Celluluid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons

Celluloid Heroes
&
Mechanical Dragons
Jonx Davin Enrnr
Celluloid Heroes
&
Mechanical Dragons
Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
Joux Davio Eniir
Cybereditions
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To my mother,
Leslie Elaine Brown
Acknowledgments
Every book that comes into being does so within the context of a web of
interconnections between individuals, and this is no less so in the present
case. Te idea for this book rst occurred to me in :,, while reading
a passage from William Irwin Tompsons book Imaginary Landscape:
Making Worlds of Myth and Science, in which he briey discusses David
Cronenbergs great lm Videodrome. So, in a way, the existence of this
book depends directly upon my chance encounter with the works of Bill
Tompson, to whom I am greatly indebted not only for its inspiration
but also for his kindness in writing the Foreword. And I would never
have stumbled across the works of Tompson if they had not been rec-
ommended to me by my friend John Lobell, who was one of the early
supporters of this project, and who has been instrumental in helping to
see it through to completion with his various criticisms and suggestions.
Te website companion to this book, CinemaDiscourse.com, would not
exist without Lobells initiative and enthusiasm for the essays contained
herein.
Special thanks are due also to the various individuals who have read
the manuscript or parts of it and made kind suggestions for improve-
ments along the way, including Leonard Shlain, Sven Birkerts, V. Vale,
Robert Fogarty, Ralph White, Philip Kaufman, Emily Kischell, Al Zuck-
erman, Caroline Hutton, Sid Quashie, and last, but certainly not least,
my perspicacious editor Robert Stootho, whose eye for accuracy has
improved the quality of the manuscript enormously.
Earlier versions of two chapters in this book have appeared elsewhere:
Visions of a Biomechanical Apocalypse, originally published in Ralph
Whites Lapis magazine (Issue Five, :,,;); and Myth, Film and the De-
cline of Western Literature was published under the title Film: the New
Novel in the Fall :cc issue of Te Antioch Review. Tanks to both pe-
riodicals for allowing us to republish these essays.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife Fiona for her support and loving
encouragement.
John David Ebert
May :cc,
Q: Dont you think that today it is in this sort of popular literature
that you nd strong archetypes, symbolic images which have van-
ished somehow from the more highbrow literary works?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, I do. . . . I believe fantasy stories at their
best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology
formerly did. Te current popularity of fantasy, particularly in lms,
suggests that popular culture, at least, isnt getting what it wants
from realism.
September :o [:,o]. Stanley gave me Joseph Campbells analysis
of the myth, Te Hero with a Tousand Faces, to study. Very stimu-
lating. Arthur C. Clarke
Contents
Foreword by William Irwin Tompson, xi
1. Introduction, :
:. Myth, Film, and the Decline of Western Literature, ::
. Apocalypse Now as a Celluloid Book of the Dead, ::
. :oo:: A Space Odyssey: Te Compression of Western Cosmology into
a : Hour and :, Minute Strip of Celluloid, ,o
,. Visions of a Biomechanical Apocalypse, ,,
o. Trough the Biomechanical Labyrinth: A Guided Tour of the Films
of David Cronenberg, oo
;. Tolkiens Industrial Apocalypse, ,:
8. The Visionary Seizures of Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky,
:c
,. How Monsters Attack Civilization and What Celluloid Heroes Do
About Tem, ::o
1o. Te Comic Book Superhero: Or, How Gotham Became Self -Aware
and Developed an Immune System, ::
11. Lucass Electronic Opera: Te Star Wars Epic and the Solution to
the Problem of the Biomechanical Man, :,,
1:. Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg: A Study in Polarity, :;:
Digging Images: A Cultural History of the Movie Teatre, 1,
Appendix I: Te Evolution of Visionary Cinema since 1,o8, ::;
Appendix II: Two Film Reviews, :
Appendix III: My Top Sixteen, :oo
Illustrations
Wolfgang Kilian, St. Brendans Voyage (from Caspar Plautius, Nova
Typis Transacta Navigatio. :o::), ,,
Rogier van der Weyden, Middelburg Altarpiece (ca.:,:).
Gemaldegalerie, Berlin, ,c
Dissecting instruments (from Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis
fabrica libri septum, 1), 1,
Sandro Botticelli, Pallas and the Centaur (ca.::). U zi Gallery,
Florence, :o,
Raphael, Te School of Athens (11o-11). Stanza della Segnatura,
Vatican, :;:
Paul Klee, Sinbad the Sailor (1,:), :o:
Machinery of the Heavens (1th Century (?)) (from Harry Robin, Te
Scientic Image: From Cave to Computer (NY: Abrams, 1,,:),
:1:
Te eye (from Descartes, La Dioptrique, Discours troisime). Panthe-
on, Rome (ca.:;,;), ::
xi
Foreword
by
William Irwin Tompson
John Ebert has found a very interesting way to track the transformation of
Western Civilization that sneaked up on us while we were looking at televi-
sion. In the time between :,o and :,;:, we watched the war in Vietnam on
TV and followed the news of the assassination of the Kennedys, Martin Lu-
ther King, and Malcolm X, and we thought that history was what made it into
the news and managed to stay there for a long time. What we did not know
was that conventional history the stu of wars and assassinations had just
ended and the real stu was what was going on at rates of time that our ha-
bitual : frames per second eyes could not track. Politics had become invisible
and what the American public saw was what it got dished up in a new State
of Entertainment that crossed sports with political campaigns to give us a new
kind of race for the Presidential Super Bowl.
Poets and cultural historians those sorts of old souls who had been reared
on Western literature knew that a scam was afoot and moved away from the
crowds in the street intently following the , card Montys moving hands. Poets
may think in images, and therefore sneer at fake icons, but they also feel with
sounds, and perceive with hyperdimensional sensitivities the crashing of the
long waves of time on the shores of civilizations. So for members of our esoter-
ic guild, the period of :,o; to :,;: was the time when a new Zeitgeist landed
on Earth, when higher mathematics moved from Advanced Institutes in Paris
into public life as catastrophe theory began to morph into chaos dynamics
and complex dynamical systems. Mandelbrot touched a key on his computer
and ghostly equations took on new incarnations as fractal landscapes. James
Lovelock would capture an electron in a device of his own invention, like a
sorceror capturing a genie in a bottle, and then envision the planet not as a
rock carrying life as a passenger but as a larger entity of life that never made it
onto the screen of human perception.
All the old world views that had been cleared out by the monocrop mentali-
ty of modernization began coming back like tough weeds carried by a stronger
wind, and yoga, zen, susm, Kabbalah, and animism returned in the company
of this Zeitgeist.
Ciiiuioio Hiiois axo Micuaxicai Diacoxs
xii
What John Ebert recognized as a child growing up in this invisible shift
from the politics of mental representation to that of psychic participation was
that movies were expressing this transformation much more than the news.
Movies were the Evolutionary News. :,o was the year of Kubricks :oo:: A
Space Odyssey, and one could not talk about the transformation of Western
Civilization into a new planetary culture and only talk of Mandelbrot, Tom
and Lovelock; one had to gure Kubrick into the new civilization that was
neither civil nor a nation.
Eberts book captures this moment of planetary shift in a most absorbing
and entertaining way. His book is both a rant and an ode: a rant against those
academics who miss the planetary to drown themselves in the location of cul-
ture by the new provincials of pomo subculture; and an ode to the pop culture
of the Kubricks and Spielbergs that lifted the many into a new and joyous
sense of participation in the One.
John Ebert is an evolutionary mutant, and therefore naturally selected to
highlight this new chreod and report on the evolutionary news of planet
Earth. He is neither novelist nor lmmaker, critic nor professor, but a soul on
the loose. If you look in his direction, you will see a horizon you missed.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
September 6, 2005
:
1
Introduction
Tis book is an attempt to answer the question: What are the new myths?
*
I
would like to preface my response, however, by pointing out that I am a gen-
eralist and a dilettante from Italian dilettare, to take delight in who loves
to read books about culture. In fact, studying the weaves made by the par-
ticular threads of the disciplines that hold the textile of a civilization together
is my specialty, and so sometimes patterns become visible to me that would
otherwise remain overlooked by the specialist, just as certain meteorological
features of the earths atmosphere only become visible in Landsat photographs
taken from outer space. So I am neither a specialist in mythology, as Joseph
Campbell and Mircea Eliade were, nor am I an academic, but merely one of
those vanishing few who spend most of their time reading books in an age
dominated by electronic culture.
Tere are still a few of us left.
Indeed, the last days of the great universally educated generalist ended with
the death of such old-fashioned men of letters as Arnold Toynbee (d. :,;,),
Marshall McLuhan (d. :,c), Arthur Koestler (d. :,,), Joseph Campbell (d.
* By the word myth here, I mean the telling of stories in the broadest possible
sense, and so I am using the word in a way that is dierent from how it was
used by the myth scholars of the Eranos conference generation. In those days,
scholars like Eliade and Campbell used the word myth to refer exclusively
to a sacred narrative that formed the content of a ritual, whereas all other
traditional stories were regarded as either folktales or literature, depending
on the stratum of society in which the stories originated, either top or pop.
Te purpose of a folktale, in contrast to a myth, was in this denition strictly
for entertainment. So the way in which I am using the word myth in this
book is consistent with what scholars have traditionally meant to demarcate
by folktale, but since I nd the latter term laden with rural connotations
that conjure up pipe-smoking peasants sitting on ramshackle front porches,
I prefer to use the word myth, especially since I understand these modern
celluloid narratives to be not just individual creations of artists and poets, but
also communications to us from a higher intelligence.
:
:,;) and Lewis Mumford (d. :,,c) during the nal three decades of the
twentieth century. Along with them went an entire epoch of competence in
formulating panoramic vistas of thought, in which ideas drawn from dierent
disciplines are cross-fertilized and spliced into such strange literary mutations
as Te City in History, Te Masks of God or Te Gutenberg Galaxy, works which
have become great classics read by people who like to think, except, of course,
those academics who, having withdrawn into their own private circles of un-
intelligble discourse, regard with suspicion anyone who is literate in more than
one discipline.
I have written the present book in this very tradition of literary works which
are so strange as to be almost unclassiable. So readers expecting some new
academic theory about lm, or a history of the medium, or a series of witty
reviews, are in for a disappointment. Indeed, those interested exclusively in
cinema lm critics above all should not bother reading this book, for it will
have nothing to say to them, since it is addressed to the generalist and not the
specialist. Te disease of specialism has ruined our universities, which churn
out hordes of individuals who have not the faintest interest in exploring how
the pieces of our society t together to form a civilization. As a critic of cul-
ture who long ago rejected academe as having become to our present society
what the Church was during the scientic advances of the seventeenth century
namely, an outdated institution with a petried world view that freezes and
arrests the development of minds rather than encouraging them to explore I
am interested in learning about things like the relationship between cinema
and the history of cosmology, or between lm and the novel, or the inuence
of comparative mythology on Hollywood.
*
In essence, then, this is not really a book about movies but a series of fan-
tasies inspired by lms and images from celluloid which have so haunted my
imagination that I decided it was necessary to write an entire book in order to
exorcise them.
Tus, the book you are now reading may be considered nothing more than
the documentation of an exorcism.
* Let me at this point reassure the reader that this is not yet another book on myth
from the viewpoint of a Jungian seeking to project his cookie mold archetypes
into story patterns. I regard the Jungian theory as no more than one tool in a
toolbox with many others, such as Anthroposophy, or McLuhans media theory,
or Germanic culture morphology. Nothing is more detestable to me than to
pick up a book on myth or lm only to learn that its author is a Jungian analyst.
And most importantly of all, there will be no discussion whatsoever of the relation
of Campbells Te Hero with a Tousand Faces to any of the lms in this book. It
is time that we give this hackneyed premiss the burial that it deserves.
Introduction
,
As one who takes delight in the study of culture, I see todays new myths
coming to us in the form of celluloid. Joseph Campbell, by contrast, coming
out of the Modernist generation, saw the new myths of his time emerging in
the literary apotheosis of the novel under the pens of James Joyce and Tomas
Mann, and in the art of Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. Film, in those days, was
still a minor art, considered not one of the highbrow arts at all, but a diversion
for the masses. Oswald Spengler compared it with the Roman mime shows of
the days of the Empire and Campbell thought so little of it that, with the ad-
vent of the talkies which he and his colleague at Sarah Lawrence, the art and
lm critic Rudolf Arnheim, dismissed as a decline into realism he completely
avoided the medium until the release of :oo:: A Space Odyssey in :,o. Later,
when George Lucas invited him to see his Star Wars trilogy which, after all,
had been based on Te Hero with a Tousand Faces he remarked, I thought
real art had died with Joyce and Picasso, but I guess I was wrong.
But Campbells earlier attitude toward lm was typical of his generation,
for neither Lewis Mumford nor Arnold Toynbee nor the German philosopher
of culture Jean Gebser took lm seriously, for lm was one of the nascent arts
of popular culture, and its attitude toward history and tradition diers fun-
damentally from that of Modernism. Indeed, the crucial dierence between
Modernist art and popular culture is that the Modernists made conscious use
of myth as a means of reconnecting the individual to tradition in the largest
sense: by studying the texts and modes of discourse which stamped West-
ern thought with its unique character, the contemporary inhabitant of the
crumbling streets of Paris or London could nd solace in the idea that the
swarms of the Luftwae darkening the sun or the V-: rockets screaming across
the sky were the organic and inevitable outcome of specic sequences of West-
ern history. Popular culture, on the other hand, is a largely naive, unconscious
creator of mythic forms with the exception of some of the lms that we
will be studying in this book and hence, it is closer to the traditions of folk
culture than highbrow art. Film, lest we forget, began essentially as a sideshow
spectacle at fairs and carnivals, and its immense popularity today can be par-
tially accounted for by the fact that it was born out of such forms of popular
entertainment.
I think of lm, then, as a kind of modern equivalent of the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art that draws from and encompasses
most of the other arts. Wagner, perhaps the rst mega-popular artist of the
nineteenth century unless it be Charles Dickens conceived his operas as a
synthesis of drama, music, singing, acting and painting, in short as a hybrid
medium that would take up all the other dying media in a new and surprising
combination of myth and music. Nietzsche, of course, attacked him as a deca-
dent for this very reason, although he could never deny the powerful eects of
Wagnerian opera. Film, likewise, is a Gesamtkunstwerk that has taken up the
frayed threads of the drama, novel, classical music, symbolist poetry, painting
and acting, and woven them together into a new integral art form.
Furthermore, the particular type of lm which we will be discussing in this
book also resembles Wagnerian opera insofar as it constitutes a retrieval of the
vanished tradition of the epic, an inherently mythopoeic medium. Te novel,
beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with Gargantua and Pan-
tagruel, Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quixote, put the epic out of business
(Miltons Paradise Lost was its swansong) and along with it the grand tradi-
tion of visionary narratives in which entire cosmologies unfold through the
deeds of monster-slaying heroes and warriors. But beginning with :oo:: A
Space Odyssey, lm directors began a conscious eort to retrieve the epic form,
and in the process of cross-fertilizing its mythic spirit with lm, catapulted the
medium into the art form of the age of the masses, who have always preferred
the fantastic and the mythological to the realistic (in Milos Formans Amadeus,
think of the delighted rabble in the vaudeville house entranced by Te Magic
Flute, in contrast to the sti-necked upper classes watching Te Marriage of
Figaro).
Te epic originated as an oral storytelling medium popular with the masses,
and so part of what made the great mega-hits of the :,;cs so successful was
precisely their retrieval of such ancient mythic modalities as that of the epic
with its great deeds, killing of kings, rescue of ladies and huge Mahabharata-
style battles. Tus, what Star Wars has in common with Te Iliad or Te Song
of Roland or Jerusalem Delivered is a grandiose vision of contending armies
struggling for possession of an entire cosmos, while the underworld sequences
of Te Odyssey or Te Aeneid or Te Inferno are blown up to become the en-
tire narrative structure of Apocalypse Now, a three hour celluloid Book of the
Dead. Steven Spielbergs Jaws, likewise, is an updating of John Hustons Moby
Dick, itself a cinematic version of Melvilles American epic stripped clean of its
philosophical digressions.
But lest I convey the impression that my argument in this book is that
contemporary cinema owes its success to a retrieval of the literary epic, I must
hasten to add that it is not the epic form as such that is important, but rather
the application of myth in lm generally. For there are other inherently mythic
literary genres, such as tragedy or the apocalypse, which lm has been restor-
ing as well. Francis Ford Coppolas Godfather lms, for example, are a continu-
Introduction
,
ation of the Shakespearean tragic portrait study in the mode of Othello, Lear,
Hamlet or Macbeth, while Close Encounters of the Tird Kind or the climax of
:oo:, for that matter is an updating of the genre of the Hebrew Apocalypse,
as are the lms of James Cameron and Werner Herzog. Other lms, such as
Peter Weirs Te Truman Show and Alex Proyass Dark City are recastings of the
Utopian-Dystopian genre, in which isolated cities become the containers for
experiments in the transformation of consciousness. But what all these lms,
regardless of genre, have in common is a preoccupation with the mythic, the
visionary and the symbolic.
It is my contention in this book that lm, with the aid of myth, is expand-
ing and developing the great themes of the Western canon, and that it was not
until the late :,ocs and :,;cs, when lmmakers began to make conscious use
of myth, that this process began. And by conscious use of myth, I mean, for
example, that lmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and George
Miller drew inspiration for their narratives from Joseph Campbells Te Hero
with a Tousand Faces, while Francis Ford Coppola structured the climax of
Apocalypse Now upon the model of Frazers myth of the slain bull god-king in
Te Golden Bough. From these four examples of the deliberate use of myth,
ve of the most successful lms of all time were created :oo:: A Space Odys-
sey, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Te Road Warrior
which then spawned hordes of secondary imitators whose work did not bear
the direct inuence of mythic scholarship, but were mythologically inspired
nonetheless by way of their being a liated to these ve lms. To this second-
ary group belongs such lms as Close Encounters of the Tird Kind, E.T., Altered
States, Te Last Wave, Dune, Jacobs Ladder (inspired by Te Tibetan Book of the
Dead), the Star Trek movies and others.
Indeed, the myth movement in Hollywood has revolutionized the industry
so thoroughly that I can only compare it with what happened in the High
Renaissance when, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in :,,, refu-
gee Greek monks came ooding into Italy bearing with them the writings of
Plato, Plotinus and the Corpus Hermeticum. When these texts were translated
and absorbed by the Florentine intelligentsia, they became the inspiration for
a whole new generation of artists, beginning with Botticelli and Michelangelo,
whose work developed into a visual equivalent of the philosophy of Neopla-
tonism, in which Greek and Christian mythology were wedded together. It is
the application of myth to celluoid, furthermore, that has changed the me-
dium from being a merely popular art recycling soap opera plots and genre
ction clichs as in fact, most American cinema prior to the :,ocs had been
doing to a rst rank artistic medium worthy of being placed alongside the
o
novel, classical music and painting. For make no mistake: it is in lm, and in
lm alone, rather than the novel, which is dying (as I argue in Chapter : be-
low), that the Great Tradition of the Western mind is continuing the dialogue
with itself that began with Gilgamesh and Homer.
Artists form the conduit between the open eld of a particular societys waking
consciousness and that of its dreams. Artists are, in fact, the culture dreaming
while awake, for they are to the society in which they nd themselves embed-
ded what the dream organ, as Schopenhauer called it, is to the individual
psyche. As Nietzsche remarks in Te Birth of Tragedy, we are, each of us, in-
dividual artists as dream-makers each night, only unconsciously. Dreams are
woven not by the conscious mind, but by the same instinctive non-rational
forces which have built and shaped our bodies themselves. Tey are therefore
closer to nature than culture, and yet the works of art of a society are precisely
not nature, but culture. However, the further removed a work of art is from the
mythic, the symbolic, the visionary, the more it is addressed not to the whole
organism, but rather to the one organ of the problem-solving rational mind,
whence it has arisen; whereas the mythic images of the archetypal human
psyche are communications to the waking mind from the higher, form-build-
ing intelligence of biology. Just as individuals neglect their dreams only at the
peril of attracting disastrous episodes and accidents into their lives, so when
a society ignores the messages of its own myths and folktales, there follows the
sinking of a Titanic, the collapse of a World Trade Center or the explosion of a
space shuttle. Te history of Greek civilization should be considered here as a
parallel, for with the rise of philosophic rationalism, the Greeks dissolved their
myths out of existence and as a result their society, beginning with the onset of
the Peloponesian war in ,: n.c.i., slowly went to pieces.
In Jungian terminology normally useless for the elucidation of works of
art, because it is formulaic dreams are communications to us from the Self,
a sort of spiritual nucleus at the center of the human psyche around which the
ego is thought to revolve like an electron. Te Greeks imagined this higher
intelligence as the Delphic Oracle, which the ancients would consult for spiri-
tual instruction. Te Sibylline Oracle, for example, told the Romans that they
wouldnt win the Carthaginian war against Hannibal unless they imported the
black stone of the Anatolian goddess Kybele from Asia Minor, and once they
had done that, they proceeded to win, as foretold.
Nowadays, outside the highly specialized province of Jungian psychology,
no one has the slightest idea where to go in order to receive oracular com-
munications from a higher mind, but my suggestion and the reason I have
Introduction
;
felt it necessary to write this book is that our modern Delphic Oracle is to
be found in our movie theaters. Tere is indeed a certain analogy between
lm and dream: the very architecture of the process of going to see a movie
is similar to what happens each night when we go to sleep, for there we leave
our physical bodies behind at the threshold and gaze into the darkness at
magnied images of ourselves glowing with their own weirdly radiant biolu-
minescence as they surface toward us out of the dark. Our new myths, then,
are coming to us in celluloid form, and like dreams, we ignore their messages
at our peril.
One of the messages that is coming to us in the form of these celluloid
dreams is that the human soul is ghting to preserve its existence against the
megamachine. Over and over again, in a kaleidoscope of variations, we nd
this theme recurring in our lms, comic books and best-selling novels, whether
we think of Dave Bowmans battle with H.A.L. in :oo:, or Trumans attempt to
escape from the virtual reality that has imprisoned him in Te Truman Show,
or the war of elves, hobbits and men against the dark, industrialized world of
Sauron in Lord of the Rings. We nd it reiterated endlessly in one superhero
movie after another, in which the old comic book ght of the hero against a
deranged rogue villain is recast as the individual standing up to a demonic car-
icature of a corporate executive who wishes to eliminate cultural authenticity
and replace it with a fake, pre-fabricated plastic substitute. We even nd this
theme in lms like the latest Michael Moore documentary, in which Moore
casts himself as a modern David standing up to the corporate Goliaths bent
on victimizing the poor and wiping out the middle classes.
If we take the analogy of lm with dream seriously, then we can only
conclude that the Western mind is having nightmares about the megamachine
of society that it has built as an exoskeleton to protect itself against nature. But
now the machine has taken on its own life and, like an autoimmune disorder,
has begun to attack the individual human cells that compose its body.
One of the traditonal functions of myth has been to relate humanity to the
specic circumstances of its environment, and so the rst myths had to do with
the problem of relating to the animals that humanity depended upon for its
survival. Later, with the Neolithic invention of agriculture, the environment
shifted to the plant world and the mystery of its analogy with the female body.
With the rise of high civilization in ancient Sumer, the environment shifted
again from the products of the earth to the stars of the heavens. Nowadays, the
cities within which we live glow with a luminous incandescence that is bright-
er than the stars, for they have themselves become miniature cosmopolises
blotting nature out altogether. And so, faced with this new all-encompassing
environment, our contemporary celluloid myths are attempting to attune us

to this new articial landscape that has become our hive-world.
Tus, the unifying theme of the lms discussed in this book is that the
human soul is in danger of being swallowed alive by the very systems which
humanity has created in order to make the world a tolerable place to live in.
Tat is the central irony of our modern civilization, for we have traded spiri-
tual depth and individual integrity for the shallowness of safety, security and
material wealth. Te soul, when confronted with the cheap plastic objects that
the corporations which have hijacked our society oer to us as essential to
life, is absolutely starved for real spiritual nourishment, for the kinds of deep
experiences that make life worth living. Mephistopheles is always with us in
one guise or another technocratic scientist, CEO, or military leader but
the Faustian passion that drives us onward in quest of authentic experiences,
instead of the fake ones oered by the devil, will accept no substitute. Just as a
plant, in order to actualize the fullness of its potential, requires sunlight, soil,
water and carbon dioxide, so too, the human soul in order to ourish requires
the depth and light of real experiences, and not just the manufactured garbage
that is fed to it as the cultural equivalent of junk food.
Tis, book, then, should be thought of as a sort of epistemological experi-
ment, an investigation into what happens when an old-fashioned bookworm
encounters a hitherto derided mass artform and discovers in it the same kinds
of layers of meaning and signicance that once upon a time were the concern
of the highbrow European novel.
A Note on the Structure of this Book
Te essays in this collection have not been assembled randomly, and ideally
they should be read in the order in which they are presented. In doing so,
the reader will discover that the book does indeed have an architecture that is
designed to illustrate the problem of mans fall into technology with a series
of possible solutions to that problem as exemplied by each lm or director
that is discussed. Te book is structured on an analogy to the Gnostic myth
of the Fall, which describes how the soul as a spark of light falls into matter
and at the time of its birth on the physical plane remains caught there in a
material prison. In the present case, it is the machine, instead of matter per se,
into which humanity as a spark of light has fallen and from which it needs to
be rescued. I envision a number of possible responses to the task of rescuing
the human spirit from this fall, and explore through the lms discussed below
Introduction
,
how these solutions have been articulated in the visionary form of celluloid
narratives.
Tus, the essay entitled :oo:: A Space Odyssey: Te Compression of West-
ern Cosmology into a : hour and :, Minute Strip of Celluloid (Chapter ,)
functions as a kind of overture to the whole theme, for it states the problem
and hints at the solution by presenting us with a vision of the rise of humanity
from a state of crude, animal-like bestiality to a mastery of technology which
enables him to ascend to the stars. Te price of this ascent, however, is im-
prisonment within the very machines that made his journey possible, and the
advent of the Star Child at the end of the lm is Kubricks hint that man is in
need of salvation from above and awaits the birth of an avatar to rescue him
from the technoskeleton that imprisons him.
As indicated in the mythic scenarios spun forth in the lms which I have
chosen to discuss below, there are seven possible responses to this problem of
mans fall:
:. Transcendence. Here technological dominance is subverted through the
retrieval of Gnostic structures of thought, in which the world is regarded as
fallen and technology as a means not of improving it, but of getting free of it
by destroying the body. (Chapter o: Trough the Biomechanical Labyrinth:
A Guided Tour of the Films of David Cronenberg)
:. Demolition. Technology is rejected altogether through a willed destruc-
tion of all complex machines. (Chapter ;: Tolkiens Industrial Apocalypse)
,. Transparency. Technology is simply rendered invisible by a gestalt switch
in human perception that dwarfs it as an all-encompassing environment by set-
ting it o as gure against the ground of a much larger environment. (Chapter
: Te Visionary Seizures of Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky)
. Boundary formation. Technology is neither rejected nor seen through but
rather put in its place and kept carefully at a distance. (Chapter ,: How Mon-
sters Attack Civilization and What Celluloid Heroes Do About Tem)
,. Identication. Technology is combated through individual identication
with a mythic persona that simultaneously anchors the human individual in
the past while keeping one foot in the present. Psychologically, this is a dif-
cult maneuver, however, since such a (temporary) identication involves the
danger of ination and manic tendencies. If the actor doesnt realize hes play-
ing a role here, he will be swallowed by the mask and become schizophrenic.
(Chapter :c: Te Comic Book Superhero: Or, How Gotham Became Self-
Aware and Developed an Immune System)
o. Symbiosis. Mankind and machine achieve a harmonious and cooperative
living-together side by side, attained through the practice of a spiritual disci-
:c
pline that rst makes the human soul strong enough to stand up to whatever
demands the machines make. (Chapter ::: Lucass Electronic Opera)
;. Etherealization. Gods and goddesses are invited into the mechanical en-
vironment to come down and take up residence amongst the machines, trans-
forming them into delicate ethereal structures. (Chapter ::: Stanley Kubrick
and Steven Spielberg: A Study in Polarity)
Finally, in the essay Digging Images, the reader will nd a separate cycle
of ideas altogether: a discussion of the history of cosmology and its relation to
modern lm.
Tough each essay has been built to stand on its own, the reader who prefers
to skip around will miss the unifying argument that I have constructed by the
deliberate chronological sequence of the essays. For they are arranged in such
a way as to ow into one another like the chapters of a novel, and if read in
this way, the reader will nd that the argument develops organically from one
essay to the next. On the other hand, some readers will simply ignore this and
go directly to the chapters on their favorite lms or directors. In that case, my
advice is simply to enjoy the essays in any way that you wish; only know that
in doing so, such readers will probably miss certain connections.
::

2
Myth, Film and the Decline
of Western Literature
Surveying at a glance the current state of western literature and by litera-
ture, I mean not only novels, poems and plays, but also traditional nonc-
tion modalities like literary essays and great works of philosophy compared
to its state in, say, the rst half of the twentieth century, what strikes one is
an appalling decline in overall quality. Reading a contemporary novel like
Salman Rushdies Te Ground Beneath Her Feet, which falls apart about half-
way through; or Umberto Ecos Te Island of the Day Before, which starts o
promisingly, but reads more and more like an outline for a novel; or Cormac
McCarthys All the Pretty Horses, which is so self-consciously aected that it
reads like a caricature of Faulkner; or even Tomas Pynchons Mason & Dixon,
which goes in and out of focus one is inevitably perplexed by the awkward-
ness of the performance. Even when considering the best that the novel of the
past thirty years has to oer, such as the works of Italo Calvino If on a Win-
ters Night a Traveller is the ultimate experiment in authorial self-consciousness
or Patrick Suskind, whose Perfume reads like the rough draft of what should
have been a larger, more detailed work, or W. G. Sebald, whose beautiful Aus-
terlitz is a haunting and lovely piece of prose poetry one still has the feeling
that these are micro performances at best, utterly lacking the magnicence of
those Cretaceous giants Mann, Proust, Joyce or Musil. Rather, with Calvino,
Suskind and Sebald, who represent the last stragglers of the European literary
tradition, we are dealing now not with behemoths, but rather with tiny, glit-
tering green lizards scurrying about in the underbrush while the new mam-
mals of electronic culture stalk about the scene.
Classic works of nonction, furthermore, like Te Waning of the Middle Ages
or Te Revolt of the Masses, Te Gutenberg Galaxy or A Study of History, have
vanished altogether, to be replaced by dull books by boring academics with no
sense of literary style whatsoever.
While it is true that more books are being published than ever before, a close
::
inspection of the average level of quality oered by most publishers reveals
them to be the literary equivalent of fast food: trashy coee table books with
more pictures than words; computer and business books; cookbooks; graphic
novels; pop ction bestsellers; and worse, the books that pass for real lit-
erature, like Jonathan Franzens Te Corrections or Toni Morrisons Paradise or
Arthur Goldens Memoirs of a Geisha, are really just frauds masquerading as
literature, rip-os from great novels of the past displaced to modern, or exotic,
settings. Te handful of real artists out there creating real literature Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie grows ever smaller, while
the frauds, and the publics inability to discern the dierence between them,
proliferate.
Literary essays like this one, meanwhile, are thought to be irrelevant in a
predominantly electronic society, and old fashioned modalities like poetry and
drama have all but dwindled away, patronized by ever-narrower and more
specialized audiences. Morris Berman in Te Twilight of American Culture, fur-
thermore, has complained of the alarming increase in spelling errors on public
signs, while the books of Neil Postman bemoan the inability of the MTV
generation to articulate itself in anything but a Burroughsian patchwork of
broken sentences.
Te usual explanations given for this decline of literacy assume that the
electronic media are at fault, that they are in process of eroding the cognitive
structures built up by centuries of developments in the technology of reading
and writing. First, the Semitic invention of the alphabet, with its abstract let-
ters enabling thought to move around in a new kind of intellectual hyperspace
in which concepts are no longer so tightly nailed down to images, as they are
in Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese pictographs; then, the Greeks throw in
vowels, and invert the Hebrew direction of reading from right to left; then,
with the printing press, and the near simultaneous discovery of depth perspec-
tive in painting, an even more abstract mental phase space is created, one in
which objects are unied by the eye into a linear series of moveable blocks
that must be arranged in a careful sequence (hence, the inward relationship
between the still life in painting and the uniform arrangement of words on
a page of printed text). But all this, the current theory goes, was changed with
the advent of electronic technology, which, with its everything-all-at-once
light speed reconguration of culture, melted down the kinds of intensely pri-
vate mental space opened up by a readers relationship with the printed word
into a collective Here Comes Everybody, with an initial phase of nation
states crashing into each other and eroding geographical boundaries followed
by a second phase of individuals invading each others privacy with telegraphs,
Myth, Film, and the Decline of Western Literature
:,
telephones, televisions, satellites, computers and now cellphones. Tis radical
cooling o of our culture, as McLuhan put it, has resulted in an implosion
in which privacy has become a thing of the past, while the entire planet has
become a Truman Show-style movie set in which everybody is busy looking
over everybody elses shoulder.
While there certainly is some merit in this explanation, I dont think its the
full story. For if we just blame electronic technology, then our thesis isnt broad
enough to account for the gradual erosion of literacy in ancient civilizations
like Egypt, China and Rome. To take the latter as an instance, illiteracy had
saturated it like spider cancer long before the collapse of the Empire in :: c.i.,
for in the so-called Golden Age of Augustus Caesar, Virgil, Horace, Livy and
Ovid were masters all, but when, just a handful of decades later, around oc
c.i. we get to the Silver Age of Nero, with Seneca, Lucan and Petronius, theres
a general falling away of literary ability. Lucan is not as good as Ovid, and
Senecas plays were written not to be performed but to be read aloud because
the gladiatorial shows had put the theater out of business. Why go see people
faking death when you can watch the real thing? Senecas plays, consequently,
are crudely violent because he had to compete with the arenas. In the next,
and last, generation of Roman literature, with Martial, Juvenal, Suetonius and
Valerius Flaccus, there is a further falling away, for Suetonius, in comparison
to Livy or Tacitus, is a minor historian, and Flaccuss version of Jason and the
Argonauts is a withered stump by comparison with Apolloniuss Argonautika.
But the curious thing is that by the time of Marcus Aurelius (who composed
his Meditations in Greek) a mere couple of decades later, Roman literature is
nished. After that generation, from about :,c c.i. on, there are no Roman
writers whatsoever. What happened to them? Western Roman civilization goes
on for another three centuries without anybody writing a thing worth noting.
In ancient Egypt, likewise, we can document from the New Kingdom on-
ward the slow but inevitable vanishing of literacy and literary values. In the
Nineteenth Dynasty, for instance, the language shifted from classical Middle
Egyptian to the rise of vernacular, and at the same time, popular culture in the
form of love songs, pornography, beast fables and folktales came to the fore.
By the Twenty-First Dynasty, image predominated over text in the various
funerary papyri, and by the Twenty-Second, all forms of literature including
funerary papyri simply vanished as though they had never been. It is not until
the Twenty-Sixth dynasty, during the Saite revival, that the funerary papyri
surfaced once more, but by then the literature is gone for good.
I think the German philosophers had it right in claiming that the anti-in-
tellectualism evident in dying societies as they shift into the brutal politics of
:
Empire and the creation of a Universal State is just a natural process akin to
the senility of old age. Tink of the burning of the books in the time of the
rst Chinese Emperor Shi Huang Ti, under whose reign the Great Wall was
built, or the breaking of the tablets under the reign of the Babylonian king
Nabonassar. In the German Romantic tradition of Nietzsche, Spengler and
Tomas Mann, the intellect was thought of as a mere ower produced by the
vital and instinctive forces of nature, a ower that wilts and dies with the onset
of nightfall. But to a good old fashioned American with a monkey wrench in
his hand, such organic morphological processes sound like hokey mysticism,
and so gadgetry-minded American scholars are always looking for a mechani-
cal cause, since they look at everything including social and cultural changes
the way a mechanic would ponder an automobile engine thats making a
funny noise. To Americans, everything is an automobile engine.
In saying that the real reason literacy is declining is because our society is
growing senile, what I am really trying to express is my feeling that the ascen-
dancy of electronic media is a symptom not a cause; a manifestation, that is to
say, of the Zeitgeist. When consciousness changes, new media are invented in
order to express the interior phenomenology of those changes. Ten those new
media begin aecting older media in detrimental ways. Most philosophers of
media have got the problem backwards in assuming that new media just hap-
pen upon the scene and are found ready made, and that when the users pick
them up, it is only then that they are changed by the new technologies. Yes,
the medium is the message; but the question McLuhan never answered was,
why this new medium at this particular time and place?
1
Every cultural epoch favors a particular art form as the vehicle for expressing
its Zeitgeist: in the eighteenth century, classical music informed everything
from lace cus to the wearing of wigs, the wild curves of Baroque architecture
and the style of painting in Watteau and Goya. Ten, in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the novel became the primary art form, while classi-
cal music was beginning to fall apart (Nietzsches criticism of the theatricality
and bombast of Wagners operas is evidence of the rst symptoms of decay in
that medium). Te novel, originally, told the story of the middle classes by
focusing on unique individuals and showing their rise from rags to riches, or
else their migration from the countryside to the city to demonstrate the transi-
tion of the lower classes from ownership of farms to ownership of the means of
production. Like a massive object in space that is so dense it warps the space
around it so that other bodies are caught in its gravitational pull, the rise of the
novel changed all the other media of the nineteenth century. Te drama and
:,
the epic, for instance, become more prosaic under its inuence: Byrons Don
Juan and Pushkins Eugene Onegin (the rst Russian novel) are both essentially
narrative poems that have been given the contours of novels, while Ibsen and
Hebbel get rid of poetry altogether and just have their characters speak natu-
rally. Even classical music is aected, for it is at just this time that the opera,
hitherto a light and dainty medium, like a sonnet, begins to grow into novel-
length proportions.
One of the surest signs that the novel has entered its twilight is the gradual
erosion of the ideal of originality in lm and popular culture, an ideal which
was actually the novels whole raison dtre. Te rst novels Don Quixote,
Clarissa, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe were new because of their departure
from all traditional modalities of storytelling, like the epic or the romance.
Te protagonists, as their titles indicate, were not recycled heroes or legends
from the Middle Ages, but three-dimensional and original, essentially novel
human beings whose stories had never been told by anyone before. Te ideal
of the Elizabethan age, by contrast, had been not originality but artice; that
is to say, how well you could take an old tale and retell it anew. Shakespeare
takes Hamlet over from an earlier play by Tomas Kyd who, in turn, took it
from the chronicles of ancient Danish history. Lear is based on an episode out
of Spenser, and the lives of Marc Antony and Julius Caesar were well known
from the pages of Plutarch. As a new medium, lm, like the epics, dramas
and romances of the Middle Ages, is based primarily on interpretations of
preexistent works either literature, comic books, television shows or older
movies. Te lms of Stanley Kubrick, for instance, are almost all based on
novels, and so, likewise, are a signicant portion of the works of lmmakers
like David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. Whereas no
novelist in his or her right mind at least prior to the late twentieth century
would ever consider recycling characters and plots from Tom Jones, Moby
Dick or Remembrance of Tings Past, remakes of old lms, or American redos
of European icks, are so common that they invite comparison to the Greek
and Roman practice of reworking the same xed stock of myths over and over
again, like Oedipus Rex, which is refabricated over centuries by Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Seneca; or Jason and the Argonauts, which was likewise re-
done by Euripides, Apollonius, Skytobrachion and Valerius Flaccus. Stephen
Kings pop novels Carrie and Te Shining, for example, have each been lmed
twice, once for the big screen and once for television, as have been both Dune
and Te Lord of the Rings. Te same goes for the various incarnations of pop
culture myths like Tarzan, War of the Worlds, King Kong, and Batman, just as
the Gilgamesh saga was rewritten over and over again for :,,cc years by one
:o
Mesopotamian people after the next. (Whereas the postmodern tendency to
rework classic novels, such as Michel Tourniers recasting of Robinson Crusoe
in his novel Friday, Robert Coovers Pinocchio in Venice, or Jean Rhyss prequel
to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, is a testament to the decline of the novels
inuence on culture generally, pointing instead to the rapidly soaking stain of
popular culture and its inuence on all things highbrow).
In contrast to the experience of reading the best that the modern novel has to
oer, it is the medium of lm which, these days, impresses us with an ease and
wealth of creative energy, a kind of Mozart-like exuberance and abundance of
vitality. Tis doesnt mean, of course, that there arent lots of bad movies, just
as there have always been bad novels. But in lms like Goodfellas, Schindlers
List, Titanic, or Te Lord of the Rings, it is evident that the director has so
mastered his craft that not the slightest self-consciousness is apparent. Tis
cannot be said with any condence about even the best contemporary novels,
which are all self-conscious because the anxiety of inuence has saturated the
medium so thoroughly as to make it nearly unworkable. You cannot improve
upon Joyce, Mann, Dostoyevsky or Proust, whatever your ambitions as a writ-
er; at best, you can only hope to achieve a vague approximation, as Tomas
Pynchon did with Gravitys Rainbow his agon with Joyce or Doris Lessing
with her underrated Shikasta.
Film, on the other hand, is only just now becoming fully assured of itself,
and it has a past, furthermore, that certainly can be, and is being improved
upon, for Bunuel, Antonioni, John Ford and Orson Welles, however great
they were, can be bettered. Film has no Shakespeare, Joyce or Picasso whose
shadow so intimidates all those who come after as to virtually paralyze the
performance. Nevertheless, in the line-up of directors like Stanley Kubrick,
Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Da-
vid Cronenberg and others, one does begin to sense the same aura of legendary
greatness that was associated with Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Ti-
tian, once the medium of oil painting had attained, with them, the period of
its high mastery; or in classical music, the generation straddling the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries that produced Haydn, Gluck, Stamitz, the junior
Bachs, Mozart and Beethoven; or, in the novel, the group that included Dos-
toyevski, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Tomas Hardy, Flaubert, and George Eliot.
When a medium is still vital, it contains a kind of reservoir of potential
energy that enables even mediocre talents to routinely turn out nished mas-
terworks. Tink of the paintings of a minor artist like Vasari, for example,
which are as beautiful as any of Raphaels, but his achievement exists within a
:;
style already initiated by Raphael. Or all those obscure Dutch painters living
in the time of Rembrandt that youve never heard of, whose works are so good,
in fact, that they often stump even the best eorts of the experts to discern
authentic Rembrandts from imitators. But as a medium ages, its possibilities
begin to wither, the number of artists able to turn out polished work dwindles,
and consequently only the rarest geniuses who appear less and less often
can achieve any eect at all.
Take the evolution of classical music. In the time of Mozart and Haydn,
when it was at its apogee, there were hundreds of obscure composers whose
music is qualitatively indistinguishable from those two, and then as the me-
dium began to decline, we move from Mozart to Beethoven and just com-
paring the sheer output of Mozarts oeuvre to Beethovens almost constipated
production, who lived much longer, shows that something in the medium is
already exhausting itself and then to Wagner, who had to focus absolutely
all of his lifes energies to milk the very last drops out of this classical style,
and Mahler, whose greatness rests upon a mere ten shattered symphonies.
Nowadays, in contemporary classical music, weve got people like Pend-
erecki, Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who, like academic specialists, have
tastes that are so rened that they appeal to only a very small circle of listeners.
(Philip Glass is certainly well known, but the kind of music hes composing is
no longer really classical, and only barely qualies as highbrow.) Tese indi-
viduals, however great, are really only isolated instances that stand out against
a background of overall very poor performance.
So, while the Wests classical forms of art vanish into the past, the various
media of popular culture comic books, movies and rock and roll have led
onto the stage, and lm, in particular since :,o has achieved its plateau
of mastery. My observations, of course, will be met by purists with scorn, for
a glance at the Sight and Sound top ten lists which are issued by critics every
decade will show just how fond they are of old school garbage like Battleship
Potemkin, Te Rules of the Game and Open City. Tis is not to say that there
arent any true masterpieces on those lists, for lms such as Ugetsu or Andrei
Rublyev are timeless, but the fact that such lists consistently overlook lms like
Apocalypse Now, Close Encounters of the Tird Kind, and Alien indicates either
a generation gap or, more likely, a prejudice against visionary and metaphoric
lms in favor of those which are in the realist modality.
Since :,o, lm as a medium has been something dierent from what it was
in the days of John Ford, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Current lm
historians agree with this observation, but they see it dierently than I do. To
:
them, the dying studio system that had been falling apart since the early :,ocs
was reinvigorated by a fresh new crop of young American lmmakers who
inltrated Hollywood with a vision honed by the European auteurs. Peter Bis-
kind, for instance, in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, insists that the Golden
Age of cinema was the :,;cs, when producers of the New Hollywood began
to take chances with such European-inuenced lms as McCabe and Mrs.
Miller, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, Midnight Cowboy, Te Godfather, and
so forth, but this brief epoch, he insists, was put to an end by special eects
blockbusters beginning with Jaws in :,;, and Star Wars in :,;;. Tis Hol-
lywood auteur vision, however, is no longer around, and in fact, it died very
quickly, never even making it alive out of the ;cs. But since Biskind favors
realism, the golden days of which were, indeed, Hollywood in the early
;cs he sees the predominance of this type of visionary, special eects-laden
lm as announcing the decline of cinema in the late :,;cs. From my point of
view as a culture historian with a preference for the mythic and the symbolic,
the :,cs was precisely the decade when these great visionary, or if one insists,
science ction lms, really began to take o movies like Te Ting, Blade
Runner, Altered States, Te Shining, Brazil, Videodrome, E.T., Raiders of the Lost
Ark, Te Road Warrior, Te Dead Zone, Te Hunger, Te Terminator, Aliens, Te
Fly, Dead Ringers, Te Abyss. Only a fool would regard such a list of neo-classics
as a decline in any sense.
But what has survived since the :,;cs is a vision of lm not as the product
of a European auteur aimed at an elite audience, but as a mythic medium of
mass spectacle aimed at huge, bread and circus style arenas. Tis idea of lm
as something inherently and properly mythological was not only new to the
:,;cs, but it is still the driving force today behind such blockbusters as Peter
Jacksons Te Lord of the Rings, Tim Burtons Big Fish and George Lucass Star
Wars lms. Tis idea of a crowd-pleasing medium fuelled by stories of dragon-
slaying heroes, furthermore, is not even itself a new scenario, but one familiar
to the crowds gathered in villages and taverns throughout history, listening rapt
with awe to oral recitations of bards recounting tales of marvelous deeds and
great adventures in epic-heroic style. It is my contention in this book that lm,
since Stanley Kubricks :,o opus :oo:: A Space Odyssey, has been the mega-
medium of popular culture precisely because of its infusion with consciously
mythological ideas. Stanley Kubrick was the rst director to draw inspiration
for a celluloid epic from the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, and with
:oo:: A Space Odyssey he reinvented the science ction lm, lifting it single-
handedly from the drive-in B-movie circuit to become the driving force of a
new kind of lm, the popularity of which was so huge that it actually brought
:,
about the physical restructuring of the movie theater auditorium itself. Tose
stadium-style theatres with their tiered rows and digital sound that you and
I take for granted would not exist without the discovery and application of
mythology to the celluloid medium, since without that :oo: would not have
existed, and so neither would Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Te Lord of
the Rings. Without the nancial success of those lms, directors like George
Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola would never have had the money, power or
resources to put pressure on theater owners to upgrade their auditoriums to
provide rst-rate arenas for bread and circuses entertainment.
At the dawn of cinema, the realistic and the visionary tendencies what the
literary critic Harold Bloom has called the Chekhovian and the Borgesian
modes were already evident in the contrast between the Lumire broth-
ers and George Melies. Te Lumieres lmed such banalities as the arrival of
a train at a station, or people sitting around playing cards, whereas Melies,
generally credited with the invention of special eects, was the pioneer of vi-
sionary cinema and was preoccupied with lming things like robots or rockets
voyaging to the moon.
Indeed, when one looks back through the history of cinema up until the
late :,ocs, one notices that what has generally been regarded as its mainstream
work was predisposed toward the Lumirean style of realism. Tere are vision-
ary lms, to be sure, which have been and are appreciated Te Wizard of Oz,
the work of the German Expressionists, the lms of Fellini and Bunuel but
the preponderance has been tilted most decidedly in the direction of realism.
It is surely no accident that what has been usually regarded as the greatest lm
of all time, Citizen Kane is a realist lm, for though technically considered it is
a masterpiece, its content is merely a shallow exposition of the cliche from the
Gospels which asks, What does it prot a man if he gaineth the whole world
and yet loseth his soul? (Borges, in his review of the lm, is one of the few
who got it right: . . . Citizen Kane will endure as certain Gri th or Pudovkin
lms have endured lms whose historical value is undeniable but which no
one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious.)
Mythologically inspired works of art, moreoever, have never been rendered
realistically, for myth is the visionary modality par excellence, and most of the
history of art in civilization has been composed in the symbolic mode, whether
we are looking at the Great Pyramids, a work of Greek vase painting, or a Hin-
du sculpture. In fact, whenever an artistic tradition has shifted into realism, it
has almost unfailingly been linked with the decline of a particular development,
as Nietzsche pointed out in Te Birth of Tragedy, when he argued that Greek
:c
drama ended as a great form of art when it was overtaken by the Apollonian Ra-
tionalism of Euripides. Te decline of Hellenic sculpture, likewise, of Egyptian
relief carving in the Eighteenth Dynasty, and of Chinese painting during the
Manchu Dynasty, were all marked by the ascendance of realism.
Mainstream lm, therefore, has been primarily realist in its aesthetic at least
until the last three or four decades of the twentieth century because it origi-
nated in an epoch in the West in which the arts as a whole were declining into
realism, and so it bears the characteristic style of this epoch within it. But with
the rise of such mythologically inspired lms as :oo:: A Space Odyssey, Raiders
of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Tird Kind, and Apocalypse Now, it has
been evident that a shift in aesthetic sensibilities has taken place in cinematic
history, one, furthermore, that runs counter to Nieztsches thesis in Te Birth
of Tragedy. For instead of a decline into Apollonian realism, lm is shedding its
realist carapace as it ascends into the visionary tradition. Perhaps the fact that
Peter Jacksons Te Lord of the Rings is the rst fantasy-special-eects-laden lm
to win the best picture Oscar signies a benchmark in the history of cinema.
So it is clear, to me at any rate, that the kinds of literary and mythic rich-
ness that used to be evident in great literature of the caliber of Te Odyssey, Te
Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, is now to be found in lm. Tese works of
art, looked at in their own terms, can now provide us with the kind of densely
textured experiences that one used to be able to nd in works of literature like
Ulysses or Te Magic Mountain.
Take, for example, the case of Apocalypse Now. . .
Note
:. Tis is evidenced, for example, by the discovery of Mesolithic female gurines at
Near Eastern sites like Mureybet, Nahal Oren, Khiam and Salabiyah, dating from ca.
:c,ccc,,cc n.c.i. and therefore preceding the technology of agriculture, which did
not develop for another ,cc years. Te presence of such gurines, which were entirely
absent during the prior Natuan period, and which became the leading icon of the
succeeding Neolithic, indicates a transformation of consciousness that brought forth
new icons as expressions of its interior structure. Once manifested through symbolic
images, these then later began to make possible new kinds of technology as eects
of those changes, such as the application of the hoe to making furrows in the soil as
reiterations of the incision marks indicating the vagina on limestone and clay female
gurines. It is symbolic thinking, that is to say, which makes technological innovations
possible, just as it is symbolic thinking which, through ritual and myth, attempts to
prevent these very changes from becoming dangerous sources of destabilization in a
society. It is only later, when technology gains the upper hand, and becomes divorced
from the kinds of symbolic thinking which produced it, that we begin to think of
::
3
Apocalypse Now as a
Celluloid Book of the Dead
Hollywood is cranking out a lot of lms these days, but few of those lms
are truly visionary. Te only truly visionary lm to come out this year is
Apocalypse Now. Steven Spielberg
[Facsimile transcript of interview, for West Coasties magazine, by Charlie Smith
with John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes and Mechanical Dragons]
CS: . . . you have this interesting chapter on Apocalypse Now, which you say
was a key lm for you in putting all these pieces together. Why?
JE: Well, I was about eleven years old when I rst saw it and it just hit me
like a thunderbolt. Of course, I didnt understand what I was looking at, but
that didnt matter, because the world that Coppola set up in that lm is so
hypnotically beautiful that it really was like journeying to another planet. I
went back to see it on two consecutive weekends, though I had to sneak in,
because the picture was R-rated.
CS: Your response was strictly visceral. . .
JE: At the time, yes. As when Id seen Star Wars a couple of years before, it
was just totally amazing. When myths are working, they bypass the intellect
and go straight into your nervous system where the images work like keys to
open up all these little neural oodgates and you feel excited, without know-
ing why. Its only when myths are dead, as Joe Campbell used to say, that they
need to be interpreted. Part of the reason I wrote this book was to try and nd
out why these lms aected me the way they did.
CS: So, at what point did you really begin to understand the lm?
JE: I was a sophomore in college majoring in English, and at the time, I
was still reading the things Id grown up on, mostly science ction novels
and Stephen King, that sort of thing. I was taking a basic intro to lit course
and we started reading T.S. Eliots poem Te Waste Land, which I couldnt
understand; but I was fascinated by it, so I went out and bought the Clis
Notes, and suddenly, the possibilities of what you could do with literature
::
opened up to me. Te way Eliot had created this tapestry woven out of myths
and symbols was a completely new experience.
Ten one night, I happened to be watching Apocalypse Now on my VCR
remember those? and I noticed that in the concluding sequence at the
Kurtz compound, the camera pans across a shelf of books, among which are
copies of Frazers Golden Bough and Jessie L. Westons From Ritual to Romance,
the same sources Eliot listed in his footnotes to Te Waste Land. And then
I realized that Kurtz was reading Eliots poem Te Hollow Men, which was
inspired by Conrads novel Heart of Darkness, upon which Coppolas lm is
based. So I decided to read Te Golden Bough, where I learned about this myth
of the periodic slaying of the king, which Coppola had built into the conclu-
sion of his narrative.
CS: Now, describe for us what thats all about.
JE: Well, the ending thats in the lm wasnt in the original screenplay by
John Milius, and I think Coppola just felt that Miliuss ending, in which Kurtz
and Willard go out ghting side by side against Army helicopters as they at-
tack Kurtzs compound, was ridiculous. I mean, its a kind of comic book,
Rambo-style ending. But a friend of Coppolas named Dennis Jakob came in
at this point and said, Look, what youve got here is Te Waste Land and
Te Golden Bough, which was closer to the original ending of Conrads novel,
anyway, so he realized that it made sense to structure his conclusion around
that myth.
CS: Tis actually came late, then, into the production, didnt it?
JE: Very late, yes. In fact, hed already been shooting scenes from the Kurtz
compound with Marlon Brando before deciding on this. But in drawing
upon Te Golden Bough for his conclusion, he was able to make explicit certain
themes that were already implicit in the narrative.
CS: His or Conrads?
JE: Both. Take this idea of ritual regicide: killing the king when hes no
longer t to rule. Te idea of Marlow going upriver to retire Kurtz from his
trading post, where hes accumulated all of this ivory, has a mythic sub-struc-
ture buried in it, possibly because Conrads novel is set in the Congo where,
according to Frazer, ritual regicide was actually practiced. I think its an inter-
esting coincidence that Coppolas narrative is displaced to Cambodia, where
Frazer says that regicide was also common.
CS: So why is the king killed?
JE: According to Frazer, the king is killed for one of two reasons: either
because hes showing signs of decrepitude or else, in accordance with a pre-
determined cosmic cycle such as the orbit of Jupiter, which completes its
Apocalypse Now as a Celluloid Book of the Dead
:,
revolution around the sun every twelve years. In Apocalypse Now, hes killed
not because of physical debility, but mental. And the reason why you have
to kill the king when he begins to weaken is because he embodies the spirit
of the lands fertility and if anything happens to the vessel that contains that
spirit, then it will adversely aect the land and the crops will start dying and
the cattle will stop reproducing and you wind up with a waste land situation,
as in the Grail romances, which Jessie L. Weston discusses in her book From
Ritual to Romance, where the wound of the Fisher King is linked with the dy-
ing of the land.
But there is an older myth going back, perhaps, as far as the Neolithic
behind all of this, in which a dying and reviving god is linked with the
alternations of annual cosmic cycles, as in the case of Attis or Adonis, who
undergo death and descend into the underworld, and since they are vegetation
spirits according to Frazer the plants die and you get winter; or, in the case
of Dumuzi, summer. So the rebirth of Attis and Adonis was celebrated in the
spring because thats when the vegetation returns and this is why the resur-
rection of Christ was also assigned to that season. In the festivals associated
with the god Attis, by the way, there was practiced in Rome a ritualized bull
sacrice, in which a candidate for initiation would climb down into a pit over
which a kind of metal or wood grating was pulled; a bull was then placed on
that grating and stabbed to death with spears so that the initiate beneath was
baptized in the bulls blood. So Coppolas brilliant idea of editing the carabao
sacrice into a montage with the killing of Kurtz actually brings his narrative
even closer to the spirit of Te Golden Bough.
CS: Brings it closer because. . .
JE: Well, very often the slaying of the king would also be associated with the
killing of bulls, since for example, in Egypt, the pharaoh, in the early dynas-
ties, anyway, was associated with the bull, an animal form of Osiris. Te god
Dionysus, likewise, was in the form of a bull when he was torn apart and eaten
by the Titans. And the Greeks, by the way, regarded Osiris as the same god as
Dionysus, since they were both associated with wine and sexual fertility.
1
CS: Why a bull, specically?
JE: Because the bull links the heavens together with the earth, since on the
one hand, its horns are associated with the crescent moon, which dies and
revives every month, and on the other, because he pulls the plow that digs fur-
rows into Mother Earth, fecundating her with new life.
CS: So the bull is a kind of symbol of regeneration, in other words.
JE: Tats right. In the Zoroastrian creation myth, for example, there is a
Primal Ox which is slain by Angra Mainyu, the Dark One, and from its semen
:
spilling onto the ground all the earths animals are born, while from its spinal
marrow all the plants grow.
CS: So the practice of ritual regicide, then, evolved out of this older agrarian
myth of sacricing the bull?
JE: Possibly. Teres a further complication to all this, which has to do with
a Bronze Age astronomical overlay on top of the older agrarian mythology.
In India, for example, the king used to be killed at the end of a twelve year
cycle, which is one complete revolution of the planet Jupiter around the sun.
In Greece, though, kings tended to be killed at the end of four or eight year
cycles, as Robert Graves demonstrates in his Greek Myths. Every eight years the
full moon coincides with either the summer or the winter solstice. Also, every
eight years, the planet Venus winds up back in exactly the same position with
respect to the zodiac. Tink, for example, of the story of King Minos, who had
seven boys and seven girls sent to him at eight year intervals.
CS: So, would you say, then, that some knowledge of Frazer is crucial for
understanding Apocalypse Now?
JE: Certainly the ending, anyway, which all the critics complained about
when it was rst released, claiming that it was murky and confusing. But the
real problem isnt the lm, its the critics, most of whom are either disliterate
or just spend so much time watching movies that they dont have any left over
to read books. Te lm critic David Denby, for example, realized this and so
he went back to Columbia to take their Great Books courses.
But a cultural archaeology of Apocalypse Now would reveal all these oth-
er texts that have been absorbed into its narrative, like Wagners opera Die
Walkre, for instance, or Michael Herrs Dispatches or Kurosawas Dersu Uzala
or Werner Herzogs great lm Aguirre: the Wrath of God, from which Coppola
borrows some of his imagery. Anyone who really wants to understand Apoca-
lypse Now should become familiar with those basic texts, and then the lm will
no longer seem murky or obscure, any more than Eliots Waste Land does
after you go to the trouble of doing secondary research on it.
But were living in an age in which people no longer read books, and so, as
a result, the ones who dont will lose out on this whole experience of initia-
tion into the mysteries of something by reading. Tats one of the great things
about literacy: its a long, slow, tedious process, but it can yield immense re-
wards. Neil Postman has this wonderful little book called Te Disappearance
of Childhood, in which he argues that the notion of children as fundamentally
dierent beings from adults is actually a recent invention, one that goes back
to the sixteenth century. In the Middle Ages, he says, they were just regarded
as miniature adults and they could be sent o to war or join the crusades, as in
:,
the Childrens Crusade, but with the advent of the printing press, the idea of
becoming educated through reading books became prevalent, and so reading
itself became the initiatory process which demarcated the idea of child from
adult. Now, with our electronic meltdown of literacy, were losing the dis-
tinction again as we remedievalize our society through the spread of dislitera-
cy. How many sitcoms on television, for example, feature literate adults who
make references to classical books or poetry? And when they do, as in Cheers
or Frazier, its only to portray intellectuals as pretentious snobs or frauds. As
a result of the dumbing down of our culture, consequently, its getting more
and more di cult to dierentiate children from adults in any other than a
legal sense.
So critics, likewise, when they go to see di cult lms like :oo:: A Space
Odyssey, or Apocalypse Now, or A.I., become frustrated when the lms dont
immediately yield up their secrets, which they believe should be transparently
obvious, as most lms, in fact, are. But there is a kind of image literacy that,
paradoxically, can be developed only through the reading of books, and since
the art of reading is dying out just look at some recent titles, Te Gutenberg
Elegies, Te Death of Literature, Te Twilight of American Culture so too,
complex and di cult works the cinematic equivalents of Te Waste Land
or Ulysses are being made less and less often.
CS: So it was in college, then, as a student of English literature, that you
began to make these connections between myth and lm.
JE: Yes, and then right about the time I was reading Frazer, a friend of mine
2

recommended Joseph Campbells book Te Hero with a Tousand Faces, which
I started reading that winter. Te Campbell-Moyers interviews were premier-
ing on PBS and there again, as I listened to Campbell talk, I could barely
understand what he was saying, but I knew instinctively that I wanted to learn
about everything he was talking about, so I ended up spending the next ten
years or so reading and rereading not only his books, but also the books of the
authors who had shaped and inuenced his vision Spengler, Nietzsche, Jung,
Schopenhauer, Kant, and so on. I was delighted to learn that Te Hero with a
Tousand Faces was the primary mythological text behind Star Wars.
