The Books of My Life: Religion in the Cinema

 

Ivan Butler's Religion in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, 1969), which should have been titled Christianity and Anti-Christianity in the Cinema, is an early film studies attempt to explore the relationship between Christianity and, for the most part, though Butler takes brief excursions to Mexico and Brasil largely for aesthetic reasons, European and American cinema. In eleven chapters Butler explores the impact of Bible stories such as the Delilah and Samson tale and the Moses story; Christian figures such as nuns, monks, priests, saints, preachers, mystics, and sinners; Christian derived allegories and parables, Christian settings, Christian demonic figures; and comedy and satire on the cinema.

Butler's monograph provides a useful jumping off spot for anyone interested in the relationship between Christianity and the cinema thanks to its typological and historical approach. However, Its mix of journalistic film criticism and film history is a bit too much grounded in aesthetics for my taste, however, though one has to, I suppose select films on some basis and whether aesthetics is superior to popularity is an open question. Like so many scholarly books and monographs on the cinema it is overlong. It's selective encyclopedic form would come off better, I think, in article form rather than monograph form. While informative Butler's short book is now dated and anemic in its study of religous horror films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), films of possession and the coming of the Beast that have become ever more prominent and popular in the post-new new Hollywood. After reading Butler's monograph I am still not sure whether religion in the cinema constitutes a genre, a tone, a set of images, specific settings, or all of the above.

Musings on Right Wing Delusions, Hallucinations, and Misuse of History

There are a lot of things about the contemporary American right, which has its origins in the wacko elite and popular Christian conspirary theories, many of them involving Jews, since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire rather than in anti-Enlightenment conservatism, that are intriguing. One of the things about the radical right I find most interesting is the concerted use by some of the Republican faithful of the Dixiecrats to tar and feather, in an act of deflection, the Democratic Party with the stain of racism.

Such a populist strategy, while certainly demagogically effective with respect to the faithful, is, of course, ahistorical not to mention bizarre. While it is true that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats that dominated the American South, was one of the fractions of the Democratic Party between 1877 and the 1980s and it is true that most Dixiecrats, including its moderate faction, was tied to Jim Crow, it is not true that the contemporary Democratic Party has, as one of its fractions, the Dixiecrats. The Democrats who dominate Austin, Dallas, and El Paso, Texas are not contemporary Dixiecrats. Rather they are an embodiment of the Democratic Party that emerged in the wake of Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, Northern Democrats, and moderate and liberal Republicans passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those actions, as LBJ told Bill Moyers it would, crippled the Democratic Party in the South where Dixiecrats reacted angilly to the civil rights activism of the Democratic Party and transformed the Democratic Party as a result into a party of Blacks, educated Whites, Hispanics, and Asians.

The Dixiecrats, of course, did not disappear nor were they raptured. Where they went was to the Republican Party, a party that became the heir of the Dixiecrats and the John Birchers after the mid-1970s. The shift from Dixiecrat to Republican took several forms. The shift geographically from Dixiecrats to DixieBirchPublicans was political and was stimulated by Democrat President Harry Truman integration of the military and LBJ and his allies passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965 respectively. It was political and demographic. Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, for instance, who ran against Truman because of his desegregation of the military, became a Republican in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It was cultural. Republicans came, thanks to their recognition of the effectiveness of Dixiecrat George Wallace's rhetoric in the Midwest and even the Northeast, to adopt the discourse of Dixie populist ragoholism. Republican President Richard Nixon and Republican strategist Kevin Phillips referred to the Republican adoption of Southern states rights discourse (the Dixiecrats meant by this, of course, keep your hands off our Jim Crow) and the rhetoric of White anger at busing and affirmative action, as their Southern strategy, their strategy to take Dixie for the Republicans. Between the 1970s and today the Republicans engaged in a kind of cult like ideological cleansing and purification that cleansed moderate and liberal Republicans, Republicans in name only, from the party and the Dixiecrat and Bircher factions became dominant within it. The shift was also geographical as evidenced by the shift between the late 1960s and the 1990s of Dixie and Dixie's Whites, including its evangelical Whites, into the Republican camp. Many in the West, particularly the Intermountain West with its legacy of anti-Chinese racism likewise found a comfortable home in the dixified and birchified Republican Party. Blacks, of course, well those Blacks who were allowed to vote, increasingly switched from the Republican Party (the party at one time of Lincoln, Reconstruction, Radical Republicans, and occupation of the South) to the Democratic Party after the 1920s.

