Forbidden Mixtures: Movies, Monoculture, & Apocalypse
Hollywood & the Creation of a Counterfeit Religion, Part Five (of Five)
(Audio at end of piece.)
A Girardian Intro
“This kind of moviegoing was religious because it had to do with worship, it had to do with the screen being larger than you were, and you being in awe of what you were looking at, and feeling a certain reverence for it. . . . Hollywood culture is the dominant culture. It is the fantasy structure that we are living inside.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum
Movies as “invented” (corporatized and formalized) by those early Jewish moguls were quite consciously (“Hollywoodism”) meant as the means to cement an idealized image of American life for people to imitate, via the characters and actions (stars and stories) they were paying money to be entertained by.
Where once we used the stars in the sky to guide us, we then came to use the stars on the screen for the same purpose.
Movies became a primary (and primal) means to unify the US, via the establishing of an “American Way” and an “American Dream” (fresh from the dream factory). Thus we began to move towards a global monoculture via such sociopolitical movements as multiculturalism, political correctness, and globalism.
As Girard comments on the Old Testament books of the law and the prophets,
the primitive conception of the law [is] a form of obsessive differentiation, a refusal of mixed states that looks upon indifferentiation with horror. There is no difficulty in discovering in the books of the law precepts that recall all codes of primitive law [and] the biblical fear of the dissolution of identities. In my opinion, [it] is not wrong to note the part played by fear of violence in this horrified reaction to forbidden mixtures (Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 148).
Movies were “history written in lightning” (Woodrow Wilson), “the universal language,” and “the means to world peace” (I can’t attribute those last two quotes but I know I read them recently.)
Girard’s view, ironically (though as far as I know he almost never spoke or wrote about movies), was the inverse: to unify ever-larger groups of people via mimesis is the surest way to global violence, or social apocalypse.
This may be a partial, esoteric explanation for why any celebrity—no matter how allegedly “self-made,” “grass-roots,” “populist,” or un-coopted (Alex Jones, David Icke, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson)—ends up, one way or another, as part of the problem and not the solution.
Figures with large audience-bases foster parasocial (one-way) relationships, which in turn encourage mass imitation and thereby reduce the possibility for autonomy, or for inner-directedness.
This is also the conundrum, as I see it, of institutionalized Christianity, as the first religion to expose the scapegoat mechanism and represent God as a man who is also a victim of mob violence, thereby giving the example of non-resistance via the imitation of Christ. And to imitate Christ—though of course we have scriptural doctrine as a necessary reference point—must always, by definition, be inner-directed and not externally focused; for otherwise how can it be truly Christ-like?
Yet any institutionalized Church is an outer structure made up of people who should not be imitated (and would be the first to admit it, if they are being true to their principles).
Paradox: each man must be Christ to himself, and to none other; and yet to be as-Christ-was means (in some sense) to put others before oneself. “Greater love has no one than this, that one should lay down his life for his friends” (John 15: 13).
That movies became the guiding light of the modern world, and hence have for so many people supplanted religion (or at the very least, stole a great deal of its thunder) is why violence—the ritualized sacrifice of heroes and villains—is so central to the cinematic (dark) arts.
Still Struggling with Theodicy
Continuing where we left off last week, regarding the interface between cultural artifacts and audience perceptions:
A person is more likely to have a revelatory insight while reading the Bible than the back of a cornflakes box. We are also that much more likely to end up crazy or delusional from reading the Bible, as compared to a cornflakes box. The sword of art cuts both ways.
Now bring in a less neutral counter-example—Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice, say, or (to stay on the topic) Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Certainly, the second point above is true, that we are more likely to end up going on a killing spree after NBK than either after reading the ingredients of a cornflakes box or reading the Bible.
(Contrary to Hollywood tropes, as Brett Carollo has pointed out, there are very few “serial killers” or psychopaths driven by Judeo-Christian obsessions, at least as compared to Satanists.)
