(Mp3 audio at the end of the piece)
Part I: Beautiful Self-Destroying Machines
The Devil’s Art
Why did Jews create Hollywood?
(Or should this be, why did the Anglo-American military intelligence complex create Hollywood and blame it on the Jews?)1
There is, for sure, a tendency to assign blame to Jewish factions, elements, and ideologies within society. Most confusingly of all, this strategy often seems to be practiced by these very same factions, self-scapegoating being one tried-and-true method for cementing Hebrew hegemony.
But I have only led with “the Jews” to reassure anyone reading that I have not “moved on” yet from my recent focus at Children of Job; or to disrupt the complacency of those hoping I had.
It occurred to me today, while thinking of the Tanakh and the Book of Job, just how far we have come, collectively, as a culture, since them thar days, and just how central the image (no longer graven, but stamped in celluloid, video, and digital) has become to our forms of worship.
“Cinema” is simply too powerful and pervasive a tool of social control to be ignored by any group or ideology that wishes to extend its influence. There is simply no way to compete, in the economy of attention, without it. It would be like coming to a gun fight with flyers and pamphlets.
And yet. Judaism—at least the Torah—forbids visual representations of the divine, in favor of the authority of scripture (even the Hebrew alphabet). Clearly (at least with hindsight, and though Birth of the Nation, a religiously-themed work complete with Ku Klux Klan heroes, effectively set the template for cinematic art), movies were not invented to spread religious doctrine, per se.
But were they designed to supplant it?
Did those Jews who built Hollywood as their empire set out to cynically capitalize on the mass instinct for religious worship, by adopting the devil’s art of mimicry? Knowing that Yahweh could never be represented, did they develop an art form that could simulate everything but Yahweh, with the aim of putting people hopelessly in thrall to an image that they (this empire) controlled?
Knowing that, by that point, Judaism was never going to become the world religion, but that movies just might?
Simply put, did the unholy powers and principalities that had managed to co opt both Judaism and Christianity, since the early days of both, extend their operations by adopting a new, more current avatar of influence, in the form of Hollywood?
In 1975, Pauline Kael commented how so many of the best recent American movies had been directed by Catholics. Directors with Catholic backgrounds, she thought, had “more sensuality around them in their formative years, because their religion was itself more sensual, more suggestive, providing more material for the imagination.”
Where Judaism forbade images of the divine, Catholic Christianity—the one which the Roman State sanctioned—has always relied heavily on just such imagery, especially if we consider the cross (with or without Jesus on it, but especially with) as representing the Christian deity.
Movie Art as a (Sensual) Love of Evil
Since my Porto presentation, “The Moviegoer” (also an essay to appear in the first issue of Decoding Culture magazine this month), I have been reconsidering what makes a good movie or good TV show, and what the criteria are for goodness.
Specifically: can aesthetic qualities be separated from ethical ones, and if so, how, why, and should they be? Good intentions not only do not make a good movie (or government policy), they as often as not guarantee the opposite. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, it is because the Devil works best at the level of the unconscious, and because, in the process, he makes sure to provide a good cover story for the conscious mind.
The worse the unconscious evil, the loftier the conscious rationalizations must be.
When I first started to write The Blood Poets in 1997, my reasoning was that, since all my favorite movies were violent, I would write about movie violence. I justified (or rationalized) this bias to myself—and to the reader—by arguing that art has to represent reality, and we live in a violent reality.
This seems to be superficially true; but the question I never considered—since I believed, both then and now, that all good art should also be entertaining—was this: Is making entertainment out of violence the best way to address it? Today, I would say no, that it is (almost) impossible for great cinematic art to represent evil (I would not have used that word back then) without glamorizing it in some fashion.
Let’s take The Godfather as an example. The critic David Thomson wrote:
Think of the killings in The Godfather: isn’t the consciousness observing them that of a Corleone? These deaths are not messy or untidy. The attitude is proud, masterful, in love with meticulous detail. Nothing in the sensibility disturbs the remorseless efficiency of vengeance, or departs from the managerial pleasure in seeing intricate plans work sweetly. . . . It’s during the grease-quiet, digestive mechanics of [the film] that we may recall how frequently film has appealed to fascists . . . something essential to the medium cleaves to uncorrected powers, the magic of plot (or organization) and the chance to stare at death without honoring pain and loss (Beneath Mulholland, p. 170-71).
There’s more. Since Al Pacino plays Michael Corleone, and since Pacino went on to become one of the most charismatic movie stars of all time, all of that energy, talent, charisma, went into the creation of a murderer. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to say how much Pacino created Michael, and how much (playing the role of) Michael created Pacino; but either way, the contrast is chilling in its implications. Pacino is an artist that all the world admires, where Michael is the picture of corruption. Yet through Pacino’s (and Coppola’s) mastery of his craft, the two effectively became one.
That circle is squared by the empathy with which Coppola and Pacino depict Michael. Michael, who is as tragic in his way as Macbeth, but also a whole lot more appealing, because of all that Hollywood “magic” behind him. (And let us not forget that, according to producer Al Ruddy, the many heads of the Mafia were all invited to attend an early screening of the film, and all loved it.)
In the end, does the power of the film medium swallow up the sincerity of the message in The Godfather? Isn’t Michael’s corruption less compelling and convincing to us, finally, than Pacino’s magnetism or Coppola’s artistry?
The proof is that we make heroes of the men who create our villains.
Once upon a time, I believed this was because their work was deepening my understanding of evil (and therefore of myself), that it was providing a service of such vitality and depth that it was as good as—equal to—a religious form of revelation. This is precisely the point, I think, of the hallowed imagery of Hollywood.
The Jews forbad imagery because they knew it could quickly replace people’s sense of the numinous, by flooding their perceptions with a simulated representation of reality, and by doing it illegitimately, via the combination of artifice and artistry.
In a word: the creation of false idols.
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Beyond the Paywall: Little Children Dreaming of Being Psychopaths (Wild Bunch, Natural Born Killers, Apocalypse Now), Loving the Demons (Unforgiven, how movies led me to occultism).
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