CS: Isnt it true that Lucas was originally slated to direct Apocalypse Now?
JE: Yes, thats right, it was a project he was going to do with John Milius,
which they originated in :,o. Lucas tried to get it o the ground after the
failure of THX-::,, but nobody was interested, so he made American Gra tti.
And then after the success of that lm, he wanted to do Apocalypse Now for
Columbia pictures, but that fell through also. So by the time Coppola was
ready to produce it, after Te Godfather Part II, he asked Lucas to direct, but
:o
Lucas had already started writing Star Wars and Coppola, at the time, wanted
the lm to be done for the :,;o bicentennial, so Lucas said, Go ahead.
Lucass lm would have been very dierent from Coppolas because he had
intended to shoot it in :omm documentary style using real soldiers and snip-
pets of news footage.
CS: Didnt Orson Welles at one point want to lm Heart of Darkness?
JE: Yes, he originally wanted to do it before Citizen Kane, but the budget
wouldnt have allowed him to do it the way he wanted. I think its appropri-
ate that the director who nally made Heart of Darkness was Coppola because
there are a lot of interesting similarities between the two men. Coppola re-
minds me more of Orson Welles than of any other director, and even Coppola
himself has remarked on this. Both men started out strong with a couple of
masterpieces, but then both alienated themselves from Hollywood. Both had
a tendency to dissipate their talents, but showed occasional ashes of the old
genius, as when Welles lmed his version of Kafkas Te Trial.
CS: Tats a great lm!
JE: Isnt it? He creates this whole landscape. Its amazing, I mean: he doesnt
just show you the o ce in which K works, he envisions this factory warehouse
with rows and rows of desks that dissolve into a vanishing point.
Or, in Coppolas case, Te Godfather Part III and Dracula are both awed
lms, but they also hearken back to Coppolas early genius. Te opening half
hour of Dracula, for example, is fantastic. He based that whole battle sequence
on the big one in Welless Chimes at Midnight.
CS: A lot of people didnt like the third Godfather movie.
JE: I loved it, although I recognize that it isnt as good as the rst two. But
I think the last forty-ve minutes, borrowed from the climax of Hitchcocks
remake of Te Man Who Knew Too Much, is the best sequence in the entire
trilogy.
CS: Apocalypse Now, I take it, is your favorite lm?
JE: Along with :oo:: A Space Odyssey, yeah. I particularly like the way Apoca-
lypse Now and :oo: t together.
3
I envision the two lms as this giant plant,
with the roots going down into the soil in Apocalypse Now and the ower turn-
ing up toward the light in :oo:.
CS: Expand on that.
JE: Well, if you look at the meta-narrative of :oo:, the story has this basic,
archetypal structure that begins with humanity in a state of bestial darkness
and then follows its course upward to an apotheosis of light in the heavens.
In Apocalypse Now, weve got the opposite pattern: we start out in the world of
waking daylight consciousness. Ten we gradually descend, layer by layer, into
:;
darkness. Notice that the opening scene, in an oblique allusion to Te Trial,
involves two men who arrive at Willards room in order to summon him to his
mission, but rst they have to wake him up from sleep (a traditional metaphor
for spiritual enlightenment; the Buddhas name, for example, means the one
who woke up). Ten, instead of leaving the earth behind, as in :oo:, we bore
right down into the middle of it, as in Jules Vernes Journey to the Center of the
Earth. By the way, his other novel, From the Earth to the Moon, established the
prototypical space journey which :oo: continues and in a way apotheosizes.
CS: I dont quite get what you mean by boring down into the middle of the
earth in Apocalypse Now.
JE: Well, Vernes Journey is just a translation into science ction of the ar-
chetypal journey to the underworld, and Apocalypse Now is really a three-hour
journey into Hell. Ten if you look at where the story ends up, its goal is Kurtz
himself, right? And Kurtz is envisioned by Coppola as a sort of rebel angel
who has deed the authorities and set up his own kingdom in the Cambodian
jungles. So, in that sense, hes like Satan in Dantes Inferno, who is actually
stuck upside down in the earths core. Coppolas whole narrative, very con-
sciously, I think, retrieves the heros descent into the underworld, and in that
sense his epic belongs in the same literary tradition that produced Te Odyssey ,
Te Aeneid , Te Divine Comedy , and Ulysses. Its almost as though hes taken
the descent into hell episode of those works and blown it up to become the
narrative pre-occupation of an entire story, as the Egyptians, for example, did
with their Books of the Dead, which are actually the prototypes for this un-
derworld journey. Apocalypse Now , in fact, reminds me more of the Egyptian
Books of the Dead than anything else: in the Book of the Netherworld, the sun
god Ra journeys down a river through the kingdom of the dead, where he
encounters various obstacles, such as giant serpents and monsters, that have
to be overcome. Eventually, he achieves union with Osiris, the ancient god of
the dead, from which point he is then enabled to be resurrected. In Apocalypse
Now, we have the same basic narrative: Willard is the solar hero who journeys
through the underworld to meet the Lord of the Dead, namely, Kurtz, from
which point he achieves regeneration, which is why we see rain falling in the
last scene.
CS: You especially feel this hellish atmosphere in the Do Lung Bridge se-
quence.
JE: Right, where they blow up the bridge every day and then rebuild it every
night. Tats exactly the sort of repetitive behavior that you associate with the
Greek underworld where Sisyphus has to keep pushing the stone, or Tantalus
has a rock above his head that perpetually threatens to fall, or Prometheus is
:
pinned to the Caucasus mountains where an eagle comes and tears out his
liver every night and it regrows again every day, like an alcoholics.
And then when they approach the bridge itself, you see all these creepy
people in the water yelling after them, dragging suitcases like refugees, which
reminds me of the sequence in the Inferno where Virgil and Dante have to
cross the River Styx, near the circle of those who have committed violence
against others, and the waters are full of all these people and centaurs washing
in the blood of their own violence, who shout after Virgil and Dante as they
oat past.
Kubricks lm, on the other hand, is more of an updating of Dantes Para-
diso, which begins with Dantes ascent to the moon while invoking the god
Apollo as his patron. And the rest is all about his journey upward to the throne
of God through the Ptolemaic spheres encasing all the planets. :oo:, likewise,
is a journey through the planets which was originally supposed to conclude
as it does in the novel with the Stargate sequence taking place near Saturn,
the uppermost sphere of the Ptolemaic cosmology. And Kubrick and Clarke
put all of this together at the same time as the Apollo missions are carrying us
to the moon.
So :oo: ends with the transguration of man as a Star Child, whereas Apoca-
lypse Now ends with this lapsed regression of a man kurz means short in
German whos fallen short of his ideal of becoming a Superman.
CS: And both lms, as youve mentioned, were inspired by works of mytho-
logical scholarship.
JE: Yes, Apocalypse Now was inspired by Te Golden Bough and :oo:: A Space
Odyssey by Te Hero With a Tousand Faces. In fact, Stanley Kubrick was the
rst director to consciously draw inspiration from mythology for the making
of a lm. :oo: marks the beginning of the myth movement in Hollywood.
CS: Which is the organizing theme of your book, if I understand it cor-
rectly.
JE: Right, all the lms I discuss are in one way or another heirs to Kubricks
lm.
CS: So is this trend toward what you call the visionary in lm primarily
an American phenomenon?
JE: No, its global. Te Australian lmmaker George Miller, for example,
the director of Mad Max and Te Road Warrior, also read and metabolized Jo-
seph Campbell, whose work inspired his lms. Peter Jackson is from New Zea-
land and one of the main reasons why his Lord of the Rings lms are so good
is precisely because they were made by an outsider to Hollywood. Te only
people in Hollywood nowadays who could make big budget special eects
:,
lms of that quality are established giants like George Lucas, Steven Spiel-
berg and James Cameron, because they have complete artistic control of their
work. Te rest of Hollywood, like the pop music industry, is just corporate
management, and so produces the cultural equivalent of fast food garbage
like Armageddon, Independence Day, or most of the superhero movies. Most
Hollywood lms are made by cynics marketing a product for an audience
they couldnt care less about, but good lms, nevertheless, do manage to get
made by committed individuals whose passion allows them to push their way
through the cynicism of the moguls.
CS: Getting back, then, to your comparison of :oo: and Apocalypse Now,
Ive often had the sense that the two of them are in some way revisitings of
Homers Odyssey, which is one of my favorite works of literature.
JE: Yes, in fact, John Milius rather heavy-handedly pointed out how the
Playboy bunnies represent the Sirens and Kilgore is the Cyclops and so forth,
but thats too literal. I think the main resemblance has to do with the fact that
both lms are similarly structured using a very loose, episodic scaolding,
exactly like the great epics that ourished before the novel put them out of
business. And both lms also draw from the archetypal sea voyage: in :oo:,
you have the spaceship that resembles a human skull and spinal column sailing
through the oceans of outer space, and in Apocalypse Now, you have this little
boat that travels along a serpentine river. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad even
says that the river resembled an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the
sea, its body at rest curving over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths
of the land.
Now if you put them both together, that sounds a lot like the imagery of
kundalini yoga in which you have this serpent that travels up through the
interior of the spinal column the bodys river of cerebrospinal uid land-
ing on these chakras that are like islands of consciousness along the way.
Notice that in Apocalypse Now, near the beginning, just after Willard has
introduced you to his crew, the camera pans quickly past the character Chef,
where we see that he has this huge tattoo of a cobra on one arm. In kundalini
yoga, the whole process begins when you use a certain kind of breathing
technique to awaken this tiny white serpent that lives in a cave at the base of
your spinal column. And then theres the fact that the symbolism of some of
the episodes corresponds very closely to the qualities assigned to the chakras:
you have Willards state of spiritual inertia, representing chakra number one,
where the sleeping serpent has to be awakened; then you have the whole se-
quence with Colonel Kilgore, personifying the will to power, which is what
the third chakra is about; and then the erotic sphere of the Playboy bunnies
,c
corresponds to the second chakra, which is located at the level of the genitals.
And then theres this moment near the end of the lm when Kurtz says that
he had this revelation that was like being shot with a diamond bullet, and he
points right to the center of his forehead, which is the location of the Ajna
chakra, the sixth in the series, and that chakra is actually the middle eye of
Shiva from out of which he shoots thunderbolts that illuminate the mind.
In Tibetan Buddhism, moreover, the thunderbolt is called a vajra, and it
contains a diamond within it, since the diamond body is an analogue of ones
own immortal, indestructible nature.
CS: Tis raises the issue, then, of what Coppola himself was consciously
doing in his lm. Are you saying that he deliberately put these references to
kundalini yoga in it?
JE: No, these associations are just my responses to these lms. Someone
else is going to see another picture entirely. Te lm critic Roger Ebert no
relation in his DVD commentary on Dark City mentions that once while
they were screening that lm in Boulder, Colorado, someone in the audience
got up and started talking about how Dark City takes the point of view of Te
Eye of the Spirit, rather than Te Eye of the Flesh which is just another way
of saying that its a visionary, and not a realistic lm which Ebert thought
sounded interesting, although, as he says, you can never prove that your inter-
pretation is correct because theres no way to prove that its in the lm. I would
guess from the terminology and the location in Boulder that the person was
a follower of Ken Wilber whose approach to symbolic traditions I think is
deplorably left brain (very rigid, very systematic) and that since Wilbers ter-
minology and system was what the person was carrying around in their head,
then thats what they saw in the lm.
From my own point of view, I just want to make clear that Im not taking
the approach of a Jungian who would say that the whole lm just represents
the individuation process, end of story.
4
Any kind of formulaic approach of
that kind, be it Freudian, Jungian, Wilberian or what have you, is really just
a defense against having to learn. I think the best comment on the approach
Im taking is by Heinrich Zimmer when he says in the prologue to his book
Te King and the Corpse that if we think we know what the symbols of mytho-
logical stories already mean ahead of time, then were closing ourselves o to
a dialogue and killing the symbols with prefabricated interpretations. Tat, I
think, is also what James Hillman is saying when he insists that you shouldnt
try to interpret imagery, because the moment youve pinned down the mean-
ing of the snake in your dream, youve killed the image.
5
And he has a point,
although I think hes just as uncomfortable with these images as Wilber is: but
,:
hes taking the opposite approach and insisting on not interpreting them at all
instead of pigeon-holing them into these xed categories.
So my whole premiss in Celluloid Heroes involves translating images and
stories into verbal discourse, but not thereby reducing them to this or that
interpretation. For the other important gure in my hermeneutic is William
Irwin Tompson, who insists that myths can and should be translated into
concepts as long as we regard every one of these approaches as valid.
6
Tey
all have something important to contribute and we shouldnt ever get stuck
with this idea that were cracking a code and weve got the key to the exact
cipher, like the astro-mythographers Hertha von Dechend or David Ulansey
who look at mythic images and stories and provide nalistic interpretations of
them as coded ciphers of astronomical phenomena. Teres no understanding
of metaphor as something inherently slippery and ambiguous in those kinds
of approaches.
CS: What do you think, then, is the role of the creative artist in all this? I
mean, how much conscious control over his material does he need to have in
order for these associations to be valid?
JE: Tats what the novels of Tomas Pynchon are all about, but I think the
point of view that you take toward it depends on how you see the role of the
artist. And of course, it also depends on the artist, because some have more
conscious awareness of these things while others are more naive. Somebody like
James Joyce, for example, had complete control over what he was doing, and
everything that scholars of myth nd in that work is really there, not just in
their heads, because he was so meticulous about these things (despite what the
deconstructionists say). A more naive artist like Malcolm Lowry, on the other
hand, in the case of his novel Under the Volcano, is only half aware of what
hes doing, which is how I see the role of Coppola in his lm, whereas I see
Kubricks relationship to the symbols in :oo: as more like Joyces in Ulysses. So I
dont think Coppola was aware of most of these connections, but theyre not ac-
cidental, either, for anyone whos studied Jung knows that the unconscious has
an intelligence and a formative capacity all its own, which is entirely separate
from the deliberative, problem-solving intelligence of the waking mind.
CS: So you see the artist as more of a conduit of a larger force. . .
JE: Yes, I think artists who know how to listen to their inspiration are listen-
ing to the same centers within us that produce our dreams, which we have al-
most no conscious control over whatsoever, but yet they tell these little stories.
Teyre communications from a deeper intelligence, and I see artists, likewise,
as persons who are embedded, as we all are in fact, in a kind of universal intel-
ligence that has orchestrated the stars and planets and atoms and everything
,:
else, only their waking minds are more permeable to this intelligence than
most peoples are.
So, for example, in Coppolas case, his decision to base the climax of his
lm on Te Golden Bough turns out to be the right one, because the intelligent
energies within the lm itself then pick this up and it resonates like a thread of
gold all throughout the preceding narrative. Take, for instance, the intercut-
ting of Kurtzs death with the slaying of the bull, which makes you realize that
Kurtz is the bull and that he has been this ubiquitous mythological presence
all throughout the lm in the form of bovines. We recall, for example, an ear-
lier scene during the Kilgore sequence when a bull, or a cow, was being hoisted
into the air by a helicopter while a priest performs mass near a bombed-out
church on the battleeld below.
Ten theres this wonderful sequence where Kilgore is handing out what he
calls deathcards. When he shows us the back of the card, there is this insignia
for his air-cav regiment, a thunderbolt. As hes doing this, we notice that in
the background behind him is a white bovine tied to a fence. Well, I just think
its a curious coincidence that the whole sequence, as Ive mentioned, has
the same will-to-power symbolism as the third chakra of kundalini yoga, and
that that chakra is associated with the Hindu god Shiva whose animal form is
a white bull named Nandi, and the thunderbolt is what he shoots out of the
third eye in the middle of his forehead. Now that kind of thing certainly isnt
intentional on Coppolas part, but its an example of this dream-like intelli-
gence making connections of its own.
CS: So what does all of this have to do with whats going on in the mind of
the average viewer watching these lms?
JE: Nothing, on the surface. But subliminally, the persons unconscious
knows all about these things and is quietly responding to it. Tats why I had
those visceral responses to these lms as a kid, because this stu works at these
deeper levels.
CS: Whats your favorite scene in Apocalypse Now?
JE: I have two: the whole sequence with Kilgore and the concluding se-
quence with Kurtz. When the lm came out, most people loved the Kilgore
sequence but became restless with the Kurtz episode, which critics complained
about being confusing, which I think is just wrong. Some critics made exactly
the same complaints all over again when the long version of the lm, Apoca-
lypse Now Redux, was released in :cc:.
CS: Which version, by the way, do you prefer?
JE: Te longer one, denitely.
CS: Why?
,,
JE: Because it brings in more of a sense of humor and also a feminine erotic
element that was almost entirely missing from the lm before especially the
Medevac sequence with the Playboy bunnies which, in associating one of the
girls with birds, retrieves the old motif of the bird goddess. Notice that Chef,
the one with the cobra tattoo, is the one she hooks up with. Tats not an ac-
cident, since the two are linked iconographically with the bird and the snake
which appear together throughout the history of mythology.
But the whole Playboy bunny sequence was always one of my favorites be-
cause its a sort of asymmetrical image of the Kilgore sequence, only from the
point of view of Eros rather than Tanatos. If you notice that the lead bunny
whos dancing is wearing a cowboy outt which parodies the whole cowboy
persona of Kilgore whom they refer to over the helicopter radios as Big
Duke, John Waynes old appellation and one of the others is dressed like a
Native American, then subliminally it links in your mind with the previous
sequence of Kilgore destroying an entire village, just as the cowboys performed
genocide on the Native Americans. And if you look carefully, you can see a
white saddle on the tip of the Playboy helicopter, which echoes the line from
the previous sequence when Willard narrates how the air-cav has traded in its
horses for choppers.
CS: Fascinating.
JE: But to get back to my two favorite scenes: Ive mentioned that the he-
licopters are really disguised horses and Coppola is very direct about that.
Te attack on the quiet agrarian village takes on these historical resonances
of horseback-riding Indo Aryans whose primary gods were thunder-hurling
deities like Zeus and Indra coming down on these peaceful, settled agricul-
tural societies in a series of waves beginning around ,cc B.C.E., the last such
wave occurring around :,cc B.C.E. Or, with the added layer of Wagners music,
you can think of the Viking hordes suddenly appearing along the horizon out
of the sea and smashing up these Irish monasteries.
In Apocalypse Now, the horses have been replaced by helicopters, although
behind them, we still sense the ghosts of the world that was displaced by the
machine, for Coppola has chosen Ride of the Valkyries from Wagners opera
Die Walkre as his soundtrack. Te Valkyries, remember, rode ying horses and
they would hover above battleelds, where they would swoop down to pick up
the souls of dead soldiers and carry them o to Valhalla.
Now, if you take the agrarian world of the bull and the nomadic world
of the horse by the way, the pairing of horse and bull is a motif that goes
clear back to the Paleolithic where, in the caves of Lascaux, for example, they
would always appear together you can line them up iconically as the worlds
,
of Kurtz and of Kilgore, respectively. Te two kinds of heroes weve been dis-
cussing the dying and reviving agrarian god Osiris, Dionysus, Attis; and
the dragon-slaying warrior hero Zeus, Indra, Yahweh are the mythic beings
which most typify these two worlds. I think part of the genius of Coppolas
lm is that his two most memorable characters, Kilgore and Kurtz, t per-
fectly into these archetypes (sometimes, Ill admit, the Jungian approach is
irresistible). Kurtz is the dying and reviving bull god and Kilgore is the thun-
der-hurling, horseback-riding warrior.
7
Tese are the two great mythic hero
types that history has given us: the shamanic hero of the mind, who indeed
does walk a razors edge between sanity and insanity (as Kurtz discusses when
they play the tape of his voice in the beginning of the lm) and the external
warrior hero of the outer world.
So Coppolas lm is really quite rich in this kind of imagery, if you know
how to read the language of images, which is what mythology teaches us.
CS: So, why is :oo: your other favorite lm?
Notes
:. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, who writes: Not merely did the bull appear in
later ages, on the Narmer palette, for instance, as the symbol for the king, but the bull
was frequently sacriced in historic times instead of the Divine King. Te Myth of the
Machine: Technics and Human Development (NY: Harcourt Brace, :,o;) p. :,:.
:. Sid Quashie, now a Hollywood screenwriter.
,. I especially like the fact that both lms were re-released in the same year: Apocalypse
Now Redux in the summer of :cc:, and :oo:: A Space Odyssey in the fall.
. Jung himself interpreted the kundalini in terms of a historical individuation of
the human race. Te lower chakras, for instance, correspond to the gut instincts of
primordial man, while the emphasis on the heart chakra corresponds to the period
of the high civilizations when the heart was regarded as the seat of consciousness, as
in Egyptian mythology, in which the heart is weighed against a feather in the Day of
the souls Judgement, or in Greek mythology when Dionysus is torn apart the only
organ to survive and which is essential for his reconstruction is the heart. Te
throat chakra then corresponds to the Hebrew emphasis on the power of the Word,
and the Ajna chakra between the eyes maps onto Northern Europes insistence on the
brain as the center of consciousness. Jungs reading should be compared with Gebsers
in his Ever-Present Origin, where he lists exactly these organs as corresponding to the
consciousness structures that have developed over time: the intestines for the Magical,
the heart for the Mythical and the brain for the Rational. For Jungs interpretation of
the kundalini see Te Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in :),:
by C.G. Jung, ed. Sonu Shamdasani (Princeton University Press, :,,o).
,,
,. We sin against the imagination whenever we ask an image for its meaning,
requiring that images be translated into concepts. Te coiled snake in the corner
cannot be translated into my fear, my sexuality, or my mother-complex without
killing the snake . . . Interpretations and even amplications of images, including
the whole analytical kit of symbolic dictionaries and ethnological parallels, too often
become instruments of allegory. Rather than vivifying the imagination by connecting
our conceptual intellects with the images of dreams and fantasies, they exchange the
image for a commentary on it or a digest of it. And these interpretations forget too
that they are themselves fantasies induced by the image, no more meaningful than
the image itself. James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology (NY: Harper Collins, :,,:),
p. ,,.
o. . . .a myth is an imagistic rendering of events that are more precisely understood
when they are translated into the conceptual language of science. . .If all these
mythological images have references that can run parallel to the stream of concepts in
scientic narratives, then what is the nature of knowledge in this more ancient form
of seeing, this way of knowing through imagery that we still call the imagination?
William Irwin Tompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
(NY: St. Martins Press, :,,), pp. ,c; o:.
;. In the history of mythology, there are some exceptions to this dichotomy. In
Ugaritic myth, for example, Baal is both the thunder-hurling dragon slayer storm god,
and also the dying and reviving god whose animal vehicle is the bull, upon the back
of which he is normally depicted as standing. Tis combination of a bull god and a
thunder-hurling dragon slayer, however, is rare in mythology.
,o
I
Stanley Kubricks :,o lm :oo:: A Space Odyssey* is one of those truly epochal
works of art, like Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon, or Botticelllis Primavera,
which announces, in seed form, the major themes to be developed and worked
through by an entire generation of artists. Botticellis painting encapsulated
the primary Renaissance themes of Greek mythology, Platonic philosophy and
Christian iconography that was to become the obsession of artists for the fol-
lowing century, and Les Demoiselles dAvignon, with its total abolition of the
laws of perspective, announced the birth of the modern art movement. :oo:,
likewise, represents a watershed in art history, for the style of lmmaking that
came into being between :,o; and :,;,, and with which we associate such
lms as A Clockwork Orange (:,;:), Te Godfather (:,;:) and Te Exorcist
4
:oo:: A Space Odyssey:
Te Compression of Western Cosmology into
a 2 Hour and 19 Minute Strip of Celluloid
* :cc: suggests the fairy tale world of :cc: Arabian Nights in which, after three
years of being told stories by Shehrzad, the homocidal king is cured of his
temporary psychosis of deowering and then ordering the murder of a dierent
virgin each night. :cc:, likewise, is a story in which the protagonist, humanity,
goes through the temporary psychosis of its enchantment with technology, and
then, with the Star Child, moves on to a state of higher health.
Also, :cc: implies the beginning of a new month of the Magnus Annus,
each of which lasts approximately :,:cc years in duration. Te previous month,
the Age of Pisces, dawned with the arrival of an avatar, Christ, who descended
into matter in order to redeem humanity from its fall. In :oo:, likewise, the
new month of the Magnus Annus, two thousand years later, begins with the
incarnation of an avatar, the Star Child, who has come slouching towards
Bethlehem to be born.
It should also be noted that :cc: contains the number :: implicit
therein, for :: is traditionally the age associated with maturity. Tus, humanity,
the lm implies, is moving into the phase of its maturity, in which it will
develop new spiritual potentialities.
2001: A Space Odyssey
,;
(:,;,), was rst crystallized in Kubricks masterpiece.
:
But more particularly, :oo: was the rst major presentation of a theme
that would come to be reiterated in lm over and over again, namely that of
the battle of an individual human being against an impersonal system that is
threatening to dehumanize him, whether that system is dened as the megalo-
politan city, the meta-national corporation, or technology in general.
2
Tis theme will be reworked by one great director after the next during
the following three decades: the story of Anakin Skywalkers descent into the
biomechanical skeleton that consumes him; of the murderous robot Ash in
the lm Alien; the armies of sentient robots in Camerons Terminator lms,
bent on eliminating human beings from the planet; the way in which Seth
Brundles teleportation device in David Cronenbergs remake of Te Fly at-
tempts its own feat of genetic engineering by cross-breeding the genes of a y
with those of a man; and even James Camerons portrait study of the sinking
of the Titanic as a microcosm for the breakdown of human civilization. All are
reworkings of Bowmans battle with HAL.
Furthermore, the cosmological canvas of outer space upon which Kubrick
paints his images is rendered here, for the very rst time, with exquisite stylis-
tic realism. Te worlds which we take for granted in such lms as Star Wars,
the Star Trek movies, or the Alien lms would simply not have been possible
without Kubricks obsessive commitment to creating vivid, believable images.*
As Martin Scorsese has remarked, Every frame of :oo: made you aware that
the possibilities for cinematic manipulations are indeed innite.
II
It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have
had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our genera-
tion, and that the far-ung islands Homers wonderful characters visited
were no less remote to them than the planets our spacemen will soon be
landing on are to us. Stanley Kubrick
Whether we are considering the wanderings of an Odysseus through the island
world of the Mediterranean, the quest of his predecessor Gilgamesh to sail
out beyond the membrane dividing the known world from its dark hinter-
lands, or the peregrinations of a Sinbad or a Saint Brendan, we nd ourselves
contemplating a human imagination embedded still within a very large and
* Kubrick had all the original models of his spacecraft destroyed so that no one
would be able to reuse them. When Peter Hyams set about making the sequel
:o:o, he had to reconstruct the models from scratch.
,
mostly mysterious earth. Te world in the time of Homer was a at disc sur-
rounded by a sea serpent named Okeanos, while Mount Olympus, the home of
the gods, was the exact center of the earth, just as Mount Meru was for the Hin-
dus. With Pythagoras, the idea of the earth being round began to take shape in
the Greek imagination, and the gods, consequently, were displaced from their
provincial mountain home to the stars and constellations of the heavens, while
the earth itself was imagined to be the nucleus of a series of nested, crystalline
spheres, each of which bore one of the seven heavenly bodies within it.
Beginning in the fteenth century with the voyages of Diaz, Columbus,
Vasco da Gama and Magellan, the size of the earth has gradually decreased,
becoming ever more and more minute, while the cosmos, like an optical trick
out of Alice in Wonderland, has grown to truly gigantic proportions. Te planet
itself is as well known and familiar to us as the shores of the Mediterranean
were to the Greeks, and the hinterlands demarcated on ancient maps with
fabulous beasts have now been relegated to the reaches of outer space.
Tus, the episode in the Voyage of Saint Brendan when the coracle of monks
lands upon what they think is an island, and they begin to perform Mass only
to discover that they are on the back of a great sea beast turns up in Te Empire
Strikes Back when the crew of the Millenium Falcon take refuge in a huge cave on
an asteroid which turns out to be the inside of a gigantic worm-like monster.*
As in Picassos painting Guernica, the primary means of human transport
is no longer the caballero mounted upon his horse, or the navigator on his
tri-master, but rather horsepower, for the rockets and spaceships created by
the technological imagination of science ction are outgrowths of the steam
engine and the internal combustion engine, which made obsolescent the mo-
tive forces of wind, water and hoof.
Te mythic deep structures, that is to say, havent changed, but the imago
mundi has undergone a metamorphosis from the Homeric and Babylonian
image of a at island with a central mountain to the Hellenistic vision of a
round earth at the center of a cavern-like cosmos, to the Newtonian model
of a celestial clockwork of planets intermeshing like gears, and to our present
post-Einsteinian image of the earth as a glittering blue dust mote oating in a
galaxy that is one of billions in an expanding spherical universe.
It is the primary task of our contemporary artists to render our cosmological
* In his novel :o:: Odyssey Tree, Clarke misses the cosmological poetry of this
scene from Te Empire Strikes Back: I always wondered how the poor beast
eked out a living. It must have grown very hungry, waiting for the occasional
tidbit from space. And Princess Leia wouldnt have been more than an hors
doeuvre anyway.
,,
images diaphanous to the spirit, so that they radiate glowing, numinous ener-
gies, like the gures in the late paintings of Rembrandt. Tat Kubrick and
his collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were consciously trying to do just that is
conrmed by Clarkes mission statement: We set out with the deliberate
intention of creating a myth. Te Odyssean parallel was in our minds from
the beginning, long before the lms title was chosen.
III
If we step back from the lm as a whole, we can see that its narrative archi-
tecture is actually a reworking of the ancient Greco-Roman myth of the souls
ascent through the heavenly spheres at death, and descent back to earth for
reincarnation. Here, to refresh our memory of Hellenistic cosmology, is a pas-
sage from Ciceros Republic on the Dream of Scipio:
Africanus said, Well now, how long will your thoughts remain xed on the
earth? Do you not notice what lofty regions you have entered? Everything
is joined together by nine spheres. One of them (the outermost) is that of
heaven, which surrounds all the others. It is itself the supreme divinity,
holding apart and keeping in all the rest. In that sphere are xed those stars
c
which revolve eternally in their courses. Below it are seven spheres which re-
volve backwards in a contrary motion to that of heaven. One of them (that
nearest to heaven) belongs to the star which on earth is called Saturns; then
comes that light, called Jupiters, which brings prosperity and good health
to mankind; then comes the red star dreaded by all on earth, which you say
belongs to Mars; below that, the band more or less in the middle is occu-
pied by the sun, which is the leader, chief, and ruler of the other lights; it is
also the mind and regulator of the universe, so huge that it suuses and lls
everything with its light; the sun is followed by two attendants Venus in
her course and Mercury in his. Te lowest sphere is that in which the moon
revolves, lit by the rays of the sun. Below that everything is subject to death
and decay, except the souls which the gods, in their generosity, have granted
to the race of men. Above the moon all is eternal. Te earth, the innermost
and last of the nine spheres, does not move; it is the lowest sphere, and all
heavy things fall onto it by virtue of their own weight.
,

At the moment of death, in this classical myth, the soul departs from the
body to ascend through these spheres, leaving behind at each one its respective
associations, such as a particular note of the diatonic scale or an archetypal
quality like courage or eros. Tis myth of death was central to Western civ-
ilization up through the time of Dante and even beyond, surfacing perhaps for
the last time in the mythology of the great German mystic Rudolf Steiner.
Tus, the four short stories composing the architecture of :oo: are laid out in
a sequence that roughly corresponds to the order of the Ptolemaic spheres.
,
Te
opening story, Te Dawn of Man, begins on earth and in the second a kind
of recapitulation of the origins of cinema in Meliess :,c: lm A Trip to the Moon
Heywood Floyd journeys to the moon, traditionally the souls rst stopping
point on its ascent. In Manichean cosmology, for example, the moon is said to
ll up with the souls of the dead on its waxing phase, and then to empty itself of
them during its waning, whereupon the souls are transmitted to the sun.
In the middle and nal stories, we travel with Dave Bowman to the moons
of Jupiter, but if we also include Clarkes novel, the correspondence becomes
even more clear, for there the climax of the story ends at Saturn, the up-
permost of the planetary spheres in the Ptolemaic cosmos.* So one can see
why it is signicant that Bowmans confrontation with extraterrestrial powers
takes place just here, for in the Ptolemaic cosmology, beyond Saturn lay the
Empyrean, the throne of God and his hierarchies of angels in the Christian ad-
aptation, while in the Greek, the Empyrean was the Mind of God.
o
Bowmans
* Tis was changed in the lm only because Kubricks special eects crew couldnt
gure out how to represent the rings of Saturn realistically. In the novel, Clarke
:
transformation into the Star Child, then, prepares him for reincarnation on
the earthly plane below.
IV
In undertaking cultural archaeology, we discover that each image has a past, and
that if we dig far enough, we can track its transformations layer by layer in order
to discover its prototype. Te tool that enables us to practice this archaeology
rests upon the recognition of deep structures
;
not Jungian archetypes which
are simply isomorphisms shared by one image, text or artifact with another. Te
discovery of chains of these images leading us back through time is what enables
us to track their earlier incarnations.
By applying such an archaeology to Kubrick and Clarkes creation myth in
Te Dawn of Man sequence of :oo:, we are able to discover the exact point
in the mythology of :cth century popular culture at which the myth of the
foundation of civilization by extraterrestrials mutates from its ancient proto-
type in which culture is given to man by divine beings, such as angels.
In Te Dawn of Man sequence, the australopithecines awaken one morn-
ing to discover a black rectangular slab resting incongruously amongst the
rocks and minerals of the African landscape. Tey all gather, fascinated, while
one of them reaches out to touch it. Later, we discover that the one who has
touched the monolith comes up with the idea of fashioning the rst tool, a
primitive club, from the bone of an animal.
Te inspiration for this sequence came from an earlier short story by Clarke
entitled Encounter in the Dawn,
in which a group of extraterrestrials de-

scends to earth in their spaceship looking for signs of nascent intelligence.
Tey discover a tribe of humans living in huts near a river, and begin meeting
with one of them on a regular basis, providing him with dead animals which
their robot hunts for them. Te story concludes when their time for departure
arrives, and they leave behind with the tribesmen a handful of tools, such as
a lighter and a special type of knife. In the last line of the story we discover
that the entire narrative has taken place in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley
thousands of years before the birth of civilization.
But Clarkes short story is, in turn, a reworking of Genesis o, in which a group
points out that the rings of Saturn are only about two or three million years
old, which is the date given for the burial of the monolith on the moon by
extraterrestrials. So Clarke suggests that the aliens, in establishing their Star
Gate on one of the moons of Saturn, actually destroyed a Saturnian moon,
thereby causing the dust which was taken up to become the rings of Saturn.
:
of angels known as the Sons of God descend to earth in order to mate with hu-
man females. Apocryphal accounts of this story, such as in the Book of Jubilees
or : Enoch, tell us that these were the beings who taught men the arts of warfare
and agriculture, and women the art of beautifying themselves. But as a result of
their half-human, half-angelic ospring monstrous ogres with an appetite for
sodomy and cannibalism God decides to wipe man out with the Flood.
Te isomorphism between Clarkes narrative and Genesis o is conrmed
for us by a glance at a passage from Chariots of the Gods? (:,o) by Erich von
Daniken:
Te spacemen articially fertilized some female members of this species,
put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Tou-
sands of years later the space travelers returned and found scattered speci-
mens of the genus homo sapiens. Tey repeated their breeding experiment
several times until nally they produced a creature intelligent enough to
have the rules of society imparted to it. Te people of that age were still
barbaric. Because there was a danger that they might retrogress and mate
with animals again, the space travelers destroyed the unsuccessful speci-
mens or took them with them to settle them on other continents. Te
rst communities and the rst skills came into being; rock faces and cave
walls were painted, pottery was discovered, and the rst attempts at archi-
tecture were made.
,
Von Danikens narrative brings the isomorphism into focus, for his spacemen
descend from the heavens to impregnate hominid females just like the angels
in Genesis o. Te problem, however, is that Von Daniken doesnt understand
the dynamics of the human imagination, for the mind does not simply discard
the past, just as in the case of evolution where what has been learned is not so
much sloughed o by new advances as scaled down and miniaturized to oc-
cupy a certain niche. Tus the Archaean cyanobacteria invent photosynthesis
and restructure the earths atmosphere as an oxygenated one that threatens their
very survival; their response is to encase themselves in the larger protective cells
of other bacteria, where they become the ancestors of the chloroplasts in plant
cells that allow them to photosynthesize. Te same processes are at work, like-
wise, in the dynamics of cultural evolution, whereby the cosmology of angels
is done away with by the Copernican vision and then returns in the form of
cultural organelles as science ction aliens shepherding the human race towards
its apotheosis. So despite the paranoia of von Danikens mythology, his work
is useful to the student of comparative cosmology, in so far as it conrms the
intuition of a connection between the ancient cosmic hierarchies of angels and
the modern folklore of extraterrestrials.
:c
,
All of which shows that the myth of extraterrestrials as the primordial cre-
ators either of civilization, of human beings, or of life itself is alive and well
in popular culture. But at what point, we may ask, did extraterrestrials come
to displace angels and gods?
As near as I can determine, the answer is to be found in the works of H. P.
Lovecraft, and the creation myth that he presents explicitly in his novel At the
Mountains of Madness (:,,:). In a modied version of panspermia, he describes
how the race of the Old Ones gray, barrel-shaped creatures with bat-like wings
and starsh-shaped heads migrated through outer space, without spaceships,
to take up their abode in the earths Hadean waters, long before the emergence
of life, but shortly after the separation of the moon from the Pacic basin. Tey
established cities underwater and created the rst living cells from inorganic
matter in order to feed themselves, but then later created a race of amoeboid
slaves called shoggoths. Te Old Ones gradually invaded the earths nascent
continents, but their colonization was checked by a second race of beings the
descendants of Cthulhu who dropped from the stars and gradually pushed
the Old Ones back into the waters. Te Cthulhu race, we learn from another
story of Lovecrafts, Te Call of Cthulhu (:,:o) were later worshipped by hu-
man beings as gods, and the sinking of their city Rlyeh into the Pacic basin
put a temporary nish to their civilization, but their worshippers knew that
one day, when the stars are properly aligned, Rlyeh would arise from the ocean
and the race of Cthulhu would return to dominate the earth. Te Old Ones,
meanwhile, retreated to the continent of Antarctica during the epoch of the
dinosaurs, where they built their last great city, the ruins of which have been
discovered in a scientic expedition by the novels :cth century narrator.*
On one level, Lovecrafts myth of the coming return of the Cthulhu race
is a kind of pulp ction metaphor of our current relationship with the gods.
Te story seems to be saying that even though the cosmological developments
* Lovecrafts novel inuenced John W. Campbells short story Who Goes Tere?
which became the basis for Howard Hawkss cheesy movie Te Ting, remade in
:,: by John Carpenter. Carpenters lm has been badly underrated and usually
compared unfavorably with Hawkss ridiculous version. Carpenters version, on
the other hand, is truly frightening, a claustrophobic study of madness and
isolation in the tradition of the paranoid narrative. Tomas Pynchon, also, has
tipped his hat to Lovecraft in his novel V, where he writes about the discovery of
a mysterious city named Vheissu at the South Pole, whose inhabitants have dug
tunnels leading to the major centers of civilization. Also, the climax of Chris
Carters theatrical version of his television show Te X-Files: Fight the Future,
with its frozen extraterrestrials inside a spaceship that launches from the South
Pole, owes a debt to Loveccraft.
of science have pushed aside the ancient pantheon of gods or, as Jungians
would say, archetypes they are really only dormant within the collective
unconscious, and one day will resurface from the watery depths of the human
imagination to claim their due respect.
Lovecrafts Cthulhu mythos, which date from :,:o to about :,,; or so,
are the rst stories in which the myth of the creation of life by extraterrestrial
beings is articulated, for if we glance back at the generation just prior to Love-
craft, the creation myths of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner (who died in
:,:,) were still centered around hierarchies of angelic beings. In his book Out-
line of Occult Science (:,:c), Steiner describes his vision of how the earth has
gone through a series of incarnations during which humanity and the entire
solar system has been woven together out of substances poured forth from
the bodies of angels, just as silk is spun from moths. By the time civilization
comes about, during the days of Atlantis, these beings have begun incarnating
themselves in human form as avatars in order to further the process along, as
in the Canopus in Argos novels of Doris Lessing.
Tus, cultural archaeology enables us to see how the myth of angels and
before them, gods and goddesses creating life, or else bringing higher cul-
ture to humanity, has been transformed through the folklore of :cth century
popular culture into the myth of extraterrestrial beings. But what has really
happened is that the myth has remained the same while the cosmology in which
it is embodied has changed, for it was precisely at the time of the emergence
of Lovecrafts mythos that the truly gigantic size of the universe was being
discovered. Myths, that is to say, adapt themselves to the current cosmology of
the society in which they appear.
V
:oo:: A Space Odyssey is about . . . mans hierarchy in the universe, which is
probably pretty low. Arthur C. Clarke
According to Islamic myth, the Black Stone that is encased within the Kaaba,
the great cube covered by a black cloth ornamented with gold script around
which the Muslims circumambulate, was brought down from heaven to the
earth by the angel Gabriel. Originally it was white, but it has been darkened
by contact with human hands.*
* Clarke has remarked on this: Te analogy of the Kaaba has also been mentioned.
Tough I certainly did not have it in mind at the time, the fact that the Black
Stone sacred to Moslems is reputed to be a meteorite is more than quaint
coincidence.
,
In a certain sense, Kubrick and Clarkes monolith from the heavens is a re-
trieval of this Islamic myth, but even more than that, :oo:: A Space Odyssey
miniaturizes the entire cosmology that held the Middle Ages together in the
form of the Great Chain of Being, which was shared by Arabs, Hindus and
Christians alike. Te Great Chain of Being was a legacy of Greek philosophy
and cosmology, in which all of creation is ranked into a hierarchy of levels as-
cending from inert matter to God on his throne.
We have seen how the narrative structure of :oo: has retrieved the Greek
myth of ascent through the Ptolemaic spheres to the gods for transformation
and subsequent rebirth on the earth, and also how, through Clarkes myth
of the foundation of human culture by extraterrestrials, the ancient Biblical
hierarchies of the angels have also been retained, though in the guise now
of extraterrestrial beings. It would appear then that one of the unconscious
motives of Kubrick and Clarke in their book and lm, was to restructure the
Great Chain of Being in a way that would make it consonant with modern
cosmology. In the old model, we had God at the top with his nine ranks of
angels, then the planetary spheres descending down toward earth, and then
on earth, the human being was the noblest of all the kingdoms immediately
below him, on down from animals to plants to metals and minerals.
In Kubricks model, the mineral world is represented by the stark, nearly
plantless, landscape of South Africa in the Dawn of Man sequence, with the
australopithecines representing the animal level. For in the contemporary ver-
sion of the Chain of Being, the upper hierarchies are evolved from the lower,
whereas in the Medieval version, God created the entire chain all at once, with
everything neatly laid out into slots. Te old model was static and vertical; the
new, horizontal and evolutionary.
Tus, the mutation from what the German philosopher Jean Gebser would
call the Archaic consciousness structure, in which the australopithecines are
embedded, to that of a Magical structure, in which human consciousness now
emerges and looks out upon the world as a web of interconnections capable
of manipulation through magical interference, is such a gigantic leap as to
require the intervention of a cosmic intelligence.*
For the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, Kubrick and Clarkes monolith
symbolized the idea of the Holy, and the scene depicting the australopithecines
* Tere is a word group correlating among others the words make, mechanism,
machine, and might, which all share a common Indo-European root mag(h)-.
It is our conjecture that the word magic, a Greek borrowing of Persian origin,
belongs to the same eld and thus shares the common root. (Jean Gebser, Te
Ever-Present Origin [Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, :,,], p.o)
o
awakening to awe as it reaches out to touch the black slab dramatizes the birth
of mans spiritual consciousness out of the chrysalis of his animal nature. Awe,
you see, is what moves us forward, Campbell remarks. Tats what the lm-
maker recognized, that there was a continuity through all time of this moti-
vating principle in the evolution of our species. Tus, in Campbells view,
the monolith functions as a sort of philosophers stone which transmutes base
animal consciousness into the gold of human spiritual consciousness.
*
A further clue to Kubricks restructuring of the Chain of Being can be found
in the fact that the signiers for articial intelligence and extraterrestrial intel-
ligence are both indicated by rectangles: HAL ,ccc is a glyph composed out
of a black rectangle and a glowing red eye, while the extraterrestrials are repre-
sented by a black rectangular slab.
If we look at discarded drafts of the novel

in Te Lost Worlds of :oo:, we nd that Clarkes rst renderings of the aliens, as
in his short story Encounter in the Dawn, are strictly anthropomorphic, B-
movie stu, and his rst visualizations of HAL, likewise, as the robot Socrates,
are stock Asimovian cliches. But Kubrick, grasping their relationship to each
other via the Chain of Being, streamlined both into rectangular hieroglyphs,
for in the cosmology of the :cth century, the aliens now occupy the hierar-
chy above man, whereas articial intelligence occupies the rank immediately
below him. Tis slot between the human and the animal did not exist in the
classical chain, but it is one of the contributions of Kubricks reimagining of
this ancient edice.
VI
[:oo:] is the perfect American irony: a gadget-lled, special eects ode to
technology that is at once a requiem to all technology. Te very movie that
dazzles us with all its tricks is the movie that shows how trivial all these toys
are when set upon the cosmic scale. William Irwin Tompson
Te transformation of a bone into the rst tool confers upon the primate
mind the ability to disentangle itself from the web of animal instinctuality that
encompasses it. Tus, the extraterrestrial insemination of the human with the
seed of mechanical know-how grows into a technoskeleton which bears him
* Consistent with Campbells reading, Clarke in his sequel ,oo:: Te Final Odyssey,
has this original monolith dug up out of Olduvai gorge, where it is surrounded
by all sorts of ritualistic oerings, like animal bones and stone tools.
Michael Whelans cover art for Clarkes sequel :o:: Odyssey Tree, shows this,
for he has actually embedded the rectangle of HAL within the monolith, as
though the two have been alchemically fused together. Note that silver, red and
black are colors associated with alchemy.
;
to the moon, where he encounters yet another black monolith four million
years later.
In the next sequence, that of the expedition to Jupiter, we are introduced
to a spaceship that resembles a human skull and spinal column, for the single
bone that sparked the technological idea in man has grown, like a seed, into
a form that mimics mans own anatomy. Te metaphor of the ship as spinal
column evokes the imagery of kundalini yoga,
::
which is all about awakening
the tiny white serpent that rests in the cave of the rst chakra at the base of the
spine, and through the practice of certain rhythmic breathing exercises, caus-
ing it to ascend, transforming ones consciousness at each chakra encountered
along the way. Ultimately, the process concludes when the serpent arrives, via
the spine, at the chakra located at the crown of the skull, known as the thou-
sand petalled lotus, a state associated with the blissful, luminous rapture of sa-
madhi. Te architecture of this overall movement from the darkness of animal
instinctuality associated with the lower three chakras to regions of supernal
Light, is also duplicated in the narrative of Kubricks lm, so that the refer-
ence to kundalini yoga which, I am sure, was unintentional, is nevertheless
fortunate. Te seven chakras are a microcosmic miniaturization of the seven
traditional heavenly bodies, and so :oo: is isomorphic not only to Western
cosmology, but to Eastern as well. Kubricks genius of designing his spaceship
in terms of the human skeleton becomes a way of playing around with Joseph
Campbells utterance that the journey into outer space is also simultaneously
a journey inward, into the depths of the human psyche.
Te idea, furthermore, of HAL ,ccc as the ships central nervous system
brings to a focus the problem of wearing our technologies as a kind of protec-
tive exoskeleton, for the danger is that we may lose our own humanity to the
armor-plating within which we are encased, as in George Lucass myth of the
fall of Anakin Skywalker into the shell of Darth Vader. In Te Wizard of Oz,
the Tin Man in search of a heart, and in Spielberg and Kubricks A.I., Gigolo
Joe, who is programmed to give sexual satisfaction but not to love, point to
the same question: What happens when we cant get out of the exoskelton that
we have evolved to protect ourselves with, and instead become so dependent
upon it that our essential humanity, our heart, is lost?
In :oo:, Kubrick has invented a myth in which he cracks open mans techno-
logical shell to peer at the soft luminosity of the divine man within. He shows us
that technology is merely a faade concealing a transcendent self that constitutes
the true essence of our humanity, and it is our spirituality that separates us from
the animals, not our technological abilities. Dave Bowmans destruction of HAL
,ccc can be read, then, as man having attained the nadir of his fall into technol-
ogy and beginning the turn-about by prying himself free from its petried cara-
pace in order to move onward to the next mutation of consciousness.* For in
the old rationalist structure symbolized by the eighteenth century decor in the
nal sequence the fascination of the machine was such that even the universe
appeared to be one: the planets whirling around the sun were like the gears and
wheels of a clockwork, while the relation of the soul to the body was nothing
more than that of two clocks set to exactly synchronous times.
In the vision of the Stargate which follows the HAL ,ccc episode, the shell
of technological man will be left behind in quest of the shining iridescent
wings of spiritual man, the Anthropos, who no longer needs machines and,
prior to physical incarnation, never did.
VII
Q: Since :oo: ends with an apparent evolutionary transformation, is it
oered as an alternative to the end of the world in Doctor Strangelove?
A: Not really . . . its more of a mythological statement. All myths have a
kind of psychological similarity to each other. Of the hero going somehow
into the underworld, or the over-world, and encountering dangers and
terrifying experiences. Ten he re-emerges in some god-like form, or some
greatly improved human form. Essentially the lm is a mythological state-
ment. Stanley Kubrick
A cultural archaeology of the lms nal climactic sequence, Jupiter and Be-
yond the Innite, shows us that Kubrick and Clarke are not yet nished com-
pressing Western cosmology into a : hour and :, minute strip of celluloid.
For Kubricks protagonist Dave Bowman is singled out by the extraterrestrials,
like Spielbergs Roy Neary at the conclusion of Close Encounters of the Tird
Kind, and taken up for a privileged vision of the origin and evolution of the
cosmos. Tis motif of the human individual singled out by cosmic beings was
actually a narrative precedent set by the apocalyptic literature of the Hebrews.
In : Enoch written along with the Book of Daniel around :oc B.C.E. Enoch,
* Notice that when Bowman returns back inside the spaceship after HAL has
locked him out, he changes helmets from red to green. While destroying HAL
he is wearing a green helmet, a suitable color preguring his rebirth during the
Star Gate sequence.
Te animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out
man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and
with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god.
Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? (Sri Aurobindo, Te Life Divine
[Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, :,;c]. pp. ,-)
,
the grandfather of Noah, is taken up into the vault of heaven for an initiatic
vision of the universe. Te Sons of God who cohabited with human females
in Genesis o to produce monstrous ogres have caused Yahweh to decide, like
James Camerons extraterrestrials in Te Abyss, that he will unleash an enor-
mous ood to wipe out giants and men alike.
*
Enoch tries to intercede with God on behalf of the fallen angels, but it is
no good, for the almighty has made up his mind and communicates to Enoch
a grand vision in which the destiny of the universe is laid out before him like
a Mexican mural. Yahweh takes him on a tour through the heavens, showing
him the great pits into which the stars come to rest at the end of their daily
journey, and the chasms which hordes of angels are mining into the heav-
enly rmament to become the prisons for the fallen angels. He also sees the
reservoirs where the oodwaters are kept, and he is told that both humanity
and the giants are doomed.
Tis text set the basic narrative pattern for the apocalyptic genre: an emis-
sary from the heavens comes down to warn a chosen individual of coming
catastrophes and takes him on a grand tour of the universe in which the desti-
ny of all things is revealed. It is the same basic pattern whether we are discuss-
ing the angels that come down to Adam in Paradise Lost to explain the history
of the universe, or the strange white-haired being who comes to John on the
island of Patmos to confer upon him the vision of the Last Judgement.
As it turns out, this is precisely the narrative structure retrieved by Kubrick in
the latter half of his space odyssey, for Dave Bowman, like his literary forebears
Odysseus a master archer, incidentally and Ishmael, is the lone survivor for
whom higher beings have singled out a metanoiac vision. Te walls of space-
time split apart in the seizure of a visionary trance, and Bowman is taken into
a Slitscan matrix of radiant geodesics within which he is shown the origins of
all things: A universe emerges before his very eyes and he witnesses the opales-
cent birth of a galaxy; then oats like a discarnate entity over an archaic earth
swarming with azure waters in which the rst microorganisms will arise.
* In fact, Camerons lm Te Abyss may have been inspired by a discarded earlier

draft of the Star Gate sequence found in Te Lost Worlds of :oo: entitled Te
Abyss. Dave Bowman there journeys to an underwater civilization of extra-
terrestrials.
Notice how all the moons of Jupiter line up in conjunction and form a cross
with the monolith as the horizontal bar just prior to Bowmans entry into the
Stargate. Te Babylonian priest Berossos wrote in his Babyloniaca that the end
of the world would come by re when all the planets lined up in Cancer, and
by a great ood when they all lined up in Capricorn.
,c
In the sequence which follows, Bowman undergoes a series of transformations
in a Louis XVI style room with a glowing, white oor. Just as the disintegra-
tion of HAL ,ccc in the prior episode was prophetic of the coming end of
our technological epoch, so Bowmans last days take place in a room with
an architectural style that captures the fading vestiges of eighteenth century
classicism because it is precisely the Age of Reason that Kubrick is bidding
farewell to in his lm. As in the climax of A.I., the aliens have constructed a
hologrammatic room that is familiar to Bowman, for the multidimensionality
of the Stargate is terrifying to him, and it is within this hermetic vessel that he
must undergo three nal transforma-
tions: from an old man having his Last
Supper, to a dying man perched at the
edge of Innity, and ultimately, to the
Star Child whose enigmatic presence
graces the lms nal scenes.
Te wineglass which Bowman
knocks over as he is dining shatters
against the luminous oor and be-
comes the transition to his deathbed
Transguration. Te scene recalls the
custom of destroying wineglasses at
Jewish weddings, where it is intended
to symbolize the destruction of the
Temple by the Romans in ;c C.E. and
thus, Kubricks reference supplies us
with the key to its function as a transi-
tion, for it symbolizes both the tran-
scendence of mans reason as it shatters
against the adamantine mystery of the
numinous, and simultaneously, the
disintegration of the body left behind
by Bowman. For just as the breaking of
the wafer in the Catholic Mass signies
the death of Christs body as prelude
to his ascension, so here the shattered
wineglass the vessel bearing the wine
just as the body contains the blood is
the transition to Bowmans resurrec-
tion as the Star Child.
,:
In the nal frames, we are shown the vision of a cosmic embryo enshrouded
within a translucent sphere oating down toward the inkblue crescent of
Earth, thus retrieving an old Christian art motif wherein the astral body of the
Christ child is shown hovering above his Nativity inside a yellowish sphere, as
in Rogier van der Weydens Nativity of :oc. For Bowman, like the Christ be-
ing, must undergo incarnation as a messiah in order to intervene in the condi-
tion of mans fallenness; only now, a Platonic month of :,:cc years later, mans
command over matter has overheated into a reversal in which he has become
its prisoner, as we shall see in the following chapter.
Notes
:.Tese are the key transitional lms: :,o;: Bonnie & Clyde, Te Graduate; :,o:
:oo:: A Space Odyssey, Rosemarys Baby; :,o,: Easy Rider, Te Wild Bunch, Midnight
Cowboy; :,;c: M.A.S.H., Five Easy Pieces; :,;:: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Carnal
Knowledge, Te French Connection, Straw Dogs, Te Last Picture Show, A Clockwork
Orange; :,;:: Te Godfather, Deliverance; :,;,: Badlands, Mean Streets, American
Gra tti, Te Exorcist.
:. Of course, I am leaving out here lms like Metropolis (:,:;), Orson Welless
version of Te Trial (:,o,), and Alphaville (:,o,), but prior to :,o they were few and
scattered occurrences. After :,o, a dam seems to have burst, and such lms start
pouring out from all directions.
,. Cicero, De re publica o.,:o.
. Steiner believed that the soul literally passes through the planetary spheres
between lives, during which time its qualities are worked upon by the various divine
beings associated with each one. See, for example, his Karmic Relationships.
,. Tough there are four stories, only three are indicated with title cards: Te
Dawn of Man, Jupiter Mission: : Months Later, and Jupiter and Beyond the
Innite. Te second story (not indicated with a title card), that of Heywood Floyds
journey to the moon, is actually based on Clarkes short story Te Sentinel, which
was the inspiration for the lm, while Te Dawn of Man is a reworking of Clarkes
short story Encounter in the Dawn. It is interesting to note that three of the four
stories end with a death: the primordial Cain and Abel murder of Te Dawn of
Man, the death of HAL in Jupiter Mission, and the death of Dave Bowman in the
nal story. Te Heywood Floyd story is the only one without a title card and that does
not end with a death.
o. Compare Mohammads night journey through the spheres, in which his astral
body ascended from Jerusalem through the planets to the throne of God, from whom
he received the Second Pillar of Islam, namely, that the devout Muslim must pray ve
times a day. Tis may have been one of the primary inuences on Dantes journey
through the spheres in his Paradiso.
;. I have borrowed the term deep structure from a footnote in William Irwin
,:
Tompsons Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (:,,), p. ,.
Te term was invented by Noam Chomsky, and is normally contrasted with surface
structure in his linguistic theory. But the term is also used in a dierent sense by Ken
Wilber in his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (p. oc) in reference to the form or morphogenetic
eld of a holon.
. Kubrick and Clarke developed their lm out of the raw material of several of
Clarkes short stories, including the following: Te Sentinel, Encounter in the
Dawn, Breaking Strain, Whos Tere? Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting.
. ., Into the Comet, and Before Eden. All of these can be found in Te Collected
Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (NY: Tor Books, :ccc).
,. Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods (NY: Bantam, :,;:), pp. ,:,:.
:c. See Weird Myths about Human Origins as Expressive of the Evolution of
Consciousness from the Territorial Nation-State to Global Noetic Polities: Te Strange
Cases of Zecharia Sitchin and Rudolf Steiner, in William Irwin Tompsons Coming
Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (NY: St. Martins Press,
:,,o).
::. See William Irwin Tompsons discussion of yoga and the spaceship as spinal
column in his Darkness and Scattered Light (New York: Doubleday, :,;), p. :::.
,,
5
Visions of a Biomechanical Apocalypse
In contemplating the meaning of the nal image of Kubricks lm, that of the Star
Child descending toward earth, I think the very last authority we should consult is
Arthur C. Clarke himself. From Clarkes notes, it is apparent that the image was
Kubricks idea, and Clarkes interpretations of it in his sequels to 2001 are facile,
for there we nd that Bowman has not metamorphosed into a Star Child at all,
but rather a kind of discarnate messenger of whatever intelligence the monolith
represents. Like Ben Kenobi in the Star Wars lms, he has been absorbed by the
Force, becoming merely immortal. In the sequels, Clarkes essentially rationalist and
materialist mentality forces him to interpret the monolith as a teaching device, or
a tool, for in the universe of the technocrat, there is no problem so complex that
it cannot be solved with a gadget. While I dont pretend my own interpretation of
the Star Child to be nalwhich would be absurd, for these images do not have
nal, authoritative meaningsI do think it important to consider the millenial
signicance of the title, 2001, in association with the beginning of a Platonic
month of the Magnus Annus, or Great Year. Te last such month, the epoch of
Pisces, was ushered in by the incarnation of an avatar, the Christ being, whose
appearance was necessitated by the utter materialism of Roman civilization. Te
human being, we might say, was a sh, lost in the waters of ignorance, requiring
an avatar, as sherman, to bring him out into the light of spiritual consciousness.
Come, Christ said, as he was gathering disciples, and I will make you shers of
men.
And so, consistent with the birth of this Great Month two thousand years later
(although Aquarius is some century or two still ahead of us) humanity once again
nds itself fallen and in need of an avatar, only this time the fall into materialism
has taken on the shape of imprisonment within the steel and concrete labyrinths
of our technology. In McLuhans reading of the Narcissus myth, the young man
plunged to his death because he had mistaken his image for another being, when
in reality this reection, like our technologies, was an extension of himself which
made Narcissus into its own servomechanism and drew him in. We nd ourselves
now, today, in the role of Narcissus, narcotized by our own self-extensions in the
form of technology, and so we require the aid of an avatar to rescue us.
,
In 1943, the United States navy supposedly embarked on a project in invisibility
known as the Philadelphia Experiment. Te story goes that the navy actually
made an entire battle ship disappear for about three hours, but when it returned,
the crew was in a state of total hysteria and panic. As one of the survivors puts
it: Tere were four men embedded in steel, two in bulkheads and two in the
decks. A fth man had his hand embedded in a steel wall. He lived. Of course,
what they had to do was chop his hand o. And a number of people disappeared
completely.
True or not, the story is a World War II parable illustrating the nature of our
fall into technology. Te central myth of Gnosticism describes how the human
soul was a spark of light that had fallen from the Heavens and become entrapped
within matter and how the process of gnosis, or retrieving the memory of our
divine origins, is the key to our salvation. As the Philadelphia Experiment shows,
however, nowadays we have become imprisoned within the steel and silicon of
our machines and the process of releasing us from our entanglement is akin to
extracting a precious metal from its ore, and so requires the warming thaw of an
avatar like the Star Child to reconnect us with the iridescent Being within.
1. Annunciation
If we were to remove the strip of celluloid bearing the frames of Kubricks -
nal, apocalyptic image of the Star Child and overlay it as a kind of illuminated
thought transparency across, say, Leonardo da Vincis Annunciation, then the
surface structures of Kubricks science ction story would dissolve to reveal
the palimpsest beneath of an earlier Medieval Christian art motif in which
the angel Gabriel, like the Star Child, is shown entering from the left, while
Mary sits reading scripture o to the far right. Her response to the message of
her imminent transformation into Teotokos, the God-bearer, is to say, My
soul doth magnify the Lord. In Kubricks updating, the Star Child and the
Earth have taken up positions once occupied by Gabriel and Mary, for the Star
Child is shown drifting from the left side of the screen toward the pale blue
sphere of the earth down in the far right corner. Nowadays, in other words,
the Earth itself must become God-bearer in its magnication of spiritual
energies, for it has existed in our cultural imagination as a lump of matter
shorn of any sense of animate spiritual presence for the past ve centuries. But
now, like the worn features of a coin which has been poured across too many
hands, this cultural token of the Western imagination is ready for the imprint
of a new mold.
