Where Art Lies: How to Tell a Psyop from a Co-op
Hollywood & the Creation of a Counterfeit Religion, Part Four
(Audio version at the end of this piece)
“But, if it is coming to be accepted—at least by the more progressive philosophies—that morality is and can be finally no more than a matter of taste, it is surely the next logical step to realize that taste is no less than a question of morality.” —Jake Horsley, “Evolution of Demons” (from Blood Poets, volume 2, “Millennial Blues”)
Art Vs. Religion
Movies and other art forms can be judged by two primary criteria:
1) How well does the work achieve what it sets out to achieve?
2) What does it set out to achieve?
Can art bring about a genuine crisis of conscience? If so, can it thereby serve a religious or spiritual function?
Even from the most conventionally Christian perspective, the Bible is certainly a form of art, or at least it employs art to achieve its ends. Religious art exists, obviously, and on the flip side, the primary aspiration and potential of art, historically, has been to evoke the numinous.
Yet as touched on last week, moralism is no substitute for morality. Art that prescribes certain practices and proscribes others, with the threat of punishment and a promise of reward—art that overtly aspires to act as religious engineering doctrine—is not likely to cut much mustard as art.
(This why passages of the Old Testament are so difficult to read, or to find anything of either moral or aesthetic value in.)
The central junction between art and religion—the element without which religion is not religion, and with which art can extend to the religious—is revelation.
Do I need to add the word “divine” or is that tautologous? Is there such a thing as demonic revelation or would that only be a pseudo-revelation?
Ask Job.
Did Job’s revelation come wholly from God, or was the Satan, with his trials and torments, indispensable to its arrival? It seems clear to me that, in that book, Job would not have requested, or demanded, received, or understood or benefited from his encounter with God, were it not for the Satan’s intervention.
By this model, before divine revelation (at least some of the time) comes demonic interference, albeit an interference ordained also by God.
NBK Revisited
While re-reading my 17,000 word essay on Natural Born Killers, I had something of my own mini-crisis of conscience. Not because it was a work of art, but because it wasn’t.
Not only do I fall back on some fairly questionable philosophy in my defense of the film, but I do so in such a rambling, pretentious, didactic and undisciplined way that it was slightly embarrassing to read. The piece exposes all my limitations from that time, both as a writer and a (moral) thinker.
As it happens, my embarrassed reaction dovetails rather well with the leading point in the essay itself: that of morality being synonymous with taste, as quoted above.
And I think I did hit on something crucial, albeit without realizing just how symptomatic this point of view is to the same nihilistic rot I was describing (and embracing); or how I was demonstrating those symptoms myself.
Fortunately, I was doing so with a modicum of awareness. Essentially, my argument was consistent with my current “position” on the Bible, here at Children of Job: that the value of NBK—its strange morality—depended less on any intrinsic qualities of the work itself than on viewer-responses. In the essay, I say the film:
comes closer to exposing the true nature of the psychic climate of America (and Earth), at this time, because it comes as close as any single artifact to correctly representing this climate. . . . NBK joins up with, becomes one with, the very concepts and trends and forces (occult or otherwise) which it is endeavoring to satirize. It aligns itself with a collective zeitgeist, and embodies it so totally and whole-heartedly that it effectively takes it several steps further (into the millennium, let’s say). At which point, it merely has to display itself, say “here I am,” the living proof of the nightmare reality which it set out to expose. Understood at such a profound level, it’s possible to see that NBK is a map of the abyss so committed and so determined to doing justice to its territory that it has become the abyss itself—and that one’s response to the film depends wholly on one’s own capacity or willingness to gaze into this abyss. To despise and denounce the film, then, is, to at least some extent, to acknowledge its efficacy in depicting a wholly despicable reality (or facet of reality), and its influence upon us (p. 308).
(Note the plethora of italicizations, a literal indication of how over-emphatic my style was.)
As it happens, the day I first wrote this present piece, “Nadroj” (Jordan spelled backwards) commented here at CoJ:
What if the Bible is not a literal instruction manual but more like a holographic blueprint? What if the product of your interaction (with such a powerful system of metaphor) is what determines the morality that manifests? My sense is that most “holy books” are much more oracular and interactive than base level matrix would suggest. I find Jasun’s documented interactions demonstrate a lot of these “holographic” principles.
This question (thanks Nadroj!) is close to the heart of my struggle with “movie love” and a lifetime Hollywood fixation: can I somehow redeem that troubled relationship (if not the works themselves) by separating the wheat from the chaff? Or is it all chaff, destined for the refiner’s fire?1
The sorting of the seeds which I am hoping will end with redemption begins, as always, with a closer look at my own complicity with that which needs to be redeemed.
