (Try this in virtually any group setting, and note the reaction. This is an excellent wake-up call as to what this culture is about, and how totally alien to it you are.) Indeed, using Lewis Lapham’s criteria for genuine literacy — having some familiarity with a minimum number of standard texts (Marx, Darwin, Dickens . . .), and being able to spot irony — it may even be the case that the number of genuinely literate adults in the United States amounts to fewer than 5 million people — that is, less than 3 percent of the total population.

In 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 — later made into a movie by Francois Truffaut — which depicts a future society in which intelligence has largely collapsed and the reading of books is forbidden by law. People sit around interacting with screens (referred to as “the family”) and taking tranquilizers. Today, nearly five decades later, isn’t this largely the point at which we have arrived? Do not the data cited above suggest that most of our neighbors are, in fact, the mindless automatons depicted in Truffaut’s film? True, the story does contain a class of “book people” who hide in the forest and memorize the classics, to pass on to future generations — and this vignette does, in fact, provide a clue as to what just might enable our civilization to eventually recover — but the majority of citizens on the eve of the twenty-first century watch an average of four hours of TV a day, pop Prozac and its derivatives like candy, and perhaps read a Danielle Steel novel once a year.

Apologies for my failure yesterday to make my regular Monday blog post. I really have no excuse, especially since I was off work yesterday due to last week’s winter storm that has resulted in several days of school cancellations. Today we’re in our fourth day of this unexpected vacation, with a return to work tomorrow looking mighty doubtful given the dreadful ice-packed conditions of all the rural back road around here. I devoted yesterday to working on some writing and musical projects, so at least I was productive after a fashion. But alas, I let the blog slide.

Today I realized that I’ve let something else slide here at The Teeming Brain: I never announced the winner of the fourth Daemonyx contest! I announced the contest way back on October 23rd, almost a month and a half ago, as part of my ongoing attempt to spread the word about Daemonyx (my musical project whose first album will be released next year). My apologies go out to Cody, who won by correctly identifying the source of the sound clip that appears multiple times in my/Daemonyx’s songs “The Gates of Deep Darkness” and “Daimonica.” For his prize Cody chose a hardcover copy of the horror anthology The HWA Presents: Museum of Horrors. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it, since there are some fine stories by some fine authors in there. Congratulations, Cody!

The sound clip, incidentally, consists of a man’s voice asking, “Is there someone inside you?” Cody correct identified it as coming from the film version of The Exorcist, where it is spoken by the psychiatrist (played by Arthur Storch) who hypnotizes Regan in an attempt to get at the source of her bizarre behavior. She answers “Yes” to his question, after which the psychiatrist announces that he is now speaking to the person inside of her. As we all remember, frightful chaos ensues.

My fascination with the theme of possession, inner presences, and that kind of thing won’t be new to readers of The Teeming Brain. The idea of a demonic, or rather a daemonic, or rather a daimonic influence evidencing itself in a person’s psyche has become a kind of philosophical/psychological/artistic/spiritual/religious lodestone to me over the past several years. It gets at the foundations of everything that has always fascinated me about the questions and issues surrounding art, creativity, inspiration, religious authority, God, the Devil, good, evil, spiritual transcendence, human subjectivity, psychosis, dreams, nightmares, mythology, and more. As I’ve mentioned in the past (e.g. in my post titled “Daemonyx: What’s in a name?“), the same idea stands at the center of my musical and literary pursuits.

At one or two points in the history of this blog, I’ve offered excerpts from my essay “The Angel and the Demon,” which will appear in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, a two-volume reference work from Greenwood Publishing Group that’s scheduled for publication on the 30th of this month. I thought it quite fortuitous, given my intense personal fascination with the subject, that this specific topic fell to me when the essays were being assigned. A couple of posts ago I talked about the upsurge of religious-themed horror that I see taking shape in contemporary popular culture. As all culturally informed readers know, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. It famously happened once before, in the 1970s, when The Exorcist became a phenomenon, first as a book and then a movie, that swept across the American and Western cultural landscape. We should remember, especially in present circumstances, that Blatty’s famous novel was one of the key elements in the birth of “horror” as a modern publishing category. Right from the start, then, religion was central to this whole enterprise.

Surely you guessed a paragraph ago (didn’t you?) that I was going to quote once again from my Angel and Demon essay. Here’s a goodly chunk of its introduction, excerpted from the extended or complete version, which will only appear in a scaled-down fashion in the Greenwood book. The introduction discusses America’s cultural fascination with the iconic Angel and Demon, both of whom are aspects of the “someone inside you” that inhabits us all. As frequently happens when I really throw myself into nonfiction projects, I found all of my research playing right into the topics that fascinate me most as a human being.