,,
2. Annunciation Redux
Tere is a scene in J. G. Ballards :,;, novel Crash which functions as a kind
of Annunciation of our cultures perverse desire for the fusion of machine
and esh. Te scene occurs near the novels conclusion, where the protago-
nistnamed after Ballard himselfmakes love in the back seat of a car
with a woman named Gabrielle, who has been injured in a car crash, and
whose entire body bears the cartography of her wounds. She is a virgin and
happens to be convalescing from her injuriesher legs are in braces, and her
body is covered by scars, bruises and indentations made by the impact of her
body with the plastic and chromium of the machinery during her accident.
By this point in the narrative, the protagonist has discovered that he can be
sexually aroused only if the act takes place within an automobile, preferrably
in motion. In the present scene, however, the car is parked near an airport
runway, so that the roar of the jets lifting o forms the basso continuo of their
foreground activity. And the peculiar thing about this scenewhich to my
mind is simultaneously poetic and yet somehow frighteningis that the nor-
mal erogenous zones of the body do not here provoke sexual arousal. Instead,
both parties nd that they can be aroused only by each others wounds, and
the indentations on their bodies are described as though they were somehow
mutated sexual organs. In Ballards vivid prose:
She lifted her left foot so that the leg brace rested against my knee. In the
inner surface of her thigh the straps formed marked depressions, troughs
of reddened skin hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps. As I
unshackled the left leg brace and ran my ngers along the deep buckle
groove, the corrugated skin felt hot and tender, more exciting than the
membrane of a vagina. Tis depraved orice, the invagination of a sexual
organ still in the embryonic stages of its evolution, reminded me of the
small wounds on my own body, which still carried the contours of the in-
strument panel and controls. I felt this depression on her thigh, the groove
worn below her breast under her right armpit by the spinal brace, the red
marking on the inside of her right upper armthese were the templates
for new genital organs, the moulds of sexual possibilities yet to be created
in a hundred experimental car-crashes.
:
It is as though every detail of this scenefrom Gabrielles name to the fact
that she is a virginhas been chosen to suggest a kind of bizarre technological
Annunciation, in which the descending Angel announcing the Words desire
to become esh is here transformed into the desire of the human body itself to
fuse with its chromium and steel extensions.
,o
3. Te Biomechanical Bride
Te ospring of Ballards visionary insemination is pictured for us in a :,o
short story by William Gibson called Te Winter Market, in which a young
girl whose body has been wasting away due to some unknown disease can
get around only by means of a black, polycarbon exoskeleton in which she is
encased from the neck down. As Gibson describes her:
She couldnt move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked
straight into her brain, myoelectric interface. Te fragile-looking polycar-
bon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled
her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high
school lab tape, then hated myself for it.
:
Te girl has a special talent, however, for true to the spirit of Gnostic mythol-
ogy, in which the soul nds itself at odds with the soma in which it is encased,
she is able to retrieve dreams and visions from the collective unconscious and
record them by means of technology provided by the narrator, so that others
can play them back as though they were their own. Te girl is dying, however,
and at the storys conclusion the narrator is haunted by the fact that even
though she is dead, he is expecting a phonecall from an articial construct of
her personality which has been downloaded into a computer program.
Gibsons story is a brilliant distillation of the kinds of Gnostic myths that
keep turning up in science ction, for the girls escape from her body via
cyberspace is exactly isomorphic to the Gnostic myth of the souls ascent
through the whirling spheres of the heavens after the death of the body. But
more importantly, the story is a marker indicating just how far we have fallen
in our descent into technology, for we inhabit our machines just as Paleolithic
man wore the skins of the animals that he hunted and the ghostforms which
composed the fabric of his image of the world-round.
4. Tomas Pynchons Decline of the Flesh
Tomas Pynchons :,o, novel V. provides us with a glimpse of the ultimate
fate of the biomechanical bride. Pynchons novel tells the story of a quest for
the mysterious woman whose rst initial forms its title, and as the episodes
concerning her are recounted, we discover that she is connected with a series
of major political catastrophes which have occurred throughout the course
of the :cth century. She was present, for example, as a young :-year-old at
,;
the Fashoda crisis of Egypt in :,, which nearly started a major war between
Britain and France. We then nd her involved in an anarchist insurrection in
Italy that also includes a plot to steal Botticellis Birth of Venus from the U zi.
She turns up, as well, in :,:: as the concubine of a German o cer in charge
of a genocidal suppression of the revolt of South African tribesmen. Finally,
disguised as a Manichean priest, we nd her on the island of Malta in :,,,
where she is apparently killed during a bombing raid.
It is here, on an island which during the Neolithic was one of the great
shrines to the mysteries of the Mother Goddess, that Pynchon presents us
with the nal, arresting image of her fate: V. has been pinned beneath an
enormous beam knocked loose from the ceiling by an explosion, and when
the bombing is over, a group of curious children wander into the ruins and
discover her there. At once, they begin removing the articial implants and
metallic appendages with which, throughout the course of the novel, she has
gradually replaced parts of her anatomy. Te wig covering her shaven skull is
found to conceal a tattoo of the Crucixion, while her left eye is made of glass
and painted with a tiny clockface. Tey also remove the surgically implanted
sapphire from her navel, detach her prosthetic feet, and make o with her false
teeth, which have been cast out of gold, silver and titanium.
Marshall McLuhans book Te Mechanical Bride appeared in :,,:, but it
was in his two following masterworks Te Gutenberg Galaxy (:,o:) and Un-
derstanding Media (:,o) that he made himself famous with his insistence
that machines are extensions of human physiology. Te printing press, for
example, is an extension of the eye, the wheel of the foot, and electric cir-
cuitry of the central nervous system. According to McLuhan, furthermore,
each medium not only amplies the function of the organ that it extends, but
also deadens the sensitivities of that very organ. Pynchons novel, in line with
this, suggests that the evolution of technology in the West has resulted in a
numbing of our human sensibilities altogether, for Vs gradual descent into
what Pynchon terms the Inanimate plays in counterpoint with the spread
of political violence and chaos during the course of the :cth century. Indeed,
Pynchons novel suggests that there is even an inverse proportion between the
advancement of technology and the dehumanization that accompanies it,
for we often forget just how much the industry of warfare accelerates tech-
nological innovation. Consider the rocket, the jet engine and the computer:
these mutations in technological evolution constitute the virtual infrastruc-
ture of the Information Age, and their development was accelerated by World
War II defense industries, just as the Internet and the satellite are technologies
generated by the friction of the Cold War.
,
It would seem, then, that the historical metanarrative framing Pynchons
vision of the modern world is not that of the Western myth of linear progress.
Te vision of history as a gradual and inevitable progress was rst articulated
by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, who pictured the cosmos at the beginning
of time as a pure world of light, which then fell into a state of darkened, mate-
rial corruption, but will one day, through human eort, return to its original
purity. Tis myth has unconsciously fuelled all our notions of progress, and
for us moderns it gained a particular signicance during the political reforms
of the French and American Revolutions of the late :th century, in which
democracy was viewed as an advance over all earlier forms of government.
Tis political optimism, furthermore, provided fresh impetus in all the cul-
tural domains of the :,th century, especially those of applied science and en-
gineering. Te gradual perfection of the steam engine with its applications in
the steamboat and the railroad; its miniaturization in the form of the internal
combustion engine; the invention of the dynamo and its extensions in the tele-
graph, electric light, and a myriad of gadgetssuch marvels all seemed to refu-
el the old Zoroastrian-Christian myth of the progress of man, emerging at last
from the darkness of his bondage to nature. Te publication in :,, of Darwins
Origin of Species showed that man had evolved from a state of primitive bestial-
ity and, having proved his tness in the struggle for supremacy against all other
species for domination of the planet, was well on the way to the perfection of
human society. And with the publication in the :,cs of Frazers masterpiece
Te Golden Bough, the myth of progress was transplanted to the development
of human culture, for in Frazers view, the primitive epochs of magic and
religion would be rendered obsolete by the age of science, and myth and ritual
would be forever consigned to the superstitions of mans childhood.
But Frazer couldnt have been more wrong. For the new century dawned
with World War I, and the uses to which these technologies could be put in
the service of mass destruction was profusely demonstrated. Te work of phi-
losophy, moreover, which best seemed to capture the whole drift of this shift-
ing of historical sensibilities was Oswald Spenglers Decline of the West (:,:)
for Spenglers paradigm, like Tomas Pynchons, was based not upon the myth
of linear progress, but rather on that of the ancient Bronze Age myth of the
cycles of eternal return, in which the phases of history move in accord with the
organic morphology of birth, orescence, sensescence and death. For Spengler,
as for Goethe, Vico and the Greeks and Hindus before him, each of the great
civilizations had demonstrated this, for they were all deadSumer, China,
Egypt, the Islmaic Worldand with them, their technologies. According to
Spengler, a similar fate lay in store for the West. Here is his vision of a machine
,,
apocalypse from his :,,: essay Man and Technics:
Tis machine-technics will end with the [Western] civilization and one day
will lie in fragments, forgottenour railways and steamships as dead as the
Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins
like old Memphis and Babylon. Te history of this technics is fast drawing
to its inevitable close. It will be eaten up from within, like the grand forms
of any and every Culture. When, and in what fashion, we know not.
,
Tat the gradual realization of Spenglers prophetic vision here is already
well underway may be attested by careful attention to the huge rotting hulks of
industrial debris that are already beginning to litter our landscapes. On Tree
Mile Island, for example, the bleached funnels of four massive cooling towers
rest against the sky, a monument to technological failure and disaster. In Flor-
ida, the ruins of Cape Canaveral are crumbling in the sun like the remains of
some vanished futuristic city out of a J. G. Ballard or a Stanislaw Lem novel. In
Tucson, Arizona, the worlds largest aircraft graveyard displays rows and rows
of the rusting skeletons of n-,: bombers, jetplanes and other aircraft exposed to
the baking desert sun which is slowly stripping them of their skin, like bodies
left out for excarnation to the vultures. Even in New York City, on Manhattans
West Side, huge sunken harbors doze in the humid air like ghosts, dreaming of
the past and the humanity that once crawled through them like maggots in a
corpse. And the transformation of some of our megalopolises into ghost cities
has already begun: witness the decaying ruins of skyscrapers and automobile
factories in Detroit, the abandoned suburbs of East St. Louis, or the empty
civic buildings of Bualo, New York, and Gary, Indiana.
4

At present, such piles of debris are all but invisible because there is not
enough of it to draw attention to itself. Noticing them requires a certain sub-
liminal perceptive ability, along with the realization that nobody is ever going
to clean them up. Tere is no reason to do so, since no money can be made
from such expensive operations. Consequently, more and more of them will
clutter the landscape at rst, only on the peripheries of the great centers of
civilization, and later gradually moving closer and closer to their vital hearts.
Most people will never even notice them, but simply assume that they are part
of the urban landscape, like empty shopping malls and deserted parking lots.
Viewed through the lens of Spenglers prophecies, then, Pynchons image of
a cyborg being dismantled by a group of children could be read as an allegory
of the coming deconstruction of our biomechanical world viewand with
it our machines themselves by future generations. And if Spenglers vision
turns out to be an accurate prophecy of the fate of Western civilization, then
oc
the scenario imagined in George Millers Mad Max lms will become our liv-
ing reality. In that case, the :,th century notion of linear progress will fall away
and give rise to the older Bronze Age myth of the eternal return, wherein the
wheel of time must always revolve back toward its ground of origin. In Te
Road Warrior, the Middle Ages return, paradoxically, as our possible future.
5. . . .and down we went.
When James Cameron set out to make his version of the sinking of the Ti-
tanic, his primary intention was to translate Ken Marschalls beautiful, vivid
oil paintings of the disaster into celluloid spectacle.
,
But lm, like opera, is an
inherently mythic medium, for its images are larger than life visions which
icker in the darkness of the cavern-theater, unconsciously evoking the tribal
experience of story-telling before the evening re against the all-surrounding
abyss of ancient Night. Tus, in transplanting Marschalls images from one
medium to another, they underwent a metamorphosissomething analo-
gous, perhaps, to Francis Ford Coppolas transmutation of Mario Puzos pop
novel Te Godfather into a work of high artfor the images of the disaster as
they appear on the screen have the feel and look of an apocalyptic myth of the
end of the world.
In the iconography of medieval cathedrals, there is a recurring motif of
the Last Judgement, in which the archangel Michael dangles a pair of scales
weighing the blessed against the damned, while behind him, the Devil tries
to tip the scales to add one more soul to the crowd sliding down into the jaws
of the Great Beast. Such a beast is the personication of Hell itself and is
depicted all through Medieval and Renaissance art choking on the squirming
multitudes of the damned.
What, the sinking of the Titanic as allegory of the Apocalypse? Te Atlantic
ocean as the Great Beast swallowing the city of the damned? Te Titanic as
microcosm of European civilization on the eve of World War I?
Te aforementioned image of the archangel Michael holding a pair of scales
on the Day of Judgement is descended from the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
where the Weighing of the Soul is described after death: the heart is weighed
against a feather of the goddess Maat, and if the heart is heavier, it is devoured
by a beast known as the Swallower. If the feather is heavier, the soul of the de-
ceased is guided to the throne of Osiris, who bestows immortal life upon it.
Te sinking of the ship as reenactment of the Weighing of the Soul? Te
atheistic city of the damned cast into perdition for impiety to the gods? Sodom
o:
and Gomorrah on the High Seas?
Like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the Titanic was a miniaturization of
the cosmos, an apotheosis of the Faustian vision of the universe as machine, in
which there is a place for absolutely every obsession of the industrial imagina-
tion. Instead of saints, stained glass windows and niches lled with Biblical
gures, it displays the opulence of Art Nouveau, the miracles of electricity and
the telegraph, Turkish baths and exercise rooms. All the great cosmological
machines are present, as well: the mechanical clock which came into being
simultaneously with the cathedrals; the steam engine, already two centuries
old; and the dynamo that lights the ship with the articial luminescence of
electric light.
But with the glow of electricity, the stars vanish, for no one can see them any
longer. However, there is no need. Astrology has fallen into desuetude, and
navigators need no longer rely on the heavens to nd their way about. Indeed,
the ship is a self-contained world, a microcosm of the great megalopolis. What
need, then, has it for reference of any kind to nature? Te stars are invisible;
the moon irrelevant; icebergs are no threat to an unsinkable ship. Faustian
man takes to the seas and scos at nature, for she is at once transformed into
the backdrop over which the drama of civilization plays itself out. Spengler
has captured this turn of the century grandiosity in the following passage from
Decline of the West:
Tis is the outward-and upward-straining life-feelingtrue descendant,
therefore, of the Gothicas expressed in Goethes Faust monologue when
the steam-engine was yet young. Te intoxicated soul wills to y above
space and Time. An ineable longing tempts him to indenable horizons.
Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the innite, leave the
bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars
. . . Hence the fantastic tra c that crosses the continents in a few days, that
puts itself across oceans in oating cities, that bores through mountains,
rushes about in subterranean labyrinths, uses the steam engine till its last
possibilities have been exhausted, and then passes on to the gas engine, and
nally raises itself above the roads and railways and ies in the air; hence it
is that the spoken word is sent in one moment over all the oceans; hence
comes the ambition to break all records and beat all dimensions, to build
giant halls for giant machines, vast ships and bridge-spans, buildings that
deliriously scrape the clouds, fabulous forces pressed together to a focus to
obey the hand of a child, stamping and quivering and droning works of
steel and glass in which tiny man moves as unlimited monarch and, at the
last, feels nature as beneath him.
o
o:
Te ship sinks. Te lights go out. Te luminous stars of a limpid April evening
burn like candleames against the dark blue canvas of the night.
6. Neuronic Icons on the Spinal Highway
Here is another image I would like to sketch for you. In :,;,, the science c-
tion lm Alien was released, providing a kind of Gothic counterpoint to the
optimistic visions of such lms as Star Wars (:,;;) and Close Encounters of the
Tird Kind (:,;;). Science ction monster lms have been around for a long
time, and in the :,,cs, beneath the radioactive lucence of the post-Manhattan
Project era, they gained a particular popularity. But none were so brilliantly
executed and beautifully realized as Alien, and perhaps no other monster lm
before itwith the possible exception of Te Exorcistwas so viscerally disturb-
ing in its imagery of the destruction and transformation of the human body.
Alien was the prophecy from a dark oracle, forecasting an ominous glimpse into
the disease-infested decade of the :,cs, for it managed to convey through the
language of science ction what was actually the semiotics of another language
altogether, namely, that of viral invasion and cellular destruction.
Trough the anamorphic lens of mythology, furthermore, the lms iconic
imagesthe stranded spacecraft shaped like the discarded vertebra of some
wandering giant, the dreaming fossil of the ships navigator, the alien coiled
up like the kundalini serpent within its eggturn out to be surface structures
in which the deep structures of ancient myths are embedded. In a sense, then,
the lm casts an X-ray into the anatomy of the Western imagination, revealing
that our ancient myths have not vanished, but have become trapped like in-
sects in amber within the steel lattices and clockwork gears of our machines.
Te main visionary force behind the lm was the demon-haunted imagi-
nation of Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger, whose visions are the descendants of a
truly Gothic line of Germanic artists, from Hieronymous Bosch to Arnold
Bcklin. Te aliens of the lm had sprung from the abysses of Gigers imagi-
nation, and perhaps no contemporary artist was better suited to visualize the
fossilization of ancient myths, and along with them, the human body, inside
of machines.
Te image from Alien I have in mind evokes our Western love for the broken
torsos and empty ruins of vanished civilizations, as the crew of the Nostromo
nds the pilot of an abandoned spaceship whose radio signal they have traced
to its source. Te spacecraft is reminiscent of a giant bone, and the image is
thus a visual quotation of the bone in :oo: that is transformed into an orbiting
o,
satellite and grows into the oating spinal column of the spaceship Discovery.
Alien thereby establishes continuity with the kind of artistic science ction
lmmaking that began with Kubricks opus in :,o, while at the same time
looping back to McLuhans insights on technology as an extension of the hu-
man body. Inside the ship, they nd a cavernous interior with curvilinear walls
textured more like the densely layered brils composing the surface of some
bodily organ than the architecture of a spaceship. In the murky silver light
pouring in through the oculus of the dome-shaped ceiling, they discern a huge
circular dais like a sundial, upon which sits a gigantic being at the controls of
a navigational device reminiscent of the telescope of an observatory. Te con-
tours of its yellowing skeleton fuse with the chair and surrounding console, as
though the being had been genetically engineered to spend its life as the ships
prophetic nucleus, guiding the voyages through innite space with clairvoyant
foresight, like those spice-drugged guild navigators of Frank Herberts Dune
books.
I nd this image beautiful and yet disturbing. It reminds me of some of
Carl Jungs descriptions in his autobiography of dreams involving journeys to
mysterious underworlds where strange beings are discovered. In particular, I
am thinking of the dream he told of his own infancy, wherein he went down
through a hole in the earth into a cave, and was terried to nd there a gigan-
tic crowned phallus sitting on a throne. Jung later interpreted this being as an
echo of the pagan phallic god Dionysus, lord of wine and sexuality, forgotten
since the rise of Christianity, but still slumbering in the collective unconscious
of Western civilization, awaiting, like one of Lovecrafts Cthulhu gods, the day
of its return. Ten there is the anecdote he recounted of a man who wished
to undertake training as a psychoanalyst, and one day told Jung of a dream he
had had of getting lost in an abandoned subway, where he followed a set of
stairs that led downward into an enormous dark arena where an infant sat in
a pool of light smearing itself with its own feces. For Jung, this indicated the
presence of a latent psychosis waiting to erupt in the mans psyche, and so he
discouraged him from pursuing a career as an analyst.
Te centralized presence of these beings in their underworld habitations
suggests an isomorphism, to my mind, with the sequence in Alien where
Gigers space giant is discovered. It is as though we had undertaken a journey
to a level of the collective unconscious of our present Western civilization, and
found there a single great icon encoding a number of messages for us. One
possibility is that the giants biomechanical fusion of machinery and esh is an
index of the state of our present seduction by the wonders of technology: we
have become so entranced with its possibilities that we are like cocooned ies
o
caught in its gigantic web, and like the Space Jockey, we are fated to remain
imprisoned at the controls of our great machinery until the vectors of time
have fossilized our bodies, and with them, the imagination of the Western
mind.
Gigers paintings, furthermore, are lled with such biomechanical beings
and landscapes: convoluted geometries of steel esh; living topologies of fused
chromium and cartilage; strange machines built not of cogs and pistons but of
metal bones with sinuous curves and paraboloid arches animated by sentient
AI beings. Gigers paintings are X-rays of the anatomy of our present imagi-
nation, in which genetic engineering, plastic surgery, research into articial
intelligence and the immune system, and nanotechnology have all conspired
to produce a living nightmare of biology trapped like an organelle within the
larger structure of all-encompassing machinery.
Alien, furthermore, is one of a wave of lms that came out in the :,cs
which featured imaginal descriptions of the breakdown of the human body
in illness. John Carpenters remake of Te Ting and David Cronenbergs Vid-
eodrome came out in :,:, and in :,o Cronenbergs remake of Te Fly and
James Camerons Aliens were released. Te deep structures of all four lms
were closely linked to the breakdown of the body in illness and disease, for
the decade of the :,cs was precisely when a whole ecology of virusesHIV,
Ebola, hantavirus and otherswas uprooted and let loose into the worlds me-
tabolism as a by-product of deforestation in Africa and South America. Tis
was followed in turn by a horde of weather anomalies during the :,,csre-
cord heat waves, gigantic hurricanes, freezing wintersand a similar cluster
of lms, Te Abyss, Waterworld, Titanic and Te Perfect Storm, that evoked the
contention between civilization and nature.
Tus, like the destruction of the medieval world order in King Learin
which the madness of the king nds its outer reection in the raging storm on
the heaththe awakening of the beast of nature in both the inner world and
the outer was part of the annunciation of the twilight of the industrial mental-
ity. For we are poisoning not only our rivers with industrial sewage, our skies
with automobile exhaust, and our ozone with chlorourocarbons, but also
our bodies, which, as William Irwin Tompson has remarked, are like pieces
of Mulligan stew cooking in a planetary soup of electromagnetic radiation
and noise. Links have been suggested between low frequency radiation and
leukemia; and every day we pour bizarre chemicals into our bodies for which
they have no evolutionary record, and the overloaded immune system, in its
eort to sift out information from noise, simply breaks down and begins to
dismantle itself. Te explosion of hundreds of strange :cth century diseases
o,
such as AIDS, cancer, neuro-muscular disorders, neuro-transmitter imbalanc-
es and the like, suggests that the fusion of machine and esh may result in the
destruction of human biology altogether.
Blake said that Eternity was in love with the productions of Time, and that
was his way of dilating the Incarnation myth to encompass all of creation as
a manifestation of God. Likewise, I would say that the human organism is in
love with its machines and desires some kind of incarnation within the silicon
and metal lattices of systems of articial intelligence such as that pictured by
William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer. But it may be precisely this love
that draws uslike a bridegroom to his bride, as Augustine said of Christ go-
ing to the crossto our own biomechanical Crucixion.
Notes
:. J. G. Ballard, Crash. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, :,,;), pp.:;o;;.
:. William Gibson, Burning Chrome. (NY: Ace Books, :,o), p. :::.
,. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics. (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, :,,:), p. :c,.
. See Manfred Hamm and Rolf Steiner, Dead Tech: A Guide to the Archaeology of
Tomorrow, (SF: Sierra Club Books, :,:)
,. Ken Marschalls paintings may be found in Don Lynchs Titanic: An Illustrated
History. (NY: Hyperion, :,,:).
o. Oswald Spengler, Te Decline of the West. (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, :,,,), vol. II,
p. ,c,.
oo
6
Trough the Biomechanical Labyrinth:
A Guided Tour of the Films of David
Cronenberg
People say, What are you trying to do with your movies? I say, Imagine
youve drilled a hole in your forehead and that what you dream is projected
directly onto a screen. David Cronenberg
If the Swiss painter H. R. Giger is the master of the biomechanical in the medium of
oil painting, then Canadian lmmaker David Cronenberg is surely its prophet in
the medium of lm, for no other director has so thoroughly explored the implications
of the interpenetration of the machine and the human body. Cronenbergs artistic
maturation began in :), with Videodrome, a lm that bombed at the box o ce
and was panned by critics for its nonlinear unintelligibility, but which nowadays
seems prophetic, for it was a generation ahead of such virtual reality pictures as
Te Matrix, Te Cell and Strange Days. Cronenberg followed Videodrome with
Te Dead Zone, Te Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Buttery, Crash,
Existenz, Spider and A History of Violence. Tere exists no other body of work
by any lmmaker anywhere that so exhaustively explores the fate of the human
body cocooned within the web of technology. Cronenberg is one of the true geniuses
working in cinema today, a kind of modern Kafka whose primary obsession is
to explore how we are, in fact, destroying our bodies with machines, chemicals
and electromagnetic radiation. His lms, moreover, present us with our rst type
of response to the problem of the machine through what I call Transcendence,
in which deep structures from Gnostic myth are discovered to be organizing
Cronenbergs narratives from below, as it were. In this mode of response to the
problem of mans fall into the machine, the human body will be destroyed precisely
with the aid of technology in an eort to break free from the material plane and
achieve rebirth in another, parallel world.
Trough the Biomechanical Labyrinth
o;
1. Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970)
Cronenbergs rst feature length lm, Stereo, opens with a series of images of
students wandering the halls of a university science building while a clinically
detached voiceover explains to us that a Dr. Stringfellow has performed brain
surgery on eight subjects for the purpose of inducing telepathy in them. Some
have had portions of their larynx removed; others have submitted to excision
of the speech centers in their brains.
Te lms imagery is textured through the interplay of two kinds of geom-
etry: severely rectilinear modernist architecture and the soft curvilinearity of
human erotic entanglements. One scene, for instance, shows us a man and a
woman having sex on a biology lab table, precisely the place where we would
normally expect anatomical dissections of formaldehyde-stiened cadavers.
Tis is appropriate because Stereo was itself the result of an experiment in
which Cronenberg availed himself of a ,,mm Arriex camera and shot a o,
minute black and white feature in a modern university building during the
summer session. He made up the story as he went along, shooting without
sound (partially to hide the noise of the Arriex) and then wrote the narration
post facto as a way of unifying its meandering episodes.
While there is a note of pretentiousness in these early student lms, they
are nonetheless overtures announcing in seed form most of Cronenbergs later
themes. Te conict, for example, between biology and technology, between
erology (lets say) and engineering (represented by the modernist architec-
ture) is a theme that will recur later in Crash. Te study of human erotica as
gure against the ground of mechanized environments will become, in true
auteur fashion, one of Cronenbergs major themes, for he is fascinated with
exploring how man-made environments aect human biology. In this lm, it
is as though Cronenberg were examining the human condition the way a biol-
ogy student would regard his frog-cadaver splayed out against the shiny metal
of the lab table before him.
One other thing to note about Stereo is that it is an uncharacteristically ce-
rebral lm for Cronenberg. It contains almost no visceral imagery whatsoever.
Te lms visual Umwelt is composed of right-angled architecture, clinical
voiceovers and very cool human interactions, signifying an almost Gnostic,
celestial world of the masculine intellect divorced from wet biology. It is the
world of the Manichean Anthropos before he takes his plunge into the realm
of birth and death. In this respect, it becomes signicant that the lms open-
ing shot features its protagonist debarking onto the campus from a helicopter,
as though he were arriving from the heavens.
o
Crimes of the Future plays like a color version of Stereo. It is shot on the same
location, using mostly the same actors, and with a single voiceover narrator in
place of a series of commentators. As the lm begins, the narrator introduces
us to Adrian Tripod, a doctor who has inherited directorship of the House of
Skin from Dr. Antoine Rouge, who, in turn, founded the institution to treat
patients with severe skin pathologies induced in them by cosmetics. Te narra-
tor, who happens to be Tripod himself, informs us that the House is in decline,
its operation having been subverted by two of Tripods sullen assistants. Now
it has only one patient with a condition known as Rouges Malady, the
symptom of which is the discharge of a white uid from the ears. Tis malady
has apparently killed o most of the female population from the earth. At the
lms climax, a splinter group who has captured a little girl intends to impreg-
nate her, giving the job to Tripod who, however, hesitates because he senses
that the girl may be a reincarnation of his master, Dr. Rouge.
Early in the lm, Tripod visits the Institute for Neo-Venereal Disease, where
the viewer encounters the rst truly Cronenbergian leitmotif. A former col-
league of Tripods has contracted from one of his patients a venereal disease
which causes his body to produce strange new organs, seemingly without func-
tion. As each is surgically removed, it is quickly replaced by another, equally
mysterious. We are told that his disease is possibly a form of creative cancer.
(Tis theme will turn up later in Te Brood).
It is at this point that Cronenberg in the role of the cosmic Anthropos be-
gins his plunge into the human body, where he will nd himself incarnate in
an extremely polymorphous medium which he can shape and sculpt in any
way that he likes. Indeed, as Cronenbergs work progresses, he will nd him-
self plunging deeper and more thoroughly into this new incarnational vehicle,
which will become a laboratory for creating new forms, the way a potter shapes
gurines out of clay. Te human body will become a test subject, splayed and
pinned, as he probes it with the scalpel of his intellect, testing a nerve here, a
muscle there. For Cronenberg, the only cosmos is the human body, and each
of his lms, to a greater or lesser degree, will take place within it.
Cronenberg claims to be an existentialist, and so in the absence of any high-
er moral authority, he is free to do whatever he wishes with the human form.
In fact, he is really a displaced genetic engineer, designing and redesigning
new morphologies of esh as works of postmodern art in an epoch in which
humanity has become a fallen angel, entrapped by its own technologies. In
the age of corporate patents on genes and the harvesting of organs with the
aid of stem cell research, biology is the new frontier. Cronenbergs work, then,
is a sort of experiment: given the premiss of no higher moral authority, what
o,
happens if we interfere with the basic biogenic forces that bring living forms
into being? Why not, when weve interfered with everything else? Why should
biological forms be set aside in a kind of moral chapel, sacred and inviolable
while the Faustian intellect tears the rest of creation apart like a curious child
pulling the legs o of a spider?
Cronenbergs Mission Statement: Lets pull the arms and legs o a human
being and see what he does.
2. Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1976)
Shivers was Cronenbergs rst commercial feature, and it was shot in fteen
days, giving it a raw, low-budget feel. Anyone watching it today will undoubt-
edly do so only because of its interest as the rst major Cronenberg lm, rather
than any intrinsic merit in the lm itself. Indeed, if Cronenberg had never
made another lm, this movie would have vanished altogether.
Yet its energy is undeniable. Te premiss is simple. Like Stereo and Crimes
of the Future (and also like J.G. Ballards novel High Rise) it takes place en-
tirely within one building, in this case Starliner Towers, a huge new apart-
ment complex that is a miniature society in itself, complete with shopping
mall, doctors o ces and grocery stores. One of the buildings residents is a
professor of medicine, Dr. Emil Hobbes and here we nd our homologi-
cal equivalent to Antoine Rouge and Dr. Stringfellow (these mad scientists
which turn up repeatedly in his lms are Cronenbergs alter egos, for they are
the men behind the scenes whose genetic and biological manipulations are
what bring about the contrivances of the plots). Dr. Hobbes believes that the
human race has become far too rational, and so he has created a parasite that
will cause people to act out their violent and erotic fantasies. Te parasite in
question is a larval-looking thing the size of a leech, which is unleashed into
the apartment building like bacteria into the drinking water of a village, for
soon enough, the whole society is ill. Te creature spreads by crawling from
one persons mouth into another, an obvious euphemism for venereal disease,
sliding around under the skin like a huge mobile tumor. Gradually, social
chaos supervenes, as people begin raping each other, going from apartment
to apartment, like a horde of mad zombies from George Romeros Night of
the Living Dead.
Subtexts? Disease, viral invasion and cellular destruction, a theme lat-
er explored by Alien; a social allegory of the kinds of violence and unrest
characterizing the late :,ocs and early :,;cs, as people awoke from their :,,cs
;c
trances, and allowed their Ids to drive; a satire on the kinds of crowded liv-
ing conditions which these Corbusierian machines for living impose on their
inhabitant-victims.
In the context of Cronenbergs oeuvre, the Anthropos has completed its
descent into the human body and from here on out, its interior will become
Cronenbergs canvas.
Like Crimes of the Future in relation to Stereo, Rabid is Shivers redone on a
larger scale. Cronenberg had more than twice the budget available to him,
and as a result this is the rst lm in which he was actually able to shoot on
various locations around Montreal and Quebec. It is also his rst lm that is
not conned by the closed, interior spaces of a building, and so represents, as
it were, a stepping out into open space.
Te premiss of Rabid, like that of Shivers, is simple. A woman named Rose is
nearly killed in a motorcycle accident, and, since it happens to have occurred
near a plastic surgery center known as the Keloid clinic, she is taken there
instead of a hospital. Te clinic is run by Dr. Dan Keloid our Cronenberg
alter ego scientist again who attempts to compensate for the damage done to
Roses intestinal tract, most of which has been destroyed, by taking skin grafts
from her thighs and reverting the esh to undierentiated tissue that can then
be used to help restore and regrow the skin on her body. But as an unintended
by-product, a new organ grows beneath Roses armpit that resembles a min-
iature version of the parasites from Shivers. Tis organ is a kind of mosquito-
like proboscis that causes Rose to desire to drink human blood since, with her
ruined intestines, she can no longer metabolize anything more complex. But
just as in vampire mythology, anyone she attacks becomes rabid and, foaming
at the mouth, searches for victims with whom to spread the disease. Before
long, Quebec is under martial law, as armed guards patrol its streets, shooting
these rabid individuals on sight. Eventually, Rose is killed by one of her own
victims, and tossed into a garbage truck like a piece of human refuse.
Whereas in Shivers there were no morphological changes to the human
body, here the Anthropos begins to get creative, sprouting its own organs in
places where there shouldnt be any. If disease happens to be the by-product
of that creativity, it is also the by-product of the very desire of viruses and
bacteria to maintain and propagate themselves. Just as sneezing and coughing
are ailments brought about by bacteria eager to spread themselves to other
hosts, so Cronenberg takes up Roses point of view as a means of illustrating
how antigens create illnesses in human beings not to be willfully destructive,
but rather to bring about the conditions of life, conditions that is, in which
;:
bacteria may thrive. Disease, Cronenberg is saying, is actually creative evolu-
tion in action. What we see as death and destruction becomes, from the point
of view of the invading parasite, a means of optimizing the conditions for
the existence of new lifeforms. If Cronenberg tends to sympathize with the
antigens point of view, that is part of his experiment in turning human biol-
ogy into his playground.
3. Te Brood (1979) and Scanners (1980)
In Te Brood, Cronenberg gives us Te Somafree Institute for Psychoplasmics,
a cult-like clinic run by Dr. Raglan, author of Te Shape of Rage (our mad sci-
entist alter ego again). He treats patients on the theory that repressed emotions
may be exteriorized through somatic manifestations such as scars, bruises or
even tumors. His star patient is Nola Carveth, a woman estranged from her
husband whose rage is so intense that it grows into womb-like extensions from
her body that give birth to an asexual brood of children who carry out her
wishes by murdering the people she hates. Te brood kidnap her daughter and
bring her back to the clinic, but Nolas husband arrives and enlists the Doctors
aid in rescuing her. He witnesses Nola giving birth to one of her children, as
she rips open the womb-like sac and licks the blood from its body.
Here the Anthropos has learned how to reproduce itself through the act of
making spores, producing extensions of itself from the mothers body in imi-
tation of the asexual reproduction of bacteria. Te penis-like proboscis of the
woman in Rabid has metastasized like an exploding tumor, seeding its hosts
body with revertant colonies of mutant cells. Te creepy brood of asexual
children act, furthermore, with one mind, for they are extensions of Nola
Carveths will, and as such have no individuality per se. Nola with her brood
is a mythic image of the Terrible Mother out of ancient epic literature, like
Scylla, the lower half of whose body is composed of barking dogs, or Miltons
image of the goddess of Sin:
(who) seemd Woman to the waist, and fair
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent armd
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing barkd
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbd thir noise, into her womb,
;:
And kennel there, yet there still barkd and howld
Within unseen.
In Scanners, the Cronenbergian mad scientist is a man named Dr. Paul Ruth
who, during World War II, dreamed up a drug named Ephemerol to be used
by pregnant women as a tranquilizer. As a side eect, however, the drug caused
their babies to be born with certain telepathic abilities that enabled them to
scan the thoughts of others, including making them do things against their
will. Dr. Ruth sold o his corporation, however Biocarbon Amalgamate
and went into the security business instead, having been picked up by an-
other corporation called ConSec, which specializes in international security
and private armies. Dr. Ruths program at ConSec involves nding and re-
cruiting scanners to be used as military weapons, but there is one problem: all
the scanners have disappeared into an underground organization run by a man
named Daryl Revok. As the lm opens, Dr. Ruth has actually managed to nd
one scanner, a man named Cameron Vale who has become a derelict due to
his inability to screen out other peoples thoughts, which occasionally drown
his own self-identity in mental white noise. Dr. Ruth uses Ephemerol to help
stop this background chatter so that Vale can function normally, and sends
him o on a mission to nd and recruit other scanners. Vale discovers that a
resistance underground of scanners has formed in opposition to Revoks mad
scheme of world dominion using scanners, but Revok has been hunting down
and killing this group o one by one. Vale learns that Revok actually owns and
runs Dr. Ruths old corporation Biocarbon Amalgamate, which he is using to
produce more Ephemerol to administer to pregnant women in the hopes of
creating a whole new generation of scanners as soldiers for his private army.
Eventually, Vale is led to Revok, where he learns that he and Revok are actually
twin brothers whose father is Dr. Ruth. Te two have a scanning showdown,
which ends with the incineration of Vales body, but his mind transmigrates
into Revoks, fusing the two into one organism.
Here the shared group mind of the mutant children in Te Brood has become
magnied into the collective mind of the scanners, who are actually able, in
scanning sessions, to think and feel with one mind. Only now the parthenoge-
netic Terrible Mother has given way to the Father who creates his children arti-
cially, through the use of chemistry. Te Anthropos, having produced spores
of itself in Te Brood, has now become a superorganism composed of scanners,
whose members communicate with each other magically, through telepathic
means. Te Anthropos is beginning to experiment with non-local elds of
etheric energy that glue separate organisms together with invisible bonds.
;,
At one point in the lm, the protagonist, Cameron Vale, scans a com-
puter by melding his nervous system with it via the telephone lines, like a
forerunner of the Internet. He downloads information out of the computer
into his own mind and then destroys the computer by mentally scanning it.
Tis scene is a forerunner of William Gibsons :, novel Neuromancer, in
which cyberpunk hackers are envisioned interfacing their minds with com-
puters via cyberspace. Apparently, Cronenberg, as a fellow Canadian artist,
was already sensitive to the same kinds of invisible environments that were
just beginning to emerge in the :,cs, which would later be illuminated by
Gibson and others.
Also, like Gibson, Cronenberg evinces a sensitivity to the rising power of
the corporation, whose tyrannical dominance of humanity will become a
leading theme of :,cs science ction lms and novels. For the rst time in
Cronenbergs work, the individual is threatened with being swallowed alive by
the vast, impersonal corporate hivemind from whose captivity it will be the
purpose of the celluloid heroes studied in this book to redeem him.
4. Videodrome (1983) and Te Dead Zone (1983)
With Videodrome, we arrive at this books darkest vision of humanitys fall
into the machine. Videodrome is a program that was developed by Profes-
sor Brian OBlivion our scientist alter ego, loosely based this time on me-
dia prophet, Marshall McLuhan as the next phase in human technological
evolution. It is a cable television show that broadcasts only snu violence and
pornography, but it has the special property of inducing a brain tumor in any-
one who watches it. Te tumor hijacks the victims visual cortex and begins
projecting its own hallucinatory images onto the fabric of his or her waking
reality: bizarre, Dali-esque images of violence and living, biomechanical tech-
nology. Te lms protagonist is a man named Max Renn, who happens to
be president of a cable TV station known as Channel ,. In order to keep his
shoestring operation aoat, Max is always on the lookout for a new edge, and
when his engineering assistant stumbles across the signal for an obscure show
called Videodrome, he thinks hes found it. Te only problem is, no one else
seems to have heard of the show, and when he does some digging, he nds
that it was the brainchild of Professor Brian OBlivion, a man who, as it turns
out, is dead, having become the victim of a brain tumor which caused him
to have visions. But OBlivion has left behind many videocassettes of him-
self giving pre-recorded answers to peoples questions on the eects of media
;
(a wonderful satire on McLuhans predigested interviews). Max meets his
daughter Bianca OBlivion, who gives to him videotapes that will purportedly
explain Videodrome to him.
But as the Videodrome signal sinks in to his nervous system, Max begins
to hallucinate. His television set comes to life as a throbbing, pulsing organ;
he sees himself slapping his assistant in the face; nds dead bodies in his bed,
etc. It turns out that Professor OBlivion had developed Videodrome and
sold it o to a corporation known as Spectacular Optical, which is run by a
man named Barry Convex, who explains to Max that actually, Videodrome
has never been broadcast at all, and that Maxs assistant has been a Spectacular
Optical plant whose job it was to expose him to Videodrome as a test case.
One of Maxs rst hallucinations is to see a vertical slit open up in the center
of his torso, like a displaced vagina. Convex asks him to open up, Ive got
something I want to play for you, and thrusts a pulsing videocassette into this
hallucinatory vagina. Te videocassette contains the instructions for becom-
ing the assassin for Spectacular Optical, and Max is sent o to kill his part-
ners at Channel ,, thereby clearing the way for Videodromes rst national
broadcast. Max does as instructed, but then when he attempts to kill Bianca
OBlivion, she counterprograms him to become her assassin, ordering him to
kill o the heads of Spectacular Optical. Once he has done so, he creeps away
to an abandoned shipyard, where he shoots himself.
In Te Brood, we saw how the Anthropos becomes sensitive to etheric energy
elds that bind organisms together into a single collective entity, and in Scan-
ners this theme was taken up to include a study of the group mentality that
unites the scanners through the mind melding of telepathy. In Videodrome,
Cronenbergs sensitivity as an artist to invisible environments alerts him to elec-
tromagnetic elds of radiation. Whereas in the former lms, the invisible ener-
gy elds bound individuals together into a collective hivemind, in Videodrome,
the electromagnetic radiation has the opposite eect, isolating and dissolving
the individuals body into a cancerous mess of degraded images and confused,
conicting impulses. Te body is actually melted down under the radiation
bathing it from the television, just like those Martians in the :,,cs version
of War of the Worlds, who melted away everything they touched with a green
deathray that suspiciously resembled a cathode ray tube. As McLuhan pointed
out, in the theater images are projected onto a canvas, whereas with television
the opposite is the case: we become the canvas upon which the cathode ray tube
paints its images. Hence, the person watching television is actually in the role of
Max Renn when he discovers that the vagina opening into his torso is really an
opening into his psyche through which the media inserts its images.
;,
McLuhan always insisted that the best defense against the medias attempt to
manipulate and pacify the mind is literacy. Tere is a huge dierence, he pointed
out, between the mentality of those who grew up reading and came to televi-
sion when it was invented later on, and the current generation which begins
watching television before it has learned how to read. Te earlier generation, as
a literate one, had a built-in immune system to protect it from the degradations
of television. But now, with the general melt-down of literacy as we slide into a
new Dark Age in which electronic culture replaces a literate one, Videodrome
presents us with an image of the kinds of things that can happen (and in the case
of the Columbine killings, do happen) in this kind of brave new world where
television replaces the primary pedagogical instrument of the book.
Finally, Videodrome gives us a mythological image of a man who has been
swallowed up into the belly of a great beast. Tat this is indeed the case is
conrmed when we note that one of Maxs rst hallucinations is an image of
a pulsing television set on which appear a womans lips in extreme close up,
into which Max leans forward and inserts his head, like a lion tamer stick-
ing his head into the beasts mouth. It is at this point that Max is swallowed
up by the media-generated simulacrum of Videodrome, itself a corporate
sponsored construction. Max becomes an image of modern man fallen into
the Machine, in which the deterministic forces of the inorganic world have
completely robbed him of all initiative and autonomy. It is this books bleakest
image of the Fall and capture of humanity by the machine, an image of the
utmost baseness to which his technological extensions have reduced him, and
from which he is in need of rescue by Kubricks messianic Star Child. Max
Renn is the being that Kubricks Star Child has been sent forth to rescue from
his technological-materialist prison.
But Max is not totally paralyzed, for even inside the belly of the beast he
can do some damage, as Bianca OBlivion explains to him in the novel based
on the lms script: But at least youre inside Videodrome now. And now
that you are, do you know what you have to do? You become the cancer, you
become the tumor that destroys the body. You destroy Videodrome!
In the Finnish epic known as the Kalevala, oddly enough, we nd a parallel
to Maxs situation when the epics hero, Vainamoinen descends through the
mouth of the earth giant Antero Vipunen and sets up a blacksmith shop in
his belly. He is searching for the magical charms that he needs to construct his
boat, and so, once within, he sets up the smithy and goes to work. Te giant
feels the heat of the smithy and begins uttering charms designed to expel this
invader. With this very uttering of charms normally used by the Finns to expel
sickness from a man, we realize that the whole sequence has been an image of
;o
the invasion of a human body by an antigen, and that the temperature raised
by Vainamoinens smithy is a fever. Finally, the giant agrees to give Vainamoin-
en the spells that he needs to build his boat. Max Renn, in becoming the
cancerous tumor within the Videodrome corporation that assassinates Barry
Convex, becomes a surprising sort of miniature dragon-slayer.
Tus, for modern man the dragon to slay has become the Machine. We are
within its belly, for we have covered the earth with vast urban megalopolises, and
now, like Asimovs planet of Trantor in his Foundation novels, there is nowhere
where city is not. And so now, the city is the mechanical dragon to be slain,
whether by the celluloid heroes of our movies or by the external proletariat of
Islamic fundamentalists from without. Viewed through the dream-like imagery
of our movies, therefore, the events of ,/:: become turned upside down, for
perhaps it is the case that we are the poor slobs who, like Max Renn, have been
swallowed alive by the machine of the city and dont realize it. Te Islamic fun-
damentalists are merely dragon-slayers ghting a great mechanical beast and,
like the huntsman in Little Red Riding Hood who cuts open the wolf s belly to
release everyone inside, are merely trying to help disgorge us from its belly.
Te protagonist of Cronenbergs next lm, Te Dead Zone, is a man named
Johnny Smith who, after a car accident, winds up in a coma for ve years, and
then awakes one day, only to nd that his girlfriend is married and he can
barely walk. But in the interim, his sojourn into some kind of dead zone has
conferred upon him psychic abilities, for now, merely by touching someones
hand, he can learn of emotional traumas or foresee tragic accidents. He also
learns that the future events he foresees are not bound to happen deterministi-
cally, but can be changed. One day, at a campaign rally for a man named Greg
Stillson who happens to be running for Senate, he shakes Stillsons hand and
has a vision of him initiating a full-scale nuclear war. Johnny decides to show
up at Stillsons next rally with a loaded rie, whereupon he takes aim, res,
and misses his target. Stillson, however, puts an end to his career by making
the mistake of reaching for someones baby in order to defend himself. Johnny
is shot down by Stillsons bodyguard, but dies only after he learns that Stillson
has no future.
In many ways, this is a threshold lm for Cronenberg. It his rst major
project based upon someone elses work, namely Stephen Kings novel and
Jerey Boams screenplay. It is, furthermore, an uncharacteristically warm
lm, since the emotional tone of his work is usually ice cold. Here, his charac-
ters have a new-found depth and three-dimensionality that they have not had
before, and there are so many moving moments in the lm that one imagines
;;
that Spielberg would not have done it any dierently.
Also, for the rst time, the Cronenbergian mad scientist is missing. Tere
is an analogue, however, in the role of Smiths medical Doctor, who runs the
Weizak Clinic, and becomes Johnnys personal adviser, although this character
has nothing to do with the acquisition of Smiths new-found ability, and so
Te Dead Zone is the rst Cronenberg lm in which the fantastic element
that drives the plot has been caused not by human wrong-doing, but by some
other, more mysterious, larger purpose. Cronenberg has jokingly remarked
that his mad scientist has here been replaced by God, who botches his experi-
ment in conferring second sight on John Smith.
Te Dead Zone forms an important counterfoil, ontologically speaking, to
Videodrome. In that lm, a brain tumor causes Max Renn to have hallucina-
tory visions that make him paranoid, casting doubt upon the validity of his
actions. In Stephen Kings novel though not in Cronenbergs lm Johnny
Smiths visions, likewise, are caused by a brain tumor, but in this case, there
is no doubt whatsoever about the validity of Johnnys powers to peer behind
the curtain of the stage of world history, for over and over again his visions
are objectively veried. Tis puts him in the role of a metanoid rather than a
paranoid, for he has access to information that guarantees him an objective
glimpse into the ow of destiny.
Tis is important, because when he attempts the assassination at the end of
the lm, we are certain that his deeds will have eective results. Tus, Cronen-
berg takes a rst step toward the solution of the problem of mans fall into the
machine by suggesting that one of the possible ways out is through taking
action rather than merely reacting to media-generated stimuli. Tis is almost
Cronenbergs only optimistic lm about the human condition, since Te Dead
Zone envisions the possibility of mans saving himself through acting upon his
circumstances, although most of his lms do not leave room for such a pos-
sibility, since they usually end with the destruction of their protagonist. Tat is
why the solution to the predicament of humanitys fall into the machine must
generally be found in the work of other lmmakers, as subsequent chapters
will reveal.
5. Te Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988)
Te Fly picks up the basic plot structure of Videodrome, but whereas that
lm shows the disintegrative eect of technology upon a mans psyche, Te
Fly shows how a wayward technology destroys a mans body, while his mind
;
remains perfectly intact along the way. Videodrome is an investigation into the
kinds of psychological pollution generated by electronic technology, while Te
Fly gives us a glimpse of what the biological pollution that will result from
genetic engineering may look like.
Just as Stanley Kubricks eighteenth century vision for his abortive lm Na-
poleon was redirected into his Barry Lyndon, so, in a similar way, Cronenbergs
abortive project of adapting Frankenstein surfaced as his remake of Te Fly, a
kind of modern updating of Kafkas Metamorphosis in which, as in Fran-
kenstein, technology gives birth to a monster. Te lm concerns Seth Brundle,
a scientist who has designed a teleportation pod shaped like the cylinder of a
Ducati motorcycle. One day, while transporting himself from pod A to pod
B, a y crawls into the machine, and their molecular structures are synthesized
into a single being which at rst looks like a normal person. But after a while,
the alien DNA begins to assert its presence, slowly destroying Brundles body,
which falls away at the lms conclusion like the shell of a cicada, revealing the
presence of a gigantic human-y mutant.
Here is another rst in the evolution of Cronenbergs oeuvre: in all his
previous lms, the archetypal mad scientist was separate from the protago-
nist, but here, for once, mad scientist and protagonist are fused into the same
character, as Seth Brundle becomes his own worst enemy by using technology
to destructure his human form. Before Brundle teleports himself, he experi-
ments on a pair of baboons: one goes through the teleportation process and
turns up inside out; the second goes through successfully, encouraging his
own attempt. Te use of the baboon is interesting, for it implies an evolu-
tionary symbolism, as though Cronenberg were suggesting that there is an
unconscious motive amongst scientists to use technology to rid themselves
of their animal, hominid origins, and escape into a pure world of Gnostic
release. In ancient Egypt, the baboon was a symbol of the god Toth, the lord
of writing and the cult of the dead. Baboons are normally shown in Egyptian
mortuary symbolism greeting the rising sun, and so they were associated with
the idea of rebirth.
Cronenberg has mentioned in interviews that he lmed a coda for the mov-
ie in which Brundles pregnant girlfriend gives birth to a boy with the wings
of a buttery. In Greek mortuary symbolism, the buttery was a symbol of
the human soul, and at one point in the lm, Brundle glosses an old Chinese
parable about how the sage Chuang-tzu dreamt he was a buttery and on
waking wondered whether he then had been a man dreaming, or might not
now be a buttery dreaming it was a man. Tus, Brundle suggests that his
transformation into a huge mutant y may be a kind of waking up, like death,
;,
in which the dream of life as a human being is shed like a cocoon.
What, Cronenbergs DNA fable as disguised Gnosticism? Te underlying
motive of science not, after all, to improve upon Nature, but rather to tran-
scend it? Brundles unconscious motive all along to use his machine to help
him get free of his body?
Here the Anthropos begins to grow nostalgic for its home in the luminous
ether.
With Dead Ringers, the Frankenstein theme continues, for in this lm too
protagonist and mad scientist are the same character, only now the Anthropos
has performed cellular mitosis, splitting itself asunder. Dead Ringers examines
the fate of a pair of twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle, who not
only sleep with some of their patients, but trade o with them, as well. When
they meet a woman named Claire Niveau, their relationship is destabilized,
as they are confronted with the very thing they most abhor: emotional seduc-
tion by the power of a woman. For the Mantle twins, women are like insects
to an entomologist: objects to be studied, dissected, analyzed; pinned down,
splayed apart, cut open. At rst, Claire begins sleeping with the brothers
without realizing that she is going to bed with two dierent people, hav-
ing convinced herself that her lover is subtly schizophrenic, as she puts
it. But when she nds out that the twins are playing her, she rejects them,
until she realizes that Beverly, the more emotionally unstable of the two, is
really in love with her. Claire rejects Elliots idea that the three of them share
each other, for she demands that they relate to her as two separate people,
not one. Psychologically speaking, however, the twins are not individuals at
all, but one person inhabiting two separate bodies, and so, no matter how
deeply involved he becomes with Claire, Beverly cannot sever the bond with
his brother. Claire gets him hooked on pills, and eventually Beverly gets his
brother hooked too.
Beverly has discovered that Claire has a trifurcate uterus, or a womb with
three separate chambers, as though to imply that the twins are a sort of thesis-
antithesis awaiting their fusion in a synthesis which it is her destiny to bring
about (likewise, there are three telepods in Te Fly). Beverly insists that he has
never come across such a mutation before, and later, as he is descending into
madness, he explains to Elliot how he has noticed that the patients which have
been coming to him are all right on the outside, but inside, their bodies are
all wrong, and so he commisions a metal sculptor to make a series of surgical
instruments for operating on mutant women. Te resulting implements are
a strange collection of tools with biomechanical characteristics, resembling a
c
collection of metal bones. Ten, when he proceeds to botch an operation us-
ing these instruments on a patient while under the inuence of medication,
the twins lose their license to practice. Eventually they lock themselves away in
their high-rise medical o ce, having alienated everyone, and immerse them-
selves in shooting up exotic drugs, until they decide to attempt a separation
using Beverlys surgical instruments. Beverly gently kills his brother in a drug
induced stupor, and then tries to return the next morning to a normal life,
only to discover that he cannot. After making a phone call to Claire and then
hanging up on her, he returns to the o ce, where he kills himself with a drug
overdose. Te nal image of the lm shows the two brothers draped over each
other as an image of the two who are one again in the end as they were in the
beginning.
Part of the key to understanding the lm lies in its set design. One takes
careful note, for instance, of the fact that the twins apartment, as well as their
medical o ce, is in a high-rise skyscraper. Teir taste in dcor is strictly mod-
ernist: lots of glass, very clinical, cerebral, abstract right angles everywhere
without a curve in sight. Te twins, that is to say, are elevated too high up from
the ground, where they have retreated from the earth and all its associations
of body, femininity, and slippery biology. Tey have become gynecologists in
order to possess and control the female body, the thing they are most afraid of.
Tey inhabit an abstract, transcendental world, similar to that of Cronenbergs
rst two lms Stereo and Crimes of the Future.
Claire Niveaus apartment, on the other hand, is decorated in earth tones:
coee and chocolate browns with walnut paneling and cream-colored walls.
Its dcor, furthermore, is the very opposite of abstract: traditional Chinese
art, statues and calligraphy. She is, in other words, the earth mother, the
dark womb that Beverly crawls back into in order to hide from his brother.
Her world is the cavern: sheltering, chthonic and deep; theirs is the ziggurat,
in which the priesthood attempts to climb away from the earth in order to
achieve escape velocity amongst the stars. But since Beverly cannot live with-
out his brother, he is caught between two worlds: the West, with its aggres-
sive conquest of mother nature, putting her on the rack to torture her secrets
from her the lms opening image in the title sequence is a page out of
Vesalius and the East, with its wandering Tao that ows along with, rather
than against, the cosmic rhythms. Beverly, in attempting to design surgical
instruments, not for real human beings, but for mutant women, is suering
from the distortions of a mind that has sealed itself up inside its abstractions,
for his concepts are not aligned with their percepts. In order to come down
to the earth, Beverly must leave his brother for Claire, but he is caught by the
:
rhythms of another kind of cosmic magnetism that will not allow him to be
severed from his brother: that of morphic resonance, in which forms that are
similar to one another create a resonant stability that is very di cult, if not
impossible to break. Te brothers are caught in a sucking matrix that threat-
ens to swallow their sense of self-identity, and so they are slowly imploding
into one another.
Indeed, one of Cronenbergs major thematic preoccupations is to study the
forces that erode and dissolve the egos attempts to create a stable, dierenti-
ated self. In Videodrome and Te Dead Zone, the individuals ego becomes so
transparent to visions from the astral world that he is ultimately drowned and
overwhelmed. Te same goes for the protagonists of Existenz, Spider and M.
Buttery: all are studies in the devolution of personality. Te Mantle twins are
two of Nola Carveths identical children from Te Brood who have tried to step
away from the group and nd their own life in deant independence of the
mothers will, and so their misogyny is rooted in the fear of being devoured
alive by her. But ultimately she will not allow them to have their own lives and
in the end reclaims them again.
6. Naked Lunch (1991)
Te theme of drug addiction, implicit in Dead Ringers, becomes in Naked
Lunch the explicit metaphor of the lm. Cronenberg, in his adaptation of Wil-
liam Burroughss novel, sends Bill Lee into a kind of drug-induced alternate
reality known as Interzone after he accidentally kills his wife. Cronenbergs
drugs, however, unlike Burroughss, are entirely invented, for Bill and his wife
shoot up bug powder. Later, after he has killed his wife, a Dr. Benway this
lms only vestigial reminder of the Cronenbergian mad scientist prescribes
for him another kind of drug, a black powder made from a ground up giant
centipede. After having shot up with this drug, Lee is on the way to the realm
of Interzone Lees unconscious itself, although it is physically located in
Tangier, where Burroughs wrote his novel and sees, in a hallucinogenic vi-
sion, his typewriter transformed into a giant beetle with a talking asshole that
tells him what to write. Once in Interzone, however, he meets other writers,
among them Tom and June Frost characters based on Paul and Jane Bowles.
Tom loans him his typewriter, but once back in his room, his bug typewriter
attacks and assaults this new insect typewriter, tearing it to pieces. During his
stay in Interzone, Lee encounters Mugwumps, tall spindly beings with heads
shaped like brains from which writer-addicts suck jissom from penis-shaped
:
tubes, jissom which inspires their creativity; in the stalls of the bazaars, mer-
chants peddle the carved-up esh of a gigantic mythical black centipede; it is
a world where everything is erupting spontaneously into animate beings, like
Burroughss undierentiated tissue which can spawn human organs anywhere.
From his contacts with the beings of this underworld, Lee writes the manu-
script of Naked Lunch, the pearl which he brings back with him.
Naked Lunch is shot in the very same earth tones of Claire Niveaus apart-
ment, for it is essentially a vision imagined in the colors of Rembrandts
browns and greens (Bill Lee, for instance, wears a chocolate brown suit). With
this lm, then, Cronenberg has gone down into the bowels of the earth and
the body, where he turns up mythical beings everywhere. Te scarab beetle,
for instance, was one of the major icons of Egyptian mythology, where it sym-
bolized rebirth, since the beetles act of pushing a ball of dung before it was
imagined as though it were actually pushing the sun up out of the ground each
morning. (Te centipede was also a creature of Egyptian myth, albeit a minor,
and very rare one.) Here, Cronenbergs theme of the dissolution of the ego as
it is worn away by contacts with transpersonal forces becomes a portrait of the
artist as a young addict, attempting to channel the forces and impulses of his
bodys organs into a work of art. In this case, Cronenbergs alter ego almost
drowns, but not quite, for at the end of the lm Bill Lee emerges from Inter-
zone with his completed manuscript and is shown crossing the border into the
land of Annexia, where, as a writer, he will annex other peoples lives to his
own. Whereas in Dead Ringers, the Mantle twins had nothing to keep them
aoat in the ocean of the unconscious, Bill Lee unlike, say, Johnny Smith in
Te Dead Zone, or Max Renn in Videodrome has the practice of his craft as
an artist to keep him from drowning in the very same waters that have killed
Cronenbergs other protagonists.
And so, as in Te Dead Zone, where Cronenberg showed us one possibil-
ity for nding a way out of the biomechanical labyrinth as a taking charge of
ones own life through acting, so in Naked Lunch, we are presented with an-
other soteriological possibility: the way of the artist, the practice of whose craft
keeps him sane amidst the oodtides of the Boschian monsters who threaten
to swallow him up. It is signicant that whereas Max Renns hallucinations
in Videodrome were of being swallowed up by giant mouths and other such
vortices, Bill Lees hallucinatory monsters are largely personications of what
Joseph Campbell used to call magical aid, for the various Mugwumps and
typewriter insects are trying to help, rather than hinder, Lee in his endeavor.
Tus, Naked Lunch is one of Cronenbergs very few positive statements of
ways in which the individual ego, threatened with dissolution by the various
,
forces of the modern world electromagnetic technology, drug addiction,
insanity can successfully build a bulwark against them and survive.