But what about the first point? Is it also fair—even necessary—to allow that some people might have revelatory insights from watching NBK, without being insane? Or that the potential of a given work to provide meaningful insights is inseparable from its potential to engender crazy delusions?
What else are we doing here—any of us that are struggling with theodicy—if not trying to understand the nature of evil by studying its works, and thereby get closer to goodness?
In other words, can whatever makes Hollywood’s counterfeit religious propaganda so harmful really be separated from those qualities that either stem from or allow for—genuine revelatory insights?
The Serpent in the Garden didn’t exactly lie when he promised Eve godlike knowledge. He just made damned sure Eve didn’t read the fine print.
Is that on the Serpent, or is it on Eve and Adam? The answer must be that it is on all three—as well as on God for setting things up that way.
Ethics vs. Aesthetics 2: The Glamorous Vice of The Godfather
“[A]rtistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable.” [We then] get not just coldly intellectual games of structuralism, but a thirst for “revenge” that becomes “constructive” in its cultural context because it can be spent on . . . a sacrificial substitute.” —Rene Girard, quoting Freud, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (p. 387).
The question of ethics vs. aesthetics is similarly complex and seemingly contradictory. If the medium is the message, then to a degree, aesthetic qualities can’t be separated from ethical ones. The short-lived (he died at 25) English poet Keats (my mother adored him) most famously wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
This is not a message that the hapless hero of a Hollywood film noir is likely to appreciate. In movies, and in Hollywood, “beauty” is as often as not a lie. So how do merchants of deception create objects of beauty? How can something we regard as a thing of beauty actually be the product of deception, or psyop? Isn’t beauty still a measure for truth?
Glamor magic is the answer: being the means by which faery folk (traditionally considered fallen angels) disguise their ugliness as beauty.
For example, The Godfather is, I think inarguably, a more beautifully crafted movie than It’s a Wonderful Life, or any number of more “conscientious” Hollywood films that have a more overtly wholesome storyline and message. The problem begins, as previously discussed, when a movie makes ugly things (the Mafia, murder, and deception in The Godfather, self-destructive and orgiastic violence in Taxi Driver, Wild Bunch, or NBK) beautiful, by turning it into art.
The flip side of Keats’ poetic decree is that lies (since they relate to distortion) are synonymous with ugliness, where beauty relates to purity, perfection, and harmony. So what to make of religious art that represents the crucifixion? Isn’t that also turning something violent and ugly (the torture of an innocent) into something beautiful? One could argue that this is even central to the meaning of the Gospel story, and to the (Girard would say false) idea of Christ’s “sacrifice.”
Like religious art, beautifully crafted movies (such as those mentioned above) are not glorifying violence or beautifying the ugly in any obviously immoral way, but rather with the ostensible goal of emphasizing the tragedy and pathos of a life-path that ends with violence. As I wrote in Blood Poets, The Godfather and its first sequel constituted the fullest demonstration in movies of the Gospel saying, “What does it benefit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul?”
And yet, as the author Greg Desilet argued to me, where are the contrapuntal characters? Where is the good found in all of this evil?
Though far more artful and subtle than Eastwood’s Unforgiven, are the Godfather films so dissimilar insofar as we don’t ever really want Michael Corleone to reject his crime family ties and become a mild-mannered school teacher, raising his children with the dull Kay (or to remain in Sicily with the beautiful Apollonia). We don’t want that for him, because we don’t want it for ourselves: we want to experience vicariously a life of power and mastery, of being the Godfather.
And Coppola, with his beautiful artistry, against his own best intentions (if we grant him benefit of the doubt), ensures we want exactly what we get: the dark glamor of a life of vice; and we revere Coppola—the real godfather—for giving us the most aesthetically perfect version of a crime family in movie history.
(Behind the Paywall: Peckinpah’s Folly: The Wild Bunch Burnout; the New Hollywood credo, “Ugliness is truth, truth is ugliness”; occultism & Christianity, Is There a Cure for Belief?)
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