FROM “THE ANGEL AND THE DEMON”

by Matt Cardin

I. Introduction: the prevalence of the Angel and the Demon

Even a cursory survey of the supernatural horror genre reveals the important role that the angel and the demon have played in it. From texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy (written 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which straddle the boundary between religious devotional literature and outright fiction, to fictional works such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), the demon has provided ongoing fodder for creators of supernatural horror. As for the angel, while it has most often served as a mere foil for the demon, and has often been left entirely unmentioned in favor of focusing exclusively on demonic horrors, it has still made its presence known. Paradise Lost, for example, begins with a dramatic narration of the fall of Lucifer and his fellow angels from heaven and their subsequent transformation or transition into demons. More recently, the Prophecy series of horror movies from the 1990s and early 2000s has flouted modern Western conventions by abandoning the cute, cozy angels of Victorian art and the greeting card industry, and returning to a more ancient and traditional portrayal of angels as powerful, terrifying beings.

Nor are these figures influential merely within the confines of the supernatural horror as such. In 1973 the cinematic adaptation of The Exorcist became a sensation among audiences and was subsequently recognized as the first true “blockbuster,” predating the likes of Jaws and Star Wars. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two of them. Its earnings made it one of the top grossing films at the U.S. box office that year, and in the decades since, it has steadily remained in and around the top ten highest grossing films of all time both domestically and internationally. Upon its first release it ignited a national conversation about theological matters within the United States, just as its author (Blatty, who penned the screenplay from his own novel) had hoped it would do, and spurred many fear-based conversions and reconversions to Christianity.

Angels have shared a similar widespread influence. Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which begins and ends with angels, received only a middling response from audiences and critics when it was first released in 1946 (although it was nominated for five Academy Awards). Then in 1974 a copyright lapse due to a clerical error placed the film in the public domain. When television stations around the country began to take advantage of the opportunity to run the film free of royalty charges, a new generation of viewers rediscovered and fell in love with it, thus transforming it into a widely beloved “holiday classic,” and thus rendering the supporting character of Clarence the most famous cinematic angel of them all.

Over the course of subsequent decades, angels became the subject of a bona fide national obsession in the U.S. A slew of television programs (Highway to Heaven, Touched by an Angel), movies (Angels in the Outfield, City of Angels), and best-selling books (A Book of Angels, Ask Your Angels, Where Angels Walk) arose to cater to a rising fascination with the idea of winged heavenly guardians and messengers. In 1994 the NBC television network aired a two-hour primetime special titled Angels: The Mysterious Messengers, and PBS ran a well-received documentary titled In Search of Angels. A 1993 Time magazine cover story about the angel craze included a survey indicating that 69 percent of Americans claimed to believe in angels, while nearly half believed they were attended by a personal guardian angel. Newsweek, which ran its own angel-themed cover story the very same week the Time issue appeared, reported that the angel craze appeared to be rooted in a very real spiritual craving: “It may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe—that someone up there likes me” (quoted in Nickell, 152-3).

Not incidentally, this sentiment closely echoed Blatty’s expressed motivation for writing The Exorcist. As he has explained in numerous interviews and also in his 2001 memoir If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty’s Story of the Exorcist, when he was a junior at the Jesuitical Georgetown University in 1949 he encountered a Washington Post story about a fourteen-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland who had undergone an exorcism under the official sanction of the church. Blatty had long been concerned about the spiritual direction of modern Western society—The Exorcist, let it be noted, was published in the immediate wake of the 1960s’ “death of God” movement—and in the account of this boy and his apparent demonic affliction, Blatty thought he could discern “tangible evidence of transcendence.” Two decades later he fictionalized the story in his famous novel. But it was a fiction with a serious existential purpose; as he later explained, in his view the reality of demons served as a kind of apologetic proof for the existence of God: “If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting” (quoted in Whitehead). In 1999, at a time when movies such as The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, The Blair Witch Project, and Stigmata were flooding movie theatres and video rental stores, he invoked a version of the same idea to account for the resurgent popularity of supernatural thrillers: “One of the prime allures of the supernatural thriller is that there is a world of spirit and that death doesn’t mean our final destiny is oblivion” (Bonin).