7. M. Buttery (1993)
Tis lm is based upon David Hwangs stage play, which is in turn loosely
based upon actual events, in which a Western protagonist falls in love with an
Eastern woman, just as in the opera Madame Buttery. Te only problem is
that the woman is really a man, who happens also to be a spy for the Chinese
government trying to get information on troop movements in Vietnam, for
the Western protagonist is a man named Ren Gallimard, who is working for
the French embassy. Gallimard does not apparently realize that he is in
love with a man impersonating a woman, a man who is ostensibly a Chinese
opera singer named Song Liling. Te lm plays upon a number of ambiguities
through their relationship. Is Gallimard in love with Liling, or with a Chinese
opera singer? Or is he in love with Chinese culture? Or is he merely a repressed
homosexual who can allow himself such an experience only by inventing the
convenient ction that the person he is in love with is female? Eventually
the two get into trouble with their respective governments, and when Lilings
identity as a man is revealed to Gallimard in a French courtroom, he feigns
indierence, but the masks are fully removed on the ride which the two share
in a paddy wagon. Liling, dressed in suit and tie, now pleads before his ex-
lover that their love was no illusion, and as he does so, sheds all of his clothes,
like a buttery emerging at last from its cocoon. Tis scene, one senses, is the
key one for Cronenbergs interest in lming a work not his own, for it echoes
the penultimate scene of Naked Lunch, in which the housekeeper Fedallah re-
moves her skin to reveal that she had really been Dr. Benway all along. In the
dream logic of Cronenbergs inscape, women spontaneously mutate into men
and vice versa, as though he isnt examining the human world at all, but rather
a lower level of the evolutionary scale, something amphibian, perhaps.
Ten, in the lms nal scene, intercut with a montage of Liling being ex-
tradited to China, Gallimard, now in prison, puts on for the inmates his own
version of Madame Buttery, in which he makes himself up as the operas
female lead, and then commits suicide by cutting his own throat with the edge
of a mirror. Nothing in the Cronenberg opus is accidental: the themes of later
lms are explicit amplications of themes contained in embryo in earlier ones.
M. Butterys East-West opposition, for example, was foreshadowed in the set
decoration of Dead Ringers, in which the Mantless modernist apartment is
contrasted with Claire Niveaus Chinese style. Notice that the sexual valencies
in both lms are consistent: the East is associated with the female, and the
West with the male attitudes (the protagonists, in both cases, even played by
the same actor, Jeremy Irons).
In both Te Fly and M. Buttery, the central metaphor, as indicated by the
two insects, is metamorphosis: in the case of Te Fly, physical transformation
of a mans body into that of a giant ys, and in M. Buttery, the psychological
transformation of a man into a woman, played in counterpoint with the trans-
formation of a mans self-deceptions into the truth. In Te Flys never lmed
coda, furthermore, the image of a child born with the wings of a buttery would
have suggested the birth of the soul from the death of the body a religious
idea that is anathema to Cronenbergs stated disbelief in life after death. But
the death of the protagonist of M. Buttery, playing the female buttery of
Puccinis opera at the moment of his suicide, also suggests the idea of the birth
of the soul from the death of the body, underlining once again Cronenbergs
(unconscious) Gnostic desire for release from the connes of the esh.
Te Anthropos is not only restless for liberation from its eshly prison, but
is also growing nostalgic for its hermaphroditic being as the one who existed
eternally before splitting into male and female with the simultaneous irrup-
tion of time and space.
8. Crash (1996)
James Ballard and his wife Catherine live in a high-rise apartment building that
overlooks a huge, swarming freeway. Ballard is an actor, and his wife is taking
ying lessons. Both are having aairs, the details of which they share with each
other in order to intensify their own lovemaking. One day, Ballard has a car
accident which causes the death of the other driver, but leaves the drivers wife,
played by Holly Hunter, alive, though injured. While convalescing in a hospital,
Ballard happens to bump into an acquaintance of the womans named Vaughan,
whom he mistakes for a medical photographer. When Ballard goes to retrieve
his automobile from the parking lot, he encounters the bereaved wife, and the
two begin an aair, having sex in their parked car at an airport. Soon, Ballard
is introduced formally to Vaughan, who happens to be the leader of a small
cult dedicated to performing ritual reenactments of the car crashes of celebri-
ties. Ballard witnesses their performance of the crash that resulted in the death
of James Dean, and listens as Vaughan explains their intentions of performing
a Jane Manseld crash. Vaughan is obsessed with taking photographs of car
,
crash victims, and Ballard learns that Vaughan has actually been following him
around, taking photographs of his aair with Holly Hunter. Vaughan is also a
kind of stalker, or at least enjoys pretending he is one, for Ballard watches from
his own car while Vaughan uses his :,o, copy of the car Kennedy was killed in
to stalk and intimidate Ballards wife. But it is all a sort of game, for Vaughan
and Ballard are now buddies, and they enjoy traveling about in Vaughans car
picking up prostitutes and having sex with them while driving. When Ballard
also brings his wife along, Vaughan proceeds to rape her in the back seat of the
car while Ballard watches in the rearview mirror from the drivers seat, as the
car glides through an automated carwash. Everyone in Vaughans cult has sex
with each other usually in automobiles, or while watching videotapes of crash
test dummies in the living room, and they all look up to Vaughan as a sort of
prophet of a future cult of the automobile. When Vaughan has a huge tattoo of
a steering wheel printed onto his stomach, he insists that Ballard get one, too,
and after doing so, the two have sex in Vaughans automobile. Shortly thereaf-
ter, while Ballard and his wife are playing stalker with Vaughan on the highway,
Vaughan drives his car through the overpass and crashes it into a public bus,
killing himself. Ballard and his wife go to the junkyard and reclaim Vaughans
automobile, and then proceed to reenact Vaughans stalking of his wife, as Bal-
lard attempts to run her o the road. But to his surprise, he is successful and
his wife crashes her car. Ballard goes to her rescue, nds her lying on the grass
where she has been thrown, apparently without injury, and proceeds to have
sex with her. Te lm ends.
Cronenbergs lm is not merely, as it may at rst appear to be, a piece of
avant-garde art designed to shock the middle classes in good Baudelairean
tradition, but rather, it is another attempt to solve the problem of humanitys
fall into the machine, which he rst set up in Videodrome. In that lm, we saw
how the protagonist, Max Renn, was swallowed up into the media-generated
simulacrum of hallucinatory imagery called Videodrome, and was unable to
get free. Indeed, every action of his was merely a reaction programmed into
him either by the owners of Videodrome or their enemies, and the lm end-
ed with his self-destruction by suicide. Crash, likewise, returns to the image
of the human being swallowed up by his machines, in this case personied as
the individual inside the articial environment the miniscape of his auto-
mobile. Tis is made clear for us in a sequence in which the lms protagonists
drive past a car crash, and watch, hypnotized, as the re department attempt
to pry the victims free using the jaws of life. Tis image, we realize, is mere-
ly a euphemism for the situation of the lms protagonists, who likewise are
trapped inside their automobiles. At one point in the lm, a woman named
o
Gabrielle, who has been crippled by a car accident and must walk with leg
braces which she wears like an exoskeleton, climbs into a showroom car, and
is unable to maneuver her legs properly into the drivers seat. Im caught, she
tells the showroom assistant, which, indeed, is an image of the old Gnostic,
Neo-Platonic vision of the souls fall into matter.
In the Finnish epic known as the Kalevala there is an echo of this ancient
idea, in the protagonists journey up to heaven in order to steal re. Te black-
smith hero Ilmarinen lights a re but drops it, and it plunges to the earth,
where it is swallowed up by a blue whitesh. Te whitesh is, in turn, swal-
lowed by a trout, and the trout by a pike. In order to retrieve the re, the
protagonists have to capture the pike, and then peel back layer after layer of
sh until they let the re loose. Te image is a coded allegory of the souls fall
into matter, where it is surrounded by successively denser layers of materiality
which occlude and ultimately cause it to forget its divine origins.
In Crash, there is actually a similar image, when Ballard watches Vaughan
rape his wife in the back of Vaughans convertible. Tey pull into a car-wash
where rst they raise the top, which traps and seals them, like Osiris being
nailed up inside his co n, and then, while the rape goes on, they are further
surrounded by machinery in the form of the tunnel-like car-wash. In other
words, Cronenberg gives us an image of the fall of man into his machinery,
and takes us down into that machinery in hopes of nding a way to extract
him from his mechanical prison, just as the re department extracts wounded
bodies from the twisted wreckage of the automobiles on the freeway.
Indeed, the question which Crash asks is: How is the human being to be
extracted from the mechanical exoskeleton in which he has trapped himself?
What is it, in other words, that makes us properly human, and saves us from
being mere servomechanisms of our machinery?
Crash shows us two inextricably intertwined aspects of the human condi-
tion. One is that we are particularly, and uniquely, sexually obsessed animals.
Unlike all other animals, human females are receptive to intercourse year-
round, and so their sexuality is a constant stimulus to sex-hungry males who
will compete with each other for access to their vaginas. So, we are hungry for
sex year round.
Te other characteristically human thing about us is that we are religiously
inclined. Animals are not interested in spirituality, but we are. Indeed, with
the dawning of self-awareness, human beings have a need to feel connected
to a larger whole that their ability to think and reason ssions them o from.
Spirituality is the antidote to a consciousness that is fragmented by the ability
to reason.
;
So we discover that in Crash Cronenbergs scientist alter ego has meta-
morphosed, for the rst time in his oeuvre, into a prophet-messiah gure.
Vaughans interest in technology is outweighed only by his need to create a
cult that ritually reenacts the car crashes of celebrities. And in his reenactment
of the James Dean crash, he is careful to point out to the audience that the
crash, though killing Dean physically, really succeeded in making him im-
mortal. So, like the early churchs performance of the death and resurrection
of Christ through their ritualized reenactment of the Mass, Vaughan is the
priest of a cult in which the celebrity becomes a sort of modern divinity, made
immortal by the power of the media to magnify images into larger than life
canvases upon which weak egos project their fantasies.
So, in Crash, Cronenberg attempts one solution to the problem of human-
itys fall into the machine. Sex and spirituality are two sides of a related im-
pulse, an erotic urge to achieve wholeness through connection. Tey are both
a means of achieving immortality, the one through biological ospring, the
other through spiritual identication with a cosmic image. Tus, the pro-
tagonists of Crash are much better o than Max Renn, trapped in a similar
environment in Videodrome. Tey are actively sexual and frustratedly spiritual
at the same time. Tey are attempting to nd their way out of the prison of
materiality that the labyrinth of modernity has encaged them in. And since, as
is often the case for a Cronenberg lm, the characters do not here meet their
destruction at the lms conclusion but are fully alive and well, we may suspect
that they are onto something with a future.
9. Existenz (1999)
Picking up on the religious theme from Crash, this lm opens inside a church,
although it is not a service that is taking place, but rather a focus group meet-
ing there in order to assess the audience response to a new virtual reality game
called eXistenZ. Te game is produced by a corporation called Antenna
Research, and it has been specially designed by a virtual reality game designer
who, in Cronenbergs universe, has become a celebrity named Allegra Geller.
Tat there is no such thing as a celebrity game designer, virtual, video or
otherwise, is our rst clue to Cronenbergs metaphor: for there are celebrity
lm directors who, in a way, are analogous to virtual reality game designers in
that they produce virtual environments that become, in theater auditoriums,
nearly as vivid as our dreams. And indeed, the other metaphoric level at work
here (as though there were only two such levels) is the realm of dream vs.
waking, which is subtly paralleled by art vs. reality.

Allegra Geller steps forward, while volunteers are selected from the audi-
ence twelve altogether, as though Allegra were about to become the founder
of a new cult who sit in a loose semi-circle of chairs on the stage, where-
upon they plug in to eXistenZ. We notice that the game pods look more
like eshy embryos than electronic devices, for in Cronenbergs virtual reality,
all electronic machines are personied as tiny living creatures. Te gamepods
have umbilical cords which plug in to a so-called bioport at the base of ones
spine, allowing an interface with the users consciousness that is analogous
to the cyberpunk hackers of a William Gibson novel. While interfacing with
the gamepod, one enters a virtual reality where the laws are exactly those of
a dream: you never know whats going to happen and nothing quite makes
sense. Allegra and her friend Ted Pikul, her bodyguard, set o on a journey to
nd someone to install a bioport into Teds spinal column so that he can play
the game with her. Assassins want Allegra dead; we are never told precisely
why, only that when an assassin attempts to kill her during the focus group, he
shouts, Death to Realism!
Once Pikuls bioport has been installed, he and Allegra play eXistenZ. Enter-
ing a world that is a dream transform of the physical one, they nd their sexual
passions aroused. But no sooner do they begin to make love than the lm
jump cuts to a trout farm where we learn that the gamepods are made from
amphibian eggs that are injected with synthetic DNA. Te protagonists are
directed at one point to a Chinese restaurant where they are told to order the
Special, a plate of boiled reptiles and amphibians. Pikul begins eating the food
to Allegras disgust and, with dream logic instinct, assembles the bones into
the shape of a handgun, the very same handgun that was used by the assassin in
the focus group at the lms opening (here is one of our clues that our protago-
nists have been in a virtual reality game all along). Pikul uses the gun to shoot
the waiter, who, we later learn, was supposedly one of his contacts. We are
never quite sure what the object of the game is, but by the end of it Pikul has
turned out to be an assassin instead of a bodyguard, and so Allegra kills him,
while an underground revolution of subversive Realists has taken over. At the
lms conclusion, we discover that our protagonists have indeed been inside
another game, this one called transCendenZ. Allegra is not a game designer
after all, but merely an audience volunteer, while Pikul is her boyfriend. But, it
turns out, they are in reality assassins who have come to kill the famous game
designer Yuri. Just before they shoot one of the audience volunteers (who, in
the game, had played the Chinese waiter) the volunteer stops them and says,
Wait a minute, tell me . . . Are we still in the game?
,
Existenz, in a way, loops back to revisit some of the basic themes of Vid-
eodrome. It even picks up where that lm left o, with an assassination at-
tempt using a biomechanical handgun. In this case, though the protagonists
are more psychologically stable than Max Renn, they are nonetheless more
ontologically confused. Tey can no more determine whats real than we, the
audience, can. Also, Videodromes image of a vagina opening into a mans torso
is here paralleled by an anus-like bioport opening at the base of the spine.
Cronenbergs scientist alter ego here surfaces for the rst time as a female,
for Allegra Geller, as game designer, plays the role of the scientist-maker whose
biological alterations cause havoc. But Allegra here seems symbolic of some-
thing larger, more Jungian, more Anima-like. She is perhaps a personication
of Cronenbergs own muse, that part of his psyche which inspires his own
virtual realities. Here, as in Videodrome, he seems to evince doubts about the
value of his own work as a lmmaker. Are his ontological explorations merely
confusing his audiences? Is he clarifying anything? Or merely studying the dis-
solution of the stable ego under the impact of electronic technology?
10. Spider (2002)
Tis is Cronenbergs version of A Beautiful Mind. One of his favorite images,
that of an insect, here turns up as a spider, symbolizing his protagonists in-
ability to relate to reality, spinning complex webs of illusion and self-deception
to prevent him from facing it. Spider is the lms protagonist, and like Seth
Brundle in Te Fly, he is here an analogue of the scientist alter ego. Spider
has just been released from an asylum, and now he is trying to live in society.
He takes a room across from a huge, industrial-looking gasworks factory. He
mumbles, but never articulates clearly. We are never certain what he says, but
we know what he is thinking, for Cronenberg exteriorizes his schizophrenia
through a series of subjective images, as in Videodrome. Spider is continually
revisiting his own memories, editing them and trying to weave new webs out
of them. At rst, it would appear that his father killed his mother and replaced
her with a look-alike prostitute, and that the trauma of this event caused his
schizophrenia. But then we realize that Spider has only imagined these things
and that his schizophrenia has no cause, having been there all along. He was
sexually attracted to his mother, and projected her image onto a local prosti-
tute that his father may or may not have been seeing. In either case, we realize
that he imagined the death of his mother and her replacement as a way of dis-
tancing himself from his own Oedipal feelings towards her and his father. But
,c
this imagination was fatal, for it cost him his mothers life. Imagining her as a
destructive replacement out to get him, he tries to murder her by leaving the
gas on inside the house. Te father comes home to nd the mother dead, and
that turns out to have been the incident which landed Spider in the asylum
for most of his life. Only now, in the present timeframe, he is reimagining the
destructive prostitue all over again, this time projecting her onto his landlady,
whom he intends to kill. But at the end of the lm, his realization that he had
not in fact killed a prostitute as a child, but rather his own mother, leads him
to stop himself in time before killing his landlady although it does precipitate
his return back to the asylum.
Spider, like Existenz, is an archetypal Cronenbergian lm in that it is preoc-
cupied not with the formation of a stable personality, but with its slow and
inevitable disintegration into schizophrenia. As such, it belongs with lms
like Videodrome, Dead Ringers and Existenz, which study how a personality is
eroded by outside (or in this case, inside) forces. Te irony of the lm is that
Spider, though he is generating his own webs of self-deception, is himself the
y caught in that very web, having succeeded only in cocooning himself. Spi-
der, therefore, like the characters of Crash or Videodrome, is imprisoned within
a constructed reality, in this case one made not out of technological laments,
but mental ones.
In both Spider and Existenz, Cronenberg seems to be saying that whatever
the mind imagines is what becomes reality. It is an almost Hindu insight,
except that here there is no ultimate ontological basis to hang the reality
on, as in the case of the Hindus, in which the illusion of the world dream is
projected forth by a sleeping god. In Cronenbergs universe, there are no gods
and no ultimate realities, only a shifting mental landscape dreamt up by the
self-deluding human mind, from which there is apparently no release. In the
absence of any higher moral authority, the mind has the power to create any
reality that it wants, the only problem being that the virtual universe thus
generated becomes a tomb from which there is no redemption. It is this very
human self-imprisonment that requires rescue from without in the form of
an avatar who will materialize within this virtual prison as proof of the objec-
tive existence of another world beyond.
,:
7
Tolkiens Industrial Apocalypse
Tere are several possible solutions to the problem of Mans fall into the Machine. In the
previous chapter, we considered David Cronenbergs response to the problem by subverting
technological dominance through the formation of religious structures, such as Vaughans
attempt in Crash to create a cult based on ritual reenactments of the car crashes of celebri-
ties. In this chapter we discuss the approach of Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings demon-
strates the kind of response I call Demolition: solving the problem through wholesale
war upon the Machine and all who serve its interests. Tolkiens battle of elves, dwarves,
hobbits and men against Sauron and his minions is our second scenario to imagine how
the human soul might be extracted from its technological prison in this case, simply by
destroying all complex machines and returning society back to the level of happy little rubes
and farmers nestled in their hamlets amongst emerald green hills and vales glistening with
grass and trees.
Te conict between farmer and city dweller is an ancient one, going all the way back to
Sumerian literature, in which the battles between the farmer god Ninurta the inventor
of the plow and the city god Enki the god of technology are recounted over and over
again. In one such story, Ninurta has freed the tablets of destiny, the mes, from the Anzu
bird, who has stolen them. (Te role of the tablets in Sumerian myth is like that of the
ring in Tolkiens mythological epic: that is, whoever possesses them nds himself capable of
lording enormous power over the rest of creation. Tey are analogous to a sort of magical
power of the resonant word which, when uttered, actually brings its intended eects about.
When, for example, in the story of Anzu, Ninurta res an arrow at the Anzu bird that is
in possession of the tablets, the Anzu bird merely orders the arrow to return to its original
form as a reed, and the bow to return to the sheeps gut that it came from.) Te tablets, then,
have been returned to the abzu, where Enki is in charge of them, but Ninurta desires to
have them for himself, and so he enters the abzu palace with the intention of stealing them.
Enki, however, always knows what is going to happen, and so he fashions a turtle out of
clay which digs a pit near the gate of the abzu, and when Ninurta steps near it, the turtle
reaches out and grabs his ankle, pulling him down into the hole. Ten, as the text has it,
Enki says to him: . . . you who set your mind to kill me . . . who makes big claims, I cut
down, I raise up. You who set your sights on me like this what has your position seized
for you now? Where has your strength ed? Where is your heroism? In the great mountains,
you caused destruction, but how will you get out now? In this story fragment, the point of
view of the city dweller is regarded as superior to that of the rustic farmer, and its creators
,:
did not sympathize with the plight of the farmers who were forever complaining that city
folk took advantage of their labors through overtaxation of grains. In the cosmos according
to Tolkien, on the other hand, it is the farmer who is upheld as the ideal, while the city
dweller with his clever gadgets is regarded as corrupting the purity of the simple life with
unnecessarily complicated claims made by the demands of the machine.
In Patrice Chereaus :,;o production of Das Rheingold at Bayreuth the cur-
tain rises on a stage in which the three Rhinemaidens, dressed as prostitutes,
tease the dwarf Alberich from the top of a huge hydroelectric dam. Chereaus
controversial production was met by purists with scorn, but in fact it illumi-
nated the structure of Wagners nineteenth century imagination, which was
concerned more with ideas about Blut und Boden, das Volk and German na-
tionalism than with medieval mythology. Wotan, accordingly, appears dressed
in a Victorian frock coat, while the giants resemble factory workers, for just as
the gods cheat the giants out of claiming their reward for the construction of
Valhalla, so through the stencils of Marxist formulas the bourgeois are forever
exploiting the proletariat. Siegfried, from this angle, becomes a socialist-revo-
lutionary, and the Ring an allegory of the capitalist gold hoard which corrupts
all those who covet it.
But it is Chereaus image of the Rhinemaidens singing from the top of a hy-
droelectric dam that interests me here, for it is a weirdly appropriate vision of
the enframing of myth in the modern age by technology. It was the advent of
the machine via the infrastructure laid down by Industrialization that precipi-
tated the Twilight of the Gods, and so the mythic beings that we nd depicted
in the paintings of Franz Stck or Arnold Bcklin (the same beings, precisely,
of Mallarms Afternoon of a Faun or the tales of Arthur Machen) were
chased out of the woods and trees, rivers and lakes by the arrival of threshing,
grinding, thumping machines. In breaking apart rocks and stones to extract
metal ores, the dwarves were displaced from their abodes, the elves chased out
of their trees by deforestation, while our railroads, steamships and dams scared
o the various sylphs, nixies and dryads. As the German mystic Rudolf Steiner
put the matter in his inimitable style:
. . . modern technology . . . is just work carried out in two stages. Te rst
consists of destroying the interrelationships of nature: we blast out quar-
ries and take the stone away, maltreat the forests and take the wood away,
and the list could go on in short, we get our raw materials in the rst
instance by smashing and breaking down the interrelationships in nature.
And the second stage consists of taking what we have extracted from na-
ture and putting it together again as a machine, according to the laws we
,,
know as natural laws. Tese are the two stages, if we look at the matter on
the surface.
Looking at it from the inside, the matter is like this: When we take
things from nature, mineral nature to begin with, this is linked with a
certain feeling of well-being belonging to the elemental spiritual beings
that are within it. . . . What is important here is that we cast out of nature
the elemental spirits holding nature together. . . . In all natural existence
there are elemental spiritual beings. When we plunder nature we squeeze
out the nature spirits. . . driving them from the sphere allotted them by the
gods into a realm where they can it about freely and are no longer bound
to their allotted dwelling places. Tus we can call the rst stage the casting
out of the nature spirits.
Te second stage is one where we put together what we have plundered
from nature according to our knowledge of natural laws. Now when we
construct a machine or complex of machines out of raw material, we put
certain spiritual beings into the things we construct. Te structure we
make is by no means spiritless. We make a habitation for other spiritual
beings, but these beings that we conjure into our machines belong to the
Ahrimanic hierarchy. . . .Tus we have technology around us, stued full
of Ahrimanic spirits which we have put there. Tis is what things look like
from the inside . . .
1
Tus, from the standpoint of mythical consciousness, the Rhine is an an-
cient, mysterious river lled with intelligent presences personied as Rhine-
maidens. From the standpoint of modern technology, as Heidegger points
out, the Rhine has become merely potential energy for the powering of an
electric dam:
Te hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the
Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines
turning. Tis turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets go-
ing the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its
network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the
interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical en-
ergy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. Te
hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden
bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river
is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a
water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. . . .
But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not?
Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection
by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.
2
,
It is precisely this transformation of nature in our consciousness from a eld
of intelligible presences to a grid of calculable forces whose potential energy
may be on call for storage and use at a later time that Tolkiens Lord of the Rings
is all about. Tolkien takes the various nature spirits who have been outcast
from their abodes and shows us, from their point of view, what the resulting
situation feels like.
*
For, contrary to what our modernist technocratic sensi-
bilities might assume about such pathetic fallacies, from Tolkiens narrative
it is clear that these beings are not indierent about what is happening upon
this earth, and that neither do they intend to stand by and watch us destroy
the complex tissue of interlayered dependencies and interinvolvements which
is the Earth or Gaia or the Planetary Mind or whatever your a liation to a
particular subculture inclines you to call that self-organizing entity which has
spent three and half billion years creating the biosphere.
Tolkiens prophecy of what lies in store for the future of industrial society
may be found clearly visualized in Te Two Towers, when an army of trees
uproots itself and decides to march against the evil wizard Saruman who has
spent many years deforesting the landscape about Isengard in order to erect
his blacksmith factory. Te trees, led by a race of ancient beings known as
Ents, destroy Isengard by diverting the course of an entire river in order to
submerge it (this is the response, mythologically speaking, of the river gods to
the hydroelectric dam).
Tolkiens work, taken as a whole, constitutes a prodigious feat of cosmological
miniaturization. Te Silmarillion, along with Te Hobbit and Te Lord of the
Rings, is one vast summing up of the great mythological systems of the West,
for Tolkiens opus resonates with echoes from Egyptian myth, Homeric cos-
mology, Gnosticism, the Ptolemaic world picture, Biblical myth and Greek
religion. Most of this, furthermore, is unconscious, for Tolkiens conscious
intention was to create a specically Anglo-Saxon mythology unencumbered
by Norman or Celtic overlays. It is almost as though he were an Anglo-Saxon
skald who had been killed in the Norman invasion of England, and then
*
In the :cc, lm Northfork, a similar situation is explored by Michael and Mark
Polish, who present us with a town in :,,, Montana that must be evacuated and
moved to higher ground, as the state has put in a new hydroelectric dam nearby,
the waters of which will submerge the town. Te lm shows us in true visionary
style the reactions of certain occupants one of whom builds an ark who
refuse to leave. Here the machine is polarized against rural townsfolk and also
angels, who must likewise leave the town in which they have been living since
the middle of the nineteenth century.
,,
reincarnated in the modern day with a full consciousness of his past life, for
he proceeds about the business of mythopoiesis as though there had not been
a thousand years of European cultural history in the interim.
Te overall architecture of Tolkiens opus is a retrieval of the ancient myth
of the cosmic cycle of four world ages that has come down to us most fa-
miliarly from Hesiods Teogony, in which the ages follow the declining se-
quence of metals from gold to silver to bronze to iron. In India these four
ages were known as yugas (Krita, Treta, Dvapara, Kali) and all four together
comprised one great, ever-recurring wheel of cosmic time known as a ma-
hayuga. In the West, on the other hand, beginning with Zoroastrianism,
the four ages became epochs of three thousand years apiece, and all four
together comprised not the wheel of a cosmic chariot but a parabolic arch
of twelve thousand years in which the events of history are not eternal re-
currences but absolutely unique. Te Biblical cosmology was rooted in this
Zoroastrian arch of time and thus, Christs Incarnation, Crucixion and
Resurrection, unlike the dying and reviving of the nature gods of antiquity,
came to be regarded as the linchpin holding creation together, the single
most important event in history.
At the end of the Second Age of Tolkiens cosmic cycle, as recounted in the
Akallabeth that is appended to Te Silmarillion, the shape of the Earth is
changed from at to round, for in an intentional miniaturization of the myth
of Atlantis, Tolkien imagines an island city called Numenor which attempts to
defy the will of the gods by launching an armada of ships to seek the forbid-
den continent of Valinor at the behest of Sauron. As a result, the Great One,
Iluvatar, makes the earth round, so that men can never again attempt to sail
toward Valinor but will only end up traversing the earth in a circle. Tus, at
the climax of the Second Age, Numenor sinks beneath the sea, and Tolkien
brings his cosmology up to date with the Ptolemaic.
It is only at the end of his Tird Age, which is the concern of Te Hobbit
and Te Lord of the Rings, that Tolkien sets the Earth in motion around the
Sun, thus bringing his cosmology up to the Copernican, but here his narrative
ceases, because the Fourth Age is the modern world, and Tolkien has not the
slightest interest in it. Tat he stops at the cusp of the Copernican world pic-
ture indicates the presence of an invisible wall separating him from modernity,
for the sixteenth century, the period of the Copernican shift, is the annuncia-
tion of the end, once and for all, of the Middle Ages.
Te central organizing idea that divides the ancient world from Homer to
Dante on the one hand, and Copernicus to Einstein on the other, is the revela-
tion of motion through innite space. In traditional societies such as those of
,o
the Middle Ages, motion is regarded as a destabilizing force that causes dis-
orientation. Indeed, Tolkien, in this respect, at least, hates the modern world
for precisely the same reasons as Islamic fundamentalists, for both are frozen
into the vision of a static universe of unchanging hierarchies in which mo-
tion, speed and progress are denied, because unsettling. And they are right
to some extent, for we moderns know all too well that the price of constant
change is a society full of neurotics, psychotics and lunatics. But we also have
a high tolerance for noise because we know that it gives birth to creativity and
novelty. In societies like the Islamic world which are paralyzed by rigid social
structures, change is regarded with terror and so the terried become terrorists
who inict the stasis of their own worldview on a dynamical society that is in
constant ux, like the Greek god Proteus.
Te world of the ancients, by contrast, from the Sumerians to Dante, was
a static one. Change was the exception, not the rule, and society was largely a
stable aair. Te Greeks were so afraid of motion that even though Aristarchus
oered an early version of the Copernican universe, it was rejected, for it was
essential to the Greek sense of orientation that the earth, though round, must
be located at the unmoving center of a closed cavern cosmos surrounded by
whirling spheres. And there was no theory of evolution in the Greek world
picture, not because they didnt see it for Anaximander certainly did but
because it was inconsistent with their sculptural sensibilities of the cosmos as
a work of art.
Te medieval cosmos, though temporally dierent from the Greek insofar
as the universe was regarded as the unfolding of a three-act drama of genesis,
crucixion and apocalypse rather than an ever-circling wheel of four ages,
is nonetheless consonant with it so far as the denial of change, motion and
evolution is concerned. For everything in this cosmos has its place, like saints
in their cathedral niches, held together by the skeletal Great Chain of Being
for Jew, Christian and Muslim alike: the four elements comprising the
various metals and minerals at the bottom, plants above them, animals above
the plants, and human beings above the animals. Beyond, in the Heavens,
were the nine ranks of angels, with God, Allah or Yahweh on his throne at
the top.
In the Middle Ages, furthermore, loaning money for interest was considered
usury, and so Dante puts the usurers in his Hell, whereas the modern world
economy is based on the motion of money through a system, which generates
interest, and hence, capital;
3
Galileos fascination with falling bodies led him
to formulate the rst modern law of physics, that all bodies fall at the same
constant rate of acceleration, which he is alleged to have discovered by roll-
,;
ing balls down inclined planes and causing them to travel farther by reducing
the friction and inclination of the plane. Tis led to the First Law of Motion:
that a body at rest or in motion will stay that way unless it is acted upon by an
external force. For the ancients, on the other hand, it was assumed that rest is
the natural state of a body, and that all things, with the exception of the great
spheres that turn the planets, tend toward that state, since a rolling vehicle will
stay in motion only so long as it remains in contact with a motive force. Stop
pushing a cart and the cart will stop. However, as Galileo realized, the cart will
not stop, once set in motion, if there exists neither friction nor air resistance to
impede it. So in Renaissance Europe, the natural state of a body was assumed
to be one of motion rather than rest, and that that motion was changed only
by something that got in its way. Ours is a civilization in motion, then, and
like Macbeth or Michael Corleone aggressively eliminating their enemies, we
allow nothing to get in the way.
Hence: motion through an upwardly mobile society dissolves static struc-
tures such as caste systems, purdah or aristocracy, but in a democracy, anyone
with enough ambition can make it to the top; motion through time involv-
ing temperature yields thermodynamics, and thus automobiles, airplanes and
rockets; motion through geological time yields sedimentation, lithication,
stratication and fossils; motion through biological time gives rise to the evo-
lution of living things.
And so the ancient worlds of the Classical Greek and Roman civilization on
the one hand, and the Levantine cosmos on the other both static in character
were shattered by the restless, roaming Faustian mind.
It is important to note in this connection that the texts which form the
prima materia for Tolkiens opus are entirely medieval: the Eddas, the Icelandic
sagas, the Kalevala, Beowulf, the Volsunga Saga, the Nibelungenlied. His was
a mind so thoroughly anti-modern in character that it could be compared
to a cathedral, and a Romanesque one at that. Te entire galaxy of modern-
ist literature and art simply did not exist for him, and this crucial fact must
be taken into consideration in any accurate judgment of his world-view, for
many people become so swept away by the grandiosity of Tolkiens storytell-
ing that they dont even realize that his work is, in essence, an apocalypse lled
with hatred for the modern world and all its dreams of progress.
Tus, Tolkiens work is regressive in character, for it is an attempt to revive
the mythology and cosmology of the Iron Age in the middle of the modern
world. Like a cathedral in the midst of our skyscrapers, when one enters into
it, one is taken back a thousand years to the splendor and beauty of an age
powered by wind, water, wood and myth; to evenings lit only by the light
,
of candles; to the quiet, rustic charm of rolling hills and forests everywhere,
forests which are so quiet in fact that stumbling into a clearing dominated only
by the silent growing presence of vegetative life is enough to make ones skin
crawl. In a world in which machines are now everywhere, in which people at
campgrounds bring portable televisions and cell phones along with them, lest
they allow themselves to become disturbed by the intrusion of other far more
ancient presences in such a world, we are swiftly losing even the possibility
of having any sense of communion with nature whatsoever. And so Tolkiens
work, though regressive, does have an important point to make about the kind
of world that is being lost as modernity takes over.
Te Lord of the Rings throws an X-ray into the astral plane in order to illumi-
nate the deep structures of our societys present interface with nature. Tat
is to say, what we see on the physical plane as corporations like the Pacic
Lumber Company cutting down trees becomes, from the vantage point of the
astral plane, a war of elves against orcs. For it is the job of the artist to render
the happenings of the invisible world perceptible to the rest of us.
Human consciousness having gradually evolved out of the invisible world
has indeed always sensed its presence. For what appears to the waking mind of
an individual embedded within the cultural context of one world-picture will
appear to another in an entirely dierent way, and yet both may still be grasp-
ing the same reality, the same ding-an-sich lurking out beyond the perimeters of
what can be known to the human mind. Tus, what to an Irish Christian monk
living in an eighth-century monastery may appear as a world woven together
out of an invisible armada of angels within angels like Bodhisattvas out of
a Tibetan mandala painting may appear to a modern scientist like Newton
or Einstein as a eld of higher dimensional mathematics holding together the
very pleats of the geometry of spacetime. And what to an archaic consciousness
appears as a web of astral beings demonic or angelic is to the modern mind
a eld of invisible forces, rather than intelligences electromagnetism, gravity
and mass, rather than elves, dwarves, angels and devils.
When a late nineteenth century German mystic like Rudolf Steiner claims
that our solar system was shaped by angelic beings who sacriced the substance
of their bodies to create its architecture as a humming eld of vibrations tuned
to the music of the spheres, we should realize that not only is Steiner resur-
recting an ancient, esoteric cosmology that was displaced by science in the
seventeenth century, but that that very cosmology is a mythic personication
of what the scientist says when he speaks of higher dimensional mathematics.
Both are intuiting the presence of something else, not visible to the senses,
,,
that is out there, one in the language of images, the other in that of concepts.
Whatever else their dierences and there are plenty ancient myth and
modern science agree on this fundamental point: there is more to the world
than appears to the senses.
In Steiners vision, our machines are not spiritless, but are inhabited by
what he terms Ahrimanic beings. Ahriman is the Zoroastrian god of darkness
and matter, the antithesis of Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and in Steiners
mythology Ahriman is opposed to Lucifer, the god of spirit and its contempt
for all things physical. Human beings, in this system, are caught between the
extremes which both of these entities represent: Lucifer wants to incline us
toward the spiritual world and deny the reality of the physical, whereas Ah-
riman wishes to tempt us away from the spiritual toward a mastery of the
physical. Western civilization has, since the fteenth century, been under the
inuence of Ahriman and, as a result, has steadily lost touch with the world
of the gods. Tis is catastrophic, for humanitys inability to acknowledge the
existence of a spiritual world has led to the mistaken idea that matter is all that
matters. Meanwhile, Ahrimanic beings strive for the possession of the human
soul through their continued incarnations in Western mans machines. Hence,
from the standpoint of the imagination of a George Lucas, the Ahrimanic
beings living inside our machines become visible as R:D:, C,Pc or, more ap-
positely for Steiner, Darth Vader.
Tolkien, in Te Lord of the Rings, makes visible for us his intuition of these
Ahrimanic beings as armies of orcs and goblins, personications of the dark-
ening impulses toward the occlusion of consciousness from the spiritual realm
which Steiners Ahrimanic beings represent. It is thus ironic that Tolkien, as a
good Catholic, professed abhorrence for his friend Owen Barelds fascination
with Steiners philosophy and mythology, for his work is perhaps the closest
one could come unless it be Star Wars to a dramatization of precisely what
Steiner was talking about.
Notice how technology, in Tolkien, is always associated with evil. Sauron
is a gigantic blacksmith god, and in Te Lord of the Rings, Gandalf describes
the wizard Sarumans mind, metaphorically, as being made of metal and
wheels: and he does not care for growing things. Indeed, his name comes
from Anglo-Saxon saru, meaning skill, cunning, cunning device. In Te
Book of Lost Tales, we are told that the fall of the ancient elvish city of Gondo-
lin is brought about by an army of orcs and Balrogs riding upon mechanical
dragons constructed out of bronze and iron, like something out of a Star Wars
lm. And the One Ring itself, which has been compared wrongly, accord-
ing to Tolkien, with the atom bomb is the ultimate symbol of the power
:cc
of technology: he who possesses the most dangerous weapon is the one who
rules over all others.
Te identication of Tolkiens evil minions with Steiners Ahrimanic beings
is appropriate in other ways, too, for Tolkiens cosmos is, like the Zoroastrian,
inherently dualistic: one is either on the side of light equated with natural
beings or darkness, equated with the powers of industrial society. Tere is no
middle ground. Tis is evident from the very structure of Middle Earth, for if
you turn to the map in the back of Te Lord of the Rings, you will discover that
Middle Earth is divided right down the middle by the Misty Mountain chain,
and that the powers of light are associated with the West, and those of dark-
ness with the East. Rivendell and the Shire are both in the West, while Mordor
and Mirkwood forest are in the East. (Lothlorien, the Elvish city of Galadriel,
and Isengard, the home of Saruman, are the one exception to this rule, but
their symmetrical placing at the immediate right and left of the mountain
chain suggests a sort of yin-yang inversion in which the dark contains a spot
of light and vice versa.)
In the Manichean cosmos, the powers of light are associated with the realm
of spirit, and hence the good; whereas, the forces of darkness are linked with
matter, and hence evil, for the world in this tradition is fallen, and the light
is trapped within it. In Te Lord of the Rings, the powers of light become the
various agencies of nature, whether we think of the linkage of elves with the
woods or dwarves with metals and minerals or hobbits with agrarian values
(they do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than
a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skillful with
tools
4
), whereas darkness is associated with technology and the invasion of
the agrarian world by the powers of industrialization. For Tolkien, no good
could come of industrial society, which only brought pollution, noise and de-
spoliation of his beloved rural countryside with its culture of pubs and farm-
ers. Tat Tolkiens magnum opus is an allegory of the clash between the agrar-
ian and industrial world views is conrmed for us by a footnote in Humphrey
Carpenters biography regarding a text entitled Te Bovadium Fragments
which Tolkien was working on in the :,ocs, in which the deep structures of
his narrative are more obvious, which Carpenter describes as a parable of
the destruction of Oxford (Bovadium) by the motores manufactured by the
Daemon of Vaccipratum (a reference to Lord Nu eld and his motor works
at Cowley) which block the streets, asphyxiate the inhabitants, and nally
explode.
5
Tus, the powers of light in Tolkiens cosmos are linked with a pre-indus-
trial way of rural village life that Lewis Mumford in his masterwork Technics
:c:
and Civilization termed the Eotechnic Age, an epoch that was powered by
wind, water and wood. Te society was agrarian and machines, such as they
existed, were simple and made primarily out of wood with iron ornamen-
tation, like windmills or water mills. Tolkiens powers of Darkness, on the
other hand, are linked with what Mumford terms the Paleotechnic,
6
in which
machines are made primarily out of iron and steel, rather than wood, while
coal and steam become the primary motive powers. And the Paleotechnic,
as Mumford observes, was born out of mining operations: the steam engine
began as a pump for drawing water out of mine shafts; the railroad began as
a cart that was pushed along tracks in mines; and the breaking up of mineral
ores to extract their metals became the basis for the new industries of steel
and coal.
Te Eotechnic, with its agrarian base, and wood, water and wind as its
motive powers, was essentially plant-centered, whereas the Paleotechnic, with
its mining and metallurgical foundations, was mineralogical. Notice how in
Tolkiens work the powers of light are always associated with plants and the
agrarian world: hobbits live in the Shire and are basically farmers; elves are
almost always associated with trees and forests, as in the tree house structures
of Lothlorien, where Galadriel lives. Te powers of darkness, by contrast, are
associated with mining and metallurgy: Mordor is a waste land of blasted rock
and volcanoes, where there are no plants or trees. Peter Jackson, in his cin-
ematic version of Te Fellowship of the Ring, shows how Saruman transforms
the beautiful, rustic countryside of Isengard into a huge, dark sooty mining
operation that involves the deforestation of the entire region. In Tolkiens my-
thology, furthermore, the Orcs were once really elves who have been captured
and transformed by Sauron into servants of his Machine. Te woodland peo-
ple, that is to say, have moved to the cities and become factory workers.
Tolkiens mythology, therefore, is a transformation into pictorial and nar-
rative language of what was happening to his beloved rural village life as the
factories moved in and slowly destroyed its forests, blackened its hills, polluted
its rivers and poisoned the air. On one level, anyway, Te Lord of the Rings is
a dramatization of the battle between village and megalopolis, agrarian and
industrial, beautiful rolling green hills and dark, satanic mills.
Peter Jacksons lm adaptation of Te Lord of the Rings belongs to the same genre
of apocalyptic cinema as :oo:: A Space Odyssey, Te Abyss, Where the Green Ants
Dream and Te Last Wave. Whereas the Star Wars lms, with which Tolkiens
work is often compared, do not belong to the genre of apocalypse, for they are
concerned not with imagining the imminent destruction of Western industrial
:c:
and electronic society, but of nding a way to live in it. Tough Tolkiens work is
richer mythologically, since it has been produced by a European consciousness
which is so ancient that it ultimately nds its roots in the caves of Paleolithic
Neanderthal man, Lucass solution to the problem presented by the threat of
the machine is more sophisticated, for Lucas being an American sees no
conict between tradition and modernity, but rather the possibility of a harmo-
nious fusion in which individuals can learn to live a spiritually grounded life in
a mechanized society without letting it take advantage of them.
But Tolkien sees no such possibility, for in his dualistic cosmos there is
either tradition or modernity, but not both, since the modernizing eects
of industrial society have a corrosive eect on tradition. And indeed, he has
a point, for when one considers that advances in technology are far from
merely neutral in their eects on social custom and ritual, we can understand
Tolkiens fears. Te attentive student of culture has only to note how the Eu-
ropean practice, for instance, of learning to play a musical instrument as part
of ones education went out with the invention of the phonograph; or how the
coming of the automobile, with its vast freeway systems, destroyed the sense
of community and personality in small towns and cities with urban sprawl; or
how the impersonality of traveling in cars turned other people into its and
created road rage; or how the Internet, with email, put an end, once and for
all, to the writing and sending of letters.
Technology is not only not neutral, but acts like hydrochloric acid upon
custom, culture, ritual and tradition. How much of this we are willing to
surrender in exchange for the progress of technological gadgetry is any-
bodys guess, but I suspect that there must be a point somewhere at which
people realize that technology is, in fact, slowly stealing their souls away from
them. Tus, the aboriginal anxiety of having ones picture taken for fear of
the machine stealing away the soul is no mere superstition but fact, and the
conservatives resistance to modernization is not something that should be
mocked by liberal lovers of progress but rather taken seriously. For the pro-
liferation of machines is changing our very notion of what it means to be
human, even, as Marshall McLuhan put it, to the extent of turning us into
servomechanisms.
Te name of Tolkiens hobbit hero Frodo comes from Norse frodr, mean-
ing burgeoning or growth, and may also be linked to the Norse Vanir god
Freyr, who is a phallic deity associated with agriculture and its renewal. Tus,
Frodo is the agrarian hero who will bring renewal to the wasteland created by
Saurons army of darkness, but unlike the Arthurian Grail myths, in which the
wasteland was healed by nding the Grail as symbol of the spiritual values of
:c,
love and compassion that were missing from the society, Tolkiens hero is rather
on a quest to rid his society of an evil that is personied in the Ring as symbol
of Technology or rather, Paleotechnology in Mumfords sense.
Tus when, as a philosopher of culture, I take into consideration the im-

mense popularity of Peter Jacksons lm adapations of Tolkiens novels, I nd
that this does not bode well for the endless future of industrial society and
its production of gadgets, especially since the content of Tolkiens Iron Age
myth attempts to undermine the very structures of industrial society which
the masses who pay to see the lms are spending their waking hours building
up. I see the popularity of these lms as a bit of a paradox. On the one hand,
the majority of people who pay to see them have nine-to-ve o ce jobs which
they are chained to because of credit card debt, mortgage, and car payments.
And on the other hand, these lms contain implicit messages of a willed de-
struction of the very industrial structures which are enslaving them.
*
Compare the Native American Iroquois myth of Te Woman Who Married
a Serpent, in which a young woman who has made the mistake of marrying
a serpent king who has six brothers is advised by their rival shaman to nd a
little bag containing their hearts. Once she has stolen the bag, the rival shamans
are then able to destroy the serpent brothers. Te Ring, likewise, in Tolkiens
epic, is the heart of Saurons technological operation, and once it is destroyed,
Saurons power is ended.
Notes
:. Understanding the Human Being: Selected Writings of Rudolf Steiner, ed. Richard
Seddon (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, :,,,), pp. :,:,:.
:. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (NY: HarperSanFrancisco, :,,,), p. ,::.
,. I have taken this insight from William Irwin Tompson.
. J. R. R. Tolkien, Te Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mi in, :,,:), p.:,.
,. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: Te Authorized Biography (NY: Ballantine Books,
:,;;), p.::.
o. Mumford, in Te Culture of Cities, subsequently pointed out that he had borrowed
these terms from his teacher, the urban design thinker, Patrick Geddes.
:c
8
Te Visionary Seizures of
Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky
I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice
upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness Werner Herzog
In the following chapter, we turn to the works of a pair of European auteurs who
give us yet another kind of response to the problem of the Machine. In the lms of
David Cronenberg, we saw a vision of humanity trapped within a biomechanical
labyrinth of its own making, and with Tolkien, we explored one way of extracting
humanity from its technological cocoon by attempting to blow apart the cocoon
from within. In the case of Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky, we will consider
two dierent examples of what I call Transparency, in which the machine as
all-encompassing environment is rendered invisible by placing it within a larger
environment, thereby creating a dwarng eect. In Herzogs case, human civiliza-
tion is set within a vast cosmic context in which the various landscapes of Nature
mountains, jungles, forests are so powerful and enormous that they simply
render the Machine insignicant, turning it into stage scenery playing over the
backdrop of a much larger drama. With Andrei Tarkovsky, on the other hand,
whose Solaris was a deliberate response to what he saw as the technocratic vision
of Kubricks :cc:, we discover a planetary mind that irrupts into the psychological
caverns of the minds of a handful of technocrats aboard a space station a god-like
being that is mightier and more powerful than any system dreamed up by a tech-
nocrat could ever be. Here, the machine is also rendered insignicant by something
larger, in this case, not the vast and rhythmic cycles of an impersonal cosmos, but
a planetary-scale divinity that resists the attempt to place it inside a mechanical
environment. With Transparency, then, the problem of the Machine is solved by
setting technology within an environment that eectively renders it insignicant.
Te Visionary Seizures of Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky
:c,
1
Te artistic ripening of both Herzog and Tarkovsky took place in the same
year, for it was in :,;: that Herzog made his Aguirre: the Wrath of God, and
Tarkovsky, his Solaris. Tese lms are in many ways their respective directors
nest work, each representing his most characteristic vision: in Herzogs case,
the image of the wandering nomad who strays too far beyond the pale of
civilization and pays for it with madness, and in Tarkovskys, the vision of a
spiritual communion with an utterly inscrutable intelligence that proves to be
the source of a deeper wisdom.
Aguirre sums up the major themes of the rst epoch of Herzogs career as
a lmmaker, while simultaneously inaugurating the beginning of a new one.
If we do a brief rewind of his earlier lms, it becomes evident that his major
thematic preoccupations concerned the nature of madness, visions, hallucina-
tions and mirages. His rst feature lm, Signs of Life, for example, was about
a German soldier who is stationed on a Greek island during World War II
to guard a munitions fort with two other soldiers. Bored by the heat and the
monotony of their routine, one day they take a hike back into the hills, where
they stumble across a gigantic eld of windmills spread as far as the eye can
see. Te sight of the windmills somehow drives the lead soldier, Stroszek, in-
sane, and when he returns to camp he holds the entire town under siege, tak-
ing sniper shots at them from a tower, while lighting reworks that threaten
to blow up the munitions.
In his next feature lm, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Herzog parodied the
:,o youth culture rebellion with a vision of dwarfs who have taken over a
lunatic asylum. Te lm is plotless, and spends its ninety or so minutes in
one long montage of dwarves destroying a sanitarium in Africa. Ten, in one
of his earliest documentaries, Fata Morgana, Herzog gives us a sweeping look
at desert landscapes in Africa, focusing on the hallucinatory eect of mirages.
Te lms opening images are a series of shots of a plane landing, and as the
day wears on, and the heat gets worse, the shots become more and more dis-
torted and mirage-like, preparing us for the meditation on the dissolution of
form which follows.
With Aguirre, Herzog sums all this up with a tale that is based loosely on
the actual episode of a Spanish conquistador named Lope de Aguirre, who in
the sixteenth century went in quest of the fabled city of El Dorado, and disap-
peared along with his entire expedition. One of the few surviving documents
that we possess of this disaster is a letter written by Aguirre to the Spanish
crown proclaiming not only his independence from Spain, but his ownership
:co
of all that the city of El Dorado contains. Tus, the thematic material from
Herzogs earlier lms achieves here its summation: the revolt against authority
in Even Dwarfs Started Small, the chasing of mirages from Fata Morgana, and
the theme of a soldier who rebels and goes mad from Signs of Life.
Brilliantly portrayed by Klaus Kinski, Aguirre is a small, hunchbacked man
whose body appears to be held together with an odd assemblage of straps and
belts. As the lm begins, we see the Spaniards pouring in single le down a
narrow passage along the side of an Andean mountain, and then close ups
show them, incredibly, to be dragging such things as cannons, horses and a
litter carrying Aguirres own daughter.
*
Te men come to a river where they
build a series of rafts and set forth with their horses and cannons, but two of
the rafts are immediately caught in a whirlpool from which they cannot es-
cape, and the men commit suicide.
As they go oating downriver, the party encounters a series of strange tab-
leaux, each more surreal than the last: a horse that is evicted from one of
the rafts crawls into the dense tangle of overgrowth along the shore, where it
stands peering at the protagonists as they drift by in silence; an entire galleon
is found suspended within the branches of a tree, without anybody making
the slightest comment as to how it could have gotten there; cannibalistic na-
tives straight out of a Conrad story shoot at them from the banks. Eventually,
the crew die o from various causes, until we are left with the nal image of
Aguirre, like an insane king, oating on a raft lled with dead bodies, includ-
ing that of his own daughter, while a swarm of monkeys scurries over the rafts
crumbling skeleton around him.
Aguirre plays on European quests to nd riches in the New World, a mo-
tive that will become so persistent in the founding of America as to become
its very raison dtre. Again and again, one European explorer after the next
will come to America in search of fabulous lands and new horizons, from Bal-
boa to Coronado to de Soto. America will become the New Eden, a land of
natural resources to be stripped and mined and pillaged and plundered; towns
will arise in the deserts of the Southwest whose entire economies will rest on
mining metals such as copper and silver, and once exhausted, the towns will
be abandoned to rot in the sun like rubber tires cracking in the desert heat;
bualo will be hunted only for their skins, their carcasses shamefully left blot-
* Tis shot is a classic example of Herzogs quest for what he calls new images, for
whereas Kinski preferred the lm to open with a standard postcard shot of the
ruins of Macchu Piccu, Herzog insisted that the shot begin with this Andean
mountain and its ant-like train of tiny humans, dwarfed into insignicance by
the sublimity of the landscape.
:c;
ting the plains to embarrass and outrage the Native Americans; lands will be
bought up in California solely for the mining of gold or the channeling of
water; New York City itself will become the worlds rst entirely secular city
established exclusively for the purpose of making money.
Herzog is fascinated with the dreams and chimaeras that lead us astray, the
visions that turn out to be Siren songs of destruction. Aguirres story of the
rst declaration of independence against Europe is simultaneously an allegory
of the American Dream as well as a vision of its shadow side, in which dreams
vanish like mirages to reveal the stark reality behind them. Herzog will return
to this very same theme later in Stroszek, a lm about an abused man from
Germany who seeks solace and comfort with his prostitute wife in America,
only to have his dreams end in despair and suicide.
Francis Ford Coppola certainly had Herzogs lm in mind while making
Apocalypse Now, for the visual quotations from Aguirre are too numerous to be
accidental. And Conrads Heart of Darkness looms somewhere behind the nar-
rative of Aguirre, for we know that Conrad is one of Herzogs favorite authors.
Both Aguirre and Heart of Darkness share in common the vision of a man who
rebels against authority and attempts to create his own kingdom in the jungle.
Both stories also cast an ironic eye on the fortunes of European colonialism,
insisting that the jungle and, along with it, the archaic consciousness of the
natives, is a force too powerful for the European psyche to tame. Te image of
the raft sailing up a river whose dense tangle of trees conceals hostile natives
is paralleled in Coppolas lm, as is the rebellion of the insane Kurz with that
of Aguirre.
Like Te Godfather or Citizen Kane, Aguirre is a study of a personality
gone awry, for the kind of civilization that can produce a mythology of the
individual as a cosmos unto himself can also generate pathological egos like
Aguirres or Miltons Satan whose very charisma can lead whole peoples to
ruin. Just as the shadow side of a civilization within which magic actually
works through an individuals immersion in a group is the violation of the
individual through human sacrice, so too, behind every Cortez, there lurks
the deformed shadow of an Aguirre, whose personality is actually a caricature
of individuality. For those who cannot tell the dierence between genius and
madness and sometimes the distinction is very thin, indeed the disaster of
an Aguirre expedition, the sinking of a Pequod, or the fate of a Nazi Germany,
awaits.
In the decade of the :,;cs, Herzog produced one masterpiece after another:
Kaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Stroszek, Nosferatu, Woyzeck. Tis second phase
:c
of his work ends with Fitzcarraldo, in which he returns full circle to South
America with Klaus Kinski and the plot of a boat moving up a river. After
Fitzcarraldo, he made only four feature lms in twenty years: Where the Green
Ants Dream, Cobra Verde, Scream of Stone awed, uneven works and, in
:,,,, Invincible, a ne return to his earlier mastery.
Hitherto, Herzog has been a global nomad, restlessly wandering over the
earth, setting a lm now in Greece, now in Africa, now in South America.
But Kaspar Hauser begins a phase in which his lms are set in his homeland
of Germany. He will continue with Germany as the locale for his lms until
Woyzeck, whereupon he will not return there again for a feature lm until
Invincible.
With Kaspar Hauser, Herzog poses a traditional philosophical problem,
asking, Is our inmost, fundamental human nature determined by our social
environment, or is it innate? Te posing of this question for Herzog is impor-
tant because each of his lms seeks a dierent pathway into the human soul,
investigating the visions, dreams and desires that push us to accomplish our
great tasks. Herzog is fascinated by individuals who attempt Herculean deeds:
men who push steamboats over mountains, climb to the tops of mountains
said to be impossible to scale, or survive against almost incredible adversity,
such as Dieter Dengler who, in Herzogs documentary lm, Little Dieter Needs
to Fly, was shot down in the Vietnam war and taken prisoner, where he sur-
vived while watching all of his fellow prisoners perish one by one. In the Her-
zogian universe, such events are not accidental, neither are they random, but
rather they are functions of the character of certain particular human beings
driven by a surplus of Schopenhaurian Will that pushes them into extraordi-
nary situations beyond the bounds of those necessary for mere survival. It is
therefore important for Herzog at this point in his career to ask the question
whether the inclinations of the human soul exist from birth or whether they
are mere imprints.
Kaspar Hauser is based on the true story of a boy who spent the rst sixteen
years of his life in a cellar. One day, he turns up in the streets of Nuremberg
and is taken in by the upper circles of society, where he is taught to read and
write and speak. But when, a mere two or three years after being released
from captivity, he sets about writing his autobiography, he is mysteriously
murdered. Herzog, as always, alters reality in order to suit the inward truth of
the soul, and so his narrative of Kaspar Hausers life is only loosely based on
fact, and has no concern whatsoever for speculations common to the Kaspar
controversy, such as who he really was, whether he was descended from nobil-
ity or not, and who murdered him. Instead, Herzog pays careful attention to
:c,
the way in which the acquisition of language enables Kaspar to articulate his
own unique way of looking out on the world. Kaspar is forever being told by
society that his views are wrong, but in fact they are the views of a tempera-
ment that is haunted by visions, innately those of a poet. He says things that
might have been uttered by Rilke or Trakl. When, for example, he is standing
with his ward near the jail tower in which he had spent his rst days out of the
cellar, he says, A giant must have built this. When his ward condescendingly
laughs and reassures him that this is not the case, Kaspar goes on to insist that
the room inside the tower is actually larger than the tower itself. When the
ward objects, he points out that when he was in the holding cell, wherever he
looked, he saw only the room. But if now, standing in front of the tower, he
turns away from it, there is no tower in front of him unless he turns back to
face it. Terefore the room was larger than the tower. Tis is the kind of epis-
temological experiment we would expect from an M.C. Escher lithograph.
Tough society insists upon imprinting his mind with a correct way of
looking at things that is, an eminently rational and hence, in the history of
humanity, very late kind of consciousness Kaspar insists on his pre-rational,
animistic views of the world, which could not have been socially acquired since
he has spent his entire life alone in a cellar. For example, when he insists that a
pile of apples lying on the path before the garden are tired and wish to remain
there, he is corrected once again by his ward, who tells him that the apples obey
our human will and have no will of their own. Te ward tells Kaspar that when
he throws the apple, it will go only just as far as he wants it to and no more.
But the apple hits a dip and bounces into the grass. It jumped in the grass,
and hid, says Kaspar. No, Kaspar, says the ward and proceeds to demonstrate
once more by having his friend hold out his foot as a stopping point, while he
rolls the apple directly to it. But once again the apple jumps over his friends
foot. Clever apple, Kaspar says. It was smart and disobeyed you.
Kaspar is haunted by visions. One day, he recounts a dream to his ward
who says he must be making progress because Kaspar used to believe that his
dreams were real, but Kaspar says, It dreamed me last night, and then pro-
ceeds to recount a vision of the Caucasus, in which Herzog shows us some old
mm footage of a eld of temples in Burma washed beneath a pale yellow sun.
Later, as he is dying, he recounts the beginning of a story that has haunted him
because he does not know how the rest goes, and tells of a caravan of Berbers
traveling across the Sahara, led by a blind man who tastes the dirt and insists
that the mountains which they see in another direction are a mirage and that
they must continue traveling north, where they arrive at a great city. Tere the
story ends, and so does Kaspars visionary life.
::c
Herzog is quite clear in this lm that he does not believe in the souls socially
conditioned origins, and so, consistent with the traditions of German ideal-
ism, a rms that its propensity toward a particular way of looking at things is
indeed innate. Tus, we are born into the world with a specic set of inclina-
tions that will cause us to drift now in this direction, now in that, but most
denitely not merely to be blown hither and yon by the winds of chance. In
the Herzogian universe, there is no chance. Dieter Denglers ordeal, for exam-
ple, emerged out of a vision from his childhood that he would one day y. Tis
particular inclination was unlocked from within him by the sight of an Allied
ghter plane headed straight for his bedroom window. Tus, it is no coinci-
dence that one day he too would y as a ghter pilot, just like the one in the
plane who shot at his house. In the case of Kaspar Hauser, we are certain that
he was destined to be a poet or an artist of some kind, though circumstances
did not allow this to come to fruition. Instead, it was his destiny to appear in
the world as an almost metaphysical enigma to be puzzled over by subsequent
generations curious about the nature of the human mind.
His epistemological position made clear, Herzog then proceeded with the
elaboration of his vision, and so, with his :,;, lm Heart of Glass, he turned
toward an examination of the kinds of forces that cause civilizations to col-
lapse. Heart of Glass tells the story of a small, pre-industrial German village
whose inhabitants resemble the characters of a Pieter Brueghel painting. As
the lm opens, the villagers have come to the town prophet, Hias, terried
of visions that a giant is coming to destroy them. Hias assures them that they
are wrong, but insists nonetheless that he has foreseen the end of their way
of life, for the glassworks upon which their economy depends will perish in
ames. Te town is famous for producing a special kind of ruby red glass, but
Mhlbeck, the Master of the Glassworks factory, has died, and no one else
knows the secret for making the precious glass. Frantically, the town engages
in a search for the secret, hoping that the Master had at some point written
down the formula or stued it in a couch, but to no avail. Hias, the shepherd-
prophet, is summoned in hopes that he will be able to tell them where Mh-
lbeck has hidden the formula, but Hias prophesies only destruction for them
all. Gradually, the townspeople descend into a drunken madness, and when
the glassworks factory perishes in a re, they turn on Hias, blaming him for
their misfortune, and throw him into a dungeon. When he is released, dur-
ing the lms nal sequence he has a vision, a sort of parable within a parable,
about a small island in the sea whose inhabitants have not heard that the earth
is round. One of them stands gazing out to the horizon for years, and begins
:::
to have doubts. He is joined by three men who decide to undertake a voyage
in their small craft in order to nd out if the earth is round or whether they
will fall o.