I want to end this brief post with some musings on cults in politics. The ideologically driven cleansing of the Republican Party of "RINOs" (as the Dixiepublicans and Birchipublicans called them) post-Richard Nixon points up the similarities between the contemporary right wing populist Republican Party and all sorts of inherently reactionary purifying religious sects and cults and all manner of political cults including the Cult of Hitler, the Cult of Stalin, the Cult of Pol Pot. All of these political cults, including the Cult of the Orange One or Tangholio, of course, were and are ideologically driven purification cults that had and have at their heart populist anti-intellectualism.

The Books of My Life: Caligari's Children

 

I have never been and am not a fan of the horror or terror film. I have, of course, since I have been watching films since the 1960s, seem many of the "classics" of the horror or terror genre including Nosferatu, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Lodger, Frankenstein, Dracula, Cat People, Hound of the Baskervilles, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, and the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream cycles, both of which went all postmodern on the horror film. I have even liked some of them, the first Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance. I found its surrealism and snark about high school and everyday life enjoyable (the contradictions and disruptions some find in horror films). In the end, however, I have never been a devotee of the genre just as I am not a devotee of the cult of Star Wars.

So, why, you might ask, did I read a book on the horror or terror film genre, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror by S.S. Prawer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)? The answer, of course, is that it was there on my bookshelf. A better answer might be the other one I would give: namely, that I am interested in mass popular culture and horror films have been and are popular.

I found a lot of the things in Prawer's book intellectually interesting. I agree with Prawer that the terror film has historical precedents in gothic literature, fairy tales, and biblical myths and biblical apocalypticism. It is nice to see someone paying attention to the role Judaism and Christianity have played in the history of Western culture. I agree with Prawer that film socialises, resocialises, and is a form of social control and that it allows viewers to live vicariously before they return to their "normal" socially controlled lives. I agree with Prawer that audiences are not always if at all passive. I appreciated Prawer's delineation of several stages in the history of the terror film. I appreciated Prawer's attention to mise-en-scene, something relatively easy to see in horror films like Nosferatu, Caligari, The Lodger, and Cat People. I appreciated Prawer's attempt to bring a moral and quality dimension to the terror film by counterpointing the mood and tone of classic horror films and the in-your-face quality of more contemporary terror films. Of course, notions of quality are present in all forms of film criticism simply in the choice of what films to study and focus on and they are ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. I found Prawer's hybrid approach to the terror film, one which melds sociology, anthropology, history, theology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, genre studies, and narrative studies, interesting if very much a product of the post-auteurist bricolage age in which the book was published.

Has Prawer's book converted me to a devotion to the horror film genre? No. It did enlighten me about the genre and give me much to think about, however. And for those reasons alone I recommend it.

Musings on the Free Speech Shuffle That Really Isn't About Free Speech...

One of the bizzarest things that has occurred in my lifetime during the neoliberal post-Margaret Thatcher era is the rise of a right wing free speech movement that really isn't about free speech. Think of it, the very group whose pedigree goes back to the anti-anarchist, anti-socialist, and anti-communist crusades and to figures like Gerald L.K. Smith and groups like the John Birch Society, people and groups who supported making the Communist Party illegal in the US, have suddenly become champions of free speech. All I can say is don't believe the demagogic hype. Right wing free speechers are hardly proponents of no holds barred free speech.

First of all, right wing free speech groups really don't seem to have much of a conception of free speech beyond the tautological or circular: free speech is good because it is good to have free speech. Second, right wing free speechers, as the above examples show, have, like those who argue that free speech is limited and that you can't yell fire in a theatre when there is none, limited freedom of speech in practise. As I noted, right wingers have been leaders in what is today called cancel culture. They favoured cancellation of anarchist speech, socialist speech, anti-war speech, whatever speech they disagreed with and coded as profane. These right wing free speechers whinge about attacks on Christianity by the secularist crowd, but they would, I suspect, favour limiting the free speech of someone who went into a White evangelical Church on Sunday morning at 11 am spewing all kinds of expletive invectives at those sitting in the pews. They would claim, I assume, that anyone who would do such a thing must be a disrespecful "hater" of Christianity, a claim that is akin to yelling fire in a theatre that is not aflame and akin to limits on adolescent hate speech on, for example, college or university campuses. But then right wing free speech groups have long been inherently hypocritical.