In the early 1970s it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church, or at least the Pope, agreed with at least the first half of Blatty’s demon-angel apologetic. In November of 1972, Pope Paul VI delivered an address to a General Audience in which he expressed his concern over what he viewed as demonic influences at work in the world: “Evil is not merely an absence of something but an active force, a living, spiritual being that is perverted and that perverts others. It is a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening. . . . Many passages in the Gospel show us that we are dealing not just with one Devil, but with many” (Pope Paul VI). These statements ignited a debate both inside and outside the church and embarrassed many priests whose outlook was more in tune with the secularistic, demythologized tenor of the time than with what they viewed as the mythological belief system of pre-Enlightenment Christianity. But the international phenomenon that was The Exorcist demonstrated that the Roman pontiff obviously spoke not only for himself but also for an enormous public that either believed as he did or, at the very least, suspected or wanted to believe in the existence of a transcendent spiritual reality. The fact that the pope’s remarks were bookended, temporally speaking, by the 1971 publication of Blatty’s novel and the 1973 release of the movie makes it difficult to avoid speculating that all three statements—the novel, the movie, and Paul VI’s speech—were expressions of a burgeoning cultural phenomenon.

What an interesting cultural moment it is for somebody like me, who holds an obsessive interest in religion, horror, and the interface between them.

For example, it’s widely recognized that zombies have become the monsters of the moment in contemporary horror entertainment. Zombie-themed movies have been flooding movie theatres for the past five or six years, ranging in quality from the low (e.g., 2003’s House of the Dead, based on the popular video game) to the middling (e.g., other video game adaptations such as 2005’s Doom and 2002’s Resident Evil) to the high (e.g., 2002’s 28 Days Later, directed by indie fave Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame). Last year, legendary film director George Romero’s Land of the Dead, the long-awaited fourth installment in his classic Living Dead series, finally arrived in theatres after a wait of 20 years. Zombie-themed novels are filling bookstore shelves at a staggering pace, such as Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, and many, many more. Sequels to many of the newer zombie movies have already happened (2004’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse) or are on the way (28 Weeks Later, scheduled for 2007).

This whole phenomenon absolutely fascinates me, since zombies are positively ripe (no pun intended) with the kind of religious-horrific crossover significance that I’m always looking for. I’ve been an avid student of the zombie subgenre for a great many years now. Romero’s movies blew me away when I was in my teens, during which period I also discovered the zombie films of Lucio Fulci and others. Years later, when I got into graduate school my religious studies professors generously allowed me to explore my horror-oriented interests within the confines of their discipline, and I turned to the zombie theme for one of the two seminar papers I wrote in completion of my M.A. The title was “Loathsome Objects: George Romero’s Living Dead Films as Contemplative Tools.” My thesis was that the rich trove of apocalyptic religious elements presented in Romero’s zombie movies (which at the time, ca. 2003, formed a trilogy instead of today’s quadrilogy), acting in tandem with their through-the-roof presentation of explicit violence and gore, renders them amenable to a contemplative reading in which they serve as spurs to an experience of spiritual transcendence, somewhat along the line of the famous — or obscure, or notorious (take your pick) — practice of meditating on rotten corpses that has been recommended by some historical Buddhist sects in the interest of awakening the meditator to a vivid recognition of the truth of impermanence and the reality of personal emptiness.

So in light of all that, you can imagine how interested I was to learn recently of the publication of a new book titled Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, written by religious studies professor Kim Paffenroth and published by Baylor University Press. The publisher’s description reads as follows: “This volume connects American social and religious views with the classic American movie genre of the zombie horror film. For nearly forty years, the films of George A. Romero have presented viewers with hellish visions of our world overrun by flesh-eating ghouls. This study proves that Romero’s films, like apocalyptic literature or Dante’s Commedia, go beyond the surface experience of repulsion to probe deeper questions of human nature and purpose, often giving a chilling and darkly humorous critique of modern, secular America.”

Hello! This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me sit up and take notice. A little judicious poking around online reveals that the book is achieving considerable notoriety. Reviews abound all over the web. Recommendations for the Bram Stoker Award are piling up. And in the course of scoping it out, I’ve stumbled across a number of other recent, pertinent events and items in the same vein, such as a paper by Paul Teusner, written in completion of a Master of Theology degree, titled “Resident Evil: Horror Film and the Construction of Religious Identity in Contemporary Media Culture.” Certainly, scholarly studies that offer a combined focus on religion, horror, and pop culture aren’t new; consider Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King (1996) by Edward J. Ingebretsen, S.J., or Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty (198 by Will Rockett, to name just two worthy examples. But it seems to me that the new trend in such scholarship is to include items, and even to focus upon them centrally, that were formerly considered to be nothing more than pop cultural detritus. Yes, in larger scope this is probably an aspect of the same trend that has led many academic and cultural watchdogs in recent decades to lament the devolution of academic scholarship proper into a kind of degraded freakshow that operates under the influence of a kind of post-modernist frenzied urge to smash the ivory towers and swamp taste and high culture in a sea of trash. But it’s also possible to view this trend, or at least certain aspects of it, in terms of “scholarship on the ground,” as it were: scholarship that seeks to get at the heart of what really makes a culture tick, in terms of the concrete lived experience of being a participant in it.