Herzogs concluding parable is an image from pre-Copernican cosmology
which evokes archaic maps showing the edges of the earth in space, just as his
apocalyptic fable describes its boundaries in time, for the voyages of Colum-
bus and the great Portuguese navigators mark the end, once and for all, of
the archaic cosmology of the Middle Ages. Te larger parable Heart of Glass
taken as a whole in which Herzog has situated the smaller is a vision of the
time that will inevitably come for us, and perhaps for the world, when the
highly specialized knowledge for making our machines will be lost, and of the
subsequent plunge into a Dark Age. We go about living our lives in the great
cities which we have built as though their existence were self-evident. We be-
lieve that our civilization is unprecedented, something never before witnessed
on Earth. Our planes bejewel the nightskies with articial stars, our cities
radiate their incandescence into the dark, visible from space as tiny gleaming
islands in the lenses of satellite eyes weaving their signals into a technosphere
that wraps the planet in a second skin; armies of shining automobiles pour
forth over the roads and freeways of the continent; helicopters like metal drag-
onies hang above these tra c swarms; our computers transmit thoughts at
light speed through ber optic cables, antiquating at a stroke the very notion
of distance. We moderns, it would appear, are what history has been aiming
at all along. Our cities, for the rst time ever, are permanent, like granite.
However, the truth as many of our modern lmmakers seem to recognize
is that we are just as embedded within cosmic cycles of time and history as
were the ancients, and for our civilization too the end must come, inevitably.
Herzog in this lm is making no mere economic statement, that civilizations
fall apart due to the exhaustion of natural resources, as many think. It is rather
that the loss of the secret for making the ruby red glass is a metaphor for the
loss of the initial vision which, through myth and ritual, inspired a civilization
to begin with. For, once the inspiring vision is lost, the civilization in ques-
tion is doomed. Here, once again, as with Kaspar Hauser, destiny is a function
not of the environment, but rather of the dynamics of the souls visions and
dreams and myths, and of the kinds of interior maps that enable it to organize
and articulate a cosmos. Once an individual or an entire society goes deaf to
the voice that sings the mythic vision, as ours now has, then all is indeed lost.
In :,;,, Herzog remade Murnaus :,:: silent lm Nosferatu and in a way,
he is exquisitely faithful to the original, so much so, in fact, that he actually
:::
returned to some of the locations where Murnaus lm was shot. But Herzogs
version is more sensitive to ancient mythic patterns, for his narrative excavates
the deep structures which the Dracula fable shares with Manicheanism. In the
Manichean cosmogony, the Anthropos, primal man, garbs himself in a suit
of light in order to descend into the realm of darkness and do battle with the
demons and devils who are jealous of the kingdom of light and wish to possess
it for themselves. But the Anthropos fares badly, and the demons tear o his
armor of light and devour it, so that light becomes entrapped within the world
of matter. Te Anthropos, unable to escape, must be shed out of the realm
of darkness by the Holy Spirit, who then proceeds to create the universe out
of the dead bodies of the demons slain in battle, most of whom have already
eaten the light.
Herzogs Jonathan Harker sets forth, like the Anthropos, from his world of
light, in this case, a warm, sunny home, which Herzog paints in stark white
tones, with his wifes pale skin matching her cream-colored dress. As the nar-
rative progresses, we follow Harkers meditative journey on horseback through
a shadowy landscape resembling something out of a Caspar David Friedrich
painting, while the opening chords of Wagners opera Das Rheingold sail over
the soundtrack, announcing the lms rst apocalyptic note. Harker spends
the night at an inn, where he is warned about the realm of darkness he is about
to enter, but he disregards the peasants as merely superstitious and continues
on his way, arriving at the castle by nightfall. Harker, of course, as the well-
known story goes, is so seduced by the creepy beauty of Draculas gothic estate
that he becomes entranced, and is then eventually bitten by the vampire, who
locks him in his castle. Tus, Harkers imprisonment in the castle retrieves the
Manichean myth of the fall of the Anthropos into the realm of darkness.
Dracula has discovered that Harker has a wife and so he loads up his weap-
ons a collection of ebony co ns lled with plague-bearing rats and pre-
pares, like the Lord of Darkness in the Manichean narrative, to assault the
kingdom of light by retracing Harkers journey from the city to the country in
reverse. Te ship upon which the vampire takes passage glides into the towns
harbor like the ships bearing rats that brought the Black Death to fourteenth
century Europe, for its crew are all dead, victims of the plague. As Dracula
searches for Harkers wife, the town succumbs to illness and slowly, its streets
and courtyards ll with hordes of rats and piles of dead bodies. Te camera
oats past a gallery of surreal images: a family at supper in the middle of the
town square, while rats swarm around their feet; people joining hands in a
medieval dance of death, while Dracula, garbed in black, steals in and out of
the shadows around them, looking for victims.
::,
Like Murnaus lm, the story concludes when the rising sun catches Dracula
unaware at the bedside of Harkers wife, just at the moment of his seduction;
but where Murnaus lm ends with the traditional victory of the solar hero
over the dreamlike apparitions of the night, Herzog rejects the hero myth, for
Harker, meanwhile, has made it back to the city, and we see him riding o
as a vampire toward civilization like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
carrying the plague with him.
As with Heart of Glass, Herzog here shows us a vision of civilization sliding
into chaos and anarchy, almost as though he is trying to exteriorize his child-
hood trauma of watching Germany being re-bombed into cinders all around
him. Herzog seems fascinated not with the forces in life that build structures
up, but rather with those that cause them to wilt and die, like owers at night-
fall.
Finally, consider the wonderful parable of his :,: lm, Fitzcarraldo, which
tells the story of a man obsessed with building an opera house in the jungles
of the Amazon, and bringing Enrico Caruso there to sing at its premiere.
Fitzcarraldo, as the natives call him, has not fared well in his competition
with the other tycoons who have made fortunes exploiting South American
rubber plantations, for he has already gone bankrupt in his grandiose attempt
to build a trans-Andean railway. In order to generate revenue for his opera
house, he buys a stretch of land that the other rubber barons have neglected,
since access to it is restricted by dangerous rapids, and intends to establish his
own plantation there. Two rivers are separated by an isthmus, and Fitzcarraldo
purchases an old steam boat in hopes of dragging it across to the other river,
where he will build his plantation.
But along the way, his superstitious crew deserts him for fear of the canni-
balistic Jivaro. When the tribesmen encounter Fitzcarraldo and his bone-white
steamship, however, they regard him as the fullment of their prophecy of a
white god who will deliver them to paradise in a beautiful vessel. Tey agree
to his plan and set about clearing the mountain of its trees in order to make a
path for the ship. Te central image of the lm is of an elegant white steamship
crawling up the side of a mountain like the vertebra of a dinosaur, as hordes
of natives drag it along using only block and pulley technology. Te operation
ceases for two days, however, when one of them is crushed beneath the weight
of the ship, and due propitiation is given to the river gods. When it resumes,
the ship is pulled up the hill and down the other side, but during the evenings
festivities, the natives cut the ship free from its moorings and it goes plunging
down the rapids to its destruction, a return sacrice to the river gods.
::
On one level, Herzogs lm is a meditation on the human urge to monu-
mentality. Te historical prototype for Fitzcarraldos character set out to ac-
complish exactly what is depicted in the lm, with the signicant exception
that he disassembled the boat rst. But Herzog once again changes reality
to suit the truth of poetry, for as he has told interviewers, he was inspired to
make the lm by the problem of how Neolithic peoples could have moved
the megalithic stones of Carnac in Brittany into their present congurations,
and indeed the image of hundreds of aboriginals using levers to drag a giant
ship over a mountain in service to the obsessions of civilization evokes the
Biblical lms of the :,,cs, in which slaves drag stone blocks over rows of logs
to assemble the pyramids. Every historical epoch from the Paleolithic to the
present day has been marked with a unique signature of the human attempt to
monumentalize a particular vision of the cosmos, to capture an entire world
within the more permanent substances of stone and steel.
But the shadow side of monumentality is what awaits it: Fitzcarraldos
steamship goes crashing back down the river and, along with it, his dream.
Te jungle moves in to suocate the ancient stone temples of the Mayan-Az-
tec world; the sands of the desert grind away the Hellenistic cities of the Near
East; Alexandria dreams beneath the sea, its lighthouse become legend.
Herzog is fascinated with the liminal zones which dene the shadowy
edges between civilization and chaos, the areas where black and white merge
to form the charcoal shadows of twilight between night and day. To him,
civilization is a mere dream poured over the earth like a time lapse image
of clouds in the Andes, no more substantial or permanent than a mirage on
the horizon which tricks a man into believing that his feverish dreams are
real. For Herzog, it is the great and mighty forces of the Earth which are
permanent, for these are the same forces that drive the human imagination
to pursue its fantasies.
Consequently, it is the outsider to civilization in which Herzog is most
interested: the Kaspar Hauser or Fitzcarraldo or Woyzeck who has no place
within society because of his fascination with its edges. Such individuals are
those rare ones to whom the song breaks through in the visionary seizures of
trance and, if sometimes those individuals are driven mad by such images, that
is merely the by-product of the very process that produces them. His lms
are a monument to the human soul, a mausoleum of visions of madness and
despair, but also of the fevered pursuit of realizing an idea through the various
transitory embodiments of human endeavor.
::,
2
Te great Russian lmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky was also fascinated with the
dynamics of the human soul. In many ways, he is the perfect foil for Herzog.
Where Herzog is nomadic, he is sedentary; where Herzogs attention is con-
stantly and restlessly shifting from one lm to the next, Tarkovsky was as slow
and obsessive as Stanley Kubrick; consequently, like Kubrick, he made only a
handful of lms, eight
1
to be precise. And, in contradistinction to the majority
of Russian lmmakers, each of these lms is a masterpiece of visionary, rather
than realist, lmmaking, for Tarkovsky was a man who, like Werner Herzog,
always sensed that the surface of the visible world conceals immense depths of
cosmic signicance.
Tarkovsky was a sort of displaced mural painter who eschewed his own
countrys invention of montage in favor of gigantic deep focus panning shots
stued with images and symbols: in Andrei Rublyev, peasants tilling elds or
soldiers marching on horseback adorn the horizons of the frame, while fore-
ground tracking shots follow the peregrinations of the lms medieval pro-
tagonists; in Nostalghia, the camera glides over the surface of a river littered
with debris from a poets past as he drifts through the decaying towns of Italy
searching for an experience that will make sense of his alienation; or the poet
and the scientist in Stalker, who are led through a labyrinth of corridors and
tunnels in quest of something called the Room, which is said to confer upon
its seeker anything he wishes.
Tarkovskys work, therefore, is tantamount to a spiritual thawing of Russian
materialism. His :,oo lm Andrei Rublyev, for instance a study of the great
fteenth century artists odyssey through medieval Russia could be read as an
allegory of the quest for Russian roots in the piety of its Orthodox past. Its most
immediate cinematic inuence is Kurosawas Seven Samurai, but in Tarkovskys
vision, the protagonist ghts the barbarians not with a sword, but with the
integrity of his pursuit of a larger, grander more sublime vision of the hissing
sound of displaced air made by the apping of the wings of descending angels.
Werner Herzogs study of Russian spirituality, Bells from the Deep, is a docu-
mentary that seeks to fathom this very essence of the true soul of Russia with
its image of peasants gazing down through a frozen lake in spiritual contempla-
tion of the ancient sunken city of Kitezh. Tus, as the frozen surface structures
of Bolshevism melt away, the true image of the Russian soul will emerge into
view. Te Russia of the coming centuries, as both Oswald Spengler and Rudolf
Steiner prophesied, will resemble at least in its religiosity something more
like pre-Bolshevik Russia, which Spengler sketches in the following passage:
::o
Depths of religious feeling, ashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great
awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning,
as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a [culture] . . . Says
Dostoyevski: Everyone in street and marketplace now speculates about the
nature of Faith. So might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Tose
young Russians of the days before :,: dirty, pale, exalted, moping in
corners, ever absorbed in metaphysics, seeing all things with an eye of faith
even when the ostensible topic is the franchise, chemistry, or womens edu-
cation are the Jews and early Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the
Romans regarded with a mixture of surly amusement and fear.
2
Tus, Tarkovskys work represents the beginnings of the return of the Russian
imagination to the deep, inward piety of its roots.
Of his eight lms, it is his :,;: classic Solaris which we will focus on here as
being the most characteristic of his particular vision. Based upon a :,o: novel
by the Polish science ction writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris tells the story of Kel-
vin, a psychologist sent by Russian authorities to investigate the mental status
of three scientists on board a space station in orbit around the planet Solaris,
which is covered by a vast, sentient ocean. He discovers that each scientist is
haunted by a sort of ghost, and indeed, by the time he arrives, one of them has
already committed suicide. Te remaining two scientists are reluctant to speak
to him and seclude themselves in their rooms, while Kelvin wanders about
through the detritus littering the stations empty corridors.
Ten, one evening, he awakes from a nap to nd his dead wife Hari sitting
at the foot of his bed. She had committed suicide a decade earlier but seems
to have no recollection of the event, although her arm is still scarred by the
pink welt where she injected herself with poison. She follows Kelvin around
the space station, insisting that she not be left alone. At one point, Kelvin
places her into a capsule and ejects her out into space, but later she reappears.
Gradually he learns from the other scientists that she is an incarnation of the
planetary mind of Solaris, which is apparently studying the scientists by dig-
ging around amongst their memories of failed relationships and taking on the
form of ghosts from their pasts.
As Hari begins to suspect that she is not human, she becomes more and
more desperate, and nds herself slipping back into the very self-torment that
drove her to suicide as she pleads with Kelvin to help her make sense of who
she is. She attempts to kill herself yet again, this time by consuming liquid
oxygen, but in the incarnational vehicles of the mind of Solaris, death is not
a way out and her body merely regenerates. Te other scientists, meanwhile,
::;
have developed a method of ridding themselves of these guests once and for
all, and unbeknownst to Kelvin, Hari agrees to her own annihilation. When
he wakes, she is gone, leaving behind only a note indicating the nature of her
voluntary death.
Like Stanley Kubrick in :oo:: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky and Lem are really
using the surface structures of science ction to ask questions appropriate to
the deep structures of myth and mysticism. Te relationship of Hari to the
planet Solaris, for example, evokes the ancient mythology of divine avatars,
of gods and spirits who take on human form. In Te Iliad, the Homeric gods
are continually appearing before soldiers on the battleeld as incarnate hu-
man beings, friends or relatives whose appearance they momentarily assume
in order to communicate the wishes of the gods. In India, likewise, the Hindu
god Vishnu, who sleeps on the cosmic milky ocean, and dreams the universe
into being, incarnates himself as a Rama or a Krishna or a Buddha whenever
the cosmos is out of balance and requires an adjustment. Tis practice of gods
assuming human form is part of the archaeological background to the Chris-
tian myth of the Divine Son, and in Solaris, Hari is an avatar of the planetary
mind, called forth to intervene in the disjointed psyche of Kelvin, who has
never come to terms with her suicide. Te planet seems to be orchestrating
this drama, furthermore, for Kelvins benet, not Haris, for like the Hindu
myth of reincarnation and karma, Hari is bound to the wheel of her personal-
ity, where she goes spinning like the Greek Titan Ixion, replaying her death
over and over again, until Kelvin understands that nothing he could ever have
done would have changed her fate, only the way in which he understands it.
At the beginning of Solaris, Kelvin is staying at his fathers house, where
he meets with the ex-astronaut Burton, who plays for him a videotape which
shows Burton under interrogation by the Russian government. On the tape,
Burton describes an episode that happened to him while on a reconnaissance
mission to nd a missing astronaut who had been swallowed up by the plan-
etary ocean. Burton claims that while on board his spacecraft hovering over
the planet, he saw a kind of garden form out of the plasma-like substance,
and then a giant, four meter tall baby that came oating toward him. Of
course, the authorities are skeptical of his account, insisting that he must have
been hallucinating, but Burton is adamant that what he witnessed was real. In
conversation with Kelvin after watching the tape, he is oended to nd that
Kelvin, as a scientist, takes up the same skeptical position, deriding his episode
as mere hallucination.
Kelvins attitude typies that of the materialistic scientist for whom noth-
ing is real that falls outside of empirically-based lab science. What Burton
::
is describing is one of the oldest human spiritual experiences in the world,
namely, the shamanic vision trance in which the lone individual enters into an
isolated wilderness where he encounters ancestral spirit beings or totem ani-
mals who impart information about the astral world. And whether we are talk-
ing about the trance visions of a Paleolithic shaman in which ethereal animal
forms materialize out of the rock wall before him, or the visions of a Christian
anchorite in the Egyptian desert in which demons come to tear him apart,
or even the more foundational vision of the prophet Mohammad who, while
meditating in a cave saw the angel Gabriel come down to announce what
would later become the suras of the Koran, we are dealing in each case with
a variety of the same species of religious experience, an experience, moreover,
which has traditionally been interpreted as imparting the highest truths to its
initiates, truths which become the spiritual nuclei of whole religions which, in
turn, become the directing and shaping vision organizing entire civilizations.
But it is this very same experience of visionary trance state that modern science
now derides as hallucinatory because it cannot be replicated in a laboratory
and validated by a consensus. And besides, such private departures from con-
sensus reality begin to sound to the scientist all too much like the delusions
of the schizophrenic, for as Jung has remarked, schizophrenia is the caricature
of a cosmology. To the scientist who cannot tell the dierence between the
caricature and the real thing, both experiences are mislabeled delusional and
consequently dumped into the same category.
So, it is Kelvins attitude and indeed that of science that must undergo
transformation, for in the ordeal which follows, he himself will endure a pri-
vate visionary trance similar to Burtons and will discover what such an emo-
tionally overwhelming experience is like from the inside. Tus, in the sequence
which follows, that of Kelvins launching from the earth inside his spaceship,
we are presented with a science ctional modernization of the trance ight of
the astral body which the Kung bushmen, for example, describe as a soaring
forth up into the heavens during their trance dance ceremonies.
Once on board the space station, we nd ourselves, along with Kelvins astral
body, in an environment that is diametrically opposed to the beautiful green
world of nature at Kelvins fathers estate, for this is the cold, articial world
that science would transform the earth into: a realm of steel and metal, plastic
and aluminum which has been wiped clean of all traces of nature and the
body. In Tarkovskys vision, we note that it is also a world that is beginning to
break down, for the space station is crumbling. Into this environment comes
an event that is as important for Kelvins life as the Incarnation of Christ in the
Biblical mythos, namely, the appearance of an avatar of the planetary mind of
::,
Solaris in the form of his dead wife, Hari.
Te planet has chosen to manifest itself in the personication of Kelvins
deepest, most painful emotional wound: the suicide of his wife. As in a re-
curring dream that haunts the sleeper each night after the disappearance of
a loved one, in which the ghost appears in order to reenact, like a Noh play,
the impact of its vanishing so that the psyche may slowly heal itself, so Kel-
vin must now come to terms with the loss of his wife. He cannot pretend to
a stance of cold scientic objectivity any longer, for he is now the object in
the lab under scrutiny by a superior intelligence. He is, in short, having the
very sort of mystical experience for which he had derided Burton at the start
of the lm, for it is precisely the mystical dimension that is missing from the
world-view of science, and which the mind of the planet Solaris is attempting
to restore through Kelvins experiences.
In contrast to Lems novel, Tarkovsky has his three scientists meet in a room
called the library, which turns out to be a miniaturization of the Western
curriculum: we note stained glass, the paintings of Brueghel, the deathmask of
Pushkin, a Venus de Milo statue. And it is only in the library that they quote
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and read passages from Don Quixote (the rst West-
ern character to mistake his delusions for reality). It is also in the library that
Tarkovskys protagonists, in contrast to Lems, ask themselves questions about
what it means to be human; questions, in other words, which are precisely
those asked throughout the history of the Western humanistic tradition and
which are not asked by science. For it is the aim of science to establish facts
and create new cognitive maps composed not of myth, superstition and error,
but of knowledge. To ask questions regarding the value and meaning of life
are essentially foreign to it, as such questions belong to the sphere of religion
and the arts. But in its takeover of all the disciplines, and its intimidation of
philosophers into believing that nothing is real which is not veriable by the
ve senses, science has, like a character out of Greek tragedy, overstepped its
bounds. Tus, the hubris and arrogance of the scientists is checked by the
planetary mind of Solaris through the appearance of its apparitions, whose
task it is to remind the scientists of the humanity which they have forgotten
in their pursuit of knowledge.
Part of the function of Haris incarnation, then, seems to be to lead the sci-
entists back into the library where they must pose the eternal questions regard-
ing the nature and suering of human existence, for in the age of Alexandrian
science, culture is the victim that has been oered up to make the proliferation
of machines possible. Tus, Tarkovsky presents us with three environments:
Kelvins fathers estate at the beginning of the lm, representing nature; the
::c
oating laboratory of the space station, symbolic of civilization; and the li-
brary, standing for culture. Hari is the one thread linking all three, for she
appears in some form in each one. Te mystery of her existence, furthermore,
inspires Kelvin to pursue the larger mystery of human incarnation upon earth,
and of what humanity is doing to the Earth by placing it, for the rst time in
history, inside a technological environment. (Tis is represented by the space
stations orbit around Solaris.) Trough undergoing his ordeal with Hari, he
learns that what it means to be human isnt so much to acquire knowledge,
but to love and suer loss, and contemplate the ultimate mystery of the divine
mind that has orchestrated all of this.
At the end of the lm, after Hari has gone, Kelvin has a vision of return-
ing to his fathers estate, and sees himself peering in through the window of
his house and noticing that rain is coming down through the roof on the
inside and pouring quietly onto his father, who looks at him through the
glass. Ten, the camera pulls back to reveal that the house is on an island
surrounded by the ocean of the planet Solaris, so that the pond which Kelvin
had been contemplating at the start of the lm has now grown to the size of
an ocean. Te waters of the Spirit, that is to say, have begun to penetrate his
psyche, like the rain that brings the transformation of the waste land into
an oasis, for now he is undergoing the process of transubstantiation by the
Holy Spirit, which will change his attitude from its initial arrogance to one
that welcomes the humanizing experiences of love and compassion, with its
attendant recognition of spiritual forces at work in the cosmos. So Tarkovsky
seems to be saying that science means nothing, and is nothing, unless it leaves
room in its purview for what makes us fundamentally human. Without the
recognition of a spiritual dimension, and the possibility of the human indi-
vidual communicating with this dimension through visionary trance states,
the scientic endeavor of merely acquiring knowledge is not only useless, but
dehumanizing.
Of course, Tarkovskys lm and Lems novel are two totally dierent things.
For Tarkovsky, the most important thing is the Earth. Cszeslaw Milosz
From yet another angle, though, we can think of Solaris as the Russian coun-
terpoint to :oo:, for although the Russians launched and landed a number of
data-collecting probes on the moon, they never attempted a manned ight,
preferring to remain within the curvature of the earths gravitational eld with
their orbiting space station Salyut. Indeed, one gets the impression that look-
ing down upon their beloved Mother Russian soil from orbit was enough for
:::
them, whereas for the Americans the attainment of escape velocity was but a
way station towards the conquest of outer space (an early working title of :oo:
was How the Solar System Was Won).
In fact, as Oswald Spengler points out, the Russian word for heaven, nye-
bo, implies with its n something negative:
Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad
plain. . .He sees even mankind as a plane. Te idea of a Russians being
an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon.
Instead of the vault, he sees the down-hang of the heavens something
that somewhere combines with the plain to form the horizon. For him,
the Copernican system, be it never so mathematical, is spiritually con-
temptible.
3
Tus, from the onion-shaped cupolas of Orthodox churches (which, in con-
trast to the rocket-like spires of Gothic cathedrals seem rather to hover than to
soar) to the vast, open lay out of the Kremlin or the Hermitage, one perceives,
in contemplation of Russian culture as a whole, a general denial of the vertical
tendency in favor of a horizontal one. I yielded, wrote the great Russian poet
Osip Mandelstam, with a kind of tender terror, / To the atness of the plains,
/ And the circle of the sky made me ill.
4
Or, as Nicholas Riasanovsky, in his
History of Russia puts it:
Te great bulk of Russia is an immense plain at one time the bottom of
a huge sea extending from central and even western Europe deep into
Siberia. Although numerous hills and chains of hills are scattered on its
surface, they are not high enough or su ciently concentrated to interfere
appreciably with the ow of the mighty plain, the largest on the entire
globe.
5
Indeed, the opening shot of Solaris is a kind of recursive reiteration of this
perspective, for it lingers so long on Kelvin gazing down through the glassy sur-
face of a lake at the densely layered brils of algae covering its oor like a lawn
of grass that we begin to suspect that somehow, it is the key to the entire lm,
as though it were a miniaturized version of the vast Russian plain itself. Tese
shots, furthermore, form an interesting counterpoint to the rst frames of :oo:,
which meditate upon a landscape of rocks devoid of vegetation or life of any
kind; in Solaris we have moved up along the Chain of Being from the mineral
world to that of the plants; from the earths physical body to its etheric body.
As with the polarity between the Western vertical and the Russian horizon-
tal orientations, there exists a similar contrast between the iconographies of
:oo: and of Solaris, for in Kubricks all male lm, there is an emphasis on the
:::
masculine and phallic, on rocketships and monoliths, whereas in Solaris, the
central images focus on the giant rotundity of the planet itself and the mystery
of Haris reincarnation. Here is Tarkovskys own commentary on his lack of
interest in the technological gadgetry surrounding the deep structure of his
telluric narrative:
Unfortunately, the science ction element in Solaris was nonetheless too
prominent and became a distraction. Te rockets and space stations re-
quired by Lems novel were interesting to construct; but it seems to me
now that the idea of the lm would have stood out more vividly and boldly
had we managed to dispense with these things altogether.
6
In Solaris, both the human being and his technological self-extensions are set
back into the background of the Earth, which simultaneously becomes the
new, all-encompassing foreground. As Heidegger writes:
All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, ow together as a recip-
rocal accord. But this conuence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here
there ows the bordering stream, restful within itself, which delimits ev-
erything present in its presencing. Tus in each of the self-secluding things
there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. Te earth is essentially self-
secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the open region as
the self-secluding.
7
It is not surprising that the Catholic Church awarded a special prize to Tar-
kovskys Solaris, for it not only makes use of the surface structures of science
ction to excavate the deeper structures of myth and mysticism, but it also di-
gests, absorbs and transforms the constituent elements of Christianity in order
to make them conform to a specically Russian world-view.* Te Russians, in
inheriting Christianity from the Greek Orthodox Church, have traditionally
been more interested in the Virgin than the trinity of Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. It is, for example, in medieval Russia alone that a story entitled Te
Descent of the Virgin Into Hell emerged, for the myth of the heros journey
to the underworld has typically been a masculine endeavor. Te oldest such
episode in the history of literature, however, was that of a womans descent into
Hell, namely the goddess Inanna who, in Sumerian myth, journeyed into the
underworld in symbolic imitation of the planet Venus, which disappears from
the sky as evening star in the West and reappears weeks later as the morning
* A point undoubtedly missed by the Catholic Church which, had it properly
understood Tarkovskys theologizing, would have recognized it as anathema
and not given the lm an award.
::,
star in the East. Te Russians, in reappropriating this myth for the Virgins
descent into hell, where she peers over the multitudes of the suering, are the
only people which, so far as I know, have done so.
In Tarkovskys lm, most of the story unfolds through the interactions of four
characters: the three male scientists Kelvin, Gibarian and Snaut, and the female
Hari. Tis ratio of three masculine gures to one female is isomorphic to the
Christian structure of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and the Virgin. In the Christian
structure, moreover, the three masculine components are said to be o cially
consubstantial with each other; that is to say, three modalities of one spiritual
substance. In the myth of Christs Incarnation, furthermore, he is said to be
both true man and true God, wholly divine, that is, and yet also equally hu-
man. He is, furthermore, the only such gure in the cosmos who is both human
and divine, for Christs humanity is what links him to us, while his divinity is
what links us, through him, to God. Te Virgin, on the other hand, is neither
divine nor consubstantial with the Trinity, but has her own special designation
as Teotokos, God-bearer, as declared at the Council of Ephesus (the ancient
city of the virgin goddess Artemis), which means that she is the immaculate
vessel through which the Divine Word becomes esh as a human avatar.
In Tarkovskys lm, however, the three male protagonists are precisely not
divine, for as scientists, their consciousness is an abstract masculine one which
strives to be free from both Nature and the Divine through an elimination
of both by means of the scientic method, which analyzes myths out of exis-
tence. Tarkovskys female protagonist, on the other hand, may, from a certain
point of view, be regarded as divine, for she is an avatar of Solaris and as such,
not truly human, and yet not wholly divine. In the story of her incarnation,
suering, death and resurrection (twice) she replays the myth of the passion
of Christ. Haris puzzled wonderment as to just what she is if, as the scientists
tell her, she isnt human, recalls Christs musings in Scorseses Last Temptation
of Christ on the nature of his divinity and just what it enables him to do. For
if Hari isnt human then, as in the Docetic heresy of Christianity, she only
appears to be human and her suerings, consequently, are to be regarded as
illusory, as Kelvins two advisers would have it. However, her suering appears
real enough to Kelvin, and so he is more than ready to accept her claim to be
human, for he is in process of realizing that suering is precisely a part of what
it means to be human.
Hari is an incarnation of the planet Solaris, which, as Tarkovsky takes
the trouble to make clear, is really only a science ctional metaphor for the
Earth itself. She is, therefore, an avatar of Earth who has come down into
the middle of the scientic endeavor to transform our planet into a machine,
::
in order to reconnect the scientists to the very ground itself. Tus, in fusing
together the Virgin with the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, Tarkovsky
reconstructs and completes the Christian Trinity into a tetrad of four equally
divine beings.
Tus, in transubstantiating the Virgin, Tarkovsky is also simultaneously
transubstantiating the Earth, which becomes in his masterful handling a
thoroughly spiritual being. It is at this point, of course, that he departs from
traditional Christianity, whether Greek or Roman, for in the Christian world-
view the Earth is most denitely not divine, any more than it is for the ma-
terialistic scientists who spend most of their time guring out new ways of
exploiting it. In Tarkovskys estimation, science must not only make room for
spirituality, it must do so specically through changing its idea of the Earth
as a dead thing shorn of any spiritual presence to a living, animate organ-
ism, capable of communicating to us humans through the medium of dreams
and visions. In Tarkovskys lm, the Earth is attempting to tell the scientists,
through Hari, what they are doing wrong, namely, regarding it as a thing over
which they are to be given dominion through their systems of technocratic
control and manipulation. Tey need, rather, to learn to work in accord with
its processes and not against them.
If Herzog roams over the earth in quest of new images, then Tarkovsky sinks
like a plant right down into it in order to absorb through mental photosyn-
thesis a vision of its place in the new cosmos that is emerging in the sciences,
particularly in systems theory. Both lmmakers are traditional European art-
ists whose visions have a densely textured richness to them, in contrast to the
kinds of low resolution narratives produced in American lm by Hollywood
directors. Teir lms, consequently, are slow-paced and sometimes di cult
for an American sensibility to sit through, but in doing so, we will discover
the pace and mentality of an older, slower and now almost vanished world that
existed prior to channel surng and attention decit disorder.
Tarkovsky and Herzog both belong to the now fading world of the printed
book and the literate mind which the cinema itself is helping to render ob-
solete, for in the lms of these directors we are really dealing with literature,
not movies proper. Tese narratives belong to the same kind of sensibility
that produced the Gutenbergian novel, with its careful psychological examina-
tions of interior thought processes and minimal physical action, whereas most
of the lms discussed in this book belong to the medium of cinema proper,
which actually has less in common with the novel and more to do with cir-
cuses, carnivals, country fairs and other such crowd phenomena. Herzog and
::,
Tarkovsky are displaced novelists; the other lmmakers I discuss belong to the
tradition of the folktale, the epic, and oral storytelling.
Notes
:.Tese include: Te Steamroller and the Violin (:,oc), Ivans Childhood (:,o:),
Andrei Rublev (:,oo), Solaris (:,;:), Te Mirror (:,;), Stalker (:,;,), Nostalghia
(:,,), Te Sacrice (:,o).
:. Oswald Spengler, Te Decline of the West (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, :,,,), vol. II, p.
:,
,. Spengler, ibid., p. :,,.
. Osip Mandelshtam, Selected Poems (NY: Viking-Penguin, :,,:), p.;.
,. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (NY: Oxford University Press, :,),
pp. ,.
o. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Te Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses his
Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, :,;), p. :,,,
;. Martin Heidegger, Te Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings. (San
Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, :,,,), pp. :;:;,.
::o
9
How Monsters Attack Civilization
and
What Celluloid Heroes Do About Tem
In the following chapter, we trace the rise in celluloid history of a new and yet
also very old archetype: that of the female dragon slayer, a gure which is rare in
ancient myth, but always seems to surface during a period of social destabilization
and change. Te fact that such an archetype entirely new to our civilization is
surfacing nowadays indicates that such a period of crisis is once again at hand,
namely, the androcentric attempt of technocrats to eliminate and replace all forms
of mother nature by appropriating her powers through genetic engineering and re-
placing her wet biologies with the smooth sterile surfaces of the laboratory, in which
nature herself is treated like a biological specimen laid out for examination on a
dissecting table. Whereas Kubricks messianic Star Child will appear incarnate for
us in the form of Luke Skywalker in a subsequent chapter, the female dragon slayer
is rather an avatar of Tarkovskys Planetary Mind, like a dangerous Amazonian
version of Hari. She is the Planetary Minds attempt to produce her own mythic
antibody to combat the invading virus of the Machine not, like Tolkiens heroes,
by destroying it altogether, but rather by drawing a boundary line around it. For
the goddess is willing to accept all things, so long as each keeps to its own allotted
place in the overall cosmic scheme, like the ancient Greek conception of fate as
Moira. Tus, through the process that I call Boundary Formation, the Machine
is not rejected, but only kept in its place, for the goddess of Fate or Justice, as she
has been variously known throughout the history of myth, is concerned solely with
the balance, as in Egypt, where she was known as Maat, whose primary image was
that of the scales in which the dead were weighed. Tus, in Boundary Formation
the Machine is neither rejected nor embraced nor rendered invisible, but merely
kept at a distance, and watched, for its borders must be policed constantly.
::;
From the eviscerated bison in the Shaft of the Dead Man at Lascaux to Neo-
lithic wall frescoes depicting hunters dressed in leopard skins surrounding gi-
ant bulls with bows and arrows, to Sumerian cylinder seals of Gilgamesh the
lion tamer, myths of dragon slayers and monster killers are a survival into high
civilization of the ancient mythologies of the great Paleolithic hunters. Indeed,
one of the earliest recorded stories of the killing of a dragon, that of the Baby-
lonian Enuma Elish (ca.:;,c n.c.i.) contains some extremely archaic motifs.
When the warrior hero Marduk, for example, kills the female dragon Tiamat
and creates the entire cosmos out of pieces of her carcass, we are reminded of
the houses built by Paleolithic hunters out of interlocking mammoth bones
in order to signify that the mammoth was the cosmos within which he lived.
And when we recall that Marduk creates the Tigris and Euphrates rivers out of
tears that ow from the eyes of Tiamat, we think of a Paleolithic goddess gu-
rine from Dolni Vestonice (ca.:,ccc n.c.i.) on which streams of water are
depicted owing from her eyes and down over her breasts.
1
Such improbable
continuities, furthermore, are not uncommon in the history of mythology,
for the conservatism of aboriginal man is enormous. To change a single detail
of a sacred story or an art motif can result, by way of sympathetic magic, in
catastrophe.
But as consciousness evolves and new ideas are laid down layer by layer in
human culture, stories grow, transform and bifurcate like neuronal dendrites
in the brain, and their meanings correspondingly change. In Paleolithic my-
thology, for instance, the killing of the animal was part of a sacred ritual upon
which the very lives of the hunters depended for their survival. Te animal
was envisioned as a willing sacrice in return for the performance of a rite
which had the magical eect of regenerating it. Tus for Paleolithic man, the
animal was the cosmos, whereas for the urban man of high civilization in
ancient Mesopotamia, the animal was no longer identied with the cosmos,
but became its very antithesis, chaos. Te world of the urban city state was an
imposition of culture over nature, of law and order against the forces of chaos
and ancient night, and the powers of nature, consequently, had to be tamed
and domesticated in order to enable the massive endeavor of civilization to
take place. Te myth of the dragon slayer, then, became a hieroglyph of the
victory of civilization over nature.
*
* Te earliest recorded monster-slayer myths pre-date the Tiamat and Marduk story
by half a millennium or more, and come into being practically simultaneously
in Egypt and Mesopotamia between :,,c and :ccc n.c.i. On the walls of the
Vth Dynasty pyramid of Unas in Egypt, we nd the rst apotropaic spells
against snakes, equipping the resurrected pharaoh with the necessary charms
::
In another one of the earliest recorded dragon slayer myths, that of Indras
conquest over the dragon Vritra in the Rig-Veda (ca.:,cc n.c.i.), we nd an
echo of Marduks creation of the cosmos out of Tiamat, for killing the dragon
is said to have brought forth the sun, the sky, and dawn. A few lines further
on, moreover, we learn that Indra, prior to this deed, had already disposed
of Vritras dragon mother, Danu, so we have grounds for suspecting that the
Indian dragon slayer myth was inherited from the Mesopotamians.
When the Indo-Aryans settled in the Indus valley, displacing the native
Dravidian populations of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in which worship of
the goddess was paramount the conquered populations became the lowest
caste, the Shudra. For several centuries thereafter, the Vedic myths of the drag-
on-slaying Indra and his pantheon of heroes came to the fore, while the native
religious systems of India yoga, goddess worship, the cult of Shiva went
underground. But there came a point, and it can be marked by a specic text,
when the process of acculturation set in, and the older myths began to absorb
and digest those of the more recent Vedic pantheon. Te pivotal text is the
Kena Upanishad, which dates from about cc n.c.i., in which the story is told
of the bewilderment of the Vedic gods by a mysterious apparition that turns
out to be a goddess in disguise, but the gods learn of her true identity only
after she has humiliated them through undermining each of their respective
powers. From this point on, the culture history of India dominated initially
by a heroic, life-a rming triumphalism gradually gives way to the native
religions of the more pessimistically inclined yoga, worship of the goddess,
Buddhism which owes a heavy debt to the earlier yogistic Sankhya philoso-
phy and ultimately, Tantra, with its a rmative worship of nature, sexuality,
and shakti, the female electricity that powers the universe.
Te transformation brought about within Hindu civilization by the accul-
turation process becomes vivid when we compare the conception of Indras
deed of slaying the dragon Vritra in the Rig-veda (ca.:,cc n.c.i.) with the
version recounted many centuries later in the Brahmavaivarta-Purana (ca.cc
to protect him from harm in the afterlife. In Mesopotamia, the rst dragon
slayer myths emerge in a cluster of stories surrounding the warrior god Ninurta,
whose exploits against the eleven Slain Heroes form the prototype for Marduks
ght against Tiamat and her brood of eleven monsters. Ninurtas war against
the Asakku demon emerges at about the time of King Gudea of Lagash ca.::cc
n.c.i., while his exploits against the gigantic Anzu bird is recorded on tablets
dating from the Old Babylonian period (contemporary with the Marduk and
Tiamat myth). Te earliest Sumerian stories which feature Gilgamesh ghting
the forest demon Huwawa or the gigantic Bull of Heaven date from around
:ccc n.c.i.
::,
n.c.i..cc c.i.). In the former, Indra hurls a thunderbolt into the dragon,
killing it to release the waters stored within its belly, and since then, as the
text says, you have found no enemy to conquer you. But the story of Te
Humbling of Indra from the later Puranas is of a very dierent spirit, for
there Indras ego ination after slaying the dragon becomes so intolerable to
the gods that Vishnu and Shiva appear before him to instruct him in the
might and majesty of the cosmic cycles of eternal return, whereby his deed
will be repeated by an innitude of Indras without end. So the very same deed
which in the West would be celebrated as the founding event of the birth of
the universe and of the triumph of civilization over nature is, in the Puranas,
imagined as merely being repeated over and over again, like the cycles of the
planets, and thus Indra should not think too highly of his victory over the
dragon, after all. For at the point in the cultural history of India in which this
latter text appeared, the Goddess had come to the fore, and along with her,
a shift of emphasis in the culture from the perspective of the warrior caste to
that of the priestly brahmins, whose job it was to carefully monitor the math-
ematical cycles of the planets in order to observe eternal returns and their as-
sociated archetypal qualities. For the goddess, as in the Egyptian image of Nut,
is the universe itself, and compared to the majesty of her cycles, the ephemeral
deeds of a hero are as nothing. Eventually, the ground is cleared for the ap-
pearance, in a text known as the Devi-Mahatmya, of a female monster slayer,
Durga, who is brought into manifestation by the gods because none of them
are capable of stopping the mad bualo demon Mahisha from disrupting the
cosmic rhythms.
Nowadays we in the West, with the cosmological vision of Gaia theory, are
in an analogous situation to the Hindus when the Kena Upanishad rst ap-
peared, for with the discovery that the earth is actually a self-organizing system
and therefore does not require the management of technocratic science to
bring it under control, the myth that has fuelled the vision of our dragon slay-
ing scientists as masters over nature must be put into its proper scale, just as
Indras deed was deated by the gods. And so now as we glance at the history
of the slaying of monsters in the unfolding of twentieth century cinema, we
may discern the contours of a similar shifting in values, and note the begin-
nings of the rst appearances of our own Western equivalents to Durga.
Lets begin with Merian C. Coopers :,,, King Kong. It was not the rst Ameri-
can lm to play a variation on the myth of the monster slayer, for in :,,: Tod
Brownings Dracula and James Whales Frankenstein had already appeared, and
before them, Willis OBriens Te Ghost of Slumber Mountain (:,:,) and Te
:,c
Lost World (:,:,) had put the rst dinosaurs on lm. But both Dracula and
Frankenstein borrowed heavily from European culture, for Bram Stoker and
Mary Shelley were British, while the shadowy gothic sets of Brownings lm
owed a debt to Murnaus :,:: Nosferatu, and the look of Frankensteins labora-
tory was taken from Fritz Langs :,:; silent lm Metropolis. King Kong, on the
other hand, was purely American, not based on any previous work of lm or
literature, except to the extent that it was an updating of the Beauty and the
Beast theme and, like America generally, with its big cars and skyscrapers, its
vast landscapes and enormous mountain ranges, King Kong was the rst lm
to kill a really big beast on a grand scale.
Coopers narrative carries us through the apes exploits in a series of battles
with dinosaurs the animated miniatures of Willis OBrien, Ray Harryhau-
sens mentor carefully setting aside Fay Wray as he does so. Te monster
himself in this case is a kind of Herculean dragon slayer performing his own
labors, but in Act III, he does not fare quite so well against civilization when,
at the top of the Empire State Building, he is strafed by World War I style
biplanes. As William Irwin Tompson remarks:
. . .with the Eiel Tower there was a reaching up to break free of nature that
inspired New Yorks eorts to escape the ground of nature in the skyscrap-
ers of the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller
Center. King Kong falling to his death from the Empire State Building
expressed an almost archetypal death of the old nature in the new state of
culture.
2
In his novel Gravitys Rainbow, likewise, Tomas Pynchon contrasts Skull
Island and its production, a gigantic ape, with Peenemunde, the island shaped
like a skull upon which the Nazis invented their V-: rockets, playing them o
as what he elsewhere calls the Bad Asses of Nature vs. Culture. And, as Ma-
rina Warner, in her book Six Myths of Our Time, points out, there has been a
tendency in the history of twentieth century mythology to polarize the animal
against the mechanical, as in the battle between Ewoks and Empire at the
conclusion of Return of the Jedi, with the animal being favored, whereas in the
traditional fairy tales of the past, the transformation from human to animal
was normally seen as a regression. As she puts it:
Its blithely symptomatic of contemporary forgettings that we now nd
bears sweet. Te return to human form used to be the quest, the reward,
the reason of the fairy tale in the rst place. But beastly shape is now
becoming an appealing alternative, even a prize, a more valuable than a
degraded state. Te beast seems to oer a refuge from the robot.
3
:,:
Treatened by the machine, the psyches immune system responds by generat-
ing mythic personications of the brains mammalian instincts. Hence we get
Chewbacca piloting a spacecraft, or the discovery of a giant ape on a remote
island whose adventures recapitulate the brains evolutionary architecture,
from battles with dinosaurs, to the mammalian limbic ring, to the steel and
glass, plastic and chromium extensions of the apotheosis of the neocortex as
skyscraper.
Tus, in King Kong, we have a myth about the fate of nature encompassed
by civilization. Like Central Park surrounded on all sides by a forest of sky-
scrapers, Kong is attacked by World War I biplanes atop the Empire State
Building and sent to his death amidst the concrete and asphalt below, for in
the twentieth century articulation of civic space as megalopolis, Nature loses
and Civilization wins.
But only for the time being.
Over sixty years later, James Cameron, in his masterpiece Titanic, stepped
into the role of Jeremiah and showed us the future of civilization swallowed
whole by Leviathan, the exact inverse of Kongs death, for by the time of the
:,, remake of Godzilla, it is the monsters who are bringing down the sky-
scrapers.
Jumping over precisely four decades of monster movies from :,,, to :,;,
during which time the standard hero myth of the victory of civilization over
nature is reiterated again and again, especially during the Cold War paranoia
of the giant monster movies of the :,,cs we arrive at William Friedkins
great lm Te Exorcist, which was released in the year following Herzogs
Aguirre and Tarkovskys Solaris. From being a hapless victim of a rampaging
beast which gives the hero the excuse he needs to prove his virility, the female
has now become the monster herself. To be sure, there is still a rescue to be
performed, for both King Kong and Te Exorcist are variations on the theme
of the abduction of Persephone to the underworld by Pluto, in the one case
by a giant ape and in the other by an Assyrian demon named Pazuzu. Te
dierence is that in Te Exorcist, the female herself appears in the role of the
beast, and the solar hero who embodies the principle of light is Father Merrin
instead of Marduk, for there are many parallels between Te Exorcist and the
Enuma Elish.
When the two priests attempt to chase the demon away, it is through the
power of the spoken word read from a sacred text that they are victorious, as
in the Greek myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, in which the deed of the war-
rior hero is a slaying by the power of the word itself, for in solving the riddle
:,:
which the Sphinx, a composite female creature woven out of a lion and a bird,
poses to him What is it that crawls on four legs in the morning, walks on
two legs at noon, and on three in the evening? Answer: Man! she hurls
herself in despair over the edge of a precipice. In Biblical tradition, the word
is a powerful substance with unique magical properties, for whenever Yahweh
wants a prophet to internalize his pronouncements, he makes him eat a scroll,
as do both Ezekiel and later, John, in the Book of Revelation. For to eat a scroll
with the sacred script etched upon it is akin to taking communion, the partak-
ing of which makes one superconductive to the power of truth, for when the
Spirit descends, what comes out are magical words like chips of the innite.
In the beginning was the Word, we read in the John Gospel, for Christ is an
avatar of the Logos, the Word of God, the utterance of which on the rst page
of Genesis brings the cosmos into being.
Indeed, the internalization of an alphabet by Jews, Greeks and Hindus alike
confers new cognitive possibilities on the mind, apparently not possible using
the language of hieroglyphics, for the rst strictly philosophical systems in the
world begin with these three traditions. And the clarity of abstract, rational
thinking is what empowers the revolutions of Socrates, the Buddha and the
Enlightenment, each with their own vision of solar imagery conquering the
dark shadowy lunations of Finneganswakiantraumdeutung, for whether we
are speaking of Platos allegory of the cave or the Buddhas lion roar which
chases the stars of ignorance away, we are dealing with a transformation of the
myth of the solar heros victory over the lunar dragon.
In Te Exorcist, a demon takes possession of the astral body of Regan, a
thirteen year old girl who has just begun menstruating, and speaks through
her largely in the vocabulary of sexual obscenities. Tis reects the Christian
fear of the power and demonic energy of female sexuality. As Augustine put
it, Woman is a temple built above a sewer, and indeed in certain medieval
paintings, the mouth of hell is represented as a visual pun on the opening jaws
of a great beast whose jowls are pulled back to either side in imitation of the
anatomy of a vagina.
I nd it interesting, though, that the demon which the author of the novel,
William Peter Blatty, has chosen to possess the girl, is an Assyrian one named
Pazuzu, who was associated, in his benevolent aspect, with protecting preg-
nant women against the demoness Lamashtu, who steals newborn children.
A god whose amulet was worn by pregnant women becomes, in Te Exorcist,
a devil who emerges from the underworld to steal Persephone away from her
mother which, in Assyrian myth, is exactly what he was supposed to protect
against. Tus do the gods of one society become the devils of another.
:,,
Te Exorcist belongs in the Western literary tradition of such masculinist
narratives as the Timaeus, Te Oresteia, Oedipus Rex and the stories of the Bible
generally. Te lm celebrates such good old-fashioned Biblical values as the
victory of light against darkness, of the male over the female, of the power of
the word over the image. As Leonard Shlain points out in Te Alphabet vs. Te
Goddess, the more abstract the writing of a given society, the more it favors
left brain values over right brain ones, and so the masculine is preferred to
the feminine, as word against image. For example, the witch hunts in Europe
rst begin in the later fteenth century, just after the invention of the printing
press.
But there is a certain ambivalence in Te Exorcist, as well, for it also admits
the failure of the rational consciousness structure of science to build a bulwark
that will keep the magical world of demons at bay, for the doctors and psy-
chologists, despite their probings and analyses of Regan, can do nothing to
help her. Te lm is quite frank in its confession that there are real demons in
this world, and that occasionally, like extraterrestrials, they can kidnap ones
astral body and make o with it. In Te Exorcist, the world which we now
inhabit is not just one governed by science and technology, but a patchwork
of ancient and modern structures of consciousness coexisting, and at times,
colliding with each other.
Te turning point in celluloid monster mythology, however, comes in :,;,
with Ridley Scotts Alien, in which the Western equivalent of the Hindu god-
dess Durga appears in the character of Ripley, a woman who, for the rst time
in cinematic history, single-handedly slays a monster which the male charac-
ters could do nothing about.
4*
From one point of view, Alien is Steven Spielbergs Jaws crossed with Star
Wars, but whereas both of those lms are celebrations of the archetypal male
dragon slayer, Alien digs back into the ancient past of mythology to retrieve the
* Te second lm to feature a female dragon slayer is Heavy Metal (:,:), an
animated anthology of science ction fantasy stories based on the famous
magazine. In the dragon slayer episode, the nal story of the collection,
a woman is summoned as the last surviving member of the ancient race of
Tarakians to help a besieged council of elders to ght o a group of barbarians
who have destroyed their city. Tis is basically the plot of an old western like
A Fistful of Dollars (itself based on Kurosawas Yojimbo) in which the nomadic
drifter summoned from outside is always male. But the story in Heavy Metal
actually resonates more closely with the Durga myth, in which the female
monster slayer is summoned by the gods because they are helpless to defeat the
bualo demon.
:,
charismatic gure of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, whose descent into Hell
was the original prototype for what was later taken over by the archetypal male
journey to the underworld of Odysseus, Aeneas, Paul, Christ and Dante.
Wherever we nd the goddess, furthermore, her serpentine consort is never
very far behind: the aliens famous tongue with its second mouth is, of course, a
modied serpents tongue, while its crescent-shaped head links it to the moon,
which in ancient tradition was associated with the power of the snake to shed
its skin, representing the earthly rhythms of time. Indeed, the lm squirms
with serpentine imagery, since the early phases in the aliens life-cycle also
resemble that of snakes: we think, for example, of the resemblance between
the face-hugging larva packed neatly away within its egg and the kundalini
serpent coiled up in its cave at the base of the spinal column.
Tis gives us the clue why Ripley alone survives to tell the tale, for the par-
ing away of the other six astronauts is intended to reveal the lms core mythic
archetype of the serpent and his goddess lover to whom he is destined to
sacrice his life, his head, or, as in the priesthood of the mysteries of Cybele,
his phallus. But now, like Rumpelstiltskin, the goddess and her serpentine
lover have reawakened in another world entirely. Te old dark forests with
enormous trees in which dwelt the various gnomes, dwarves and nixies of the
European folk tale have been transformed into the metal pistons and hydraulic
devices of H. R. Gigers technosphere.
James Cameron, furthermore, in his sequel to Alien, has created an impor-
tant innovation in his vision of the egg-laying queen, in which he evokes the
deep structural relationships between the insect world of the hymenoptera and
the too often overlooked shadow side of goddess-worshipping societies. For as
C. S. Lewis wrote, . . . in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realized the two
things that some of us most dread for our own species the dominance of the
female and the dominance of the collective.
5
And as Marija Gimbutas writes
of the goddess Artemis: [she] was associated with the bee as her cult animal,
and the organization of the sanctuary in classical times may have rested on the
symbolic analogy of the beehive, with swarms of bee-priestesses. . . and . . .
drones, who were eunuch priests.
6
Te point here is that individuality has no place in a society based upon the
worship of the goddess, as the Neolithic graves on the island of Malta and in
Wessex testify, for there we nd that the dead have been disposed of by toss-
ing their excarnated bones in indiscriminate heaps within mounds built in
the shape of the body of the goddess. For the matriarch, as William Irwin
Tompson has pointed out, is also a hierarch, and if we must glance at any
living examples of societies in which the imago of the goddess dominates, we
:,,
need only turn to India, where our Western respect for individuality the
mythology of which, from the Grail romances onward, has produced those
titanic geniuses of science who have carved out the topology of our present
mappae mundi is regarded as dangerous. Recall that suttee, in which a wife
throws herself upon her dead husbands funeral pyre, or else agrees to be bur-
ied alive with him, was practiced in India until the nineteenth century, when
the British outlawed it, and that human sacrice, in connection with the cult
of Kali, continued unchecked until that time.
In the mythology of the goddess, the male gods pale by comparison with
the charismatic and energetic performances of their goddess consorts, for the
role of Dumuzi is simply to propagate and die, whereas Inanna builds a throne
for herself, steals the tablets containing the mes from her father Enkidu, and
descends into the underworld for regeneration; Osiris, likewise, is merely
killed and torn apart by his brother, whereas Isis gathers him up again piece by
piece and, with the aid of Anubis and her son Horus, resurrects him as lord of
the underworld. In the Alien lms, likewise, the charismatic hero is a woman,
and the men are generally secondary to the mightiness of her deeds: slaying
the beast, resurrecting the androids, descending into hell to retrieve the girl
Newt, her Persephone, and in the third and fourth lms, even absorbing into
herself the classic myth of the dying and reviving male god by undergoing
death at the conclusion of the third lm, and resurrection by genetic engineers
in the fourth.
In both Alien and Alien ,, likewise, it is Ripley who reanimates the dead
androids Ash and Bishop, for not only is she the archetypal goddess within
whose womb the dead are made living again, but she is also the reincarnation
of the anima mundi in her new role as anima motrix, the indwelling soul not
of the whirling spheres that move the planets, but of the gears and wheels,
circuits and semiconductors that power the machine.
In the fteenth century, Botticellis Birth of Venus signied the advent of a
new cultural epoch in which the imagery of the Greek gods and goddesses was
retrieved and wedded to Christian iconography. In :,:;, likewise, the dawning
of another cultural moment was announced with the appearance of the female
android Maria in Fritz Langs silent lm Metropolis, for the mechanical bride,
as McLuhan later dubbed her, has ever since continued to appear throughout
the twentieth century with increasing frequency in our magazine ads, televi-
sion commercials, music videos and lms.
7
Tomas Pynchons :,o, novel V. is
an exploration of this whole phenomenon, for the mysterious woman whose
rst initial forms the title gradually replaces her anatomy with machinery, since
she is the muse of Western civilization, which has, throughout the twentieth
:,o
century, stopped whispering into the ears of our artists and poets and instead
now peers encouragingly over the shoulders of engineers and technocrats lost
in the schematic labyrinths of their blueprints for newer and better machines,
bridges and buildings with which to adorn our megalopolises.
Te concluding sequence of Aliens, then, in which Ripley, encased in the
yellow cargo lifter, does battle with the gigantic queen, is actually a dramatiza-
tion of the conict between these two feminine imagos over which one will
come to prevail in our contemporary world: the atavistic image of society
ruled by a matriarch who demands the sacrice of both male genitals and
egos for the queens giant, snapping mouth is a variation of the toothed
vagina or the image of the technologically adept and heroic anima motrix
the equal and opposite counterpart of the celluloid hero. Te lms of James
Cameron, in particular, focus upon this female persona, which he has explored
in nearly all of his lms and television shows from Te Terminator to Dark
Angel and Battle Angel.
In King Kong, the monster is male, and the female, Fay Wray, is a completely
helpless victim who has to be rescued by the hero in the form of Western
technology. Tis is a traditional statement of a formula as old as Perseus rescu-
ing Andromeda from the Kraken, or Tristan winning the hand of Isolde after
killing a dragon, or Mina being rescued from Dracula by the vampire hunters.
But, as we have seen, with Te Exorcist, the monster herself becomes female,
and has to be overcome with the power of the Word of Christianity that ban-
ishes images just as the rising sun scatters the phantasms of dream, whereas in
Alien, the monster in the rst lm, anyway is male, but has to be disposed
of by a female dragon slayer. In Steven Spielbergs :,,, monster lm Jurassic
Park, the monster, as in Te Exorcist, is female, but here there are no dragon
slaying heroes at all, for in the end the dinosaurs survive and the protagonists
barely escape with their lives. As Marina Warner, once again, writes:
Michael Crichtons clever plot holds much interest for students of myths
today . . .[Te] female organisms, in the lm, prove ultimately uncontrol-
lably fertile, resistant to all the constraints of the men of power. Te story
can be reduced to a naked confrontation between nature-coded female
with culture-coded male: the bristling, towering, jagged, megavolt fence
cannot hold the force of the primeval at a stage of intelligent evolution.
8
While it is a mistake to attempt to reduce any story to a single interpreta-
tion, Warners point here is, I think, accurate, for Jurassic Park presents us
with a vision of science trying to domesticate the dragon of nature, instead
:,;
of slaying it. But the great sh, Leviathan, will have none of that, and so the
dinosaurs burst their cages and run amok.
Jurassic Park is actually closer than Spielbergs earlier monster lm Jaws to
the apocalyptic vision of Melvilles Moby Dick, for in Melvilles novel the great
beast destroys the solar hero Ahab, his boat and his entire crew, with one ick
of its tail, an omen of the inevitable outcome of the war between civilization
and nature, as in the case of the :cc tsunami in the Indian Ocean, in which
the great beast slapped its mighty tail against the continental shores and simply
wiped out three hundred thousand human beings as though they were ants.
Spielberg, in shifting from the ending of Jaws, in which the solar hero defeats
the abyssal monster, to a vision in which Leviathan emerges triumphant at the
conclusion of Jurassic Park, actually changes mythologies entirely, from that of
the hero myth to the earlier, Bronze Age vision of the collapse of civilizations
in accord with cosmic cycles which, as we have seen, proved so belittling to the
dragon slayers tiny deed.
Furthermore, by layering his vision of genetically engineered dinosaurs
ripped from the ecological context of their Mesozoic ora and fauna with
its mathematical analogue, chaos and complexity theory, Spielberg is actually
intuiting the deep structural connection between both. For just as Newtonian
mechanics was a translation of the myth of the dragon slayer into physics, so
complexity theory is a transformation into the technical language of math-
ematics of the myth of Brendan landing on the back of a huge beast which he
mistakes for an island. In Gaia theory, the earth has its own systems of control
which subvert human technological interference with massive, asymmetrical
weather disruptions, such as the proliferation of storms or the onset of early
Ice Ages. In complexity theory, systems with self-organizing properties are
capable of morphogenesis into sudden bifurcations with newly emergent, and
wholly unprecedented, properties. Te narrative in Jurassic Park of dinosaurs
that invent the novelty of reproducing using strains of amphibian DNA is a
translation of chaos theory into narrative form, and so Spielberg is illumi-
nating for us the mythic structures which are hidden in non-linear systems
theory.
In Tarsem Singhs brilliant :ccc serial killer movie Te Cell, the dragon slayer,
as in the Alien lms, is also female. Te story concerns a woman who is able
to enter into the minds of mentally ill patients via a technology in which she
hangs in a rubber suit, suspended above the oor, like one of those hang-
ing bodies in the movie Coma. Te rubber suit resembles musculature from
an anatomy textbook, and by draping a sort of cloth woven with electronic
:,
arabesques over her face, her astral body is able to separate from her physical
body and travel into the patients mind. Te police come to her one day be-
cause they have caught a serial killer who turns his female victims into dolls
by bleaching their bodies, and the way he kills them is by placing them into
an isolation tank which, at timed intervals, releases oods of water, gradually
lling up and drowning them over the course of a couple of days. Te police
know that he has one such victim locked up in a tank somewhere with
hours to live, but the killer is in a coma and cant tell them where the tank is
located.
Te real genius of the lm, though, lies in its virtual reality sequences, which
take place inside the killers mind. Te woman discovers there a room contain-
ing all of his victims, where they exist in his imagination as animated biome-
chanical dolls out of a brothers Quay lm. At one point, she walks into a room
with vanilla colored walls in which a horse stands incongruously surrounded
by an array of clocks. Te killer is present as an avatar of his childhood self,
and he urges her to stand back away from the horse when the hands on one
of the clocks reaches the red zone, while he cowers fearfully in the corner.
Suddenly, a series of glass sheets descend from above, slicing the horse into
segments, and then stretching the animal out in cross section. Te protagonist
walks between the sections, gazing at the still beating heart.