Of course, in the end the issue for right wingers is not free speech. It is about their speech. For them the only speech that should be free is their speech and any speech that disagrees with theirs or which they categorise as evil godless commie nazi socialist fill in the blank should not, they believe, be freely available in the marketplace of ideas. They don't even trust that the free marketplace of speech, which doesn't really exist, of course, will lead to the triumph of their "ideas", which is why they favour limiting the speech of those they disagree with and favour limiting the voting rights of those they disagree with. In the end then it is all about power for these right wing faux free speechers. They want it and they want to cleanse "America" of any speech that does not agree with theirs. Welcome to the insane world of modern postmodern America.

Musings on the Problems Associated with Capitalist Apologetics and Polemics...

There is an obvious problem with capitalist apologetics and polemics. Capitaist apologists and polemicists, unlike John Locke, don't have an empirically grounded theory of how private property came to be. Historically speaking, private property and notions of private property don't really come into existence, if in somewhat ambiguous form, until the rise of agricultural societies and particularly large-scale agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherer societies, the earliest human societies, had a collective form of property and group notions of property. It must also be remembered that large scale agricultural societies tempered their conception of property with the notion that monarchs or emperors could expropriate a variety of "goods" from peasants on the ideological basis that some god figure gave them the right to do so. Monarchs, of course, were just Mafiosi who provided protection to peasants in exchange for such expropriation.

Locke is clever enough to realise that any theory of property has to be grounded in how property comes into existence. He was an empiricist after all. Locke argues that property came into existence when an individual labourer mixed his labour with the earth creating his/her/their property in the process. He argued that because property was the product of a labourer mixing his/her/their labour with the earth it could not be alienated to someone who did not mix his/her/their labour with the earth to create private property (remember all that talk of inalienable rights in the US Declaration of Independence? It comes from Locke). It thus follows that those who do not create private property through their labours have not created property and do not hold valid property rights.

The problem with so much capitalist apologetics and polemics is that they are grounded in and undergirded by metaphysical belief rather than empirical and ontological reality. Capitalist apologists and polemicists simply assert that private property exists. They don't, in other words, have a historically grounded theory about how private property came into existence in a world that initially was not divided up into private property parcels. In this regard, capitalist apologists and polemicists are akin to the demagogues of religious literalism or fundamentalism. Capitalist demagogues simply believe that private property exists, asserts that it exists, makes it holy, and maintains that those who own property, even if it is not the product of their labours, is theirs. Adam Smith's notion of the free hand, by the way, is grounded in a similar metaphysical deus ex machina and free market liberalism is, as a consequence, grounded in dogmatic assertion rather than in empirical reality. To those, like myself, who prefer empirical to dogmatic approaches, the rhetoric of capitalist fundamentalists is not any more compelling than that of fundamentalists of various sectarian stripe.

 

Thorstein Veblen grounded his arguments about the parasitism of the leisure class who do not have valid property claims in a biological notion, the instinct of workmanship. For Veblen the capitalist robber barons and their progeny, did not work and thus were not creative. Engineers, Veblen argued, did have the instinct of workmanship, did the planning, and built things that were useful to society. The leisure class, who hired engineers, simply, according to Veblen leeched off the creativity of engineers. Additionally, Veblen argues, what the leisure or leeching class bought with the monies and wealth they expropriated from real workers, was not useful. It was simply conspicuous consumption whose purpose and function was to display wealth.

It is possible to contextualise Veblen's argument about the leisure class within Locke's theory of the origins of private property by doing only limited damage to either. Locke argues that property is the product of the mixing of labour and land. Given this, the leisure class, who do not mix labour and land creating property in the process, have no right to the property they have expropriated in some way, shape, or form from those who did mix their labour with the earth creating inalienable property in the process. They thus live off the fruits of others. And that seems to be a useful way to conceptualise the workings of contemporary capitalism.

 

 

The Books of My Life: Underworld USA

Several years ago I read an article, by whom I don't recall, in an edited collection on film history, the title of which I don't recall either. In an essay grounded in an ideology of telelogy about what the author called the "little books", the writer found these "little books" wanting particularly when compared to the illustrious achievements of the film analysis and film criticism of his own era.