When I turn my attention in this direction, significant seeming factors begin to pile up faster than I can note them. For example, my friend Maurice Broaddus is pastor, or rather “facilitator,” of a large urban church. He is also a published horror writer who is very aware of the interesting interactions between these facets of his life. Brian Keene, the aforementioned author of several best-selling zombie novels, spoke about his personal religious journey at an event held earlier this year at Maurice’s church in Indianapolis. Turning from literary matters to cinematic ones, Scott Derrickson has become a prominent Christian director of horror films in Hollywood. His resume includes Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and, as I myself reported on this blog a few months ago, a forthcoming adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. As with Maurice, Brian, and others who are working this very interesting patch of earth, Derrickson is very self-aware of the interplay between his twin foci on religion and artistic horror, as witnessed by the reflective things he has said in various interviews.

The upshot of all my scattered comments and observations here is this: I’m thinking that the conjunction of religion and horror — with the second understood as both an existential experience and an important subset of media/popular culture studies — is an Idea Whose Time Has Come. I have been personally interested in it since earliest childhood and adolescence. I devoted eight years of graduate study to pursuing it along various lines. Currently I’m co-editing an anthology of horror stories to be titled Holy Horrors. So I’m certainly doing my part to turn the earth, and it’s quite gratifying to see the subject rapidly becoming a major focus of attention in the present academic and cultural climate. Gratifying enough, it seems, for me to devote a rambling blog post to it.

Not incidentally, I’m happy to report that I’ve talked with Kim Paffenroth, and he has secured a review copy of Gospel of the Living Dead to send my way. So I’ll definitely be writing more about this book when I’ve had a chance to read it. And I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more evidence of what promises to be a long-lived trend — this widespread academic and cultural focus on religion and horror in tandem — that is only just beginning to blossom.

This morning during the drive in to work, I happened to catch sight of a particularly evocative church sign. Surely you’re aware of the church sign phenomenon that has become a pervasive part of American folk culture over the past couple of decades. It’s now standard practice for many thousands of churches, especially small rural ones, to take the signs in front of their buildings that formerly displayed only the hours of their services and the names of their pastors, and use them to display cutesy little sayings with a corny/kitschy religious edge. The result is that nowadays you can be fairly certain if you drive through any middle American town with its dozens of Protestant churches, you’ll be greeted with roadside messages like, “Eternity — smoking or non-smoking?” and “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” You’ll be asked, “Need a new look?” and then advised, “Come inside for a faith lift!” And you’ll be told that daily Bible reading helps prevent “Truth Decay.”

This morning as I was driving past a little church that sits right on the edge of the city limits in the town where I teach, I noticed the message it currently has displayed on its sign: “Keep your eyes on the skies! Jesus is coming!” And for no good reason, I thought immediately of the ominous warning, so familiar from classic science fiction films, for us all to “Watch the skies!” This is the final line of dialogue spoken in the 1951 version of The Thing, as a journalist files a radio report intended to warn earth’s population of the danger facing it from space. “Watch the Skies” was the working title for director Steven Spielberg’s classic alien invasion film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). So this morning when I read that church sign, I was suddenly catapulted into a heady vision of Jesus Christ as an alien monster against whom we should be on our collective guard.

And then I remembered a picture my little six-year-old niece had showed me just two days ago. She’s a cherubic child who came within a hair’s breadth of being used by Wal-Mart for child modeling purposes, but if the artwork she produces is any indication, then her imagination is apparently a little darker than her appearance would indicate. We were at her grandparents’ house for the regular Sunday lunch with the in-laws, and my niece came up to show me a picture she had drawn that very morning. It depicted a crayon-rendered Jesus hanging on a cross. I asked her what the red stuff on the wood was, and she replied cheerily, “Blood.” Then she pointed to a blobular yellow-orange shape located directly below Jesus. She had drawn it with elongated nodules stretching out on either side of Jesus to surround him, and she explained, “It’s a monster.” I asked her, “A monster is eating Jesus?” She smiled and said yes, the monster was eating Jesus so that Jesus would be all safe and sound inside it.

Now, I don’t know the origin of this stunningly wonderful example of childhood mental juxtaposition. I think maybe a logical explanation would be that she must have recently been taught the story of Jonah and the Whale (which was actually a big fish, as we Bible scholars are always proud to point out) and then gotten it mentally bound up with images of the felt-board Jesus she sees in Sunday School. But whatever the reason, she is my beloved niece, with whom I am well pleased.