Singh has borrowed the image from a work by the contemporary artist
Damien Hirst, whose piece Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the
Inherent Lies in Everything displays a row of glass cabinets in each of which a
slice from one of two cows is contained hovering in vivid cross-section. Hirsts
image reminds me of the bull sacrice at the conclusion of Apocalypse Now,
for as I have remarked in Chapter , above, ritual bovine sacrice was practiced
all over the Old World, with the exception of India, where instead the Vedic
horse sacrice was performed. But in a way, the birth of cinema as an art form
had its origins in the technological sacrice of a horse, for on another level the
scene recalls Muybridges attempts to determine whether all four feet of a run-
ning horse are ever o the ground at once. Muybridge simply lined up a series
of still cameras and had the horse run past. Each camera took, as it were, a slice
of the horses motion, and when the photographs were lined up in sequence,
you could see that indeed all four feet were o the ground. Hence, the cinema
was originally referred to in England as the bioscope.
Tus, Singhs brilliant image, embedded within the context of the mind
of a serial killer, shows us the deep structural relationship between the serial
killer mentality, for whom women are about as real as mechanical dolls, and
the scientic attitude of the West which, with the invention of perspective
:,,
in painting a century before Vesalius published his famous anatomy book
began to slice nature up into quadrants. Tis very same method, in which
motion is analyzed by slicing it mechanically into parts, led to the birth of the
innitesimal calculus in the seventeenth century, and so, through Newtons
construction of the clockwork cosmos, to an imago of the universe as ma-
chine. Tus, as in the case of Marduks slaying of Tiamat, a new cosmology is
brought into being through the sacrice of the great animal, in this case, the
anima mundi of the ancient Neoplatonic philosophers who had imagined her
to be the motive force behind the ever-circling orbits of the planets.
In Muybridges experiments, the analysis was followed by a synthesis and
the restoration of organic motion by mechanical means was achieved via the
birth of the cinema. Tomas Pynchon, in Gravitys Rainbow, remarks upon
this cultural continuity from calculus to celluloid:
Tere has been this strange connection between the German mind and the
rapid ashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two
centuries since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the
same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air.
And now . . . these techniques had been extended past images on lm, to
human lives.
9
Te famous woodcut from Vesaliuss De Corporis Fabrica (:,,), with its
tableful of gruesome dissecting instruments, is perhaps the great X-ray of
the structure of the Western mind. Bacons putting Nature to the rack and
torturing her secrets from her is a conceit which comes perilously close to
:c
the mentality of the serial killer (and as everyone knows, Bacon presided over
witch trials).
Te Cell, moreover, shows us that the serial killer is at once a miniaturiza-
tion and a caricature of this analytical mentality, for what the serial killer does
to women is what the West has been doing to mother nature for ve or six
centuries. Patrick Sskinds novel Perfume makes the same point, for it tells
the story of a serial killer who murders young women in order to capture
their unique scents, for he is also a consummate perfume artist, and Sskinds
descriptions of his laboratory are evocative of those of alchemists, the forerun-
ners of scientists.
And so it seems tting that the role of the monster slayer in this lm is taken
on by a female protagonist, as in the Alien lms, for in her nal encounter
with the killer, she confronts him with a huge sword and, in imitation of
Marduks deed, pins him to the ground with arrows shot from a cross-bow,
and then stabs him. But then, in a moment of creative genius, Singh has her
change personae to that of the Virgin, when his inner child shows up.* From
an earlier scene, we have learned that the killers childhood was traumatized
by Baptists who nearly drowned him, and so, as the killer dies, she drowns his
child imago in a pool of baptismal water. Tis descent of the child into the
watery abyss via the feminine will be taken up and continued one year later
in Kubrick and Spielbergs A.I., in which the boy robot David sinks into the
frigid waters of the North Atlantic that have ooded New York City, where
he discovers, at the bottom, the cast o image of the goddess in the form of a
theme park simulacrum of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio. Tus, the hero myth
that has shaped the attitude of Western civilization toward nature is currently
in process of disintegrating back into the watery abyss.
* It is a virgin, however, that shows up in connection with a peacock, which is a
tting image for a female monster slayer, since peacocks kill snakes. In Hindu
myth, the dragon slayer Krishna is linked iconographically with the peacock. In
the present scene we note that when the protagonist of Te Cell confronts and
kills her nemesis, he appears with semi-reptilian facial features, like a snake.
Notes
:. See Marija Gimbutus, Te Language of the Goddess (NY: HarperCollins, :,,:),
p. ,:.
:. William Irwin Tompson, Transforming History (Great Barrington, MA:
Lindisfarne Books, :cc:), p. ::.
,. Marina Warner, Six Myths of Our Time (NY: Vintage International, :,,,), p. ;).
::
. In the same year, signicantly, the Australian artist Arthur Boyd painted his
Crucixion, Shoalhaven, in which, for the rst time ever, a woman is depicted on the
cross in the place of Christ. Western civilization is, of course, a global phenomenon,
and so we should not be surprised to nd parallel developments within the cultural
Zeitgeist unfolding in locations as far removed from each other as Australia, England
and America.
,. Cited in Tompson, Te Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (NY: St. Martins
Gri n, ), p. :,o.
o. Marija Gimbutas, Te Living Goddesses (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, :,,,), p. :,;.
;. Notice that in the scene in Metropolis just prior to the introduction of the female
robot, the protagonist walks under a doorway that is labelled with the Roman numeral
V. Interesting coincidence in light of Pynchons focus on the biomechanical
goddess in V. Te numeral ,, furthermore, is linked with the goddess also by way of
its association with the so-called Venus pentagram, a shape made in the heavens by
the back and forth motions of Venus during eight year intervals. Tis pentagram also
appears in the scene with Maria in Metropolis.
. Warner, op. cit., pp. ,.
,. Tomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow (NY: Viking-Penguin, :,,,), p. c;.
::
10
Te Comic Book Superhero:
Or, How Gotham Became Self-Aware
And Developed an Immune System
In our modern folklore, the Machine is depicted as a living being which takes on its
own life and becomes self-aware.* As it does so, it develops an immune system with
which to defend itself against human attempts to dismantle it. Dave Bowman is
able to destroy H.A.L. only because of H.A.L.s failure to develop such an immune
system that would treat Bowman as an antigen and deal with him accordingly. In
the following essay, we will see how the Machine-as-megalopolis becomes self-aware
and creates an army of superheroes whose primary task as antibodies is to defend
the great city against invasion by the beings of ancient myth. (Te character of
Deckard in Blade Runner is a similar example of this, for his job is not so much
to kill replicants as to keep the great city free from the invasions of mythic beings,
thereby serving the interests of the megalopolis. Deckards whole agon in this lm is
whether to play the role of an immune cell on behalf of the great city or else break
free and become a true individual).
But in a countermove against the Machine, Hollywood has stripped Gotham of
its immune system by appropriating the superhero into its service against the new
villain of electronic, global society: the corporate CEO, who has appeared as the
superheros central antagonist in movie after movie. Tus, in order to battle the
megamachine, the celluloid superhero must perform a role that replicates that of
Frankensteins monster: he must turn against the articial father who has created
him the city itself and slay him. In psychological terms, that is, the contem-
porary inhabitants of our crumbling world cities must battle the corporate giants
with the aid of a superhero, an act that is actually a modern retrieval of the healing
gods and deities of tribal aboriginal man. Amongst the Native American Iroquois,
for example, illness was dealt with by the False Face Society who would wear the
masks of beings of sickness in order to combat the demons and devils that had seized
* See, for example, Frank Millers graphic novel Ronin (NY: Warner Books,
:,;).
Te Comic Book Superhero
:,
possession of their patients. In similar fashion, our cinematic superhero myths seem
to be saying that it is only through such a mythic, tribal being that the corporate
villain can be defeated.
In studying the history of the superhero, therefore, we will nd that a reversal of
roles has taken place: originally depicted in comic books and radio dramas as an
East Coast, provincial mythical gure, whose role was to defend the machine-as-
megalopolis by keeping mythic beings out, now the superhero, reborn on celluloid,
is a West Coast, universal being who stands up against the Machine as represented
not by the megalopolis but by the corporation which has displaced it as an economic
superpower. In this battle of roles, masks are traded back and forth between su-
perheroes and supervillains, and the problem of the Machine is dened in strictly
psychological terms, as that of when to identify with what particular mask and
when to leave it o. Tis response to the problem of the Machine is what I call
Identication: that is, using the superhero as a model for the individual to defend
himself against the machine through temporary identication with an ancient
mythic persona. For gures like Batman, Wolverine, Spider Man and Antman all
have precedents in ancient myth, and Native American myth in particular. With
the mythology of the superhero, then, we are witnessing the birth of a national
American mythos.
1. Origins
So, just where did the superhero come from? And why is he so popular now?
In order to answer that, we have to look back at the origins of mass culture in
the nineteenth century, for just as a ame presupposes an oxygenated atmo-
sphere in order to burn, so too does the superhero require a cultural ecology
that enables him to ourish. For example, he couldnt have existed during the
eighteenth century. Tings would have been too slow and quiet for him, then:
all those people wearing lace cus and powdered wigs, playing chamber mu-
sic, watching logs burning in the hearth instead of television you know, like
that movie Barry Lyndon that takes four hours to sit through.
But if we speed up the picture a little bit, and add in the invention of the
railroad during the :,cs, we can accelerate the cultural metabolism, so that
now goods and services are moving more quickly from one place to another.
Steamboats are moving faster than sailboats, so that by mid century the At-
lantic can be crossed in a matter of days instead of weeks. People are not only
moving from place to place more quickly, but now information is moving fast-
er as well, for with the invention of the telegraph in :, news is beginning
:
to pour into the o ces of newspapers at light speed, moving too quickly for
them to process by the old methods using literary essays which provide con-
text and background. Instead, those things will just have to be supplied by
the reader himself, who will thus ll in the missing information, just as in
political cartoons the eect of the image depends upon the readers preexistent
knowledge of the political circumstances. Ten, with the telephone in :;,
the wireless in :,,, and nally radio in :,:c, more information is moving
about than can be encompassed by any one individual. Te culture is cooling
o, imploding on itself, to use McLuhans terminology, and becoming more
participatory.
Tese are better conditions for the superhero to thrive in because he does
things fast, and does them with grand, mythic gestures. No time for that
sitting around and thinking things through sequentially stu. Deeds need to
be done instantaneously, and for that they require mythic heroes who are able
to accomplish mighty tasks quickly, without overthinking them.
As the crowds begin to gather in their Parisian arcades and New York depart-
ment stores, the forerunners begin to appear: the Captain Nemos and Allan
Quartermains, those gures of the superhero in his early incarnation as explor-
er, for there was still exploring to be done in those days, places to be reached
like the South Pole and the darkest jungles of Africa. And there will always be
a connection with science, because the superhero is somehow given birth to by
science, for he is its inevitable by-product, a cosmic side-eect of the human
intellects interfering with forces and secrets best left to themselves.
Ten, as the skyscrapers begin to rise and the land starts to disappear, Tar-
zan, Lord of the Apes, and John Carter, Warlord of Mars, break out from the
skull of Edgar Rice Burroughs and onto the pages of an American pulp ction
magazine called All-Story, for by the turn of the twentieth century, pulp ction
was on the loose (Te Argosy was rst to appear in October, :,o). Te pulps
specialized in genre ction: westerns, science ction and fantasy tales, crime
stories, and romances. Ten in January :,:,, a threshold is crossed as Tarzan
and Buck Rogers transmigrate from the pulps to the comic strips. Tey are the
rst action-adventure heroes to appear in a medium that hitherto had been
strictly regarded as the funnies.
It was not until :,,: that the rst true superhero arrived, a crime-ghting
character wearing a mythically-inspired outt and haunting the streets of
New York City. Tis was Maxwell Grants Te Shadow, who had already ap-
peared in :,,c as the narrator of Street & Smiths radio show, the Detective
Story Magazine Hour. Te Shadow was the rst superhero to have his own
pulp and his own alter ego and was followed in :,,, by Lester Dents
:,
mono-egoic Doc Savage whose base of operations was on the oth oor
of a New York skyscraper and Grant Stockbridges Te Spider, a masked
crimeghter similar in appearance to Te Shadow, and looking nothing like
a spider. Ten, in the Sunday strips, Alex Raymond was given the job of
ripping o Buck Rogers with his beautifully drawn, one page Flash Gordon
serials. In radio, meanwhile, Te Green Hornet rst aired in January of
:,,o, while in February of that year, Lee Falks Te Phantom makes his
appearance in the strips as the rst superhero to be dressed in tights. Ten,
in June :,,, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shusters Superman, originally created by
them in :,,, rst appears in Action Comics t:. Batman appears in Detective
Comics t:; in May :,,,, while in October of the same year, Marvel Comics t:
featured the debut of that companys rst two superheroes, the Sub-Mariner
and the Human Torch.
Tat little sketch gives us some idea, anyway, of where the superhero came
from. But as to the nature of the environment that made it possible for him
to live and breathe, there are two other factors that I think we need to look at:
the eect of radio, and the rise of the megalopolis.
2. Son of Origins: the Eects of Radio
In the :,:cs and :,,cs, radio was a fresh medium, pregnant with possibilities
that quickly began to shape the contours of a new kind of global mass audi-
ence, warping and conforming culture to suit its own needs. And one of the
things that it brought into being was the comic book superhero, in contradis-
tinction to the action-adventure hero of the pulps.
Heres how this works. When something is broadcast over the radio, youre
not the only person who hears it, unlike, say, a phonograph record. Instead,
you and an audience of millions hear it simultaneously. Tus, radio becomes,
as Marshall McLuhan put it, a sort of tribal drum which summons up cul-
turally unifying energies amongst huge populations, turning them basically
into a very large village. And as villages tend to have tribal leaders, so World
War II quickly provided them. Without radio, Hitler might never have come
to power, for his intense, white hot personality was magnied through his
radio speeches into that of a tribal war god, the radio serving as a kind of
megaphone held out before swarming hordes of Germanic tribes going into
berserker mode for battle.
You begin to get the picture. Or should I say, the sound?
Radio, that is, as an auditory medium and especially when it is the dominant
:o
medium, as is no longer the case today subliminally activates a pre-literate,
oral cultural mentality, which, once awakened, brings along with it into the
daylight the archetypal heroes of ancient myth and traditional oral epic sto-
rytelling. Te heroes of oral epics, such as Achilles, Beowulf, or Mwindo, are
always depicted performing deeds of graphic physical violence, for such larger
than life heroes are the kinds of gures that the imagination of tribal man
celebrated in its poems and legends. And so it is no accident that just at the
moment when an orally-based medium became the dominant one rst radio
broadcast, :,:c that the kinds of heroes which sprang into being from the
imaginatory wellsprings of pop culture were precisely such as would have been
sung about in the days of oystrygods gaggin shygods, to use Joyces phrase.
For no sooner were they invented, than the superheroes were drummed into
service to do battle with the Nazis. Captain America, whose shield and blonde
hair links him with the type of Achilles, went to war against the Red Skull,
while the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner put aside their dierences and
began hijacking U-boats.
Tus, the kind of mental ecology in which the superhero can ourish is one
that is profoundly at odds with the old, sequential one-thing-then-another
mentality of the Gutenbergian Galaxy. Te heroes of Gutenberg are the intro-
verted characters of the novel, whose rise put the old orally based epic out of
business. As the days of the printed book gained ground, the novel gradually
became the primary medium for telling stories, and as print favors an abstract,
left-brain, strictly visually-based mentality, its characters became more and
more introverted and philosophically inclined. Finally, the greatest novels ever
written also happen to be the ones in which the least amount of physical
action takes place: Remembrance of Tings Past, Te Man Without Qualities,
Ulysses, Te Magic Mountain. When electrically-based media began to arise,
however, left hemispheric thinking shifted to the right, with its gestalt-based
everything-all-at-once pattern recognition. Te kinds of heroes favored by
print are abstract; those favored by media like radio, lm and television, are
concretely sensuous, and physically inclined. Tey are no longer purely visual
abstractions like the alphabet, but are visual, acoustic and tactile all at once,
like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Tus, the superhero with the pictograph on his
breast is a kind of walking hieroglyph.
Which brings us to another characteristic that the superhero shares with
tribal man, who puts on his gods the way superheroes put on their alter ego
costumes. Oral cultures tend to favor such non-literate forms of communica-
tion as ritual and dance, and these invariably involve the wearing of costumes
and masks which personify tribal demons, gods and spirits. Like the brothers
:;
in the Grimms fairy tale Te Six Swans an orally told story who are
transformed by a witch into swans and are allowed to be human for only
a quarter of an hour at night, whereupon they take o their swan skins as
though they were merely costumes, the superhero lives in a tribal world in
which such mythical personae are put on and o as masks. And we note that
the rst costumed superheroes, the Shadow in :,,: and the Phantom in :,,o,
appear precisely at the apogee of radio.
Note, too, that the Shadows persona is particularly tting for a radio-domi-
nated culture: he is a dim, obscurely dened gure, a shadow, after all, and
hence a non-visual character, the nature of whose echoing laugh makes it seem
that he is everywhere all at once, just as sound comes to us from all directions
simultaneously.
Finally, I would point out that both the superhero and radio are rooftop
phenomena. Te superhero, as a masked crusader leaping or ying about roof-
tops, presupposes the world-view created by radio, with its mesh of rooftop
antennae beaming signals at each other from skyscrapers. Te superhero him-
self, and Superman in particular, is a personication of these lightspeed radio
waves, as he travels from the window of one skyscraper to another.
So without radio the costumed superhero with magical abilities would never
have come into existence, although as we have seen other sorts of larger-than-
life heroes were already popular in adventure ction. But the generation of
heroes prior to those of the :,,cs are a very dierent thing from the superhero
properly speaking. Without costumes, iconic heraldry and masked alter egos
all of which radio, through its subliminal retrieval of long lost magical-to-
temic areas of the mind, made possible the superhero simply would not be
the superhero.
3. Bring on the Bad Guys
What, exactly, does the superhero do?
To answer this, we have to understand a couple of basic things about the
nature of the megalopolis that serves as his environment, for it was the mega-
lopolis, with its technological innovations of radio and skyscraper that brought
forth the superhero, as opposed to the mere adventure hero of the pulps. But
the superhero is no mere explorer. Discovery has nothing to do with his raison
dtre. While some superheroes may be scientists Bruce Wayne, Bruce Ban-
ner, Reed Richards this is merely incidental to their nature, for the purpose
which drives the superhero is essentially one of defense and not the acquisition
:
of knowledge for its own sake. Understanding this distinction is crucial for
getting what the superhero is all about. Te analogy of an immune cell is
more appropriate than that of a hunter: James Bond is a hunter, the superhero
a defender.
But if he is like an immune cell, then what is the body which he is defend-
ing, you may well ask? And thats a good question because the answer isnt so
obvious. Te reader of this essay will no doubt stop at this point, take a sip of
coee, look out the window, and think: Well, isnt it obvious, you moron?
Te superhero is an extension of the legal system, and his next of kin would be
the police. Terefore, his job is to defend society from anarchy. He is a social
immune cell. Q.E.D.
But you would be wrong. For this would leave unexplained his frequent
conicts with the law, which indicate that there is some opposition between
the justice system and what the superhero does. What any reader of Daredevil
knows, for instance, is that he does not uphold the law, for Daredevil is a blind
man who is a lawyer by day and a superhero by night. His mythic alter ego is
therefore impatient with due process, and so has no qualms about resorting to
violence in order to triumph over evil.
So, the organism that the superhero as immune cell defends isnt society
but . . . what? New York City, perhaps? But then, why New York in particu-
lar? Why would New York City need an immune system? To protect it from
what?
First, some facts about New York.
Te characteristic thing about Gotham that dierentiates it from all other
cities of the world is that when it was founded by the Dutch in the seventeenth
century, it was founded as the worlds rst entirely secular city. It was built and
established strictly as a machine for making money. And as a citys architecture
reects its values, so it is that secularized kinds of buildings very quickly gained
the upper hand over Whitmans city of spires and masts. Beginning in the
:ocs, the neo-Gothic towers of John and Washington Roeblings Brooklyn
Bridge loom over the skyline like a pair of stone giants, dwarng even Trinity
Church, which had been, up till then, the citys tallest structure. Ten, in :o,
the Statue of Liberty was erected on Bedloe Island: the worlds tallest free stand-
ing statue which, at ,c, feet is taller even than the :;o foot towers of the Brook-
lyn Bridge; in :,c,, the Flatiron building went up, and in :,:,, the Woolworth
Building. In :,:,, the Chrysler Building was nished, and then in May :,,:,
the Empire State Building at :,:,c feet became New Yorks crown jewel.
What is behind this straining and striving to reach the heavens? Is it mere-
ly to say, My corporation is bigger than yours? Perhaps. But that would
:,
leave unexplained the heaven scaling tendencies of such civic, non-corpo-
rate architecture as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty, or even, in
Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument. No, there is something else
at work here, something which is driving these buildings up from the earth as
a group, something deeper, some inherent desire in Western civilization as a
whole that announced itself as early as the spear-tipped spires of our Gothic
cathedrals during the Middle Ages.
Tere is here in fact evidence of an essentially religious urge on the part of
the masculine intellect to break free from the earth, to attain escape velocity
and achieve a gravityless orbit in the pure mental space of outer space itself. It
is an urge as old as the pyramids with their stellar alignments or the Gnostic
desire to be rid of the body and ascend into the heavens; a desire to be free
from the wet biology of mother nature and her sloppy methods of morpho-
genesis, and take up residence in the abstract world of numbers, right angles
and machines. It is a transcendentalist myth in which the various sylphs, nixies
and ithyphallic Pan gods of the woods and forests are left behind in favor of a
zodiac of purely numeric divinities.
As a result, megalopolitan man is in a particularly precarious position, for
the divinities of the earth will not tolerate being left behind, and so with
Merian C. Coopers :,,, lm King Kong, we get the rst assault on a mega-
lopolis from mother earth and her brood of Titans. Coopers giant black ape
was the rst in a long series of such great beasts sent forth from the various
nooks and crannies of the earth to bring megalopolitan man down. In :,,,
Godzilla awakens from beneath the sea to launch an assault on the newly
erected skyscrapers of Tokyo, while in :,,o, Rodans slumber deep within the
earth is disturbed by miners. All through the :,,cs, furthermore, the imagina-
tion of animator Ray Harryhausen gives birth to one great monster after the
next: from the beast that rises from twenty thousand fathoms to attack New
York City the inspiration for Godzilla to the giant octopus that destroys
the Golden Gate Bridge, to the army of ying saucers that wipes Washington,
D.C. o the map.
In Indian myth, whenever demons or devils attempt to hijack the world, an
avatar of Vishnu is called forth to set right the cosmic balance. In the Western
mind, likewise, some dreaming, Vishnu-like all-awareness responded to these
invasions of its megalopolises with an avatar of its own: the comic book super-
hero, who will perform the role of civilizations immune cells specically called
forth to keep such invasions from the mythic realm at bay.
Te cover of Fantastic Four t:, in :,o:, makes this very clear, for there we
nd the four heroes battling a giant green monster that has broken through
:,c
the pavement right in the middle of New York. Te early issues of Fantastic
Four, indeed, are lled with such :,,cs giant monsters, each one threatening
to destroy the great megalopolis.
At rst Superman appears, though, to be hostile to the megalopolis. In
the initial two years of his adventures, Siegel and Shuster have him running
around smashing automobiles and bridges and ghting corrupt city o cials.
It took him a while to settle down into his true vocation and begin ghting for
the megalopolis. It isnt until Action Comics t:c (January, :,c) that a splash
panel shows him for the rst time using his powers on the citys behalf, as he
supports a broken elevated train track in time for the train to get safely across.
Shortly thereafter, the covers and splash pages feature him more and more of-
ten in acts of rescue, while images depicting him smashing machinery become
restricted to the occasional glimpse of him raising a carload of villains above
his head as he readies to throw it like a football.
But while it took Superman some time to nd his calling, Batman found it
straightaway. In Batman t: (Spring, :,c) for example, an evil scientist named
Dr. Hugo Strange unleashes a horde of giants who resemble clones of James
Whales Frankenstein monster. Tey go smashing up el-trains and destroying
cars precisely what Superman had spent the past two years doing until
Batman shoots them down with his state-of-the-art Batplane, complete, we
might add, with gatling guns. He chases the last of the giants to the top of
a skyscraper that resembles the Empire State Building, and pecks it o with
video game accuracy. Te image is an exact repetition of the climax of King
Kong, but now we take careful note that it is a superhero, and not the military,
which is in the role of the monster slayer.
It is the job of the superhero, that is to say, not to uphold the law, but to
keep monsters, devils and demons out of the city. Tus, the superheros function
is more akin to that of the ancient tribal shaman whose role he has retrieved,
for it was the shamans job not only to cure and heal illnesses, but especially to
combat the devils and demons that were perceived as being the causes of those
illnesses. He was, so to speak, a defender of the tribe against invasions from
the astral plane. But why does New York in particular need defense against
astral invasions?
New York City, like the great cities of the ancient world, is a world city, a
cosmopolis. Tis means not merely that it is urbane and trendy, but that it is a
miniature world unto itself. Te rst great cities in Sumer and Egypt were such
microcosms, and that is why they too had monster slayer myths, and in fact
that is why such myths were invented in the rst place. For the function of
the city as such is to impose a certain order over against the chaos of nature.
:,:
It serves to create a forum in which civilized, rather than instinctual, forces
dominate. For the Egyptians, draining the swamps of the Nile delta in order
to build places like Memphis and Heliopolis always simultaneously meant
the performance of an essentially mythological task in their case, that of
defeating the antagonist of civilization, the god Set, who was associated with
such wild animals as hippos and crocodiles, and indeed with everything hostile
to the concept of city, including storms and the arid wastes of the desert.
Monster-slaying gods like Horus and Ra were therefore imaged in their myths
as slaying giant serpents and other such chaotic monsters. In Indian myth,
the rakshasas are forever at war against the gods and heroes for possession of
civilization, and so, in Te Ramayana, it becomes necessary for the god Vishnu
to incarnate himself as a monster slayer named Rama who, with his brother,
must slay the demons. In the Persian epic Te Shah-Nama, likewise, each of
the great kings, in order to found a cosmos, must go out and do battle with
the Divs, the Persian equivalents of the Hindu asuras. From every place the
Divs power will I sweep, says Tehmuras, one of its foundational kings, and
will the world myself as monarch keep.
New York City, then, is a sort of modern miniature city-as-cosmos with an
axial mountain the Empire State Building like Mount Olympus or Mount
Meru. It is also surrounded on all sides by water, as in the ancient Greek or
Egyptian vision of the earth-as-island. It, too, must be defended as an or-
dered world in this case, literally laid out on a grid against forces which
it perceives to be antithetical to its nature, namely, anything that smacks of
irrational mysticism or ancient myth. As a result, New Yorkers are particularly
vulnerable to psychic attacks, their very existence imperiled by the beings of
ancient myth and legend which, through hubris, they think they have elimi-
nated from their lives.
Consider Spider Mans classic battle with Te Vulture in Te Amazing Spi-
der-Man t: (May, :,o,), which features a man with a human head who wears
the apparel of a bird and has wings which actually enable him to y. We are
also told that he lives in an old farm house on Staten Island and must y in
to New York, where he does battle with Spider Man amidst the skyscrapers.
Eventually, of course, Spider Man defeats him and sends him packing o to
jail via helicopter. Te point of the story is made here at the climax: it is not
the old agrarian world that is a rmed which dreamed of ight strictly in
mythic images like the Egyptian idea of the soul as Ba, a person with a human
head and the body of a bird, or of a harpy or an angel but rather the mod-
ern, technocratic, rational world of what myths could only once dream about,
namely, physical ight via a mechanical contrivance like a helicopter.
:,:
Tus, comic books provide us with the myths of New York City, for it is a
truism of a societys mythology that whatever villain the hero triumphs against
is an embodiment of precisely the values which that society rejects. And in this
case, the immune system of New York wants the ancient mythic beings out.
But this, of course, leads us into a paradox, for is not the superhero himself
a mythic being?
Te Superhero is indeed a sort of o cial, accepted mythic being, but he is
accepted only because of his essentially dual nature. By day, he is quotidian
and dull, like the rest of us, but at night he becomes something else, a masked,
costumed spirit that was once at home in the mythic world of tribal man. New
Yorkers will accept myth only so long as it kept in the closet, something that
can be put on and o like a Halloween costume. Te supervillains, on the
contrary, are beings who cannot change back. More often than not, they do
not have split personalities, and so lack that one foot in touch with the daylight
world of rationality and sanity which enables New Yorkers to have their myths
and eat them too. Te supervillain is one whose entire persona has been swal-
lowed up, to put it in Jungian terms, by a mythological archetype. Te waking
daylight personality cannot be reconstructed. New Yorkers abhor the supervil-
lain because he personies what they most dread: being swallowed up by an-
cient myth and never being able to come back to the rational world of numbers
and gures and machines and right angles that they have spent so much hard
work building up. Te supervillain, then, personies the sloughed o mentality
of archaic mythic man, for whom rationality as such did not exist yet, at all.
4. Dude, that movie sucked !
With lm, the superhero has simultaneously attained his widest popularity
and yet also entered into his decline. Te current success of the superhero is
due largely to the proliferation of his imagery via the medium of celluloid
wedded to corporate advertising, for it is the nature of this medium to cast
huge shadows against the back wall of the public mental space. But at the
same time, the image of the superhero on screen has become a faded Xerox
of the real thing, for the very act of translation from one medium to another
can sometimes have a thinning eect, resulting in a loss of textural informa-
tion. By comparison with the best that the comic books have to oer such as
Frank Millers Dark Knight Returns or Alan Moores Watchmen the lm ver-
sions of these superhero myths are like oats in a Macys parade: overinated
blimps with too much packaging and too little detail. Millers Dark Knight
:,,
by contrast was a plateau in the history of the comic book, for his vision of
Batman as a sixty-year old, tank-driving biomechanical centaur with psychotic
tendencies is a rich funhouse of ideas. Tim Burtons Warner Brothers nanced
Batman, on the other hand, is about as interesting as a billboard.
Te reason for this, of course, is that these movies are made, not by talented
visionaries and artists like Jack Kirby or Will Eisner, but by corporations that
hire teams of individuals to put together preassembled ideas like a piece of
furniture from Ikea. And one of the surest signs that the corporate suits who
nance these pictures couldnt care less what messages they are conveying is
that the supervillains themselves are more and more often depicted as cor-
porate executives, either obviously so or metaphorically. In Spiderman, for
instance, the Green Goblin is a corporate businessman with a split personality.
Tim Burtons version of the Joker in his Batman is a kind of caricature of a
CEO, for Jokers invasion of Gotham with an armada of balloons, oats and
mass-produced garbage is a metaphor for the Walmartication of our culture,
the replacement of well-made, quality products with cheap, plastic disposable
trash. In Te X-Men, Magneto, who wishes to collectivize the mutants into
a single all-conquering purpose instead of allowing them to cultivate their
uniquenesses, is another metaphor for the corporate attempt to transform so-
ciety into an army of zombies. And in Te Hulk, the real bad guys are the
military-industrial complex who wish to stamp this freak of nature out of
existence, using the latest hi-tech gadgetry to do so.
In the traditional comics, the superheros ght against the villain was a way
of asserting the values of the megalopolis against the ancient agrarian world
with its Hesiodic swarm of mythic beings. But in lm these mythic beings
lose their polytheistic diversity, since they are portrayed as mere ciphers for
corporate executives, and so we discover that we are watching the same lm,
reiterated over and over again. Tere has been a loss of complexity, a reduction
of multiple layers of meaning to a single, monovalent one. It is, of course, a
supreme irony that corporations are spending millions of dollars nancing
lms in which they are depicted as the villains.
Tis may even explain why people go to see these movies in droves, for
corporations, and the fake, empty and articial lives that they insist upon, are
now stronger and loom more ominously over our heads than at any time in
history. At present, it is the vast, impersonal world of corporations in alliance
with the military-industrial complex that is transforming the planet into a
cultural wasteland, and the puny human individual is left feeling powerless
at the hands of these forces. Te superhero reminds him of the possibility, at
least, that there might still exist a window somewhere in his life through which
:,
he can escape from servitude to the megamachine, and become a strong, self-
reliant individual on his own.
But it is becoming harder and harder to do this, for in an increasingly cor-
porate-dominated world it seems that individuality making your own way
on your own terms, creatively, and in deance of authority, as Nietzsche ad-
vised is becoming a thing of the past. Conformity is in like never before, and
the hive mind is taking over. A mass collectivization is driving the electric fuse
through the silicon circuit and one by one, the pathways for living authenti-
cally are disappearing over the horizon like stars that fail to rise upon spring-
time due to the precession of the equinoxes.
Te nature of the celluloid medium, then, has changed the myth of the
superhero in translation from the page to the screen, just as a given narrative,
War of the Worlds for instance, will play with entirely dierent eects upon the
imagination of its audience depending upon whether the medium in which it
is cast is radio or lm or the printed page. For in these movies, the superhero
is no longer merely an immune cell of New York City defending the Big Apple
from the gray worms of astral devils and demons. And indeed, as in lms
like Ang Lees Te Hulk, the actual location tends to be negligible, for that
movie takes place in San Francisco. Instead, lm with its tireless reiteration
of the superhero vs. the CEO has transformed superheroes into larger, less
specialized and more universal gures whose stories are made consistent with
the European myth of the individual who stands up against whatever forces
happen to be depersonalizing his way of life at the time. In the Middle Ages,
it was the Church which threatened to rob individuals of authenticity, and so
we got the Arthurian romances. Nowadays, it is the multinational corporation
which threatens to degrade a well-lived life with the false allure of prefabri-
cated, processed inauthenticity that promises to relieve the poor bewildered
inhabitants of Metropolis from the burden of having to make their own lives
based upon carefully chosen, and weighed, moral decisions. But cheap plastic
trash is no substitute for real culture, any more than a pre-digested life is for a
decent human existence.
It is most ironic that this message is being conveyed to us precisely through
the medium of cheap plastic trash.
:,,
11
Lucass Electronic Opera:
Te Star Wars Films and the Solution to the
Problem of the Biomechanical Man
With the Star Wars lms, we arrive at the vision of a mythic image that will
resolve, once and for all, the problem of the Machines attempt to tyrannize and
dominate the human being. Trough what I call Symbiosis, the Machine and
mankind become mutually dependent symbionts in a world where one cannot exist
without the other. Without some kind of mastery over technology, man would not
survive in the struggle against nature to maintain himself as a living being, but
would go under, ripped to pieces by forces which only his machines can control.
So the machine, Lucas tells us, is not something to be thrown out altogether, la
Tolkien, but is rather to be accepted as itself a revelation of cosmic powers capable
of inspiring the same kind of wonder and awe that the gods formerly did. Unlike
Kubricks vision in :cc:, all this must be kept on a human scale, and unlike the
visions set forth in Herzogs and Tarkovksys lms, man must face technology on its
own terms and not imagine it can be rendered invisible. Nor will the mere draw-
ing of boundaries solve the problem, since this does not involve an embracing of the
machine for its own potentialities and possibilities. In his lms Lucas shows how
human and mechanical systems may harmoniously coexist, which is something that
none of these other solutions even attempt to do.
George Lucass Star Wars epic is the closest thing that we possess to a modern
equivalent of the Ring cycle, for just as Wagner created for the Germans a
national mythology of the Industrial Age, Lucas has given us a modern cel-
luloid epic for the Electronic Society, in which the industrial nation state is
giving way to an emerging planetary culture. Te Romantic movement of the
nineteenth century was a reaction to the industrial system, and the various na-
tionalist movements with their retrieval of ancient myth were, at least partially,
an attempt to combat the encroachments of the machine world which was al-
ready beginning the process of eroding culture, authenticity and individuality
:,o
wherever it went. Tus, the very mechanical Umwelt that was born out of
the European nation state arose only to destroy its local, geographically based
boundaries with an electronic latticework of metanational corporations.
Te Star Wars lms are an epic for the Electronic Age in which individuality
is subsiding before the creation of huge hive cities lled with nomadic, rootless
populations living in servitude to corporate latifundia. Like the robot army
of the Trade Federation in Te Phantom Menace which goes crashing through
forests and destroying every living thing in its path, our transnational corpora-
tions, in alliance with the military-industrial complex, are threatening to turn
the planet into a wasteland of indentured slavery, ruined topsoils, desertied
seas, and scarred strips of deforested land swarming with refugee populations.
Te United States government has pledged itself to the eradication of terror-
ism, and this is bad news for everyone, since the list of states that has either
sponsored or unconsciously generated terrorist groups as a by-product of their
political metabolism (Saudi Arabia being the prime example) is embarrass-
ingly large. Te U.S., in other words, has declared war on the entire world,
and the only possible way in which it could win such a war is precisely the
way it has been done by civilizations in the past: through the formation of a
Universal State. Te Egyptians responded to their conquest by the Hyksos
through forming such a state that included the entire Middle East; the Greeks,
under Alexander the Great, responded to the Persian Achaemenid Empire with
the creation of such a state, though it was brief-lived and not restored until the
Romans, tired of being attacked by peoples like the Celts and the Carthagin-
ians, conquered the Mediterranean basin, a feat later reduplicated by Islam
under the Abbasids. Te dierence nowadays is that the geographical extent of
such an empire would have to be coextensive with the entire planet.
But perhaps we are at the turning point predicted nearly a century ago by
Oswald Spengler in Te Decline of the West, when he prophesied that just over
the threshold of the year :ccc, our Western civilization would begin its shift
from democratic politics to the Realpolitik of the Caesars, in which all checks
and balances are removed and power becomes centralized in the gure of a
monarch who occupies o ce not by any vote of the people, but for as long as
he can hold it without being assassinated. If, as Oliver Stone has speculated
in J.F.K., this shift into zoological power struggles among the ruling elite has
already taken place for us Americans, then the CIA is on its way to becom-
ing a modern praetorian guard that decides who it wants in o ce and who it
doesnt. Under George Bush, Jr., the o ce of the presidency has centralized
more power to itself than at any other time in the history of American gov-
ernment, for with such resolutions as the Patriot Act which gives the CIA
Lucass Electronic Opera
:,;
almost unlimited power to invade privacy and the War Authorization Reso-
lution Pact (WARPA) under which the President can declare war whenever
he wants without having to give just cause we are beginning to see that the
U.S. government just might give birth to a monarchy, after all.
It seems tting, then, that the plot of George Lucass Star Wars prequels is
modeled on the decline of the Roman Republic and its transition to the Em-
pire under the Caesars, for that is exactly what is happening to our democracy
right now. In fact, if you pay close enough attention to Lucass lms, you will
learn everything you need to know about what is going on in our society, for
despite their opening disclaimer, the Star Wars lms are not about another
world in outer space a long time ago, but about what is happening on this
planet right now. For Lucas is not only a modern Wagner, but a sort of Virgil
as well, forging for the Empire although in this case, he is decidedly against
it a national American epic in the time of Caesar.
Te two great science ction epics before Star Wars were both literary: Isaac
Asimovs Foundation novels and Frank Herberts Dune. Lucass screenplay for
Star Wars owes a certain debt to these works, for the premiss of a Galactic Em-
pire consolidating its power during a cultural Dark Age comes from Asimovs
epic, while the idea of a messianic warrior hero who emerges out of a desert
planet comes from Herberts. Lucass planet Tattooine is Arrakis, and his Sand-
people are a kind of transformation of the Fremen, Herberts Bedouin-like
aboriginals. In Asimovs Foundation, spaceships travel by making lightspeed
jumps into hyperspace, and in Te Phantom Menace, the image of Coruscant,
a planet whose entire surface is coextensive with a giant city, reminds us of Asi-
movs Trantor, the city-wide planet from which his old, dying Empire slowly
loses its grip over the universe.
Both Foundation and Dune, however, are concerned with the historical
manifestation of anomalies, that is, of charismatic individuals who arise to
shape the events of history. In Foundation, the psychohistorian Hari Seldon,
through the use of statistical mathematics, has foreseen that the Galactic Em-
pire will collapse into the ruin of a Dark Age that will last for :c,ccc years
unless a special Foundation is produced to stem the tide of cultural entropy,
in which case the interregnum will last only a millenium. Te Foundation is
set up on a provincial planet beyond the reach of the Empires inuence, and
at rst its stated purpose is merely to produce an Encyclopedia Galactica, but
this turns out to be a cover for the eventual creation of a miniaturized mili-
tary industrial complex within which all scientic and technical knowledge
is hoarded. Everything unfolds in accordance with Seldons predictions until
:,
the arrival onstage of a mutation, totally unforeseen by his statistical averages,
known as the Mule, a being with telepathic powers that is capable of molding
mens minds to accord with his will. Te Mule is able to destroy the Founda-
tion almost without eort, but it turns out that a Second Foundation has been
secretly established on the other side of the Galaxy. Tis Second Foundation,
in contrast to the rst, is comprised of telepathic individuals like the Mule,
and so they are able to outwit him and preserve the course of Seldons plan. In
Asimovs later sequel, Foundations Edge, history turns out to have been par-
tially directed by the people of the planet Gaia, a race of beings that make up
a kind of hive-mind with telepathic powers. Te Mule, in fact, was originally
one of these people, but later revolted against them. Te people of Gaia have
been subtly interfering with the minds of the Second Foundation in their at-
tempt to shepherd humanity toward the creation of Galaxia, a sort of Milky
Way scale version of their planetary Overmind, as an alternative to a second
Galactic Empire.
Whereas Asimovs charismatic Mule was a totally unforeseen factor in the
history of his cosmos, Herberts Dune, which focuses on a young prince named
Paul Atreides, concerns the arrival of a long expected messiah. Pauls fam-
ily, for political reasons, inherits rulership of the planet Arrakis, also known
as Dune. Teir native planet, Caladan, is lush and green, like earth, but
Dune is entirely desert, although its shifting copper sands do contain one
major resource: gigantic sandworms that manufacture an addictive drug called
spice, which also happens to induce paranormal abilities in its users. Te
Guild Navigators who the spice has, over thousands of years, mutated into
demonic-looking beings out of a Lovecraft story require the drug to pilot
their spaceships, for it gives them a clairvoyant ability to chart their pathways
through spacetime without crashing into planets or stars. Because of this fact,
the entire commerce of the galaxy depends upon the spice manufactured only
on Dune, and whichever royal family is in power on Arrakis, consequently,
becomes enormously powerful.
But the house of Atreides has an ancient enemy in the House of Harkonnen,
which ruled Dune and lost it, by Imperial decree, to the Atreides. However,
the Emperor is in league with the Harkonnens to destroy the Atreides, for he
fears them, and no sooner have they moved into the palace than it is overrun
by Harkonnen troops and Pauls father, Duke Leto, is murdered, while Paul
and his mother, a Bene Gesserit priestess, escape to the desert. Te Bene Ges-
serit suspect that Paul may be the long prophecied Kwisatz Haderach, the only
male in the cosmos who can rival their clairvoyant powers. But the aboriginal
peoples of Dune the Fremen coincidentally have also foretold the coming
:,,
of a messiah, whom they call the Mahdi, who will lead their peoples in a war
against the foreign powers perennially colonizing their planet.
1
When Paul
and his mother are exiled, they take up with the Fremen, and while learning
their ways, the Fremen realize that Paul is the Mahdi of their ancient myths,
but only after he has survived a series of initiations: he must learn to kill other
Fremen who have wronged him; he must survive a visionary encounter with
Shai Hulud, the great sandworm god; and he must drink the waters of life,
a toxic liquid that is created by larval sandworms which only the Mahdi can
drink and survive, for it kills any other male who attempts to consume it. He
also takes a Fremen girl for his wife, becomes addicted to the spice, as all Fre-
men are, and, at the climax, leads them, riding upon the backs of sandworms,
in a war against the Harkonnens to regain his rightful rulership of the palace.
Both Dune and Foundation are about the ways in which history is shaped
not by institutions, but by unprecedented individuals who arrive on the scene
to dismantle them. Just as Newton said that if he had seen so far it was only
because he had stood upon the shoulders of giants, so George Lucas, in Star
Wars, builds upon these earlier epics with his vision of how two charismatic
individuals, a father who creates an empire and a son who destroys it, shape
the tides of history. Both are a fulllment of the prophecy of a gure who
would arise to bring balance to the Force, as Lucas puts it, although in this
case, the being performs a mitotic split into two, for the son must pick up
where the father has failed.
Around the year zero, a strange excitement settled over the Middle East, in
which
all but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses
into the very fundament of things. Men now lived and thought only in
apocalyptic images . . . Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteri-
ously by one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at
once with an immediate, inward certainty.
2

All over the Eastern Mediterranean, furthermore, the coming of a messiah was
expected. Te Jews had long awaited the fulllment of a Davidic king who
would restore Israel; the Essenes, in fact, who may have originated as rebel
Pharisees, expected two messiahs, a Davidic gure who would lead them to
victory in battles against their enemies, and a priestly messiah sprung from the
line of Aaron; even the Romans were aected by this zeal, for in his Fourth
Eclogue, Virgil celebrated the birth of a hero from a virgin mother who had
come to renew the Golden Age, and later Christians interpreted this passage
:oc
as prophetic of the coming of Christ. Nowadays, the myth of the birth of the
messiah has resurfaced in the imagery of our popular culture, and this can only
mean that we too, like the Middle East in the time of Christ, await the birth
of a god, even if only unconsciously. At the climax of :oo:: A Space Odyssey,
we are promised the advent of a being who would descend to the earth and
take on esh in order to usher in the dawning of the Magnus Annus with a
dismantling of industrial society.
A decade later, we can track the progress of this virgin birth in the prologue
to the :,;, lm Superman, where we see this being in the form of a cosmic
infant encased in a meteorite crashing into the Earth. Among his rst heroic
deeds as a child, he lifts automobiles as if they were toys. Indeed, there is a
reason why Superman is described as faster than a speeding bullet, stronger
than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, for he is
the antithesis of human technology. No two bigger Luddites than Siegel and
Shuster ever lived, for most of Supermans villains are either corrupt city of-
cials or mad scientists. Ten, in the :, lm Te Terminator, we learn of the
modied virgin birth of a messiah hero named John Connor, conceived by
a father who, instead of coming down like Gabriel from the heavens, travels
backward in time from the future. It will be John Connors task to lead hu-
man resistance against a planet that has been taken over by robots. And in Te
Phantom Menace (:,,,), we are told that the boy Anakin Skywalker was born
of a virgin, conceived by tiny beings called midi-chlorians which live within
the cells of the human body. Anakin is the one, that is, who has been conceived
by the Gaian Overmind to save humanity, or to bring balance to the Force,
as Lucass mythology goes, but he fails in this task, becoming swallowed up in
the belly of the Machine from which his son Luke must retrieve him.
In putting these pieces together, we begin to see how the collective uncon-
scious of our civilization is forming a myth to counter the problem of the
machine. In Lucass mythology, in particular, the lineaments of the old Mani-
chean creation myth are visible, for in that story, the Lord of Light becomes
aware that the armies of darkness are gearing up for an attack, and in response,
he creates the Anthropos, who suits up in an armor of light and descends
into the realm of matter to pre-empt the attack. But his mission fails, for the
demons of darkness tear away his armor and devour it, trapping him in the
material world whence he must be rescued by the Holy Spirit, who extends his
hand down into the darkness and pulls the Anthropos back up to safety.
In the Star Wars lms, Anakin, in the role of the Anthropos, becomes
trapped in the machine, from which his vitality is taken from him by the de-
monic Sith Lords, and so it is his son Luke, in the role of the Holy Spirit, who
:o:
must sh him out of the darkness. Luke Skywalker, then, is the incarnation
of Kubricks Star Child, for his rst name derives from Greek leukos, meaning
light, while his last name indicates that he has descended to Earth from the
heavens. In Gnostic mythology, the soul is a spark of light trapped in the body;
in Star Wars, it is the human spirit which, like the encasing of Han Solo in a
metallic shell, is in danger of becoming trapped by technology. Te emergence
in popular culture of the myth of a superhero born of a virgin who will rescue
him from this plight is a kind of cultural immune response to the machine as
a virus, for just as viruses hijack the nuclear centers of cells and force them to
make clones, so too, technology is using us to reproduce itself.
Te Star Wars lms are an attempt to answer the questions: Given modern
mans unlimited power to use technology in order to manipulate the forces
of the material realm, what becomes of the human spirit? Can the machine
fulll the human urge for spiritual wholeness? Or is it a hindrance to this very
process?
Indeed, the very positing of such a question marks these lms as essentially
an updating of a conict of values that is at least as old as the opposition of
the romantic and industrialist in the nineteenth century--of people like John
Ruskin, William Morris, Toreau and the Transcendentalists against the dark
satanic mills and gleaming iron rails that even then threatened to transform
human beings into robots. In Te Stones of Venice, for example, Ruskin wrote:
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise
and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them,
and make their ngers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms
strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of
their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. . .
3
Star Wars continues and develops this theme of the danger of human individu-
als being swallowed up by their own all-too-e cient machinery, of the engulf-
ing, that is to say, of the humanities by the scientic method. Tis is a theme
that once preoccupied European novelists of the caliber of Tomas Mann and
Robert Musil, and American novelists like Tomas Pynchon. In Pynchons
novel Gravitys Rainbow, for example, Tyrone Slothrop is turned into a servo-
mechanism of the military, brainwashed and classically conditioned to work as
a spy, until he breaks free and disappears over the horizon, becoming a gure
of myth and folktale. In his novel Buddenbrooks Tomas Mann likewise de-
picts the fate of a family of bourgeois entrepeneurs who make a series of busi-
ness decisions which favor the family at the cost of the individual inclinations
:o:
of each of its members toward cultivation in the arts, leading to the death and
disintegration of the entire family. Star Wars has absorbed within it, that is to
say although transformed into the kitschy comic book language of Flash
Gordon-style science ction the novel and its various thematic conicts re-
garding the life-structuring or destroying choices that are made by such he-
roes as Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival, or Goethes Wilhelm Meister, or
Manns Hans Castorp.
Star Wars is about saving and recovering the authenticity of the individual
life in an age in which electronic technology is turning society into a gigantic
hive of human insects. In Attack of the Clones (:cc:) this theme is made clear
when Lucas reveals that the stormtroopers of Star Wars are actually an army
of clones made from a bounty hunter named Jango Fett. Tey are thus the
epitome of an idea degraded into mass production, like Fords assembly line
automobiles which, in democratizing the car, destroyed it as the work of hand-
crafted engineering art it had been for the rich. As Siegfried Giedeon pointed
out in his Mechanization Takes Command, the assembly line had its origins in
the Ohio meat-packing industry, in which rows of crucied pig carcasses were
passed along on runners to be disemboweled by one specialist after the next.
Te connection of the very idea of the assembly line with the slaughterhouse
should alert us to its essentially life-destroying monotony. Lewis Mumford, in
his Technics and Civilization, wrote in a similar vein:
Te machine devaluates rarity: instead of producing a single unique ob-
ject, it is capable of producing a million others just as good as the master
model from which the rest are made. Te machine devaluates age: for age
is another token of rarity, and the machine, by placing its emphasis upon
tness and adaptation, prides itself on the brand new rather than on the
antique: instead of feeling comfortably authentic in the midst of rust, dust,
cobwebs, shaky parts, it prides itself on the opposite qualities slickness,
smoothness, gloss, cleanness.
4
Hence the gleaming steel and black monochrome corridors of the Death Star
in Star Wars as opposed to the creaky, rust-eaten spaceships of the heroes; or the
army of clones signifying the factory values of standardization, uniformity and
impersonality against the charm and charisma of our little band of protago-
nists. When we nally meet up with the Jedi council at the climax of Te Phan-
tom Menace, we notice that each one is unique-looking: they embody dierent
races, sexes and body types, old and young, for the Jedi personify the principles
of individuality and authenticity as opposed to the pre-fabricated plastic suits
of the stormtroopers and their routinized existence within the Megamachine.
:o,
Whether they are given orders by the Jedi council of the Republic or by the
Empire in Star Wars makes not the slightest bit of dierence to them, for they
are not real human beings with morally centered values, but simulacra. In At-
tack of the Clones we see rows of them lined up before a symmetrically radial
conveyor belt from which each grabs his helmet, ready to set out for an adven-
ture like the knights in Wagners opera Parsifal; but unlike those knights, they
are completely indierent to the moral qualities of such adventures.
In the climax of Attack of the Clones, Lucas takes us to a huge factory that is
hidden within the bowels of a mountain fortress shaped like a cathedral, where
we learn that the droid army from Te Phantom Menace is manufactured on
an assembly line that is run by ying insectile beings called Geonosians. Lewis
Mumford has pointed out how the entire infrastructure of the industrial revo-
lution emerged out of mining operations: the steam engine, the railroad, and
the analytical method of breaking matter apart to extract natural resources.
It is a world of dirt, darkness, steel and death; but when we compare the
Geonosian droid factory with the operation that gives rise to the clone army
by the Kaminoans, we are struck by the contrast, for the clones are produced
by genetic engineers who resemble standard extraterrestrials in bright, white
environments of stainless steel and luminous glass cylinders.
Indeed, Lucass sinister Kaminoans make Ruskins fears of what the industrial
revolution might do to our humanity look quaint by comparison. For the Ka-
minoans are a metaphor for the kinds of conscienceless scientists which multi-
national corporations employ for their various attempts to patent genes, harvest
organs, and create synthetic foods. Te multinationals which specialize in ge-
netic research think nothing of stealing individual human authenticity away, if
they can make millions by replacing human biology with artice. But corporate
attempts to mimic nature inevitably pale by comparison with the real thing:
synthetic foods like Cool Whip, Velveeta and high fructose-based imitations
of maple syrup are not as good or as healthy as their natural counterparts;
psychopharmaceuticals are a poor substitute for real emotional healing; and so
far, every animal clone ever made has suered from severe health problems. If
the corporations were allowed to have their way, they would make clones out
of us all, having us dress alike, get our coee from the same Starbucks, buy our
books from homogenized chain stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble, and
serve us fake food from fast food joints like McDonalds.
Tis is the attack of the clones that Lucas is warning us about: the generic
replacement of the culturally authentic and biologically real with simulacra.
Star Wars not only points out what is wrong with our society, but it tries to
provide a solution to the problem, unlike Tolkiens Te Lord of the Rings, which
:o
presents us with a strictly Luddite view of the overtaking of society by dark
industrial machinery which, Tolkien insists, must be thrown out altogether in
order to obtain purity in human life. Lucass Star Wars lms, on the contrary,
are not hostile to technology at all, for Lucas accepts that Western society is
fundamentally a scientic and technical creation. His answer to the problem
of adapting to the living conditions imposed by such a society can be found
by examining the relationships between his two central characters, Anakin
Skywalker and his son Luke. Te one is a paradigm of failure, for he allows his
humanity to be overtaken by the machine, while the other illustrates Lucass
ideal pattern for human conduct in a society dominated by technology.
Luke Skywalker, as his rst name indicates, is associated with the bringing
of light out of darkness, whereas his father Anakin, who has become Darth
Vader, or dark father, is his antithesis. In Gnostic mythology, these associa-
tions would have implied the polarity of spirit and matter, but in the Star Wars
lms, Luke and his father represent, respectively, the values of humanity vs.
those of the machine. Tere is, however, another set of associations linked
with this primordial opposition of light and darkness that was common in
the Neoplatonic tradition revived during the Renaissance, in which the realm
of darkness and matter had to do with the passions and desires of the animal
aspect of mans nature, while that of light pertained to his spiritual potentiali-
ties. Only man alone, in the Great Chain of Being, was given the freedom to
choose which tendency would prevail within him: the spiritual or the animal.
In the words of Pico della Mirandolas classic Oration on the Dignity of Man, in
which the angels address humanity:
I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage
point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the
world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of
earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and
proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may pre-
fer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life;
you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior
orders whose life is divine.
5
Tese two possibilities are allegorized in Botticellis painting Pallas and the
Centaur (ca.::), for Athene is the personication of wisdom and chastity,
virtues which are seen to be victories over the centaur, a being traditional-
ly associated with the carnal desires of man sunken into his animal nature.
Athene bears a halberd which points straight up toward the heavens, indicat-
ing the proper direction of a human being who is spiritually inclined, whereas
:o,
the centaur leans against a bow propped into
the earth beside him, as though in downward
counterpoint to the direction of Athenes axe.
As Pico continues:
Only when, by moral philosophy, we shall
have evacuated the weakening appetites of
our too abundant pleasures and pared away,
like nail clippings, the sharp points of anger
and wrath in our souls, shall we nally be-
gin to take part in the sacred rites . . . and
to dedicate ourselves to that contemplation
of which the Sun is rightly called the father
and guide.
6
Tus Anakin, in this tradition, would be aligned with the man who chooses
not to look up toward the heavens, but to look down into the passions of his
animal nature, allowing himself to fall into the vortex of his desire for Queen
Amidala. Tis simultaneously creates in him a fear of losing her which becomes
so pathological that, in the climax of Revenge of the Sith, it actually causes him
to bring about her death. He is, furthermore, so incapable of controlling his
anger that it causes him to give way to murderous violence in which he kills
one human being after the next, starting with the Sandpeople who have tor-
tured his mother, and continuing on with Count Dooku, the Jedi knights--
including even their children trainees and ultimately, his own wife. So given
over to his passions is he that he can be redeemed only by his son Luke who,
as the principle of light, has learned through the discipline of the Jedi to gain
control over his passions. Tus, in nding the stillpoint that is unmoved by
desire or fear, he is able to liberate himself from the shackles of the animal
nature that has overcome his father and so weakened him morally that he is
easily seduced by the power of technology. In Lucass updating of Botticellis
Pallas and the Centaur, Anakin has become a biomechanical centaur, which is
the real reason why, in his light-saber ght with Obi-Wan Kenobi, he loses the
lower half of his body, for this is the part that is traditionally symbolized by
the animal aspect of the centaur, though in Anakins case this lower half will
be replaced by machinery.
Luke the light-bringer, on the other hand, represents the spiritual attitude of
one who has attained control over his animal appetites and achieved, through
compassion, a properly human orientation. And it is Lukes training as a Jedi
:oo
knight which gives him the psychological focus that enables him to achieve
this Neoplatonic self-control.
Te Jedi knights are based, of course, on the samurai warriors from the
lms of Akira Kurosawa, which made a huge impression on Lucas. Te Hidden
Fortress is frequently cited as the single most important inuence on Star Wars,
but with the exception of the droids C-,PO and R:D: which are based on
the two peasant sidekicks from that lm, the resemblance is only slight, and in
fact, the story of the princess who is assigned a samurai bodyguard and must
travel incognito actually had a larger inuence on the plot of Te Phantom
Menace than on Star Wars. But echoes from Kurosawas lms such as Trone
of Blood, Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Te Seven Samurai resound all throughout the
Star Wars odyssey.
Te swordwielding samurai of Kurosawa become the light-saber bearing
Jedi of Star Wars, and with that continuity, we are given a clue toward a solu-
tion of the problem of mans fall into the machine, since the religion of the
samurai was that of Zen Buddhism. It may seem paradoxical at rst that a
religion like Buddhism which is everywhere associated with peace and com-
passion should also simultaneously become the religion of the warrior caste of
shogunal Japan, but in fact Zen is a species of Buddhism that was uniquely
suited for the samurai, since it emphasizes the transmission of its doctrine not
through arcane scholarly treatises like the Avatamsaka Sutra, but through sud-
den, spontaneous action, whether of thought or of deed. Tis is, for example,
what the solver of the koan has in common with the swordsman, as Winston
L. King puts the matter in his Zen & the Way of the Sword:
No-Minded uidity of action-reaction is, then, a quality that characterizes
the solver of the koan and the actions of the master swordsman when the
interval between thought and action is so small that not even a hair can be
entered into it. Of course, the solving of a koan did not automatically
make a samurai into a better swordsman; but it could open up to him in a
new and productive way the realm of thoughtless instinctive reaction that
did not depend on thought-out solutions or consciously used techniques.
7
Zen traces its roots back to the Buddhas ower sermon, in which he held up
a lotus, but said nothing, while only one monk, Kashyapa, signalled that he
had gotten the message. For words and concepts are not the authentic reality,
but signs that refer past themselves to the real, and they can impede not only
the mystics understanding of the metaphysical reality of the Void [sunyata],
but also the swordsmans ability to react instantly in a life and death situation.
Te native hue of resolution, as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, sicklied oer
:o;
with the pale cast of thought, for Hamlets dilemma is exactly what zen is
intended to eradicate, namely, the restrictions which thought can place upon
action. Tere is a time for thinking and a time for doing, and if the two get
confused you can end up with a situation like the one that is caricatured in the
Monty Python sketch of philosophers who attempt to play soccer but think so
much about the ball that they only rarely manage to actually kick it.
When the instinct alone, [as D. T. Suzuki says], acts without any concep-
tual interference, there is nothing to prevent its native virility. But when
the concept enwraps or conditions it, it hesitates, looks around, and evokes
the feeling of fear in its various forms, and the blind instinctual uncontrol-
lability is curbed or greatly impaired. . . [Terefore], the man must turn
himself into a puppet in the hands of the unconscious. Te unconscious
[and instinctive] must supersede the consciousness. Metaphysically speak-
ing, this is the philosophy of sunyata [emptiness].
8
Eugene Herrigel gives us a demonstration of this philosophy in the follow-
ing moment from his elegant little book Zen in the Art of Archery:
One day I asked the Master: How can the shot be loosed
if I do not do it?
It shoots, he replied.
I have heard you say that several times before, so let me
put it another way: How can I wait self-obliviously for the
shot if I am no longer there?
It waits at the highest tension.
And who or what is this It?
Once you have understood that, you will have no further
need of me.
9
Tis is reminiscent of the scene in Star Wars when Luke receives his rst bit of
training aboard the Millenium Falcon under the tutelage of Ben Kenobi. Luke
is using his lightsaber to deect shots from a oating, baseball-sized robot:
Ben: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force owing through him.
Luke: You mean it controls your actions?
Ben: Partially. But it also obeys your commands.
10
Hence, the It that Herrigels archery master was referring to is equivalent,
more or less, to the metaphysical concept of the Force in Star Wars. In Hindu-
ism, the idea is recognized as Brahman, the ultimate ground of being out of
which all things arise. In China, the same principle is recognized as the Tao,
the guiding and shaping wisdom of the cosmos that causes all things to come
:o
into being and become that which, in their innermost essence, they most truly
are. In the human Umwelt, however, life in an overly mechanized society poses
the danger of derailing us from becoming what we are, since from the moment
we are born, we are bombarded by mechanical and electronic stimuli to which
we are constantly reacting. An individual whose psyche is not rooted in a
spiritual dimension like the Buddhist idea of the Void [sunyata] or the Hindu
Brahman or the Chinese Tao, is in danger, like Anakin Skywalker, of becoming
captured by technology and turned into a clone or a robot.