The Morality of Amorality
When does movie love become cultural colonization and when does cultural colonization become demonic possession? Or, to take a contrapuntal perspective, can movie love sometimes be a genuine conduit for divine revelation that allows for communal soul work (such as making a movie)?
And, if both are sometimes true (and I don’t think there’s any way to deny it), what then? Is there a way to get closer to God without putting ourselves in the Satan’s way?
And if the answer is no—or at least, not always—are we back in the same quandary, staring into the same abyss?
In my essay on NBK, I mention in a footnote how “the media as a whole machine-entity, a hoary-headed hydra . . . came down upon NBK, causing its release to be held up in Britain, forbidden entirely in Ireland, and . . . prohibiting it from becoming available on video in both countries.” (I add that this made it “the first major motion picture to be so restricted from public access since A Clockwork Orange,” p. 314). My response:
the spokespersons in these cases are not interested in—or concerned with—the psychological matter of individual susceptibility itself, but only with the “problem” of media violence. What they are really interested in, of course, is more ammunition for their “cause,” which is the cause of censorship, or social, cultural and psychological control, under the auspices of “protection.” The irony here is rich, in that NBK is primarily dealing with these questions to begin with, and the furor and controversy—and even to an extent the killings themselves—that surrounded the film were an almost ideal extension of its “argument”—a living demonstration, if you will, of the case it was making. The irony, then, is that those hysterics sufficiently committed to their own sense of importance to actively get involved in the debate chose to come down on the film itself, rather than to address the can of worms which it had served—both per se and ipso facto—to open up. This is because these moral guardians and public spokespeople are, for the most part anyway, more worms in the very same can (p. 314).
If authentic morality cannot ever take the form of moralizing or submitting to someone else’s moral injunctions, does it rather have to come via a willingness to expose oneself to amorality, and even immorality? A non-resistance to evil? In other words, are seemingly nihilistic and even satanic works sometimes the means to a greater form of morality?
Yes, I know it sounds like heresy. But in the Book of Revelation, why does God prefer cold souls to lukewarm ones?
Taxi Driver, the Psyop
Travis Bickle prototype in Hi, Mom! 1970
“When people talk about violence in cinema, it’s like talking about cheese on pasta; it sort of comes with the dish. And that’s what makes the dish good.” —Brian De Palma, quoted in the Blood Poets introduction
I recently listened to an episode of Psyop Cinema in which Brett Carollo and Thomas Milliary discuss Taxi Driver. Brett makes a compelling case for Taxi Driver as a top-down psyop disguised as an organic, grassroots work of individual inspiration (starting with Paul Schrader).
Central to his argument, Brett suggests that the film’s genesis began with Brian De Palma), specifically his 1971 Hi Mom!, in which De Niro plays a Vietnam vet struggling to make a name for himself. Thomas and Brett—as well as Jay Dyer—see De Palma as a full-blown “MK-filmmaker,” as far as I can tell because so many of his movies have to do with split personalities (Sisters, Dressed to Kill, Raising Cain).
I have also read (in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and elsewhere) that De Palma was the person who gave Schrader’s script to Martin Scorsese, and possibly to producers Michael and Julia Phillips. Brett’s idea is that De Palma (working for whoever, Brett doesn’t speculate) commissioned Schrader to write the script as part of an ongoing psyop, of which Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 debut Targets and Hi, Mom! were prototypes. The aim was to create an archetypal “lone nut” avenger-incel character towards the full inception of a cultural movement that would transcend movies and enter into society at large. (Psyop Cinema call it “the Joker Cycle.”)
Certainly this latter came to pass, and it seems reasonable to work backwards from that awareness. Taxi Driver’s influence on Western culture is incalculable, and knowing what we know about both the world and Hollywood, it seems highly unlikely to have come about by chance. The question is whether it was “astro-turfed” into being, as Brett suggests, or (as I tend to think) via a combination of genuine creative “serendipity” (as Schrader has described it for five decades now) with the usual psy-opportunism and corporate skullduggery.
(Over the paywall: Schrader’s version; Conspiratainment as the (False) Cure for Hollywood; Where Art Ends & Psyop Begins.)
Free long-form essay that also looks into Taxi Driver’s possible cultural culpability, “A Critical Divide: Being a 4-Part Examination on Melodrama, Tragedy, the Nature of Evil, and What Constitutes Responsible Movie Violence in Relation to Taxi Driver and Other Works in Response to the Work of Gregory Desilet.”
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