So remember: Keep watching the skies! Jesus is coming and we’ve got to be on our guard! Train the telescopes and radar dishes heavenward! Prepare the nuclear arsenal! Remain vigilant! And pray fervently that when that great and terrible day finally arrives, when Jesus comes shooting through the clouds in a flying saucer with death rays trained upon Washington, D.C., the yellow-orange blob monster will rise up to save us.

Peter Jackson directing a movie starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan? Steven Spielberg teaming up with Zhang Yimou? Say what? Have we crossed over into a paradisiacal, kung fu-filled version of the Twilight Zone here? I’ve just stumbled across some news at Rotten Tomatoes (my hands-down favorite among movie review websites) that flat out blows my mind: It seems that Jackson and Spielberg may be jumping on the bandwagon that has brought the classical Chinese martial arts movie to the West, and vice versa, in a major way during the past decade.

First, a brief bit cultural-historical background: The Chinese storytelling genre known as “wuxia” (pronounced “woo-sha”) was virtually unknown to Western audiences until the late 1990s or early 2000s, but it lies at the very heart of Chinese cinematic culture. Wuxia is older than movies; its roots reach back many centuries and even millennia into Chinese history, mythology, and folklore. It first arose in nascent form out of the political and societal stew of Chinese culture some time around the 9th or 10th centuries C.E., when widespread popular resentment of government corruption gave rise to stories of wandering knight-like warriors who fought on the side of the weak and oppressed, and who embodied the qualities of courage, nobility, and martial skill. Traditional folkloric beliefs about the supernatural spiritual abilities attained by advanced martial artists led to stories about warriors who could leap over high walls, levitate, walk on water, block sword blows with their bare hands and arms, and so on. This was of course tied deeply to Taoist and other Chinese religious and philosophical ideas about inner energy (”chi” or “ki”).

It wasn’t until the 19th century that wuxia entered the popular form of Chinese drama known as Peking Opera. In the 18th century the oppressive Qing government had sacked the famous Shaolin Temple and banned the teaching of Shaolin kung fu techniques. Some of the Shaolin monks ensured the survival of their art by teaching it to performers in the Peking Opera, who soon began to incorporate kung fu choreography into their performances. When the Chinese movie industry first got off the ground in the early 20th century, the actors all came from the Peking Opera, and the first Chinese movies ever made were silent adaptations of wuxia stories, complete with sword-fighting, levitating, and all that.

In America the name “Shaolin” first became widely known in the early 1970s thanks to the Kung Fu television series, whose protagonist was a Shaolin monk. Then there was the fact that Bruce Lee’s character in Enter the Dragon, which became a massive international hit right after Lee’s death in 1973, was also a Shaolin monk. But wuxia itself didn’t gain much of a hold in the West. Most Americans were familiar with kung fu through Lee’s movies, which represented the other major Chinese martial arts movie subgenre that centered around gritty, realistic crime dramas instead of fantasy stories. The few wuxia-oriented movies that made it to the West tended to fall on the lowest end of the quality spectrum. These were the “chop-socky” movies, complete with horrendous acting, absurd plots, hideous production values, and laughable English-dubbed dialogue, that populated the programming schedule of many a television station’s weekend or late night “Black Belt Theater” or “Kung Fu Theater.”

The 2000 release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon shattered this cultural wall. There had been a few previous attempts to bring all-out wuxia to Western and American audiences, including director John Carpenter’s notable Big Trouble in Little China (1986). But they hadn’t made much of a dent. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, however, which was an adaptation of a series of wuxia novels by an author named Wang Du Lu, won four Oscars — Best Foreign Film, Best Art Direction, Best Score, and Best Cinematography — and very nearly took home the two biggest awards of all, Best Film and Best Director. It was also massively popular at the American and general Western box office. This represented a kind of cinematic cultural sea change.

In the wake of CTHD, director Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2005) further cemented the reality of this sea change by becoming commercial and critical hits in both the East and the West. More Americans began to gain an awareness of the wuxia genre, its history and richness — not to mention its very existence — with the help of such worthy offerings as The Art of Action: Martial Arts in the Movies, a 2002 documentary hosted by Samuel L. Jackson that provided a detailed overview of both the genre’s history and its growing influence in Western popular culture, as seen in, for instance, the wuxia-fied martial arts action sequences in Hollywood’s Charlie’s Angels movies.