Lucass solution to the problem of mans fall into the machine is not really a
California Buddhist solution, but rather the Zen-inspired religion of the Jedi
should be understood as a metaphor for the attainment of a properly spiritual
orientation, no matter what the particular tradition happens to be. Te point
is that some kind of spiritually oriented tradition must be used to help ground
the individuals psyche in a conservative realm that is immune to the ux of
changing technologies, and provides a constant source of fresh energy that will
enable him or her to cope with such changes. Such an orientation is not neces-
sarily mystical, although it does involve a recognition that a higher power, a
force which isnt irrational, but rather suprarational, must be submitted to. A
period of time must be set aside for the psyche to germinate, and for the indi-
vidual to become grounded in something that has roots and tradition and that
cultivates a sense of depth and sacredness with respect to participation in life
such as in Tomas Manns novel Te Magic Mountain, where Hans Castorp
lives inside a sanatorium for seven years, during which time he is exposed to
the pedagogical inuences of myth, sex and death. For otherwise he or she will
never achieve a sense of acting rather than merely reacting to media-generated
stimuli, and so may lose the sense of what being human is all about.
Tis type of paideia is illustrated in the sequence from Te Empire Strikes Back
in which Luke Skywalker journeys to the planet Dagobah, a sort of gigantic
swamp, to receive instruction in the Jedi arts from Yoda, an ancient, eln being
like something out of Lord of the Rings. Empire is the middle lm of the rst
trilogy, and in accordance with classic monomythic architecture, it corresponds
in its imagery to the journey into the underworld made by the great heroes of
classic literature, Odysseus, Aeneas, St. Paul, Christ and Dante.
But there is a reason why Skywalker is initiated into the mysteries of the Jedi
religion on a planet that is specically a jungle, for the jungle symbolizes the
realm of the instincts, of biology and nature antecedent to civilization. Te
key to the problem of surviving in a technologized society, that is to say, must
be found rst by a return to the realm of instinct and mythology is rooted
in the instincts unencumbered by any human technical systems. Tis is the
:o,
realm of the Ancestors and every underworld ever encountered by the heroes
of all time, in which great biological energies are active as volcanic formative
forces that shape and determine life forms autopoietically. Here the human
intellect is not allowed to interfere, for it can only become a pupil of the great
Ancestral dead of all time, who have returned to the swamp-like abysses from
which the light-world has sprung, and who are thus able to advise and instruct
the temporary sojourners from the land of the living on how best to conduct
their lives. Hence the jungle planet of Dagobah refers not just to nature per se,
but also to the destiny-shaping dimensions of instinct and impulse that homo
technologicus thinks he has cast aside for good, but which slumber still within
the depths of the psyche. Not only must the passions be harnessed by the
rational mind as in Platos model of the soul in his Republic but the mind
must be able to develop a sense of tact that knows when to let go of the reins,
as it were, and allow the horse to do the leading. Tis delicate balance between
reason and instinct is a di cult one to attain, and it is precisely what the zen
Buddhist training of the samurai is all about.
Tus, the serpents that Skywalker continually encounters during his initia-
tion on Dagobah are references simultaneously to the ancient path down into
the underworld via Hermes, and to the biological instincts of the reptilian
brain stem that rest beneath the mammalian mid brain and the more recent
neocortex. Te reptile has given birth to the mammal, and the mammal to the
human, and now the human has given birth to the machine. Skywalker, as a
fully integrated human being, must assimilate all of these aspects in order to
master them, like his counterpart Paul Atreides in the Dune books. Te result
of his trials on Dagobah, then, is to achieve a symbiosis with his animal in-
stincts on the one hand, and with the machine, on the other.
Tus, in creating for us a modern myth of the machine, Lucas is telling us
that there is no need to discard technology if the forces of the soul have rst
been made strong enough to stand up to it. Tat is the job of a proper educa-
tion, involving say, the study of the classics, or an Anthroposophic curriculum
in which facility in the arts is encouraged, or else something akin to Toreaus
communion with nature in Walden. As Mashall McLuhan used to say, the
only way to escape being controlled by the media is to become literate enough
to understand their eects, and so gain power over them. Once the psyche
has taken root in something with depth, that teaches not only self-control of
the passions, but also how to listen to the wisdom of the instincts be it Zen
Buddhism, Neoplatonic philosophy, yoga or meditation only then can it
face modernity, and stand up to the machine, with strength and wisdom. Tat
is the pedagogical lesson of Star Wars.
:;c
Notes
:. Te myth of the Mahdi is borrowed from Islamic mythology, specically from
an eleventh century group known as the Ismailis, who believed that Mohammad was
the sixth prophet in a line beginning with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.
Te Mahdi was the seventh prophet, which, like the Christian Paraclete, they expected
would arrive to complete the nal message of Islam during the Last Days.
:. Oswald Spengler, Te Decline of the West, vol. II (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, :,,,).
,. John Ruskin, Unto Tis Last and Other Writings. (London: Penguin Classics,
:,,), pp.,, ;.
. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (NY: Harcourt, Brace. :,o,), p. ,,,.
,. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (Washington,
D.C.: Regnery Gateway, :,,o), pp. ;.
o. Pico della Mirandola, ibid. pp. :,,c.
;. Winston L. King, Zen & the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche. (NY:
Oxford University Press, :,,), p. :o,.
. D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, cited in King, op. cit., p. :;:.
,. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (NY: Vintage Books, :,;:), p. ,.
:c. Te Art of Star Wars, ed. Carol Titelman (NY: Del Rey, :,,;), p. ;.
:;:
12
Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg:
A Study in Polarity
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science ction. Steven Spielberg
Q: Whom do you identify with among your contemporaries?
Stanley Kubrick: Nobody. Im a loner.
With Spielberg and Kubricks lm A.I., we arrive at the other half of the solution to
the engulng of humanity by the machine. For whereas Lucass Star Wars prequels
show us the fate of a boy who falls into the machine and is gradually eaten alive by
it, becoming a cyborg, A.I. tells us the opposite story of a boy who begins as a robot
and becomes more and more human as he searches for the dening qualities that
make human beings the kind of organism that they are, namely spiritual beings
that dream of gods and myths as no machine ever could. Whereas Star Wars presents
us with a Neoplatonic/Zen path of spiritual discipline as a means of grounding the
individual against electrocution by the machine, it does not envision the human
mind as particularly, and peculiarly, concerned with the making of gods. A.I., on
the other hand, shows us what makes human beings human, and in doing so sharply
dierentiates them from machines: specically their capacity to dream of gods, as
exemplied by the boy robots quest for the Blue Fairy, his own ishtadevata (chosen
divinity). Tis particular response to the problem of the machine I call Ethereali-
zation, for just as in Hindu religious practice the statues of the gods are intended to
invite them to come down and take up residence within their images, etherealizing
stone into spirit, so too the boy robots desire to be made human is tantamount to a
transformation of the very substance of the machine into a mythic being. Moreover,
the race of super robots encountered by the boy at the end of the lm are a vision of
the luminous etherealization of the machine into a more delicate, highly organized
being which this kind of etherealization by the imaginative mind makes possible.
Before we discuss this vision, however, we must rst examine the history of the works
of its creators, Spielberg and Kubrick, so that we may learn how they arrived at this
particular mythological scenario.
:;:
1. Growth / Decay
In Raphaels painting Te School of Athens, Plato and Aristotle are depicted in
the center of the composition in such a way as to suggest a fundamental polar-
ity of temperaments. Plato bears a copy of his cosmological treatise Timaeus,
and with his right hand points straight up toward the heavens, while beside
him, Aristotle carries a copy of his Ethics and gestures with his right hand hori-
zontally forward. Te gestures, that is to say, indicate the respective direction
of thought characteristic of each philosopher: Plato, as typied by his Timaeus,
was a creator of myths regarding the souls origin from the heavens and its re-
turn upon the bodys physical demise, whereas Aristotles emphasis was on the
earthly world, and he insisted accordingly that the soul comes into being only
with the gestation of the body and perishes with its decay.
Both thinkers, moreover, embodied an archetypal opposition of styles, since
for Aristotle the world was a system, the eternal laws of which could be syn-
opsized in an encylopedia of treatises that, once known and mastered, would
grant the individual power over its in-
nermost secrets. For Plato, on the oth-
er hand, the world was a Heraclitean
ux of changing truths which could
only be glimpsed imperfectly through
the use of a handful of tools, such
as myths, allegories and the Socratic
method of questioning. We are never
quite certain, in Plato, whether the
answers to his cosmological inquiries
are not merely provisional and sub-
ject to change at some point later on,
when he has rened his ideas. In the
Apology, for example, Socrates states
with unequivocal certainty that to
fear death is to presume to know what
death is, whereas several dialogues
later, in the Phaedo, Socrates gives us a complex microcosmology of the souls
course through the universe after death. From the Apology to the Phaedo, it
seems, Plato has changed his mind about what he thinks death is, whereas for
Aristotle the answers may as well be graven in stone.
Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg
:;,
In Raphaels painting, furthermore, Plato has been rendered in the likeness
of Leonardo da Vinci, for whom, likewise, the world was not a system, but
a living organism, ever in process of metamorphosis. In Platos Timaeus, the
cosmos is likened to a gigantic animal, and in Leonardos notebooks, the earth
is compared to an organism whose bones are its minerals and its blood the
ever-circulating rivers and water systems. Look at the Mona Lisa with this idea
in mind and you will never see it the same way again, for indeed, Leonardo
discovered the circulation of the blood, and the gures in his paintings con-
sequently pulse with an inward vitality. For Michelangelo, on the other hand,
who is represented directly below Leonardo in Te School of Athens compos-
ing a sonnet while leaning on a huge block of marble, the world is not an
organism but a building constructed out of eternal truths. Indeed, the Sistine
Chapel is a veritable system of the Christian cosmos, complete in every detail
from Genesis to Apocalypse and the gures of his sculpture, likewise, are ren-
dered with an architectural plasticity that belies any kind of inward pulse, for
whereas Leonardo perceived the inward physiology of anatomy, Michelangelo
studied its outward topology.
A similar contrast is evident between Mozart and Beethoven. Mozarts
vast oeuvre poured forth from him in an endlessly running river of creativ-
ity, whereas for Beethoven, as for Michelangelo before him, creating was a
torment, comparable to a series of still births, abortions and miscarriages be-
tween which, nevertheless, individual beings manage to arise. Whereas Mozart
rarely allowed his mind to interfere with what emerged from his imagination,
Beethoven thought so much about his compositions that he sometimes killed
them in the process. Lines are crossed out, rewritten, crossed out again; titles
changed; his brow perpetually furled in a rictus of creative constipation.
Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are the most recent incarnation of
this creative polarity, and it is Mozart and Beethoven that they most resemble.
Films pour forth from Spielberg with an ease that resembles Mozarts manner
of composing: no sooner does he near completion of one lm than he has
already announced the next two or three. One of his most prolic periods,
that containing A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, Te Terminal and
War of the Worlds averages a breathtaking six months between each project.
Sometimes he even works on lms simultaneously: E.T. and Poltergeist, for in-
stance, or Schindlers List and Jurassic Park. Whereas for Stanley Kubrick, as for
Beethoven, each production is thought about so much that it becomes an all-
consuming obsession to the exclusion of everything else. Production can last a
year or longer; scenes are shot and reshot sometimes with as many as seventy
takes; actors must hit their marks and speak their lines precisely; everything,
:;
from lighting to costume to set design, to choice of lens, is carefully consid-
ered, options weighed, tested, cast aside. Nothing, in a Stanley Kubrick lm, is
left to chance, for, consummate chessplayer that he was, the entire lm set is
approached as though it were a chessboard.
For Spielberg, as for Leonardo, furthermore, the world is a living organ-
ism constantly undergoing metamorphosis. Aliens descend from the heavens,
transform the lives of human beings, then return; dinosaurs are resurrected
from the past and spontaneously mutate, evading captivity; a boy robot sets o
on a quest through a ruined world to change into a human being; a con art-
ist genius consistently evades captivity, and when nally caught, changes into
an F.B.I. expert on criminology; everything, in short, is growing in Spielbergs
cosmos. For Kubrick, on the other hand, the world is a building, as it was for
Michelangelo, within which people are trapped, like bricks. In Spielbergs lms,
people escape from their prisons, move on, grow and change; in Kubricks, they
remain in bondage, and do not grow, but decay. A man becomes trapped in
a haunted hotel and his personality disintegrates; a teenage gangleader is im-
prisoned, reconditioned, and then, when the conditioning is removed, reverts
to his former self; a provincial Irishman moves up into noble society, then sets
about creating a family that will destroy him; technology advances to such a
degree that it produces an atomic bomb with which man then proceeds to wipe
himself out; the rst intelligent computer is sent into space, only to go insane.
Kubrick is fascinated with death and decay, Spielberg with life and growth; for
Spielberg, as his name suggests, life is play, whereas Kubricks name Kubus,
German for cube, and brechen, German for break gives us a clue that for
him the world is a system that eats people and destroys them.
Growth and Decay, Life and Death: surely the world is both of these things?
As Shakespeare well knew, the world is tragic and comic, lled with as many
stories of triumph and growth as of breakdown and destruction. Together,
then, the cosmologies of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick constitute a
totality, each compensating for what the other lacks. Teir lms, taken as a
whole, provide us with a comprehensive vision of what it means to be human
in the modern world.
2. Child / Minotaur
In his Conversations with Eckermann, Goethe pointed out that Classicism is
concerned with what is healthy and strong, whereas Romanticism is preoc-
cupied with what is sickly and decaying.
1
Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy,
:;,
recasts the same polarity as the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the former
concerned with the sunny world of Greek columns and porticoes, a city state
organized around the harmonic proportions of beauty, strength, and vigor,
whereas the Dionysian is concerned with the night time revelries of orgy and
dance, wine and ergot, and with the dark, secret mystery cults out of which
the ritualized performance of human sacrice gave birth to the very art form
of tragedy itself.
Kubrick is fascinated with the twin Dionysian mysteries of sex and death,
of the portals through which human beings enter the world, and then leave it
again. Te middle stage, that of growth, does not interest him in the slightest,
although that is Spielbergs primary fascination. Te central mystery of Eyes
Wide Shut, for example, concerns fully nude human beings performing sexual
acts while wearing James Ensor-like masks and, as in the Eleusinian mysteries,
the initiates utmost silence of what he has witnessed is required. In Full Metal
Jacket, we learn that initiation into the mysteries of the life of a soldier depends
upon the recognition of death, for each of the lms two halves concludes with
a kind of ritualized human sacrice: in the rst with the suicide of Private
Pyle, and in the second with the death of a young female sniper. Kubrick,
furthermore, was so fascinated by Patrick Sskinds novel Perfume, in which a
serial killer is torn apart and eaten by a mob at the novels conclusion, that he
came very close to lming it.
On the other hand, it is Spielbergs Apollonian fascination with growth
and becoming, with all that is characteristic of the Spring and Summer of
life and not its moments of conception and vanishing that lies behind his
preoccupation with the child archetype throughout most of his work, much
of which is a continual revisioning of the two classic childrens fairy tales, Peter
Pan and Pinocchio. Te latter appears for the rst time in Close Encounters of
the Tird Kind, in which the lms famous ve note sequence sent by the aliens
to communicate with mankind is taken from the song When You Wish Upon
a Star in Disneys version of Collodis novel. And the lms protagonist, Roy
Neary, furthermore, insists that his children go to see Pinocchio, since Neary
is, in a way, the child archetype disguised as a man, for the lm is all about his
rediscovery of the magical consciousness through which the child looks out
upon the world as a cosmos of perpetual wonders. In Close Encounters of the
Tird Kind the universe is lled with strange, angelic beings who descend from
the heavens to abduct people not for bizarre experiments, but to take them on
Disneyland rides through the heavens.
E.T., on the other hand, is a reworking of Peter Pan, for instead of a fairy child
coming down from the night skies to abduct children from their bedroom, an
:;o
extraterrestrial arrives from the heavens to take up residence within a boys
closet. To the consciousness of a child, an imaginary playmate is a real being;
whereas for the adult, it is merely a childhood myth. E.T., we notice, dies
only when he is abducted by the men of science who wish to probe him for
answers: where does he come from and what does his existence imply about
the cosmos? As Heidegger puts it,
Man one being among others pursues science. In this pursuit noth-
ing less transpires than the irruption by one being called man into the
whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption
beings break open and show what they are and how they are.
2
Beneath the scrutinizing gaze of the laboratory lamp, E.T. is discovered not
to be a fact, but a myth, and like all myths, the rational consciousness of the
modern adult regards them as belonging to the provenance of the childhood
of humanity, to be cast aside once outgrown. Tus, E.T.s death is allegoric
of the decline of myth under the scalpels of science. It is only when the boy
returns to view the corpse of E.T. through the glass of his refrigerator-like sep-
ulchre that he is thawed out and resurrected like the ancient dying and reviv-
ing gods of the Near East, for only in the magical and mythical consciousness
structures of humanitys childhood do such beings thrive.
When, after another brief Peter Pan episode in Twilight Zone: Te Movie,
Spielberg returns to the child archetype in Empire of the Sun, the object of
numinous fascination has shifted from aliens to airplanes, and his milieu from
the suburbs of California to the concentration camps of World War II Shang-
hai. J.G. Ballard, the author of the novel upon which the lm is based, is a
visionary writer who, like Kubrick, is also fascinated with death and decay,
with vanishing worlds and the ruins of blown out civilizations, precisely the
imagery that does not interest Spielberg, for it is at variance with his fasci-
nation with growth. Te child personies growth, for he is symbolic of the
future, just as in the Middle Ages, when Mary and the Christ child became
the preferred motifs of Christian iconography over the crucied Christ, since
Europe at that time was a newborn society.
Tus, the clash of sensibilities between Spielberg and Ballard resulted in a
lm that attempts to give depth to the child, but fails, owing to Spielbergs
elimination of most of the books preoccupation with the imagery of death.
Te last third of Ballards novel is absolutely saturated in morbid imagery, for
everywhere the young James goes, there are dead bodies. When, at the novels
conclusion, he returns to the concentration camp, Ballard describes it like an
image out of a Francis Bacon painting:
:;;
Brushing the ies from his mouth, Jim walked into the mens ward. Te
decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the ies that fed
on the bodies piled across the bunks. Identiable by their ragged shorts
and owered dresses, and by the clogs embedded in their swollen feet,
dozens of Lunghua prisoners lay on the bunks like sides of meat in a con-
demned slaughterhouse. Teir backs and shoulders glistened with muci-
lage, and the splayed mouths in their ballooning cheeks still gaped as if
these bloated men and women, dragged from a banquet, were gripped by
ravenous hunger.
3
Such imagery, typical of the book, is absent from the lm, for it is completely
inconsistent with the archetype of owering that fascinates Spielberg. Even in
a concentration camp, all must be growth, life, abundance. His child ego seeks
through the ruins of a disintegrating civilization for an experience that will
deepen and enrich him, but fails to nd it.
In Hook, Spielberg attempts to confront the Peter Pan story directly by re-
fashioning J.M. Barries novel, but now the eternally young Peter has grown
into an adult who has lost touch with childhood and tries to regain it by
returning to Never Never Land in order to reenact the myth of his youth. As
a work of celluloid art, Hook is a disaster, but A.I., a reworking of Pinocchio,
is a masterpiece. Davids mother reads Collodis novel to him, and in the
process, imprints a goddess on his imagination in the form of a blue fairy.
David goes in quest of the blue fairy who he hopes will transform him from a
machine into a human being, but in an ironic ending, he is reunited with an
articial construct of his mother which an advanced race of robots constructs
from an analysis of his memories.
Kubricks equivalent to Spielbergs recurring alter ego is the anti-hero, a
typology that is consistent with an imagination fascinated by human failure,
insanity, death and decay. Kubricks anti-hero is rst evident as Humbert
Humbert, the doppelgnger who, in Lolita, kidnaps a twelve year old girl in
order to have sex with her and later realizes that it is really he himself who has
been kidnapped by her. Ten there is Alex in A Clockwork Orange, who, like
Collodis Pinocchio, is pure id, but with malevolent tendencies, for he thinks
nothing of killing, raping, and beating up the weak and crippled for kicks.
Tere is also the protagonist of Barry Lyndon, whose author, Tackeray, com-
mented that his book was a novel without a hero, for Barry is a swindler and
a rogue who rises from rags to riches through his skills as a cheat. He marries
not for love but money, and ends by getting what he deserves: an ignomini-
ous fate as a crippled pauper who is hated by his wifes family. Jack Torrance,
in Te Shining, begins as an alcoholic writer struggling to make a living, but
:;
is gradually seduced into madness by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel, and
becomes a kind of minotaur in the labyrinth bent on devouring his wife and
child. And, in a lm without a protagonist like :oo:, it is characteristic of Ku-
brick that we remember HAL most, for his descent into madness and paranoia
as he attempts to murder everyone around him in the isolated wilderness of
outer space parallels Jack Torrances breakdown in Te Shining.
3. Book / Comic Book
. . .this image I conjured in my mind what a Stanley Kubrick was was
nothing like the man with his sleeves rolled up, with wrinkled clothes like
Colombos . . . His beard. His probing, questioning eyes, always looking
at you to see if youre true or false. To see what youre made of, to see what
youve got upstairs. His chess players eyes. Real surgeons eyes. Steven
Spielberg
As his name implies, Kubrick is actually a displaced architect. A passion for
symmetry the mark of the architect informs every aspect of his work, from
the construction of narratives like A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and Eyes
Wide Shut, the latter half of each lm precisely mirroring the former, to the
lining up of individual shots, as for example, of Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann
walking down twin rows of bunk beds in Full Metal Jacket, or Jack Torrance
muttering to himself as he skulks down the hallway of the Overlook, or Ser-
geant Daft walking through the trenches in Paths of Glory. Indeed, his pen-
chant for symmetry is so insistent that he actually adds a twin row of toilets in
the bathrooms of the barracks in Full Metal Jacket just so the shot will come
out symmetrically. Schopenhauer criticized Kants passion for architectonic
symmetries, and the same criticism can be leveled at Kubrick, for his lms are
more like buildings than anything else.
Spielberg on the other hand works with the speed and alacrity of a comic
book artist, albeit one of a higher caliber like Richard Corben or Moebius.
Most of his lms are constructed, for example, from storyboards, that dis-
ease of Hollywood, as Werner Herzog has remarked, in which the director
prefabricates his shots with drawings that move from one panel to the next,
exactly as in a comic book. Te only problem with this kind of blueprint
planning is that it can kill the spontaneity of creative inspiration while on the
set, and indeed critics have complained that storyboarding ruined Empire of
the Sun, and that its absence was crucial to the success of Schindlers List. As
he has confessed, Spielberg grew up in the rst generation to be raised almost
:;,
entirely on a pop diet of comic books and TV shows: I was not a reader, and
Im still not a reader. I dont like reading. I have not read for pleasure in many,
many years. Tats sort of a shame. I think I am really part of the Eisenhower
generation of television.
4
Kubrick never used storyboards, preferring to assemble his work in the edit-
ing room. Every one of his lms, furthermore, was based on a preexistent work
of literature, whether a lowbrow novel like Te Shining, or a short story, like
the ones that inspired :oo: and A.I. Te novels which Kubrick has chosen to
lm, moreover, were mostly inferior works of literature with the exception
of Lolita some of them obscure novels which, had he never lmed them,
would have vanished without a trace, like Peter Georges Red Alert, the source
for Dr. Strangelove, or Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle, upon which Eyes Wide
Shut is based. On the one occasion when he decided to lm a classic novel, it
is characteristic of him to choose an obscure one like Barry Lyndon, a novel so
little read that it had been out of print since the nineteenth century. Kubrick
deliberately avoided masterpieces, so that he could improve upon them in
translation to celluloid, which, in nearly every case, he did.
Spielberg, however, is polygeneric. He has lmed everything: novels, both
lowbrow Jaws, Jurassic Park and high Te Color Purple, Empire of the Sun;
he has lmed remakes of old movies, War of the Worlds, for instance, and A
Guy Named Joe as Always; reworkings of the spirit of old serials like the Indi-
ana Jones lms; short stories like Philip K. Dicks Te Minority Report; and
even non-ction works like Catch Me If You Can and Amistad. He has lmed
childrens novels like Peter Pan, and concocted them from scratch, as in E.T.
He has even, on occasion, written his own screenplays, as in Close Encounters of
the Tird Kind and A.I.. Spielberg, in short, is a multi-media genius for whom
celluloid is the medium of choice and absolutely any subject, from any other
medium, is fair game.
Whereas Kubrick was one of the last of the geniuses whose literary sensibili-
ties shaped an entire epoch of Western civilization that has come to be known
elegiacally as Te Gutenberg Galaxy, Spielberg is a prophet of the electronic
age although he has explicitly stated his aversion to digitizing celluloid for
his work points the way to the future of lm as the medium for that age. Ku-
bricks work is part of an elegy for the sinking ship of Western literature, and
as time goes by I predict that directors who share his kind of literary tempera-
ment, like Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Philip Kaufman,
will become more and more rare, while the future belongs to the George Lu-
cases, Steven Spielbergs, and Peter Jacksons. I do not, however, regard this
with dismay, for unlike elitists I believe that lm should be a roller coaster ride.
:c
Ive got books at home to read. When I go to the movies, I want something
from the screen that I cant get from the page. I prefer to read Homer or Joyce
or the novels of the Brontes in my study, for these classic works, already mas-
terpieces in one medium, cannot be transformed into masterpieces in another.
Kubricks instincts were correct: if lm wants to have its own classics, it must
either create them from scratch or else adapt them from inferior works of
literature: Jaws as a novel is a piece of trash; as a lm, it is a masterpiece, and
the same goes for Te Godfather, Te Shining and Te Exorcist. (Te Lord of the
Rings, however, may be the only exception to this rule.)
When I look with anticipation at the future of cinema, I already know
what some of its disappointments will be. I do not look forward to celluloid
versions of Don Quixote (witness Terry Gilliams debacle here) or Paradise Lost
or Te Divine Comedy. Tese will inevitably be failures, as in the case of the
celluloid versions of Moby Dick, Te Last Temptation of Christ and Ulysses. Te
books that I look forward to seeing lmed are obscure novels like Heinrich
von Kleists Michael Kohlhaas, Doris Lessings Te Fifth Child, or J.G. Ballards
Concrete Island, minor works of literature which, however, have the potential
to become celluloid masterpieces.
4. Inhumanist / Transhumanist
Kubricks biographer John Baxter tells the story of how Spielberg was at
Elstree lming Raiders of the Lost Ark, while Kubrick was next door work-
ing on Te Shining (Lucas had already come and gone with Te Empire
Strikes Back). Spielberg was lming the Well of Souls sequence with all
the snakes, and Kubricks daughter Vivian, while shooting the only exist-
ing documentary footage of her father in action for Te Making of Te
Shining, happened to notice that the snakes werent being treated very well.
Te RSPCA was brought in, closing down production on Raiders for one
day, until provision was made for the snakes. Kubrick, of course, took
Vivians side and then there was a denite clash between Spielberg and
Kubrick. And I remember Stanley pu ng on his cigar, and saying with a
grin, Steves a jerk.
And now, like Jack Torrance in Te Shining looking down on a scale model of
the labyrinth, we will take an overview of the major patterns that each director
has laid down in the construction of his respective works.
Te rst topographical feature we notice is that both directors established
their fame through an early trilogy of lms in which their microcosmologies
::
were laid out, in Kubricks case, with his Inhumanist trilogy of Dr. Strangelove,
:oo:: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, and in Spielbergs, the Biblical
trilogy of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Tird Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In Dr. Stangelove, the attempt to manage the planet through Cold War
nuclear technology turns out to be the very means of bringing about a global
apocalypse. In :oo:, mans salvation from a technology that has become a Fran-
kenstein monster and turned against him, dictating its purposes to him instead
of the other way about, can be achieved only through the deus ex machina of
extraterrestrial powers.
While :oo:: A Space Odyssey is indisputably Kubricks best lm, it is too
atypical of his pessimistic worldview to be regarded as his signature work. Tat
honor belongs to A Clockwork Orange, his vision of the entrapment of the soul
of contemporary man within a mechanized society that doesnt even believe
in the souls existence. Burgesss wonderful title, with its synechdocal part for
the whole, expresses this quite succinctly, for if you imagine that the inner
workings of the growth and development of a living organism like an orange
tree can be merely explained away by physico-chemical interactions, as mate-
rialists do, then you have essentially reduced a living thing to a machine. As
Rudolf Steiner points out, Te characteristic feature of everything on Earth is
that the spiritual always needs a physical bearer. Materialists consider only the
physical bearer and forget the spiritual.
5
Or in the words of T.S. Eliots poem
Te Hollow Men: Shape without Form / Shade without color / Paralyzed
force / Gesture without motion. And as Burgess says in his novel, Te at-
tempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness . . .
to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical
creation, against this I raise my sword-pen
6
Before the emergence of the clockwork cosmos, living things, whether
plant, animal or human, were thought to be animated by an entelechy, a sort
of spiritual monad conceived by Aristotle to be a principle which actualizes
the potentialities of animate beings, causing acorns to grow into oak trees and
human embryos to become adult beings. Leibnizs Monadology represents the
sunset eect of this tradition, for in the mechanistic vision bequeathed to
us by eighteenth century science, the entelechy has been digested by the ma-
chine, and the consequences of this displacement became evident during the
nineteenth century when human freedom was abrogated and man became a
victim of the forces of the environment in which he lives.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant tried to make
room for freedom by circumscribing the limits of the human understanding
in his Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that the only valid objects for scientic
::
knowledge are phenomena made apprehensible to the senses within space and
time. Anything transcendent of the senses was out of bounds of the under-
standing and therefore science could not claim to pretend to a knowledge
of the existence or non-existence of metaphysical objects like God, freedom
and the human soul, for these fell into the province of Reason, that God-
given spark of spiritual intuition which made visible to the mind, if not the
senses, the reality of God, the human soul and therefore of human freedom in
an otherwise Newtonian cosmos of deterministic forces operating under the
rigid law of causality. But alas, Kants vision was immediately dismissed by the
English and French philosophers, although it persisted in German philosophy
until well into the twentieth century.
In Kubricks lm A Clockwork Orange, we are given a vision of the eects
of this loss of the idea of freedom on contemporary society through the story
of Alex, a teenage gang leader with no conscience whatsoever about killing,
raping and beating other human beings. But when he is given the chance to
submit to the Ludovico treatment, essentially a fancy form of classical con-
ditioning which would program him to become sick whenever confronted
with a violent or aggressive social interaction, his freedom is taken from him
and he becomes nothing more than a machine dehumanized by an inhuman
institution. Te lm is so characteristically Kubrickean precisely because it
succeeds in pulling o the irony of making Alexs situation a sympathetic one.
We actually preferred him better when he had the freedom to choose his de-
plorable acts than when he simply responds like a robot, because, as Kubrick
has remarked, something within us instinctively rejects the imprisonment of
unconscious forces. Te lms ironies, black humor and pessimistic vision are
so Kubrickean that they could be trademarked.
Turning now to what I call Spielbergs Biblical trilogy of Jaws, Close En-
counters of the Tird Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark, we are concerned with a
meltdown of Old Testament myth and its recasting into the surface structures
of popular culture. Yahwehs taming of the great beasts, Leviathan and Behe-
moth, out of whose bodies he has fashioned the cosmos, is revisited in the
dragon slayer mythology of Jaws. Close Encounters of the Tird Kind retrieves
the ascent of Moses up Sinai to commune with God, and the ark within which
the commandments were housed becomes the subject matter of his collabora-
tion with George Lucas and Philip Kaufman in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Spielbergs signature lm, Close Encounters of the Tird Kind, can be re-
garded as a sort of antidote to the pessimism of A Clockwork Orange, for it
oers us a vision not of a cosmos under constraint, but of one in which the
restrictor valve has been let loose and consequently, in the words of William
:,
Blake, evry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight.
Close Encounters of the Tird Kind functions also as an overture to the themes
that Spielberg would spend the rest of his career developing: the invasion of
the suburbs by transpersonal powers, the quest of the idealist to pursue a vi-
sion in spite of persecution from others, and the optimistic vision of a cosmos
lled with benevolent beings who are interested in our welfare.
In a way, Close Encounters picks up where :oo: left o. In that lm, we see
the beginnings of the descent of a messianic being from the stars headed to-
ward a troubled, overly mechanized Earth. Close Encounters picks up the story
from the vantage point of the human beings on Earth gathering in millenial
expectation of a messiah, like the Jews of Edessa or Jerusalem at the turn of
the Magnus Annus two thousand years ago. Roy Neary becomes for us a sort
of prophet of this messiah, a John the Baptist gure crying in the wilderness
of the coming of the savior. Gathered together amongst the empty elds and
deserted highways of country roads, the expectant await the arrival of the god
from the heavens who will fulll their millenial eschatology. Spielbergs lm
is an examination of what Toynbee in his Study of History called the internal
proletariat, those who are in a disintegrating society but not of it, since they
have seceded from it in order to form their own Universal Church which will
become the chrysalis of the next great civilization, as the early Jews and Chris-
tians amongst the Romans awaited their savior who would deliver them from
the shallow materialism of the dying classical civilization.
Like the protagonists of Peter Weirs brilliant lms Te Last Wave and Te
Truman Show, Roy Neary is the archetypal visionary, the prophet or artist
whose vision of the edges of civilization seems like paranoia to those who
inhabit the petrifying world that is stiening with age and senility around
him, but from the point of view of those who come after him, he is a meta-
noid and forerunner of the next great turning of the wheel of the cosmos. As
William Irwin Tompson remarks, Moses was a paranoid to the Egyptians,
but a metanoid to the Jews; Mohammad began as a paranoid to the reigning
Arabs in Mecca who went to war against him when he ed to Medina, but was
a metanoid to the subsequent followers of Islam; and Christ was a paranoid
whom the Romans regarded with surly amusement babbling about the Son
of the One True God, as though there could ever be only one god, but four
centuries later, the Roman Emperor Constantine decreed that Christianity
was the o cial religion of the Empire. In Spielbergs lm, the United States
government is in the role of the sceptics who refuse to believe that the beings
from another world have chosen neophytes whom they wish to escort into the
heavens for a privileged vision of the architecture of time and space. When
:
Neary gets inside the spacecraft and leaves the earth, we know what he is go-
ing to see because Kubrick has already shown us Bowmans tour of the cosmos
in :oo:.
5. Departure / Return
In :,;,, both Jaws and Barry Lyndon were nominated for best lm. Neither
won, for the category that year went to Milos Formans [realist lm] One
Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
Spielberg: I like Barry Lyndon, but for me it was like going through the
Prado without lunch.
Jaws, Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark taken together, then, may be
thought of as a sort of overture to Spielbergs entire body of work, for he will
revisit the themes announced here again and again. Te battle with Leviathan
will be amplied in Jurassic Park, and the theme of the invasion of suburbia by
transpersonal powers, rst announced in Close Encounters, will surface again
in E.T., Poltergeist and War of the Worlds, while the pulp ction adventures of
Indiana Jones will recur in three sequels. Even the theme of unjust persecu-
tion, reiterated in Te Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindlers List, Minority
Report and the abortive Memoirs of a Geisha, is rst hinted at in Close Encoun-
ters, when the U.S. government attempts to prevent Roy Neary from pursuing
his vision.
Both directors, with their respective trilogies, laid out their signature vi-
sions of the cosmos, and then both took the risk of departing from critical
expectations with what appeared to be completely dierent material. While
Spielberg, for example, created a kind of second unit overture in shifting from
the Meliean vision of his early work to the Lumirean realism of Te Color
Purple and Empire of the Sun, Kubrick, who had intended to follow :oo: with
a lm about the life of Napoleon, likewise shifted into realism with Barry
Lyndon, a lm set in the eighteenth century and concerned with the demise of
the rationalism that reached its apotheosis during that epoch. Barrys rational
designs to live a calculated life are continually subverted by his unconscious
passions, which undo every one of his decisions for the worse. Te lm is,
therefore, a study of the transition from Enlightenment reason to the primacy
of the instinct and the unconscious that would subsequently characterize the
rise of romanticism.
With his next lm, Te Shining, Kubrick took one step further away from
:,
his initial trilogy paradoxically, by going back to the Meliean mode. For
Te Shining is a study of the magical consciousness structure in its sinister
aspect, and nearly every attribute that Jean Gebser ascribes to this structure
in his Ever Present Origin may be found in it. Te image of the labyrinth,
which Gebser links with the shape of both the ear and the intestines, is cen-
tral to this structure, as is, signicantly, the lack of a mouth in Paleolithic and
Neolithic art, for in the magical structure, the ego has not formed, and the
individual, consequently, is part of a group among which non-verbal forms
of communication predominate, such as dance, ritual, telepathy and body
language. Te world is viewed, consequently, as a labyrinthine web of inter-
connections in which each part stands for the whole, and magic, through
spell casting, is practised, along with such activities as extispicy reading the
intestines of animals for omens and the study of oracle bones, tea leaves or
palmistry, since the patterns of the macrocosm are imagined as being reiter-
ated in those of the microworld.
Te boy, Danny, (whose name evokes the visionary dream interpreter Dan-
iel from the Old Testament) has telepathic powers, and being sensitive to vi-
sionary incursions from the astral plane, he is constantly witnessing the reen-
actment of murders that have taken place in the Overlook Hotel. He is told
by the cook, Hallorann, that he has an ability which Halloranns grandmother
used to call shining, in which he and his grandmother would have conversa-
tions without ever once having to open their mouths a modied version of
Gebsers magical mouthless motif. And indeed, one of the archaic meanings
of the word overlook is to cast a spell on someone through a glance, like a
Celtic geiss.
Te lm is also about the ways in which the human mind, when isolated,
can devolve into earlier structures of consciousness that have been cast o dur-
ing the cultural evolution of humanity. Because Jacks ego is weak, it is easily
overcome by demons from the astral plane, and so his mind regresses to a de-
cient version of the magical consciousness structure, in which the individual
is taken over and possessed by demonic beings. Kubrick is more sensitive than
Stephen King to the mythological deep structures of his narratives, and so he
and his screenwriter, the novelist Diane Johnson, transformed Jack into the
Minotaur in the labyrinth who devours children, and he assumes the motif
of the limping hero that, in antiquity, was associated with dying and reviving
gods and heroes like Adonis, Noah, Jacob and Odysseus. If :oo: is about the
advance of consciousness into the Integral structure, Te Shining explores the
dangers of its regression backward into the magical.
:o
o. Chaos / Cosmos
Both directors, after these forays, then returned to the thematic material of
their initial trilogies, Spielberg with Jurassic Park and Kubrick with Full Metal
Jacket.
In Jurassic Park, Spielberg returns to the dragon slayer mythology of Jaws,
but this time he has switched his mythological skeleton from the Old Tes-
tament to Moby Dick, for in the ending of the lm, the dinosaurs emerge
triumphant, and the bellow of the T. Rex at the lms climax echoes the slash
of Moby Dicks tale as it destroys Ahabs boat. With Schindlers List, Spielberg
returns to his second unit material the realist cluster of Te Color Purple
and Empire of the Sun but fuses it with the Biblical trilogy, for in this lm
the formers theme of unjust imprisonment is united with the latters Biblical
imagery, this time of Moses / Noah as a savior of the Jewish people (the nov-
els original title was Schindlers Ark). For in the deep structure of Kenneallys
novel, Schindler is a kind of Persian Cyrus the Great gure who redeems the
Jews from captivity by the Babylonians, and so the deep structures of Jewish
mythology begin to surface here through an apparently realistic narrative.
With Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick returned to the thematic material that made
him famous: a skeptical analysis of the value of institutions, in this case, the
military, which is examined for the ways in which it dehumanizes individuals
by transforming them into servomechanisms of their ries. At rst glance,
the lm appears to be uncharacteristically asymmetrical, for its rst half, con-
cerned with a stable and ordered environment, develops with the narrative
streamline of a classic novel, while its second half, preoccupied with the chaos
and disarray of war, is itself broken and fragmented, like a modernist poem.
However, Kubricks architectural symmetry is still evident, for both halves end
with a murder and are concerned with a meditation on death.
Te extent of Kubricks inuence on Spielberg is evident all throughout
his work: Close Encounters, for instance, owes a huge debt to :oo:, for that
lms monolith becomes the vision of the cosmic mountain as Devils Tower
in Wyoming, and the image of the extraterrestrial Star Child is recaptured in
the nale as the aliens emerge from their spacecraft in a ood of bluish-white
light. :),:, one of Spielbergs biggest failures, was his attempt to emulate Dr.
Strangelove, of which Spielberg has remarked that it is one of the few lms
that is a nearly perfect motion picture. And I suspect that Te Shining lies
somewhere behind Poltergeist, Spielbergs attempt to match Kubricks attempt
to outdo Robert Wises Te Haunting as the greatest haunted house lm ever
made. And the case is no less so with the inuence of Full Metal Jacket on
:;
Saving Private Ryan Spielbergs most overrated lm, as Empire of the Sun is
his most underrated from which he borrows the intense realism of the battle
scenes, including the episode of the sniper from Full Metal Jackets climax.
Later on in their careers, however, the inuence began to run the other way,
for Kubrick came up with the idea for A.I. as an homage to Pinocchio after
seeing E.T., which also inspired him to change its original title from Supertoys.
Ten, after Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick had intended to lm Louis Begleys
novel Wartime Lies, which he had retitled Te Aryan Papers, about a young boy
and his aunt who must consistently change identities and life histories in order
to survive the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe. Kubrick, however, cancelled
its production when he learned that Spielberg had undertaken Schindlers List,
a novel which he himself had briey considered lming.
And so for his nal act, Kubrick decided upon Arthur Schnitzlers Traumno-
velle, which he renamed Eyes Wide Shut, picking up the theme of the fantastic
and the surreal which he had explored in :oo: and Te Shining. Te primary
theme of Eyes Wide Shut is that of the relationship between sex and death, tra-
ditional Kubrickean fascinations. Sex, the protagonist learns, is a mask worn
by death, for one is the means by which we enter the world, and the other
the way we exit. Te central image of the lm is the sex cult in the red room,
where everyone wears masks from a Venetian carnival and only the protago-
nist is forced to remove his. In exchange for his life, a prostitute whom he
had earlier saved from a drug overdose steps forward to sacrice herself. He is
asked never to speak a word of what he has seen to anyone, and with that little
clue, we have the key to the entire lm, which is a retrieval of the Hellenistic
mystery cults, whose central secrets also concerned masked epiphanies in con-
junction with sex and death. Te Eleusinian mysteries, for example, featured
giant phalluses carried in baskets by a ceremonial procession of hierophants
who would walk a path meant to reenact Demeters search for her daughter
Persephone, abducted by Hades, the lord of death.
If :oo: is an initiation into the cosmic mysteries of the planets, as in the
Roman cult of the zodiacal god Mithras, then Eyes Wide Shut is an initiation into
the mysteries of the earth-bound agrarian cults of Dionysus and Demeter.
;. Coniunctionis
golem (go-lem) n. [Yiddish goylem; Heb., orig., embryo; later, monster.]
(:,;) in Jewish legend, a man articially created by cabalistic rites; robot;
automaton.
:
With A.I., we arrive at the synthesis of Kubrick with Spielberg, and the cre-
ation of a vision in which most of this books thematic preoccupations are
woven together: the fall of humanity into technology; the intervention of a
race of extraterrestrial-style super robots; and a premature Ice Age as the Ga-
ian response to an epoch in which global warming has melted the polar ice
caps.
A.I. is the latest addition to an ever-expanding corpus of literature and lm
about the myth of the articial being, which goes back through Gattaca, Juras-
sic Park, Te Fly, Blade Runner and others, to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and
beyond, to the alchemical myth of the homunculus and the ancient Jewish
legends of the Golem. What does it mean to be human, the lm asks, in a
world in which technology can perform wonders that hitherto were only pos-
sible in the realm of myth? Te Sumerian god Enki shaping the rst human
beings out of riverine mud; the Babylonian god Marduk, taking the idea from
Enki, creates primal man from the blood of the slain god Kingu; Yahweh, in
imitation of the Egyptian god Khnum, who makes man on a pottery wheel,
scoops Adam up out of the ground and rolls him together like a Neolithic
ceramics craftsman; Judah Lion, like the mother in A.I. who pronounces the
seven words that will magically cause the boy robot to love her, utters the sa-
cred syllables that will awaken his mute Golem into being: such deeds, once
performed by gods of myth and characters of literature like Faust and Fran-
kenstein, are now, at the turn of the Magnus Annus, being transformed into
fact, for human cloning is about to become a reality. Sheep, cows, pigs, frogs
and cats have all been cloned, but none has turned out normal, anywhere.
Of those clones born alive, many are abnormally large or grossly deformed.
Tey often die shortly after birth. And survivors tend to be sickly. Even
when clones appear healthy at birth, they often develop mysterious ill-
nesses later. For example, the clone Dolly was a dainty lamb but has since
become morbidly obese. Her creators have no idea why.
7
We can also think of A.I., which tells the story of an articial boy who is
discarded into the wilderness once his mother has her real son back from
the hospital, as a tale of the rst human victims of genetic engineering de-
fective, sick, disease-ridden, ultimately useless who will be discarded as
science, in its pursuit of progress, seeks to perfect the cloning process. And
even though these beings will be human in every respect that counts for
they will have the capacity to love and hate, to fear and be envious, to desire
sexual satisfaction and resent those who deny it, to dream of god and the
afterlife you can be sure that the amoral, conscienceless men of science will
:,
have no qualms whatsoever about trapping souls into the misery of living in
defective bodies.
In Mary Shelleys novel, the humanizing education of the monster, who
reads books and listens to music, is meant to contrast ironically with Victor
Frankensteins account of his own education in the sciences for the end result
of the former is to create a being who is complex and compassionate though
murderous while Frankensteins education dehumanizes him by coarsening
his feelings. Indeed, Shelleys novel was a prophecy of the type of society that
might emerge once the ideal of a humanistic education has been pushed aside
by the applied sciences and engineering. Te result an entire civilization run
by clones of Victor Frankenstein is the very one towards which ours appears
to be heading.
A.I. begins with an appearance of the biomechanical goddess as Professor
Hobby our Frankenstein counterpart demonstrates to his audience the
articial nature of one of his robots that appears human, when he touches a
spot in the roof of her mouth that causes her face to split in half and reveal the
polished black metal skull beneath. Tus the process which Tomas Pynchon
described in V. of the woman who gradually replaces her anatomy with bits of
artice here achieves its completion, for the woman who seems human on the
outside is now a full blown robot beneath.
Te image, furthermore, is an alarming index of just how deep into the hu-
man soul technology has managed to penetrate, for some of us who appear hu-
man may actually be living lives in which our humanity has been so stripped
from us by an overly mechanized society that we might as well be robots. Fax
machine, cell phone, satellite, internet, computer: where, amongst this web of
integrated circuits and silicon chips, is our humanity? Who can tell the dier-
ence any more between where the human ends and the machine begins? As
Spielberg has remarked: Technology interrupts our ability to have a thought
or a daydream, to imagine something wonderful because were too busy bridg-
ing the walk from the cafeteria back to the o ce on the cell phone.
8
Later in the lm, Spielberg and Kubrick throw one possible response to
this situation at us one which we are already familiar with as Demolition
when they take us to the Flesh Fair, in which discarded robots are rounded
up and then torn apart before cheering audiences that resemble something out
of a Monster Truck show. At what point, they ask, do the masses become so
sick of being mistaken for machines themselves, that they start smashing them
up in Luddite fashion? What could generate such a hatred of artice? But
then who decides, in this cultural intrusion into nature, what is articial and
what is not? Will clones be hunted and marched o into concentration camps
:,c
one day because someone decides that they are not real?
A.I. is about a mechanical boy who desires to become human and so in a
way, it is the response to the problem set up in George Lucass Star Wars pre-
quels, which tell the opposite story of a human boy who gradually becomes
a machine. In Return of the Jedi, the boy, now an old man, is nally rescued
from his biomechanical state by the intercession of his spiritually centered
son, while in the original story of Pinocchio, the wooden boy is transformed
into a real one by the Blue Fairy. In Apuleiuss Golden Ass, likewise, Lucius
is transformed from an ass into a human by the goddess Isis, for Te Golden
Ass is a Gnostic allegory of the souls fall from the heavens into a corporeal
state and the metamorphosis of Lucius, consequently whose name means
light back into the state of a human being is meant to evoke the birth of
spiritual consciousness from our animal nature. Tus, in both Pinocchio and
Te Golden Ass, transformation from a lower state, be it mechanical or animal,
into the higher state of humanity is accomplished with the help of a spiritual
being, the Blue Fairy in one case and the goddess Isis in the other, because it
is precisely our spiritual imagination, whereby we can conceive of such beings,
that separates us from the animals, which cannot.
James Cameron, in his Titanic, showed us a microcosm of civilization
plunging back into the watery abyss, while in the climax of A.I., Spielberg and
Kubrick take us to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean where lie the submerged
ruins of New York City. Tere David descends in his amphibicopter to a Co-
ney Island theme park which features a simulacrum of the Blue Fairy from
Pinocchio, and there, like a penitent before the Virgin, he remains locked in
prayer to his goddess for two thousand years, the approximate length, we note,
of a Platonic Month of the Magnus Annus, which lasts for :,:oc years. Wil-
liam Irwin Tompson has remarked that A.I. should have ended underwater
to show the end of the era of religion humans dominated by the emotional
level of consciousness locked into an adoration of the Virgin Mary, and in-
deed, the image of the boy submerged underwater before a goddess is certainly
appropriate to the aquatic connotations of the Age of Aquarius.
But two thousand years later, along with the precession into Capricorn, the
earth has shifted prematurely into an Ice Age because Gaia, apparently, has
had to resort to one in order to cool herself o. Te Ice Age cycle, according to
microbiologist Lynn Margulis, has been in its present phase for only the past
two or three million years; before that, Ice Ages were rare occurrences, which
suggests that the planet has been shifting into an unstable pattern of Ice Ages
to cool itself o, since more of the earths surface is exposed in an Ice Age, al-
lowing more plants to thrive and cycle greenhouse gases out of the air, thus
:,:
lowering the global mean temperature.
Moreover, the climax of A.I., in introducing us to an advanced species of
super robot, plays around with the notion that the appearance of a new spe-
cies of homo has tended to coincide with the onset of an Ice Age, for homo
habilis, homo erectus, homo sapiens and the Neanderthals were each produced
by evolutionary mutations which occurred during glacial epochs. In the lms
imagined apocalypse, humans have become extinct, but their intelligence is
mimicked by these evolutionary simulacra which thaw David out of the ice
so that they can retrieve his memories of the lost species of humanity known
as homo sapiens.
In this nal sequence, we learn, furthermore, that the voice of the lead robot
is that of Ben Kingsley, the same voice whose narration opened the lm before
a meditative image of the sea, and so we realize that the foregoing narrative
has been scanned by these super robots from Davids memories and in a sense
is articial too.
If we look through their surface structures as robots to their deep structures,
these beings, we realize, are isomorphic to extraterrestrials (and hence, to an-
gels, as well). In fact, Kubricks original ambition in :oo: had been to depict
the extraterrestrials as Giacometti-like sculptures, and so Spielbergs retrieval
of Kubricks discarded design is a way of paying homage to that lm. Te super
robots, furthermore, create a virtual reality for David just as they did for Dave
Bowman; and so A.I., too like James Camerons lm Te Abyss draws from
the ancient literary tradition of the Hebrew apocalypses in which angelic be-
ings drop from the heavens to transmit visions to a lone protagonist.
Tese super robots, moreover, are so ethereal as to be almost transpar-
ent: they glow with their own internal light, like sun rays pouring through a
stained glass window. Indeed, they and the spiritual striving of the narrative of
A.I. as a whole are an example of a particular type of response to the Machine
which I term etherealization, in which the heavier, larger and more mate-
rial is transformed into the lighter, more etheric and luminous. Abbot Sugers
redesigning of the Romanesque basilica into the Gothic Abbey of St. Denis is
an example of this. Trough the application of spidery, lament-thin ying
buttresses and stained glass windows, the dark almost windowless structure of
the Romanesque fortress was transformed into a light-soaked Gothic church.
Te history of Western technology is full of such examples: from the heavy
industrial factories of the nineteenth century to the Bauhaus-inuenced struc-
tures in which walls dissolve into glass; from the unwieldy steam engine to the
smoothly running internal combustion engine; from the giant, bulky automo-
biles of the :,,cs to the ever-lighter and quieter cars of today; and from the
:,:
huge, noisy computers of the post WWII epoch to the electronic stained glass
of the barely audible laptop. In each case we see the same tendency toward
etherealization, that is to say, an unconscious spiritual striving from matter to
light. Te super robots at the climax of A.I. are an example of this same urge to
transubstantiate the machine into something that more closely approximates
structures made out of light; even Davids desire to shed his mechanical cara-
pace and become human bespeaks this.
Tus, in making the machine itself into an extension of the human spiri-
tual impulse to inhabit higher, more luminous realms we see yet another pos-
sible response to the problem of mans fall into the machine: not, in this case,
by extracting him from it, but rather by transforming his mechanical prison
into a copy of the spirit world. If traditional spiritual ideas are applied to the
making of new technological environments, as in the case of Rudolf Steiners
architectural creations, then the machine-human dichotomy simply vanishes,
for the machine becomes reabsorbed into the human Umwelt, and the gods
that humanity has cast out of their natural abodes through breaking nature
apart to make its machines are invited to come down and take up residence
upon the earth once again, this time inhabiting not minerals and trees but
mechanical bodies.
Te very structure of the narrative of A.I. exhibits this etherealizing ten-
dency, for the nal climactic sequence, compared with the foregoing narra-
tive, is essentially composed of memory and light. Te luminous structures
which compose the lms climax Davids memories of his domestic life with
his mother as reanimated by the robots are made out of subtle, rather than
dense matter. Just as in Goethes theory of the metamorphosis of plants, in
which he imagines that the juices of the archetypal plant as they ascend be-
come more and more rened so that they are enabled to produce higher, more
delicate structures like owers and reproductive organs, so in the case of A.I.,
the narrative moves from darker, more brutal environments toward more ethe-
real ones.
In a nal irony, David is reunited with his mother, but she is articial too
for she is a clone that has been constructed by the super robots from a piece
of her hair, and she can live for only one day. Tus, in the beginning of the
lm a human mother is introduced to an articial boy who, at the end, is
reunited with an articial mother. Although his wish to become human is not
granted, we realize that the function of that wish was really only to return him
to his mother who, he is convinced, will love him again only if he can become
human. Tus, he has moved from prayer to a Blue Fairy who is an analogue of
both the Virgin Mary and her prototype, the goddess Isis, to the embrace of a
:,,
biographical memory of his own mother from a Jungian archetype, that is to
say, to a Freudian one as if to conrm our suspicion that the human mother
is the root source for the goddess archetype. And just as the lms rst images
are of the sea and Professor Hobbys biomechanical bride, so its nal image,
closing the circles of both Spielbergs lm and this book, is that of David
submerged in the ocean of his own unconscious memories of his mother, who
happens to be but one incarnation of the celluloid goddess.
Notes
:. J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe. trans. Gisela C. OBrien (NY:
Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., :,o), p. :,.
:. Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
Krell (SF: HarperSanFrancisco, :,,,), p. ,,.
,. J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London: Panther Books, :,,), p. ,c:.
. Douglas Brode, Te Films of Steven Spielberg (NY: Citadel Press, :ccc), p. :c.
,. Knowledge of Higher Worlds: Rudolf Steiners Blackboard Drawings, ed. Lawrence
Rinder, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, :,,;), back cover.
o. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., :,;) pp.
::::.
;. Christine Soares, Why Human Clones Wont Work Yet. Discover, Jan. :cc:,
p. o.
. Lisa Kennedy, Spielberg in the Twilight Zone. Wired, June :cc:, p. :c,.
:,
Digging Images:
A Cultural Archaeology
of the Movie Teater
Begin the play, the stage assume its shape,
Te lord commands it, let the rm walls gape!
Here magic is at hand, all hindrance banish,
As if rolled up by surf, it turns about,
A deep-spaced theater seems tted out,
All lighted for us by a mystic glare
Goethe, Faust
In reality we can never cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless
we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis. . .we are confronted, at every
new stage in the dierentiation of consciousness to which civilization at-
tains, with the task of nding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage,
in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of
the present, which threatens to slip away from it. If this link-up does not
take place, a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being no longer ori-
ented to the past, a consciousness which succumbs helplessly to all manner
of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics.
Carl Jung
Digging Images
:,,
Table of Contents
Preface, :,,
1. Introduction, :,o
2. Jaws, or Te Human Embryo within whe Belly of the Beast, :,,
3. Alien, A.I. and the Human Embryo within the Belly of the Goddess,
:c:
4. Te Embryo is Born: Close Encounters of the Tird Kind and the
World as Cosmic Mountain, :co
5. Humanity Returns to the Womb: Te Truman Show and the World
as Cosmic Cavern, :c,
Intermezzo: Te Birth of the Movie Teater out of Arabian Optics, ::,
6. Te World as Clockwork: Dark City and the Rise of the Inanimate,
::,
7. Anima Motrix, ::,
Preface
In the following book-within-a-book, I consider lm in its second major role,
that of miniaturizing ancient cosmologies, a function very dierent from that
of warning us about the destabilization of the environment caused by techno-
logical transformations. Tis cosmological function is so intrinsic to visionary
movies that I believe it warrants its own self-contained book within this book,
in the literary tradition of plays within plays (as in Hamlet) or plays within
novels (as in Lolita or Te Crying of Lot ,)) or even novels within novels (as in
Calvinos If on a Winters Night a Traveller . . .). Te purpose of this tradition
of internal plays and novels is to open up a special kind of mirror within the
larger narrative through which the smaller narrative will reect and illuminate
its major themes in a new light.
In the present case, this narrative within a narrative serves to illustrate the
all-encompassing power of lm as an integral, polygeneric medium capable
of absorbing and miniaturizing the cosmologies of the past. Te function of
such miniaturization is not so much to shed light on the present cultural situa-
tion, as to retain continuity with the past. Popular culture, for all its apparent
nihilism, may thus be seen to be working as a means of transmitting the cul-
tural otsam of vanished cosmologies which, when broken apart, do not just
disappear, but are carried along through the subterranean channels of civiliza-
tion in the form of folktales and folklore.
:,o
I have argued that the kinds of visionary lm discussed in this book perform
two major cultural functions: rst, as a kind of X-ray of electronic society
(McLuhans light through rather than light on), they make invisible en-
vironments visible (albeit by means of a metaphoric picture language which,
to those who cannot read it, seems rather to obscure than to illuminate the
present social situation); and secondly, they capture, preserve and carry on
environments (i.e. ancient cosmologies) which no longer exist. Film, as a poly-
generic medium is particularly and uniquely well-suited to perform the
latter task, since it is able to translate absolutely any kind of narrative from any
other medium into celluloid spectacle for the masses. Comic books, epic lit-
erature, poems, plays, short stories, novels (highbrow or low), historical works
of nonction, older movies, television shows, even videogames: lm is the only
medium capable of absorbing narrative structures from all these other media.
Tis is why cinema is the premier medium of the electronic age, in which in-
formation, moving at lightspeed, is going too fast for anybody to metabolize
using the linear structures of Gutenbergian man. Te celluloid language of
pictures wedded to narrative is ideally suited to this age since it can com-
press multiple levels of meaning in a polyphonic symphony which uses the ,:
frames per second language of visual persistence and pattern recognition to
capture the overarching metapatterns of our society, rather than the rst-one-
word-then-another of Gutenbergian linear typeface, which is better suited to
a society with a slow cultural and economic metabolism.
1. Introduction
Biology and history are not so far apart as academic specialists would have us
think. Te phenomenon of gigantism, for example, is an attribute of both cul-
tural and biological forms signaling that they are about to vanish. Te largest
dinosaurs T. Rex, Mosasaurus, Quetzalcoatlus ourished during the Creta-
ceous, just before their extinction. In the realm of human culture, likewise,
the largest and most elaborate suits of armor appeared during the sixteenth
century, just when armor was about to disappear, while in literature, the vision
of the Great Chain of Being was written about more often in the eighteenth
century than ever before, just when Darwins theory of evolution was about
to make it obsolete. In Egypt, the great temples of Luxor and Karnak, and in
ancient Rome, gigantic fora, thermae and triumphal arches announced the
respective climaxes of these societies.
1
But it is the opposite phenomenon of miniaturization with which we are
Digging Images
:,;
concerned here. Te dinosaurs became extinct, but they didnt quite disappear,
for now they are miniaturized as lizards, snakes, birds and alligators. Te cyano-
bacteria which invented photosynthesis altered the architecture of the Archean
atmosphere by soaking up the CO: and unleashing oxygen and now, with their
very existence threatened by the accumulation of this poisonous gas, they are
scaled down to perform their new role as chloroplasts in plant cells.
Te history of human culture is lled with such examples of miniaturization.
Te age of the great Paleolithic hunt, for example, was scaled down during the
goddess-dominated Neolithic in the form of mens secret societies, as depicted
in paintings on the walls of Catal Huyuk. When the civilization of the goddess,
in turn, gave way to the militarism and kingship of high civilization, the god-
dess religion didnt disappear, but was miniaturized to perform the role of an
Eleusinian mystery, or an akitu New Year Festival, in which the sacred marriage
with the goddess confers the right of rulership upon the king. After the collapse
of civilization in the Dark Ages that attended the sequel of ancient Rome, clas-
sical learning was miniaturized by Irish Christian monks in the form of illumi-
nated manuscripts and monasteries like Lindisfarne and Iona.
During the nineteenth century, the chemist Kekul, musing upon the struc-
ture of the benzene ring, had a vision of a serpent biting its tail. In Homeric
times, the Ouroboros had been the cosmological image of the shape of the
earth, pictured as a at island surrounded by a sea serpent known as Okeanos.
Tus, the Ouroboros has been scaled down from an image of the cosmos to
a pictograph the size of a molecule. Te image of the mandala was, like the
Ouroboros, originally a cosmological skeleton upon which visionaries painted
their images of the universe, from Tibetan sandpaintings to Mayan art, but
with the vanishing of the mandala as a cosmograph, Carl Jung fossilized it as
an image of the psyche.