The "little books" the author of the essay was referring to were the "little books" published by publishers such as the BFI, Viking, Indiana University Press, the University of California Press, Studio Vista, Praeger, and Zwemmer/Tantivy/Barnes, books in the BFI's Cinema One and Cinema Two and the Movie series. These "little books" were part of the flowering of auteurist dominated film analysis and film criticism in the1960s and early 1970s. And while each of these publishers and series' published monographs on auteurs, including books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Georges Franju, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Alain Resnais, they also published books on film theory, including Peter Wollen's seminal book on flim theory Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, books on stars, such as Ian Cameron's book on film heavies, and books on genre including Colin McArthur's book Underworld USA (New York: Viking, Cinema One, 1972).

In retrospect McArthur's book, which was influenced by auteurist film criticism and the structuralism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is a classic. Even at the time of its publication Underworld USA was recognised as a seminal work in the analysis of film genre. McArthur's book explores the broader historical and sociological contexts of film making, putting the lie to the notion common among contemporary film analysts that auteurists were a bunch of backward looking neo-romantics who argued that film auteurs created film universes ex nihilo. Contemporary critics of auteurist criticism appear to have read little of the classic works in the genre preferring straw men to empirical actuality. McArthur's brief monograph explores, to use a word that has become the fad of the moment in academe, the intersection between historical and sociological contexts, the collaborative nature of the Hollywood mass production line, genre, and auteurism. McArthur explores the themes and iconography (including the mise-en-scene) of the gangster film and thrillers as they intersect with the work of film auteurs including Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, and Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director whose gangster films and film thrillers of the late 1950s through 1970s reflect the influence of these Hollywood genres on French filmmaking, teasing out, in the process, the themes and iconography of these directors.
 

The Books of My Life: The Founding of New Societies

 

We in the core nations live in a modern and now a postmodern world characterised by specialisation. The workplace, including the academic workplace, is characterised by the specialisation of labour. American historians, for instance, often specialise in the type of history they do, in the eras they emphasise, and in what they focus on within their temporal areas of expertise. However, such academic specialisation has a downside. It sometimes can and oftentimes does result in a parochialism that is the intellectual equivilent of the mythic exceptionalist parochialisms at the heart of modern and postmodern nationalist narrative fictions.

Comparative history, which goes against the grain of this increasing academic specialisation, often points up the fact that nationalist exceptionalisms, whether of the American, Canadian, or Australian varieties, is problematic. While the American, Canadian, and Australian variants of English and British settler societies may think they are unique and may believe that they have been called to evangelise the world with their good news of exceptionalist utopianism, comparative analysis often shows that such messianic ideologies are more cultural myths than reality.

One of the classic texts of comparative history is The Founding of New Societies by Louis Hartz, Kenneth McRae, Richard Morse, Richard Rosencrance, and Leonard Thompson (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1964). On one level Founding shows that the settler societies of the United States (Hartz), Latin America (Morse), South Africa (Thompson), Canada (McRae), and Australia (Rosencrance) are not unique. They are all, Hartz and his contributors argue, fragments of Europe. On another level it argues that the European settler societies they briefly explore are somewhat unique. Latin America and French Canada were, Hartz and his collaborators argue, feudal reactions to French Revolutionary era Europe. The Dutch Calvinist fragment of South Africa was a reaction to liberal modernity. The British fragment of South Africa, the United States and English Canada were eighteenth century liberal fragments of Europe. Australia was a radical and reformist fragment of nineteenth century Britain. It was, Hartz and his contributors contend, around these reactions and cultural influences that each of these fragments coalesced if in somewhat different ways to produce several of the new societies of the modern era.

The Founding of New Societies is an interesting corrective to perspectives, like that of Frederick Jackson Turner, which emphasise the newness of, in Turner's case, the American settler society. As for the eternal and infinite chicken and egg question both European backgrounds and frontiers contributed, along with a host of economic, political, cultural, demographic, and economic factors, to the making of new societies. Though Hartz is often seen as a member of the school of history that emphasises the economic, political, and cultural consensus of new societies like the United States this collection of theoretical essays and case studies is aware of conflict within nations, whether between Toryish elitists and those of a more democratic orientation, between colonial imperialists and natives and slaves, or between grazers and urban dwellers. And though the book is in need of updating, thanks particularly to the revival of and current hegemony of neoliberalism, a neoliberalism that has changed the cultural character of the US and Australia and brought with it a series of ideological culture wars, it remains a worthwhile and groundbreaking attempt to look at the new societies born out of "tradition" and modernity in comparative terms, something that is absolutely essential if we are to fully understand the new societies that arose out of Europe.