Now in 2006 we have tentative reports of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson wanting to team up with some of the biggest names in Chinese cinema to produce major versions of Journey to the West, a story steeped in Chinese legend and mythology. As mentioned above, I found both the Jackson/Li/Chan news item and the Spielberg/Yimou news item at Rotten Tomatoes, and I urge you to click the links and read them yourself. Whether either version of the Journey to the West project ends up becoming a reality, the very fact that such rumors are circulating is further evidence of the cultural sea change I’ve just been rambling about. It’s suddenly a brave new world — and for once, in a positive way — for at least one corner of the Western popular entertainment multiverse. I’m truly cheered by this. (For an exploration of why such cheering is a good thing for me at present, read my previous post to The Teeming Brain,, “Against School.”)

I just stumbled across the news that a movie adaptation of one of my favorite comic books is in the works. The announcement appears at IMDB, The Movie Insider, and elsewhere. One of the most detailed announcements I’ve found is at cinematical.com. The working title for the project is The Hands of Shang-Chi, and the one-sentence plot synopsis says, “Based on the Marvel Comics hero, a young Kung-Fu master learns his father is the world’s worst criminal.” The screenwriter is listed as Bruce McKenna, who at one site is quoted as giving a tiny amount of further information: “A young kung fu master learns his father is the worst criminal in the world and the drama becomes ‘The Godfather’ in reverse, ‘because Shang Chi doesn’t want to be like Michael Corleone,’ said McKenna. ‘There’s this contemporary world of Chinese billionaire industrialists, but it’s a bit like the Wild West or the robber baron era because the influence of the mafia is so strong.’

What has me more psyched than anything is that Ang Lee and Woo-ping Yuen are attached to the project. Woo-ping is of course the near-legendary action choreographer (and sometime director) behind some of the best martial arts movies in history, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix movies, the Once Upon a Time in China series, and scores of others.  (He also choreographed the action for the Charlie’s Angels movies and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology, which may fall into a less-exalted category, but not because of his contributions.) He’s simply the man. Ang Lee, for his part, entered martial arts territory when he directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And of course he has also directed The Hulk, The Ice Storm, and several other fine films. So this bodes well and portends that The Hands of Shang-Chi will turn out to be something special.

The only thing that worries me is the sliding date that’s been attached to it. Apparently it was first announced in Variety all the way back in 2003 and, as reported by the cinematical.com article, has been an on-again, off-again affair from the beginning. Presently the announcement for it is dated 2006 or 2007 depending on where you look. So I certainly hope the project’s very long journey through development hell doesn’t indicate that it’s going to end up as a miscarriage.

Incidentally, if you’re unfamiliar with Shang-Chi, there’s a very informative Wikipedia article about the comic. (Wikipedia has rapidly become my second brain, as indicated by the numerous links to it that I’ve peppered throughout my Teeming Brain posts. The recent, highly publicized report by Nature magazine that announced Wikipedia’s science articles compare favorably in their accuracy to Britannica’s science articles has helped to assuage my guilt feelings over this.) And a great site titled The Shang Chi Chronology features a summary of the entire series.

The short version is that the character of Shang-Chi first appeared in 1973 in Special Marvel Edition #15 and then returned in the next couple of issues, and proved so wildly popular that he was given his own series. The popularity of a kung fu-based character was of course bound up with the explosion of popularity that Asian martial arts received in America during the 1970s. ABC’s Kung Fu series was tops on television. Bruce Lee achieved immortality by dying in July of 1973, followed by the posthumous release and roaring success of his only English-language movie, Enter the Dragon, on August 24 (my third birthday, incidentally). Shang-Chi’s debut came just four months later, in December.

Moreover, Shang-Chi arose not only as an attempt to cash in on the craze, but as an actual creative and business child of it all. As recounted in the Wikipedia article, “The character was conceived in late 1972 when Marvel Comics acquired the comic book rights to Sax Rohmer’s pulp novel villain Dr. Fu Manchu while they also held the rights to the Kung Fu television program. Instead of producing a straight adaptation of either source, the decision was made to combine them. The result was Shang-Chi, a master of Kung Fu, who was introduced as the (previously unheard of) son of Fu Manchu.”

In his appearance, personality, and fighting style, the character of Shang-Chi was largely a hybrid of Bruce Lee and Kwai Chang Caine (the protagonist of the Kung Fu TV series), a fact that seems eerily appropriate given that Lee developed the Kung Fu series with producer Fred Weintraub for ABC and was slated to play Kwai Chang until the network scrubbed him, fearing that American audiences weren’t ready for an Asian leading man on primetime television, and cast David Carradine in the role instead. Shang-Chi fought like Bruce Lee and engaged in frequent inner philosophical reflections like Kwai Chang, who frequently recalled words of wisdom that he had received during his training at the Shaolin Temple in China.  Artistically, philosophically, sociologically, and thematically, it was quite sophisticated, as were so many other Marvel comics from the same period.

I loved every bit of it, and this love played out in various ways. From age 11 to 17 I studied Japanese goju-ryu, a martial art that mingles hard-style Japanese karate with a few softer-styled kung fu techniques. During the same period I ate up the Shang-Chi comics series, Bruce Lee’s movies, and the Kung Fu series, which I watched religiously when it played in reruns on WGN every Saturday (I had been too young to remember or appreciate the series’ original run). That’s why I’m so eager to see the new Shang-Chi movie come to completion. A number of my childhood loves have already seen successful big-screen treatments in recent years, including Spider-Man and The Lord of the Rings. A great Shang-Chi movie would make a wonderful extension of this trend.

Sorry to all for having missed my normal Saturday update. Naturally I would never willingly fail to meet a self-imposed deadline.

Naturally.

In case you haven’t heard, one week from today the ABC television network will premier a limited series titled Fallen, which is based on a series of young-adult books about angelic warfare. A recent press release at Sci Fi Wire contained the following:

“Fallen is based on Thomas Sniegoski’s young-adult book series The Fallen, about a young man (Paul Wesley) who discovers he’s half-human and half-angel, a member of a race called the Fallen. He and his family have been tracked down by a group of killer angels. Fallen will premiere as a two-hour film on July 23, then return next summer as a four-hour limited series.

“Sniegoski said he based the series on his research into the biblical history of angels. ‘I’d always wanted to do something with angels at some point in my career and accumulated a ton of stuff about the Old Testament writings and even older stuff than that and found some really wild stuff that I used to build the mythology of the four books,’ he told reporters. He added: ‘It’s a much scarier interpretations of angels. But at the same time, you look at the biblical stuff, and. . . what did God send when he was ticked off?’”

I find Sniegoski’s final comment-slash-rhetorical question about terrifying angels to be fascinating, not only because it’s entirely true, but also because it’s not original. And that’s not to slam him. I just can’t help but wonder what he’s been watching and reading over the years that might have inspired him to devote such attention to the ancient Nightmare Angel, as Emily Hahn called the figure in her quirky and interesting little book, Breath of God: A book about angels, demons, familiars, elementals, and spirits. Throughout most of world history, in every culture where people have believed in angels or their equivalents, these beings have been conceived as terrifying creatures that possess tremendous power. Even people who have believed that angels are basically benevolent have still feared them, as evidenced by the notable example of the terrified reactions angels invariably receive when they appear to people in biblical stories.

The Prophecy series of movies did much to resurrect this creature for the modern media-drinking public. Now perhaps Sniegoski and ABC will further the cause. I can’t help but think that Sniegoski has been watching the Prophecy movies, since his comment so closely echoes a brilliant bit of dialogue that Gregory Widen, the writer-director of the original The Prophecy, put into the mouth of one of his characters: “Did you ever notice how in the Bible whenever God needed to punish someone or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?” Not only is this a surprisingly intelligent piece of dialogue for a Hollywood horror movie, but it’s one of the most crystal-clear and concentrated statements of a very significant religious-cultural truth that anybody has ever penned. You’d be hard-pressed to find the matter expressed so succinctly in theological literature.

If you’ll forgive me the vanity of quoting myself, I’d like to offer a passage from my essay “The Angel and the Demon,” which will appear later this year in the reference work Icons of Horror and the Supernatural, edited by S.T. Joshi for Greenwood Press. I spent several months earlier this year researching and writing this essay about angels and demons as icons in supernatural literature and film, and so my attention is still hot on the topic. I’m hopeful that Fallen will represent a continuation of the Nightmare Angel’s resurrection out of the tomb of dreary-fluffy cuddliness that overtook the figure for more than a century. In my essay I explained this degradation as follows:

“A final bit of duality to enter into the figure of the Angel is found in [the] area of artistic representation. On the one hand, the image continued in its original majestic form down through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, arguably culminating in the paintings of the Dominican monk Fra Angelico (‘the angelic friar,’ c. 1400-1455), for whom angels were a favorite subject. C.S. Lewis voiced a widely held sentiment when he wrote that ‘Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven.’ It was these same Renaissance-style angels that television critic O’Connor noted had been ‘culled from art masterpieces” to populate NBC’s Angels: The Mysterious Messengers. That was in 1994, so obviously this type of angelic representation has survived to the modern day.

“But in the same breath when he was praising angels in the tradition of Fra Angelico and other, similar artists, C.S. Lewis also voiced a widely noted observation about a different artistic trend that produced a decidedly different sort of angel: ‘In the plastic arts these symbols [i.e., representations of angels] have steadily degenerated’ (Lewis 7). The specific degeneration he referred to is the steady birth of the cuddlier, cuter Angel that has carved out a distinctive niche for itself in Western popular consciousness and is most associated with the work of Fra Angelico’s near-contemporary Raphael (1483-1520). If the angels of the former call to mind ‘the peace and authority of Heaven,’ then those of the latter, which appear in the form of fat, naked babies adorned with candied white wings, call to mind the cloying sweetness of a Barney episode. They are also matched by another less majestic angel in the form of the pale feminine figure that arose to populate the art world during the 19^th century. A few prominent artists such as William Blake may have labored to maintain a more transcendently serious vision of the Angel, but the shape of the future was nonetheless clear.

“Hahn links these changes to an impulse that arose with the advent of the Christian religion itself: ‘Taking stock of itself, the new Christianity made a change in all this [i.e., the fearsome angels of Middle Eastern religion]. The type of angel desired and needed by Christians, it became increasingly evident, was not the sort of Being the Jews had been satisfied with, so the authorities, viz., historians and illustrators, evolved a new concept of angel which, though we cannot all claim to love it, at least does not send us rushing off in screaming flight if we happen to encounter it in dreams’ (53).

“For Hahn, all Christian angels, even those of the Middle Ages, represent a kind of devolution of power. ‘[I]f we are to believe the medieval painters,’ she writes, ‘all was sweetness and light before the birth of jesus. After He made His appearance, the manger must have been full of the soft rustle of cherub wings, as little angels—not griffins or sphinxes, but amoretti—hovered over the crib, peering down lovingly at the Babe, between the ears of donkeys and the horns of cattle—two horns per animal, no more. Something new in religion came in with Jesus: prettiness, innocence, call it what you will. The Nightmare Angel’s sway was over’ (58).

“Obviously, Hahn was taking poetic license with history when she wrote that. The change did not occur immediately with the advent of Christianity. But occur it did, so that today, two millennia after the birth of Christ, Mark Edmundson can accurately observe in his Nightmare on Main Street that ‘America’s current angels are fluffy creatures, flown off the fronts of greeting cards,’ who compare unfavorably with the original biblical angels which are ‘beings of another order: an encounter with an angel transforms life—puts one on a harder, higher path’ (80).

“Lewis, for his part, brings the issue to a head and also summarizes the history of this degeneration in his typically inimitable way: ‘Later [i.e. in the wake of Fra Angelico’s angels] come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying ‘Fear not.’ The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, ‘There, there’ (Lewis 7).

“One can only wish Lewis were still around to comment on the angel-oriented advertising campaign mounted by the American lingerie company Victoria’s Secret in the early 2000s, which featured images of nearly-nude female models decked out with large, white, feathery wings. This enormously profitable mockery of the iconic Angel both underscored the figure’s cultural prevalence and one-upped the ‘pernicious symbol’ of Victorian art by presenting a figure that managed to appear exceedingly voluptuous and artistically insipid all at once.”

So to reiterate, I’m hoping ABC’s Fallen will further the rescue mission represented by the Prophecy movies and a few other cultural items, such as Frank Peretti’s inclusion of warrior angels in some of his Milton-Lite evangelical horror-thriller novels. Maybe Sniegoski’s source novels have already kicked the project off; I don’t know, because I haven’t read them. But if I do, I’ll surely mention them and give my reaction here at The Teeming Brain.

Incidentally, if you end up reading my essay in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural and fail to find the above passage in its entirety, it’s because the essay initially turned out to be nearly twice the allotted length. I had to cut it way down. The passage I’ve quoted is from the full version, for which I’m still seeking publication.

No, the winner of Daemonyx’s “movie genius” contest isn’t writer-director-actor-Renaissance man Kenneth Branagh. Rather, it’s Andrew, who emailed me the correct answer within a few minutes of my announcing the contest here at The Teeming Brain. The challenge was to listen to the song “The Gates of Deep Darkness” and identify the source of the sound clip that appears at about a minute into the song. Andrew correctly identified the clip as coming from the movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which Branagh unleashed upon the world in 1994. Andrew’s prize is a DVD copy of the movie. So if you want to email me with your postal address, Andrew, I’ll get that right out to you. Congratulations!

Coming in a close second was Trev, who barely missed being the winner (as indicated by the time stamp on his comment). Nice job to you too, Trev. And don’t despair. I’ll hold another such contest in the near future, probably a few weeks from now.

Not incidentally, Branagh’s version of the Frankenstein story (which I’ve long thought should have been named after him instead of being called “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” just as a more accurate title for 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula would have been “Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula”) does a marvelous job of bringing out the daimonic element in the character of Victor Frankenstein, and also in the monster he creates. The bit of dialogue that I used in my song says, “There is something