Te miniaturization of extinct cosmologies is a function that used to be
handled by epic literature. Dante, for instance, set about to retrieve the an-
cient cosmologies of the classical Western world just before they were about
to disappear. He took the Greek image of a round earth thereby preparing
the path for Columbus and placed the ancient Mesopotamian vision of
the cosmic mountain at the South Pole in the form of Purgatory, and set the
equally archaic cosmology of the world as a gigantic cavern into the middle of
a hollowed-out earth. No sooner had he captured and frozen for all time the
ancient cosmologies of the Western world, than the voyages of the Portuguese
navigators began dismantling it.
Milton, in Paradise Lost, likewise, preserved the entire Christian cosmology
and mythology on the eve of its disappearance, for in the eighteenth century,
:,
the Kant-Laplace model for the origins of the solar system out of a swirling
nebula of dust and gas displaced the antiquated myth of the Book of Genesis,
while James Hutton, with his uniformitarian theory of the formation of the
earths crust over millions of years under the slow, inevitable processes of sedi-
mentation, stratication and lithication, demolished Bishop Usshers date
for the birth of the earth in the year cc n.c.i.
Tomas Mann, in Te Magic Mountain, miniaturized the ancient Mesopo-
tamian vision of the cosmos as a gigantic seven storied mountain, while James
Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, created a scale model of the ancient Bronze Age vi-
sion of the cosmos emerging and dying out of circles of an eternal return, just
as the vision of our cosmos coming into existence out of a sort of primordial
atom and expanding to its present state was being eshed out by scientists.
But with the cross-fertilization of lm and the epic, the function of min-
iaturizing ancient cosmologies is now performed by lm, a medium which
seems eminently suited to this task, since it is a visual one. Tus popular
culture, while only apparently wiping out the past, is also actually preserving
it in pictographic form. In an age when fewer and fewer people read, because
they dont have the time, the inclination or the ability, knowledge that is not
conveyed through the word is being transmitted via the image. Tis was Pope
Gregory the Greats argument in favor of painting in Christianity, when the
Byzantine Iconoclasts railed against the use of images. Painting, he said, can
do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read. And so lm,
by unconsciously storing and retrieving the cosmologies of the past, is actually
creating a subliminal sense of continuity that bypasses the waking, conscious
mind and goes right through the neural oodgates into the unconscious,
which, unlike the conscious mind, understands these images innately, for it is,
in fact, their original source. Tis is why the public responds with such avidity
to lms like Close Encounters of the Tird Kind, Star Wars and more recently,
Te Lord of the Rings: because these lms are fullling an unconscious yearning
of the public for connection with a vanished mythological tradition that is no
longer taught in schools, which have shifted over to a largely vocational and
technological, rather than humanistic, curriculum. Te psyche, meanwhile, is
starved for myth, but the conscious mind doesnt realize it until it sits down in
the theater with a mythologically inspired lm.
So the cinema is miniaturizing the ancient cosmologies that have disap-
peared. And, in the following chapters, I will take the reader on a guided tour
through an historical museum lled with dioramic displays populated by wax
gures, so that we can get a good look at just which particular cosmologies are
being retrieved and compressed into strips of celluloid.
Digging Images
:,,
Lets begin with cinemas most direct architectural ancestor, the ickering of
light on the shadowy walls of a cave.
2. Jaws, or Te Human Embryo within the Belly of the Beast
God will not only prepare a magnicent banquet from Leviathans esh,
distributing for sale in the streets of Jerusalem what the righteous cannot
eat, but make them tents from his hide, and adorn the city walls with what
is left. . .
2
On the treeless steppes of the Ukraine, about :,,ccc B.C.E., Paleolithic man
built for himself a house constructed entirely out of the bones of dead woolly
mammoths. A pair of tusks, tied together, framed the doorway as a sort of
proto-Gothic arch, while a ring of mammoth skulls was laid out in the shape
of a base with a sixteen foot diameter. Layers of interlocking bones, like a
cityscape out of an H. R. Giger painting, composed the dome-shaped surface,
all held together by pins made from smaller bones. In the winter, the shelter
was covered by mammoth furs and skins sewn together, and in the summer,
these could be left o.
We may be sure that this hut was not made just for the practical purpose
of keeping warm, since aboriginal peoples did not go about building their
homes the way we do today, for mere economic reasons, but rather the house
was designed to miniaturize the cosmos, so that the dwelling was also a sort
of tiny cathedral. To the Native American Plains Indians for whom the buf-
falo was the primary sacred animal, for example, their Sun Dance lodges were
built in a radius of : roof beams because the bualo has : ribs. And the
rhythm of the moon, the celestial mirror of the bualo as in the famous
Venus of Laussel who holds a bulls horn in one hand while rubbing her
pregnant belly with the other completes its cycle in : days. And just as
the moon emerges from the undying light of the sun, so do the twenty-eight
roofbeams emerge from a central :,th pillar, symbolic of the suns immortal,
inexhaustible power.
Te Navajo hogan, to take another example, was built with precisely eight
sides to correspond with the eight main points of the compass, with the door-
way always open toward the east to receive the power of the rising sun. Each of
the four quarters of the Navajo cosmos, moreover, was demarcated by a sacred
mountain: Blanca Peak in the East, the San Francisco Peaks in the West, Mt.
Taylor in the South and La Plata Range in the North. Te smokehole in the
dome-shaped ceiling is a miniature version of the central hole in the vaulted
:cc
heavens through which the sun pours its light, so that the re in the hearth is
the earthly reection of the heavenly re.
Although we do not have Paleolithic man around to tell us these things,
we can be reasonably certain that his mammoth house was, likewise, a min-
iaturized version of the cosmos within which he lived, in this case inside the
belly of a great beast. For Paleolithic man, the image of the animal was the
cosmos: in the rock wombs of the caves within which human culture grew
like an embryo, he painted, drew, sculpted and carved his vision of the animal
cosmos into the world around him. Te cave walls burst aglow with animal
forms, at rst drawn with ngers in clay as simple schematic outlines, but then
later, painted in full, vivid technicolor: aurochs, horses, bison, rhinos, lions,
mammoths, birds, snakes, sh. He makes bison out of clay, and the heads of
his spear-throwers take on the shapes of horses. On the ceiling of the cave of
Altamira, a giant nest of bison are so densely layered one upon another that it
is impossible to discern where one ends and another begins.
Human beings are seldom depicted in this art, and when they are, it is
scarcely more than as stick gures, for humanity was not yet interested in
itself. When human forms were represented, they were usually patchworks
woven out of animal-human hybrids, gures with the heads of birds or bison;
weremammoths and shamanic dancers.
Te goddess was here, but only implicitly; she was not yet the primary
mythological gure. Sculpted out of ivory or limestone usually without a
face in relief or as free-standing gurines small enough to be held in the
palm of the hand, her traces can be found from Europe to Siberia, indicat-
ing her spread as one of the rst universal religions. But the animal was there
before her, as evidenced by the even more ancient Neanderthal cult of the bear,
in which goddess imagery, and indeed, representations of any sort whatsoever,
are simply nonexistent. For Neanderthal man, unlike Aurignacian man, was
not yet stricken with the Promethean urge to make images, and his culture
consequently was still a world of the hand for his Mousterian tool industries
are expert and beautiful but not yet of the eye.
Te animal is the primary numinous fascination of this time, so fascinat-
ing in fact that man, like a child, pretends that he is one, can change into
one at will. All he need do is don the horns of a bull or the skin of a bison
and dance, and he will conjure forth the will of the animal spirits. He is so
deeply embedded within the animal oversoul, that it will take him millenia
to extract himself from their inuence, for as late as the ancient Egyptians,
the gods are still human gures with animal heads. Te astral residue of the
animal is sticky, like plasma, and it will take the iconoclastic fanaticism of a
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* Note the curious coincidence of the fact that Jaws was shot on Marthas
Vineyard, just across from Nantucket, where Moby Dick opens.
Moses with his rejection of the worship of the Apis bull or the labors of a
Herakles to liberate him.
Archetypal Examples in Film
Steven Spielbergs Jaws is the celluloid apotheosis of the great Paleolithic hunt.
Based not on Melvilles novel, but on John Hustons :,,o lm adaptation of
Moby Dick,
*
both lms revisit the myth of the slaying of Leviathan, wonder-
fully captured by the poet Robinson Jeers in his poem Original Sin:
Te man-brained and man-handed ground-ape, physically
Te most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals
Up to that time of the world: they had dug a pitfall
And caught a mammoth, but how could their sticks and stones
Reach the life in that hide? Tey danced around the pit, shrieking
With ape excitement, inging sharp ints in vain, and the stench of
their bodies
Stained the white air of dawn; but presently one of them
Remembered the yellow dancer, wood-eating re
Tat guards the cave-mouth: he ran and fetched him, and others
Gathered sticks at the woods edge; they made a blaze
And pushed it into the pit, and they fed it high, around the mired
sides
Of their huge prey. Tey watched the long hairy trunk
Waver over the stie trumpeting pain,
And they were happy.
Jeerss description here isnt far o from the procedures of nineteenth cen-
tury Nantucket whaling, nor of the shark-hunting which we are shown in
Spielbergs Jaws, with its rituals of male bonding through recounting legends
like the sinking of the Indianapolis, in which the men who have just delivered
the latest incarnation of the yellow dancer in the form of the atom bomb are
devoured by sharks. Tat story, curiously enough, is actually a miniaturizing
of the ending of Melvilles Moby Dick, where the great beast devours Ahab and
destroys his ship, killing everyone except Ishmael, for in Spielbergs lm, the
myth of Siegfried slaying the dragon becomes the archetype for its nale, in
which the shark is blown to pieces by Chief Brody.
If, furthermore, we take Paul Klees painting Sinbad the Sailor and lay this
over the ending of Jaws as a kind of illuminated transparency, then the sexual
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ambiguities become evident, for
in Klees painting Sinbad resem-
bles a giant penis as he thrusts
his harpoon into a triple headed
monster whose gaping mouth
full of teeth suggests a toothed
vagina. And indeed, the great
Paleolithic art expert Andr
Leroi-Gourhan suggested that
Cro-Magnon art has a sexual
valency in which the wound
equals the vagina and the spear the phallus, so that while practicing the ritu-
al of death, the hunter is simultaneously performing the sexual act that will
magically regenerate the herds. In Jaws, however, the elimination of women
from the plot of the lm early on, and the male bonding at sea, along with
the destruction of the shark at the end, is consistent with the ancient dragon
slayer myth of Tiamat and Marduk, in which the prowess of the heros victory
over the Great Mother is asserted, for in that myth, as in Klees painting, the
dragon, too, is female.
Film also bears the residue of another Paleolithic motif that of the sha-
manic half-human, half-animal hybrid whenever the myth of animal meta-
morphosis shows up, as in the case of vampire and werewolf movies from
Murnaus :,:: Nosferatu and Tod Brownings :,,: Dracula to Lon Chaneys
:,: Wolf Man, on down to the wave of werewolf lms that appeared in the
:,cs, like Te Howling, An American Werewolf in London, Silver Bullett, and
Wolfen. Indeed, the membrane dividing the human from the animal world
has always been very thin, since the latter is the cosmology even the biology
within which we were embedded the longest and the one, consequently,
most apt to resurge in our consciousness.
3. Alien, A.I. and the Human Embryo
within the Belly of the Goddess
Around ::,ccc,ccc B.C.E., humanity began the birth labors of its emergence
from the womb of the animal, for it was at this time that the human gure
became the focus of the so-called Spanish Levantine art. In this new style, no
longer painted within the depths of caves but out on rock ledges and clis,
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the animal has been superseded by human gures who have come forward to
battle each other with bow and arrow. In the Tassili plateau of North Africa,
the human even grows to gigantic proportions in the so-called Round Head
style, in which masked epiphanies of ancestral beings stride forth amongst
smaller groups of dancing, ecstatic gures.
But after this Mesolithic interregnum, stable village cultures begin to ap-
pear in Palestine, Turkey, and in the Zagros mountains of Iran, and along
with them, a new technology of ceramics, in which the caves are miniaturized
as pottery vessels upon which their iconography has been elaborated into a
complex lattice-work of geometrical motifs that will later become the basis of
pictographic writing. During this phase of culture, humanity stopped chas-
ing the animals and took root, plant-like, within the dark soils of mother
earth, exchanging the primary image of the animal as cosmos for that of the
goddess, which we nd in thousands of pottery vessels and incised fragments.
Te entire world is transgured in accordance with the form of the female
body: vessels are shaped in her image and carved gurines are ubiquitous. Te
bulls head becomes an exteriorization of her uterus, its horns analogized to
fallopian tubes; birds and snakes are linked with extensions of her anatomy;
sh become embryos swimming in the net-patterns of amniotic uid repre-
sented on pottery.
4
And just as Paleolithic man, once outside the caves, built
houses for himself out of the bones of the woolly mammoth, so these people
built houses in the shape of the body of the goddess herself, for the primary
image of the cosmos now is that of a Mother Goddess within which the dead
are made new again. Just as the seeds are planted in Mother Earth, so the
skulls of the dead at Jericho and Catal Huyuk are removed from their bod-
ies and planted into the earth. Te image of the universe nestled within the
womb of space-time will carry over into Egyptian civilization as the cow god-
dess Hathor, who swallows the sun each day and gives birth to it again every
morning, while the sky goddess Nut becomes identied with the overarching
expanse of the Milky Way.
Just as the goddess was present during the Paleolithic in an implicit form, so
now the numinous animal falls back to become a subordinate, but still ubiq-
uitous, presence. Animal forms in relief materialize out of the mud-brick walls
of Catal Huyuk: bulls and cows are depicted everywhere. Tis would seem to
be the origin of the bulls horns that are passed on to the Halaan culture in
Northern Mesopotamia, to Minoan Crete and then onward to ancient Sumer,
for at Catal Huyuk, the bull god and the goddess are the primary divinities.
Te death goddess is here, as well, in the form of vultures painted on the walls
in the act of devouring the bodies of the dead, which are placed in mortuary
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pavilions for excarnation, a practice that carries on into the Zoroastrian tradi-
tion of the Towers of Silence.
Te world of the hunter, like his counterpart, the animal, has not been left
behind, however, for now he is miniaturized in the form of the mens secret
society, evidence for which we nd in late frescoes at Catal Huyuk depicting
men dressed in leopard skins surrounding giant bulls, stags and boars with
bows and arrows. As Mary Settegast suggests in her book Plato Prehistorian,
we are possibly in the presence here of the earliest origins of what will later
become the cult of Dionysus, the god of the wild hunt who was prominently
associated with both leopards and bulls.
5
Te hunter is here scaled down to
become an organelle within the encompassing membrane of the village com-
pound, while the body of the goddess grows, enlarges and takes on all-con-
suming proportions, devouring space, culture and time.
Like the twin goddesses of death and life, Persephone and Demeter in Sum-
er, Ereshkigal and Inanna so also the lms Alien and A.I. are revisitings of
the goddess cosmology of the Neolithic, the one in its vulture goddess of death
aspect and the other in the modality of the nourishing Great Mother.
From one angle, anyway, Alien can be seen as a study of the Wests ongo-
ing attempt to capture and control the feminine through an elimination of
the ambiguities of wet biology from the smooth, sterile surfaces of the
laboratory. To this extent, it is a nightmarish reimagination of the female
body, which it uses as a kind of canvas upon which to paint its images. For
example, when the astronauts land on the desolate planet in response to
the distress signal, the horseshoe shaped craft which they encounter as
Barbara Creed suggests in her essay on the lm
6
resembles the legs of a
woman spread apart, with a vaginal opening in the center through which the
astronauts gain access to the ships interior. Te encounter with the fossilized
space jockey becomes an embryo swimming within its cavernous womb,
while the passages down below containing hordes of alien eggs correspond
to fallopian tubes and ovaries.
Tus read, the lm becomes an entry into the landscape of the female body,
for its images are replete with gynecological associations: eggs, wombs, em-
bryos, births, toothed vaginas and the like. (Te name of the ships computer,
Mother, takes on an interesting signicance in light of this.) It is as though the
crew with their spaceship Nostromo were a personication of the engineering
labs of technocracy undertaking a night sea journey to a level of the Western
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collective unconscious forgotten since the Neolithic.
And so, for perhaps the rst time since that distant age, the Western mind,
through the imagery of the Alien lms, reenters the imago of the goddess-as-
cosmos and discovers there not the image of the Great Mother as a nourishing
and regenerative force, but that of the Death Goddess who, in her incarnation
as bird-of-prey tears away the esh from the bones of the dead which are of-
fered to her on the walls of Catal Huyuk.
In A.I., on the other hand, we are confronted with the image of the great
goddess in her nourishing and regenerative aspect. In the lms opening im-
age, we are shown a vision of the sea (Latin mare, as in Mary) while the
primary preoccupation of the story is the devotion of a boy to his mother
with an almost religious fervor. Te vision of Rouge City, furthermore, with
its buildings shaped in imitation of the female body, and the entry into the
city through a gigantic female mouth, are visual quotations of the rst cities in
ancient Sumer. Lewis Mumford suggests that there is an archaic association of
cities with the female body:
Security, receptivity, enclosure, nurture these functions belong to wom-
an; and they take structural expression in every part of the village, in the
house and the oven, the byre and the bin, the cistern, the storage pit,
the granary, and from there pass on to the city, in the wall and the moat,
and all inner spaces, from the atrium to the cloister. House and village,
eventually the town itself, are woman writ large. If this seems a wild psy-
choanalytic conjecture, the ancient Egyptians stand ready to vouch for the
identication. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, house or town may stand as
symbols for mother, as if to conrm the similarity of the individual and
the collective nurturing function.
7
In the lms closing images, the boy robot David is shown locked in prayer
to the Blue Fairy, to whom he prays to change him into a real boy, just as
Lucius in Te Golden Ass prays to the goddess Isis to transform him from an
animal back into a human being. And in the nal image, David is reunited
with a clone of his mother, within whose arms he dies. Te archetype of the
return to the watery abyss as the mother of all life is a symmetrical echo of
the opening image of the sea, and so the narrative itself becomes a womb-
like enclosure, a container for the alchemical transformation of a robot into
a human being.
:co
4. Te Embryo is Born:
Close Encounters of the Tird Kind and
the World as Cosmic Mountain
In the next great phase of human culture, that of High Civilization (ca.,,,cc
B.C.E.), the primary image of the universe changes from that of a goddess to
that of a cosmic mountain. During the Neolithic, the kurgans the ances-
tors of the Indo-Aryans enshrined their dead, usually the body of a single
warrior or priest and his family, beneath a huge hillock of earth lined with
stones. Tus, the kurgan mound, implicit during the Neolithic as the god-
dess was implicit during the Paleolithic becomes the explicit articulation of
civic space in the next stage of culture.
Te oldest myth that describes the origins of this cosmic mountain is Su-
merian: it tells how the mountain Anki emerged from out of the primordial
waters of the goddess Nammu and was split in half when Enlil, the air god,
separated the sky god An from the earth goddess Ki. One of the prototypes
of the Sumerian ziggurat is the oval temple at Khafaje, sacred to the goddess
Inanna. Tis was a three story temple surrounded by a walled complex shaped
in the form of a vagina, for the temple rises out of the vagina just as the cos-
mic mountain Anki arose from the primordial waters of the goddess Nammu.
About half a century later, during the Tird Dynasty of Ur (:::::cc B.C.E.),
the terminal phase of Sumerian culture, the ziggurat was apotheosized in the
form of the multi-storied temple-mountain compound, while the oval vaginal
wall dropped away and was replaced by a square, militaristic wall with brass
gates.
Indeed, for the Sumerians and the Babylonians, the ziggurat, like the Na-
vajo hogan, was a local miniaturization of their image of the entire cosmos,
which they imagined to be in the form of a multi-storied mountain arising
from a cosmic ocean with each of the planetary spheres, from the moon up to
Saturn, representing but one story of this great mountain. Siegfried Giedion,
in Te Eternal Present, describes one of the largest of the Mesopotamian zig-
gurats:
Te Neo-Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki may have been the Tower of
Babel. Its height is estimated at seventy-ve meters by some, by others at
ninety meters. Tough this cannot be accurately established, it does give
an idea of how height continued to increase during the last phase of Meso-
potamian temple development. Etemenanki probably had seven terraces.
Upon its highest platform one or more temples were raised. Its adornment
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was magnicent. Te stepped terraces were faced with strongly colored,
glazed bricks, each terrace in a dierent color. . . . Te seven terraces of
Etemenanki . . . were supposed to relate to the spheres of the seven plan-
ets.
8
Te architecture of the very rst Egyptian pyramid, that of the pharaoh
Zoser (ca. :occ B.C.E.), gives away its evolutionary descent from the Sume-
rians, for it is built up out of mastaba tombs stacked one atop the other,
thus creating the tiered eect that was common to the representations of this
structure in Mesopotamia. But the Egyptians, in eliminating the steps of later
pyramids by covering them with limestone bricks in order to create the illu-
sion of a smoothly polished surface were underscoring their dierence from
the Sumerian ziggurats, for the pyramid was actually closer in function to the
kurgan burial mound, since within it lay the body of the pharaoh, returned to
the mother womb to be reborn. Te pyramid symbolized the rst hillock to
appear after the ooding of the Nile begins to recede, like Mount Ararat in the
Noah episode. And whereas the pyramids were built in necropolises located
far away from the cities, Sumerian ziggurats were situated right in the middle
of them, like cathedrals, and were meant to be surmounted by the populace in
huge processions trailing up their steps, for at the top was the central chamber
within which a sacred priestess lay, waiting for her union with a man imper-
sonating a god who would descend from the heavens in order to mate with
her, thereby reestablishing the primordial unity of heaven and earth in the
temporal reection of the priestess and king. Te Egyptian pyramid, in short,
was architecturally all interior and dedicated to a single pharaoh, whereas the
Sumerian ziggurat was all exterior and devoted to a specic god.
9
Te dierences in their respective functions aside, however, the elementary
idea of the universe as a cosmic mountain spread from Mesopotamia and
Egypt all over the world: in India it became Mount Meru, and the many
temple compounds of the Far East were variations of this idea, from Angkor
Wat in Cambodia to Borobudur in Java, to the Temple of Heaven in China
and onward, across the Pacic, to the Mayan and Aztec stepped pyramids.
Westward, the idea appeared amongst the Greeks as Mount Olympus and the
Germanic tribes as Valhalla, but its latest and nal appearance as a cosmologi-
cal image was in Dante where it became the seven-storied mountain of Purga-
tory located at the tip of the South Pole and at the top of which the garden of
Eden with its four rivers became the source of the worlds water systems.
In Biblical tradition, Moses ascends Mount Sinai in order to receive the
revelation of the power of the Word; Elijah climbs Sinai to hear the still small
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voice of God that is most denitely not immanent in the storms and elements
of nature; Christ ascends the Mount of Olives to deliver his sermon, and is
nailed to the tree upon the Hill of Golgotha; while the angel takes John up
to the top of a mountain to view the descent of the New Jerusalem during
the Last Judgement, as described in the following passage from the Book of
Revelation:
Ten came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the
seven last plagues, and spoke to me, saying: Come, I will show you the
Bride, the wife of the Lamb. And in the Spirit he carried me away to
a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming
down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a
most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall, with
twelve gates, and at the gates, twelve angels. . .
10
Te cosmic mountain was the ladder down which gods and angels could de-
scend from their heavenly abode amongst the stars and planets, and up which
humanity could ascend to meet them.
Of course, the archetypal example in lm of the miniaturization of this ancient
image of the cosmos is Steven Spielbergs Close Encounters of the Tird Kind,
in which the city of the New Jerusalem, in its modern guise as a spaceship,
descends from the heavens to meet humanity at Devils Tower in Wyoming.
Spielberg even takes the trouble to indicate the ancestry of his cosmology,
for the movie which Roy Nearys children are watching on television is Cecil
B. Demilles Ten Commandments, which features the local variant of this im-
age as Mount Sinai. In Native American myth, Devils Tower was likewise
associated with a meeting point of the heavens and the earth, for according
to a Kiowa story, seven young Indian girls were playing with their brother
when he was transformed into a bear and chased them to the top of a giant
tree stump which then grew up from the earth, changing into stone while
the bears claws created the indentations on the sides of the mountain. Te
girls, meanwhile, were taken up into the heavens to become the seven stars
of the Pleiades which, during the wintertime, are visible directly above the
mountain while their brother became the constellation of Ursa Major, the
Great Bear. In Spielbergs myth, the cosmic powers have become extraterrestri-
als who descend to the mountain to deposit a load of human refugees which
they have been carrying around since World War II, while in exchange, they
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* Notice that roy means king, i.e. the personage who was usually tied to the
mountain, either as pharaohs tomb in Egypt or as the ziggurat of the ensi, the
high priest king of Sumer.
take up to the heavens with them only one human, Roy Neary,
*
consistent
with the tradition of Biblical apocalyptic writings, in which a single human
being is carted o to the heavens by angels for a grand visionary tour of the
architecture of time and space.
Cecil B. Demilles Ten Commandments, implicit in Close Encounters of the
Tird Kind, becomes, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the main thematic concern,
only disguised as pulp ction mythology. (In particular, the lm is a sort of
genetic fusion of H. Rider Haggards Allan Quartermain and the City of Lost
Gold with the spirit of Captain America comic books from the early :,cs, in
which the Nazis are always the bad guys.) Te lms predominant image is an-
nounced in the corporate mountain logo of Paramount Pictures, which then
dissolves into Spielbergs framing of an Andean mountain, and then, at the
lms climax, there occurs a ritual reenactment of Mosess ascent of Sinai, iron-
ically performed by the Nazis themselves who, in their glee at having captured
the Ark of the Covenant, decide to open it at the top of an island shaped like a
attened mountain. Te wrath of Yahweh, however, instead of descending, as
the Old Testament has it, from Heaven to Earth, ascends from within the Ark,
and pours into the gloomy night skies, having taken the souls of the Nazis
along with it. Tus, the direction of the holy powers, moving from the earth
to the heavens, is the exact opposite of that depicted in Close Encounters.
5. Humanity Returns to the Womb:
Te Truman Show and the World as Cosmic Cavern
Te Greeks had two entirely dierent cosmologies, which we might designate
the Homeric and the Hellenistic: the former is essentially equivalent to the
Babylonian vision of the earth as a at island surrounded by an ocean with an
axial cosmic mountain at the top of which dwelt the gods, while in the Hel-
lenistic, the earth was visualized as a sort of round nucleus at the center of an
enclosed cavern of nested, crystalline spheres. In the Hellenistic epoch, conse-
quently, the gods were displaced from Mount Olympus to take up residence
in the stars and constellations, while the planets were embedded in whirling
spheres made of ether, which turned with perfect, circular, undissipated mo-
tion, each sphere carrying along one of the planets within it.
::c
In the Levant, meanwhile, the cosmos was imagined more literally as a cav-
ern by the Hebrews, for the Biblical tradition retained the old Babylonian-Ho-
meric cosmology, except that they scaled down the cosmic mountain ridi-
culing the ziggurat of Etemenanki in the story of the Tower of Babel and
imagined Yahweh creating an overarching vault that separates the dome of the
heavens from the at disc of the earth below.
During the early centuries of the Roman Empire under the reigns of Tra-
jan (,::; C.E.) and Hadrian (::;:, C.E.) a new kind of building appeared
which was to the spiritual form of the world-as-cavern what the pyramid and
ziggurat had been to the earlier vision of the universe-as-cosmic-mountain,
for with the appearance of the Pantheon, a domical structure with an oculus
in the middle, the architectural prototype for what later became the mosque
emerged. For the Pantheon, as Oswald Spengler, in Te Decline of the West
writes, is the earliest of all mosques:
An ingeniously confusing interpenetration of spherical and polygonal
forms, a load so placed upon a stone drum that it seems to hover weight-
less on high, yet closing the interior without outlet; all structural lines
concealed; vague light admitted, through a small opening in the heart of
the dome but only the more inexorably to emphasize the walling-in such
are the characteristics that we see in the masterpieces of this art, St. Vitale
in Ravenna, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and the Dome of the Rock
(the Mosque of Omar) in Jerusalem.
11
To the Levantine mind, by which Spengler includes the three Abrahamic re-
ligions as well as the Persian, Byzantine and late Roman societies, the world
became a sort of enclosed cavern within which the magical forces of light and
darkness fought each other for possession of the soul of man. Te Levan-
tine vision of time as a giant three-act play of Genesis, Prophet-Messiah, and
Apocalypse is a denial of the Greco-Roman vision of history as eternal return
and along with it, the idea of the circle, for the Levantine vision of time,
structurally consistent with the cavern cosmos, is that of a parabolic arch. Te
Christians burrowing their catacombs into the body of the Roman carapace;
the religion of Mithraism practiced by Roman soldiers in underground caves;
the arched vault of the Persian Sassanid palace at Ctesiphon; even the practice
of boring tiny caverns into the pupils of the eyes on the statues of Late Classi-
cal Art: all are manifestations of this new world feeling. With the coming of Is-
lam, a religion founded by a prophet who, while meditating in a cave, received
a vision in which the old cosmic mountain is scaled down to the Black Stone
of the Kaaba, the Muslims emerged to take over most of what formerly had
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been the Roman Empire, and their dome-shaped mosques began to appear all
over the world, from the soils of Spain to the palaces of India.
In Te Divine Comedy, as in the European innovation of the architectural
form of the cathedral, both the world as cosmic mountain and the world as
cavern achieved their apotheosis, for when Satan was cast out from heaven and
went crashing down into the center of the earth like a meteor, the mountain of
Purgatory was pushed up from the South Pole. Dantes journey down through
the core of the earth in the Inferno is a revisiting of this Arabic-Magian world-
as-cavern, and when he ascends Purgatory and steps up to the sphere of the
moon, he is revisiting the Homeric cosmology of the Greeks. Tis vision of
the world-as-cavern remained predominant in the Western imagination un-
til the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Columbus and Copernicus
smashed it open to admit the disorienting spaces of innity.
Tere is no better example of this cosmological retrieval of the world as cavern
than Peter Weirs brilliant lm Te Truman Show. Written by Andrew Niccol,
the author and director of Gattaca and Simone, the story concerns the life and
fate of Truman, the rst man to be raised from birth in a studio environment,
with every moment of his life broadcast live on television as Te Truman
Show, the ultimate experiment in the demolition of privacy by electronic
surveillance technology. But like Ragle Gumm, the protagonist of Philip K.
Dicks novel Time Out of Joint, cracks in the fabric of Trumans reality begin to
appear: he suspects that his wife is not what she seems to be, and in the tradi-
tion of the paranoid narrative, becomes convinced and in this case is correct
that people are watching him. Every attempt to leave his town, whether
by plane or automobile, mysteriously meets with some mishap which prevents
his escape. One night, however, he gives the cameras the slip and sets sail into
the ocean; but the production team behind the scenes soon picks up his trail
and concocts a storm to try and stop him. (Tis entire climactic sequence is an
ingenious miniaturization of Homers Odyssey, in which the gods who work at
cross-purposes with each other trying to frustrate or to help Odysseus along
his journey here become the producers of Te Truman Show.) But Truman
survives the storm, and reaches the literal end of his world as his boat punches
a hole in the faux horizon separating his articial world, surrounded by its
gigantic dome with a fake sun and moon, from the real world outside.
Retrieving the image of the cavern cosmology is a wonderful way of visual-
izing how our technopolis has become a sort of second womb protecting us
:::
from the real world of nature that lies beyond the horizons of our cities.
Jingles from television commercials run through our minds as we conduct our
daily business; images from magazines shape our ideas of fashion; the televi-
sion news and the newspapers tell us what events in the world are important;
and we communicate with each other via fax, cell phone and email without
ever stopping to consider whether these media somehow change the ways in
which we relate to each other. Te end of it all, as Sven Birkerts writes in
Te Gutenberg Elegies, is a kind of amniotic environment. . .And in time I
dont know how long it will take it will feel as strange (and exhilarating) for a
person to stand momentarily free of it as it feels now for a city dweller to look
up at night and see a sky full of stars.
12
Te end of the lm, in which Truman punctures through the studio set that
represents the only world he has ever known is an exact retrieval of the fteenth
century (?) woodcut associated with Nicholas Oresme, in which the seeker after
knowledge (the True-man) has stuck his head through the dome of the world
and peers out at the machinery of heaven that lies beyond. Te image is a snap-
shot of the very moment when the West punctured the Ptolemaic cavern world
to gaze up at the vision of the next primary image: the world as clockwork.
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Intermezzo:
Te Birth of the Movie Teater
out of Arabian Optics
When the cavern cosmos disintegrated during the seventeenth century, it did
not disappear altogether, but rather became miniaturized in the theory of op-
tics. For the Greeks, the eyeball had been a solid thing, admitting of no inte-
riority, and their two main theories of optics correspondingly reected this. In
one theory, the eye shoots forth a beam of light in order to illuminate objects;
for otherwise, as Euclid remarked, you would never be able to spot a needle
that you had dropped onto the ground. Te other theory, common amongst
the atomists, was that the eye works by receiving simulacra which objects shed
from themselves in the form of tiny, ne atoms. Te evidence for this was that
you could see reections of objects in your neighbors eye if you looked closely
enough. In neither theory, however, was the eye imagined to have any kind
of interiority whatsoever, just as the Greek temple, with its forest of tangible
columns, was purely exterior in design.
13
But just about the time that the Romans were boring holes into the eyes
of their statues, the Pantheon was built, signifying the birth of a new cosmol-
ogy of the universe as cavern. A revised theory of optics, consistent with this
cosmology, was later put forth by the Arabs, and reached the West by way
of a text known as the Optical Tesaurus by the Arabian philosopher Alha-
zen (b.,o,d.:cc C.E.). In this theory, the eye became a sort of miniature
mosque tilted over onto its side, so that the oculus became the iris receiving
light rays from objects which penetrated it. Alhazen illustrated his theory with
a phenomenon known as the camera obscura, in which daylight is admit-
ted through a tiny hole which projects upon the darkened wall opposite an
upside down view of the outside. Alhazens treatise became the foundation of
all subsequent Western optics, leading to the invention of the rst lenses and
eyeglasses by the close of the thirteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci was one
of the rst to apply Alhazens model of the camera obscura to the theory of
how the eye works, while Giambattista della Porta in :,,, is supposed to have
invented the rst actual camera obscura. In :c:, Tomas Wedgwood used a
camera obscura to create the rst images on nitrate of silver, thus laying the
basis for the subsequent development of photography.
At this point in our cultural history of the world as cavern, we arrive at a
nexus where optics, cosmology and the origins of cinema converge, for the
principle of the camera obscura was indeed the ancestor of the movie theater.
::
Camera obscura is Latin for dark room, and if you miniaturize a room
so that it becomes portable, then youve got a camera. If you then line up
a series of cameras, as Muybridge did, in order to capture the motion of a
galloping horse through a sequence of still photographs, then your portable
room is on the way to becoming enlarged again, but this time into the size
of a public cavern with which to encompass the illusion of motion you have
captured with the help of the little djinn of your technology. In fact, the entire
world of the cinema may be regarded, la McLuhan, as an extension of the
human eye, for the movie theater is itself a kind of magic eye shared by the
public, like the Graea, the three blind witches of Greek mythology, who could
see only by sharing one eye.
During the seventeenth century, the image of the macrocosm in the shape
of a cavern was withdrawn and scaled down to an optical theory in which
the eyeball itself became a miniature cavern, as a comparison of Descartess
drawing of the inner workings of the eye with an image of the Pantheon will
conrm. And then the movie theater, as an outgrowth of the theory of optics
via the developing technology of photography, retrieved the world-as-cavern
for a kind of ritualized public experience of revisiting an earlier, discarded im-
age of the cosmos.
In the case of the drive-in movie, the ancient association of the night sky
with the bounded world cavern and its seven planetary bodies is retrieved
(with the disappearance of the drive-in, however, this experience is becom-
ing lost). Jean Gebser, in his Ever-Present Origin, has discussed the linkage
of the various words for night with the old cosmos of seven spheres, and
the preguration of the shattering of the cavern in the Scientic Revolution
with the dropping of the negation of the innitude of the heavens in the
letter n- to form the various words for eight, as in German Nacht-Acht,
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Spanish nocho-ocho, French nuit-huit, Italian notte-otte, Latin nox-octo, Greek
nux-ochto. Te old, seven-fold, simple planetary cavern space, as he says, is
suddenly ooded by the light of human consciousness and is rendered visible,
as it were, from outside.
14
Platos myth of the cave, he further points out, was
a similar foreshadowing of the day when humanity would leave the cavern
world behind once and for all as an image of the overarching cosmos.
6. Te World as Clockwork:
Dark City and the Rise of the Inanimate
As I have written in the introduction to my book Twilight of the Clockwork
God,
15
the Wests rst real scientists were thirteenth and fourteenth century
monks who were obsessed with light and magnetism, optics and mirrors, gears
and wheels, for they believed that they were serving God by learning the secrets
whereby He enabled the great machine of his creation to run. Te Englishman
Robert Grosseteste (b.::;,) developed a theory of space as a function of light,
Petrus Peregrinus a theory of magnetism, and Roger Bacon (b. ca.:::c), who
was imprisoned on suspicion of having dealt with the devil to acquire knowl-
edge of the secret motive forces of nature, wrote a letter in about :: in which
the entire future mechanical history of Northern Europe is foreshadowed:
I will now mention some of the wonderful works of art and nature in
which there is nothing of magic and which magic could not perform. In-
struments may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man
guiding them, will be carried with greater velocity than if they were full
of sailors. Chariots may be constructed that will move with incredible ra-
pidity without the help of animals. Instruments of ying may be formed
in which a man, sitting at his ease and meditating in any subject, may
beat the air with his articial wings after the manner of birds . . . as also
machines which will enable men to walk at the bottom of seas or rivers
without ships.
16
Tese monks, furthermore, were the inventors of the mechanical clock, a
device which was rst used to sound the seven canonical hours so that monks
would be on time for their prayers. Indeed, they were so enamoured of the
clocks mechanical possibilities that it became the Wests rst paradigmatic
cosmological machine, an earthly device which approximated the intermesh-
ing spheres and wheels carrying the planets about through the macrocosm.
God himself was subsequently imagined on the analogy of a clockmaker, as in
the words of Nicholas Oresme (:,,c:,:), who comments on Gods design
::o
of the universe in precisely these terms: if anyone should make a mechanical
clock [i.e. the cosmos], would he not make all the wheels move as harmoni-
ously as possible?
At about the same time that Oresme was uttering his vision of the universe
as a mechanical clock, the Italian poet Petrarchs ascent of Mount Ventoux
and his discovery of innite space as a sublime revelation of a new world of
possibilities were among the rst indications of the shattering of the enclosed
cavern world of the ancients.
Shaken by the unaccustomed wind, [he writes of his ascent], and the wide,
freely shifting vistas, I was immediately awe-struck. I look: the clouds lay
beneath my feet . . . I look toward Italy, whither turned my soul even more
than my gaze, and sigh at the sight of the Italian sky which appeared more
to my spirit than to my eyes, and I was overcome by inexpressible long-
ing to return home . . . So much perspiration and eort just to bring the
body a little closer to heaven; the soul, when approaching God, must be
similarly terried.
17
Tere is a certain irony in Petrarch shattering the cavern-vault of the an-
cients through a retrieval of the archaic ritual of ascending the Cosmic Moun-
tain. Te phallic mountain of Dantes Purgatory is here pushed back inside
the vaginal cavern of Hell, and the consequent hieros gamos generates an en-
tirely new cosmology of innite space within which the solar system becomes
a magnicent perpetual motion machine, its gears and wheels turning with
eternal, undissipated motion.
Jean Gebser, who writes of Petrarchs experience in his Ever-Present Origin,
mentions that in the art of the fourteenth century, the discovery of depth
perspective was already foreshadowed in the paintings of the brothers Am-
brogio and Pietro Lorenzetti (ca.:,:;:). In contrast to the earlier vaulted
sky, he writes, the heaven of these frescoes is no longer an enclosure; it is
now rendered from the vantage point of the artist and expresses the incipient
perspectivity of a confrontation with space, rather than an unperspectival im-
mersion or inherence in it.
18
In the subsequent development, then, during
the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the process of smashing open the
cavern world of the ancients plays itself out in a multitude of discoveries, all
more or less simultaneous with each other. As Gebser writes:
. . . at the very moment when Leonardo discovers space and solves the
problem of perspective, thereby creating the possiblity for spatial objecti-
cation in painting, other events occur which parallel his discovery. Coper-
nicus, for example, shatters the limits of the geocentric sky and discovers
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heliocentric space; Columbus goes beyond the encompassing Oceanos
and discovers earths space; Vesalius, the rst major anatomist, bursts the
connes of Galens ancient doctrines of the human body and discovers
the bodys space; Harvey destroys the precepts of Hippocrates humoral
medicine and reveals the circulatory system. And there is Kepler, who by
demonstrating the elliptical orbit of the planets, overthrows antiquitys
unperspectival world-image of circular and at surfaces (a view still held
by Copernicus) that dated back to Ptolemys conception of the circular
movement of the planets . . . Galileo penetrates even deeper into space by
perfecting the telescope, discovered only shortly before in Holland, and
employing it for astronomical studies preparations for mans ultimate
conquest of air and sub-oceanic space that came later and realized the de-
signs already conceived and drawn up by Leonardo.
19
By the :;th century, then, the once living dragons of the medieval world
had solidied into machines, while the earth was set free from its moorings
in the Ptolemaic harbor (Satans prison no longer) to wander o as a center of
force among many such centers in the ocean of innite space. When the cav-
ern world of the ancients had been shattered and lay in ruins, the dust cleared
to reveal that a gigantic clock had taken its place as the central model for the
cosmos. My aim, Kepler said, is to show that the celestial machine is to
be likened not to a divine organism, but rather to a clockwork, and Francis
Bacon, in a similar vein, declared that the imagination should be given not
wings, but weights. On the level of the microcosm, Descartes compared an
animal to a clock . . . composed . . . of wheels and springs, and of the human
body he says: my thought . . . compares a sick man and an ill-made clock with
my idea of a healthy man and a well-made clock. In the eighteenth century,
La Mettrie, the author of Man a Machine, put the matter thus:
Is more needed . . . to prove that man is but an animal, or a collection of
springs which wind each other up, without our being able to tell at what
point in this human circle, nature has begun? . . . wherefore the soul is but
a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain, which
can be regarded, without fear of error, as the mainspring of the whole ma-
chine, having a visible inuence on all the parts.
20
How two such qualitatively dierent things as the solar system and the hu-
man body could have been compared to the same image is di cult to say, but
nonetheless the vision of all living things as essentially complex machines con-
tinued to predominate in the imagination of the West right down to the end
of the nineteenth century. Te clock was replaced as a cosmological machine
::
by the steam engine and then, with Relativity, the dynamo, before the image
of machinery began to give way to something more interesting in the twenti-
eth century.
Te great archetypal example in lm of the retrieval of the clockwork cos-
mos is Alex Proyass Dark City (:,,). Drawing simultaneously from lm noir,
German Expressionist cinema and science ction lms such as Metropolis and
Blade Runner, Dark City tells the story of a society that is part of a mysterious
experiment being conducted by a group of aliens known only as the Strangers.
At precisely midnight every night, all the occupants of Dark City suddenly
stop what theyre doing and fall asleep, while the Strangers go around the city
inserting fresh memories with new identities into each of its citizens, who will
begin their new day with a false sense of continuity, for each days memories
are totally articial. Te buildings torque and change like something out of
the clay sculpture of Charles Simmonds or the Japanese buildings in William
Gibsons Idoru which, destroyed after an earthquake, are quietly and slowly
regrown by tiny nanotech machines that knit them together like giant steel
and concrete plants.
Te story concerns a man who begins to piece together what the Strangers
are up to when he actually witnesses this midnight transmogrication of the
city and slowly begins to realize that his memories of a place called Shell Beach
are synthetic. He discovers that the Strangers live beneath the city, where they
inject themselves with sets of memories which have already been tried out
by one of their human subjects in a desperate eort to fathom just what the
nature of humanity is, for their society is dying out, and they believe that the
key to their salvation lies in the discovery of the nature and purpose of human
individuality, a concept which, with their hive-like mind, they lack. One of
the lms most surprising and for our purposes here, signicant revelations
is when the protagonist punches a hole through a billboard advertisement for
Shell Beach, the dismal source of his implanted memories, only to discover
that Dark City is oating in outer space like a gigantic island. When the pro-
tagonist, who has discovered that he has the power of tuning the reality of
this simulacrum to anything that he wants, defeats the Strangers, he lets loose
the citys water supply to form a ring of water around the city in space, thus
exactly recapturing the ancient Babylonian and Homeric cosmology of the
earth as a at disc surrounded by a ring of water.
But the primary image of the lm is the clock, for there exists scarcely a
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single shot that does not contain one hidden somewhere in the frame. In their
city beneath the city, furthermore, the Strangers have a sort of giant idol in
the shape of a face that splits in half at midnight to reveal a huge clock, their
central object of worship, for the society which they reprogram each night
is envisioned by them as a mechanical clock that runs down and must be
reset. Tis bleak, deterministic vision of humans living lives which have been
programmed into them is precisely the fate of the traditional hero embedded
within the clockwork cosmos like an insect in amber. If we cast back to the
rst work of literature that begins to show the eects of this transformation of
the cosmos into a machine, we discover that it is Don Quixote (:occ), whose
hero is the Wests rst victim of a psychosis, for his mind, weaned on the pop
culture of the Arthurian romances and epic adventures of the middle ages,
was seeing a world that by the seventeenth century no longer existed. By the
time we arrive at the ultimate outcome of this gradual divestiture of freedom
on the part of the hero in Kafkas Te Metamorphosis where the transfor-
mation of Gregor Samsa into a giant insect is tantamount to a recognition that
man, as Nietzche put it, on an inclined plane downward in his own self-esti-
mation since Copernicus, is no dierent from a biological specimen in a labo-
ratory beneath the scrutinizing gaze of a scientist we have passed through
the transformation of nature into a laboratory environment programmed by
absolutely deterministic laws so that the notion of human freedom is entirely
anachronistic. Tis is the world of T. S. Eliots Hollow Men and Picassos
Guernica, where the great fallen heros shattered body is revealed to be hollow,
and the gures on the stage of world history mere puppets in a show run by
Darwinian natural selection and Newtonian determinism.
7. Anima Motrix
Te rst blow dealt to Newtons clockwork vision of the solar system came in
the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of thermodynamics which,
ironically, was thought to represent a consummate extension and completion
of Newtons laws at the level of the microcosm of matter. However, thermody-
namics introduced into physics the concept of time, and hence irreversibility,
which is a negligible property in Newtonian mechanics since all of its pro-
cesses are at least theoretically reversible. But now the mechanical clock was
replaced by a new machine, the steam engine, in which the cosmos itself was
imagined to be a sort of gigantic mechanism gradually running down toward
a universal heat death as entropy increased. At the level of particles, statistical
::c
mechanics began to displace classical mechanics and replace the deterministic
vision with one of probabilities.
Ten, with two nearly simultaneous revolutions everything changed, for
one occurred at the level of the macrocosm, the other at that of the micro-
cosm. Both emerged out of a fascination with the properties of light, for Max
Plancks discovery that energy radiates in discrete packets, or quanta, was the
rst step taken in the direction of building a science of quantum mechanics,
while Einstein, with his Special Teory of Relativity (:,c,) turned the cosmos
upside down. For in the Newtonian world-picture space and time are absolute,
Gods sense organs as he called them, and the properties of light are variable;
Einstein realized, however, that space and time are actually relative to a frame
of reference, and that light is not, since it always travels at the same speed. At
light speed, as Einstein realized, time stops, space contracts into two dimen-
sions, and matter increases to innite density. And with the general theory of
relativity, Newtons vision of gravity as a mysterious force acting upon objects
from a distance was revisioned as the curvature of space, warped by the mass of
objects within it. Te steam engine was now displaced by the dynamo, for the
universe became a sphere carved out of geodesic light paths, a sort of gigantic
humming eld of energy.
At about the same time as Einstein was working out the electrodynamics of
moving bodies, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in his wonderful little
book Creative Evolution, began to draw a sharp dividing line between ma-
chines and organisms. Hitherto, as we have seen, the paradigm of the machine
had consumed absolutely everything in existence, and even living things, as
Descartes imagined, were thought to be but complicated machines. Bergson,
however, sliced open this great mechanical whale and went inside it to retrieve
the partially digested remains of Te Organism, which he presented to his
readers as follows: machines are complex assemblages which are produced by
a movement from the periphery toward the center. You end up with exactly as
many parts as you started with, except that they are harmonized to perform
a specic function. A living organism, on the other hand, is something that
grows from a mysterious center outward to a dened periphery. You get more
form from less, for through the process of mitosis an organisms cells split and
dierentiate into specic organs. And each cell, moreover, contains the whole
organism within it. A part of a machine is worthless, but from a single cell you
can regrow the whole organism.
Following Bergsons separation of the machine from the organism, the phi-
losophy of organicism slowly began to invade the various arts and sciences. In
the macrocosm, Alfred North Whiteheads process philosophy, articulated in
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his masterpiece Process and Reality, visualized the universe as a kind of mind
capable of prehending the past; in the mesocosm, Oswald Spengler in Te
Decline of the West imagined that civilizations are like a strange and extremely
rare species of gigantic plant with a predetermined life cycle; and in the mi-
crocosm, Jung dismantled and relativized Freuds vision of the ego as a kind of
miniature steam engine, pushed and pulled by various pressures, when he took
the entelechy idea from Aristotle and surgically implanted it as the nucleus of
the psyche, thereby reintroducing the soul back into the mechanized body.
Machines now began to derive their design principles from biology, for as
Lewis Mumford put it, instead of mechanism forming a pattern for life, liv-
ing organisms began to form a pattern for mechanism.
21
Tat the airplane was
perfected at this time, for example, was not an accident, but rather emerged
from physiological studies of the ight of dierent kinds of birds. Te motion
picture, originally called the bioscope, originated at this time, also, from
Muybridges multiple photographs of a horse in motion, later followed by
pictures of an ox, a bull, a greyhound and a deer. Te telephone, likewise, was
born out of a study of the physiology of human speech and hearing.
In popular culture, meanwhile, an interesting development took place, for
in the idea of the robot, machines were themselves imagined to be alive. In
:,::, Karl Capek coined the word robot in his play R.U.R. and in the sci-
ence ction of the :,cs and :,,cs the mythology of the robot was worked
out primarily by Isaac Asimov. Tere had been, of course, forerunners of the
idea of the living machine in the nineteenth century, such as Collodis :,
childrens story Pinocchio, and before that the ::o short story Te Sandman,
by German ction writer E. T. A. Homann, which was possibly the very rst
appearance in literature of a robot. But the vision of the living machine was
really something that took o from about the middle of the twentieth century
onward and it is a vision that is the exact opposite of the machine paradigm, in
which living things are regarded as complex machines, for in the new primary
imago of the Animate, machines themselves become living things.
Let me recap this books major thematic concerns. From the appearance of the
female robot Maria in Fritz Langs :,:; lm Metropolis to Spielberg and Ku-
bricks A.I. in :cc:, our lmmakers have been working out, with ever-expand-
ing fascination and vividness, the vision of Maxwellian demons inhabiting
machines. Whether we think of HAL ,ccc in :oo:, Yul Brunners avenging
robot gunslinger in Michael Crichtons :,;: lm Westworld, James Camerons
armies of homicidal robots in his Terminator lms, or the boy robot in quest of
:::
a soul in A.I., the message seems to be that technology, as James Hillman has
said, is trying to get our attention with its insistence that it has a soul Rudolf
Steiners Ahrimanic beings and that we neglect its sentience at our peril.
Te image of the Animate that is breathing its wind throughout the cinematic
productions of our contemporary culture, however, isnt just a resurgence of
primitive animism, as Terence McKenna with his archaic revival suggests.
For the worlds aboriginal populations do not make the kinds of incredibly
complex machines that have been the signature trademark of our Faustian
civilization. Te problem is an altogether dierent one than was faced by tribal
men, whose situation had to do with relating to the world of the plants and
animals that they depended upon for their survival, and whose imagination
consequently spun forth myths which presented their personied numina in
the form of talking animals and dying plant gods like Dionysus. By contrast,
our contemporary situation involves the challenge of living in a society domi-
nated by machines, and our psyches response to this challenge is expressed by
the myths of our popular culture, in which machines are personied as living
beings.
But there are other, darker, more ominous problems involved, as well, for in
order to feed our machines it seems that we must strip the living earth of its
natural resources of oil and gas, soil and wood, water and mineral. And what
now develops, as Oswald Spengler put it, is a drama of such greatness that
the men of a future Culture, with other soul and other passions, will hardly
be able to resist the conviction that in those days nature herself was totter-
ing . . . for this Faustian passion has altered the Face of the Earth.
22
Te problem of keeping our machines alive, furthermore, is exacerbating to
the point of apocalypse the cultural wars with other societies, such as the Is-
lamic world, which are threatened with extinction as our global technosphere
enwraps the planet in its cocoon and begins to digest and break down the
various societies within. For it seems to be an inevitable side eect of human
technological development that entire species, as well as whole societies, are
wiped out as a normal part of this progress. Many biologists and climatolo-
gists, for example, suspect that the so-called Holocene extinctions which took
place around :c,ccc n.c.i. in which hordes of animal species like the woolly
mammoth, the woolly rhino, the auk and the American horse suddenly disap-
peared from the fossil record at just the time when Mesolithic peoples were
perfecting new kinds of hunting technologies, such as the bow and arrow
was largely the eect of human predation. Te Australian aborigines, moreo-
ver, seem to have wiped out all their large draft animals early on, and there
is even speculation that homo erectus may have hunted to extinction the large
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bipedal ape known as Gigantopithecus from Southeast Asia, since the two
occupied the same ecological niche, and we know that Gigantopithecus never
made it out of this niche.
But the obsession of modern Western man with his machines has also led
him to eliminate entire societies as competitors for land and resources: witness
the extinction of the Andaman Islanders, most of the Native Americans, and
the ancient societies of West Africa. Te eect of rapid deforestation upon
the indigenous peoples of South America, furthermore, may soon cause their
vanishing way of life to disappear altogether. We tend to vilify those who resist
our way of life but looked at from the point of view of the other the matter
is well nigh one of life and death.
And so the problem of living in a mechanical-/electronic society is what
the new myths coming to us in celluloid form are attempting to deal with,
for it is a problem that has been appearing with more and more obsessive
frequency since the :,ocs, and shows no signs of abating. Te imaginal de-
piction of machines in the kinds of lms I have been discussing in this book
that is, as living, sentient beings is a way of personifying them as antago-
nists with whom we must contend, like the Trojans in Homers Iliad. Tey
have a claim on our attention, that is, because they compose the fabric of the
new technoskeleton upon which we human beings make up the living esh.
But if machines continue to demand, as these lms seem to suggest, that
humans become organelles within the silicon and microchip processors that
make up their internal anatomies, then indeed they will destroy all humanis-
tic culture and replace it with an endless vista of skyscrapers, highways, shop-
ping malls and video screens a milieu, in other words, devoid of painting,
poetry, music and the imagination in general. On the other hand, if human
beings are to retain their dignity as truly human types of being, then it is the
machines which need to be scaled down and miniaturized as the Japanese,
for instance, seem to have realized to the level of organelles within the ar-
chitecture of the human Umwelt. Tey must not be allowed to dominate and
tyrannize us, like Kafkas bureaucrats in his novel Te Trial, making our lives
an endless nervous mess of anxious problem-solving. For there is more to
life than merely solving problems, although with the proliferation of gadgets
demanding more and more of our time and attention it is getting harder and
harder to realize this.
So the psychological immune system of Western man is at work in the
darkened caverns of our movie theaters, where it is busy dreaming up myths
to hold our society together for a little while longer, anyway, at least until
the imagination of popular culture, now lling the void once occupied by elite
::
culture, has exhausted itself.
What then?
Perhaps a glance at the Roman hippodromes and gladiatorial arenas will
provide us with a clue, for they put the Roman theaters out of business and
transformed Seneca into an armchair theater producer. Ten after Seneca, no-
body wrote plays anymore.
Tere was only silence.
Notes
1. I owe the inspiration for the following discussion of cultural miniaturization to
the works of William Irwin Tompson, and in particular to his book Darkness and
Scattered Light (New York: Doubleday, 1,;8).
:. Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: Te Book of Genesis (NY:
McGraw-Hill, 1,o), p. ,.
. Robinson Jeers, Te Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeers, vol. , ed. Tim
Hunt,(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1,,1), p. :o.
. Tese associations are the controversial interpretations of Marija Gimbutas and
her school. See especially her book Te Language of the Goddess (NY: Harper Collins,
1,8,) pp. :o:oo.
. See Mary Settegast, Plato Prehistorian (NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1,,o) pp. 181
8.
o. Barbara Creed, Alien and the Monstrous Feminine, in Te Gendered Cyborg: A
Reader (NY: Routledge, :ooo).
;. Lewis Mumford, Te City in History (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1,o1), pp.
1:1.
8. Sigfried Giedion, Te Eternal Present, vol. :: Te Beginnings of Architecture (NY:
Pantheon Books, 1,o), pp. :o;, :.
,. See Dierences Between Ziggurat and Pyramid, in Sigfried Giedion, ibid., pp.
:1o1,.
1o. Rev. :1:,:o.
11. Oswald Spengler, Te Decline of the West (NY. Alfred A. Knopf, 1,,), vol I.,
p.:oo.
1:. Sven Birkerts, Te Gutenberg Elegies (NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1,,), p. ::.
1. See Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light (NY: Bantam Books, 1,,) for this
discussion, pp. 18::.
1. Jean Gebser, Te Ever-Present Origin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1,8), p. ;.
1. See John David Ebert, Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science
and Spirituality at the End of an Age (SF: Council Oak Books, 1,,,).
1o. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1,o), p. 8.
1;. Gebser, op. cit., p. 1
18. Gebser, op. cit., p. 1
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1,. Gebser, op. cit., p. :1
:o. Julien Oray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing,
1,,1), p. 1.
:1. Lewis Mumford, op. cit., p. :1o.
::. Spengler, op. cit., vol. II, p. o.
::;
Appendix I
Te Evolution of
Visionary Cinema Since :,o
In this chronology I have listed those landmark lms without which visionary cinema
would not exist in its present state, and so it includes only lms which were inuential for
the development of the visionary lms of the past two or three decades. Tis will explain
why, for example, I have not listed the Star Trek movies here, for they are a continuation
into lm of another medium, television, and they have had little or no inuence on the
subsequent history of the visionary movie. (Tey are themselves, rather, the continuation
of :),os B-grade science ctional journeys among the stars la Forbidden Planet. I
have, however, listed the X-Files movie, since it owes such a great debt to lms like John
Carpenters Te Ting, and is signicant for the development of the paranoid narrative
generally). Te attentive reader will also note that I have listed very few horror lms here
only those which are important for giving direction to this whole stream of development.
Te horror lm tends not to interface quite so directly with what the German philosopher
of culture Jean Gebser calls the mythical consciousness structure, involving instead the
survival of an archaic residuum from the magical consciousness structure which preceded
it (i.e. demonic possession, spell casting, curses, the fear of the vengeance of the dead, etc.),
and it is primarily with mythical consciousness that we have been concerned in this book.
Finally, as an aesthetic standard of criterion, I have tried, wherever possible, to avoid listing
lms that are so bad as to be unwatchable (e.g., Te Chronicles of Riddick, Te Day
After Tomorrow, I, Robot, Battle Beyond the Stars, etc.). Films are listed in chronological
order by release date.
:,68
Planet of the Apes. Te trope of the talking monkey is an ancient one, going
back at least to the Hindu epic Te Ramayana, in which a race of human-
like monkeys help the heroes to rescue their beloved Sita from her captivity
by the demon Ravana. In that story, the monkeys were helping to stabilize
the hominid physical body for its evolutionary incarnation, in an attempt to
protect it from being possessed by astral demons and devils. In Planet of the
Apes, the Charlton Heston character is a personication of the human soul
::
fallen from heaven into the realm of materialist beings (the apes) which, in
good esoteric fashion, are preparing him to undergo incarnation, whereby the
evolution of hominds will perfect the physical body for the human soul to take
up residence within it. But, as in Gnostic myth, he wants to be free from his
materialist prison and ascend back to his home in the heavens amongst beings
of light. In a way, he is a forerunner of Kubricks Star Child, although his mis-
sion is an abortive one.
:oo:: A Space Odyssey. Tis picture single-handedly made possible the next three
decades of science ction cinema. Direct descendants are Close Encounters of
the Tird Kind and James Camerons Te Abyss. Less direct are those lms
which feature their protagonist in combat with a homicidal machine of some
sort, like Michael Crichtons Westworld and Camerons Terminator lms.
Rosemarys Baby. Roman Polanskis updating of Hawthornes Young Goodman
Brown is also the rst of the demon possession movies that later gave rise to
Te Exorcist and Te Omen. Here, Kubricks Star Child meets its antithesis in
the birth of a devil-baby, whose purpose it will undoubtedly be to lead humans
away from the spirit world and tempt them toward the material.
Night of the Living Dead. With George Romeros rst zombie lm, we have
a metaphoric vision of what humanity looks like when it has forgotten the
spiritual world, for the soulless zombies are a personication of the physical
body shorn of any spiritual resonance. Tis is an image of capitalist consumers
at the end of history who believe that the physical is the only thing that matters.
Tus, Romeros zombies are what the minions of Polanskis devil baby would
be like: an army of the dead who are in league to obstruct the spiritual mission
of Kubricks Star Child by reducing humanity to its mere appetites.
:,6,
Fellini Satyricon. Tis is my favorite Fellini lm. An absolutely brilliant vi-
sionary journey through ancient Rome, it surpasses Petroniuss novel. Tis
lm, more than any of his others, demonstrates how Fellini was essentially a
displaced painter, for it is composed of a series of moving paintings that have
been strung together without much regard for plot. But as Fellinis fans know,
plot has never been his main concern, which is rather to create some of the
most arresting images ever put on lm.
:,;:
A Clockwork Orange. Kubricks signature lm (see pp. ::: above).
Te Evolution of Visionary Cinema
::,
:,;z
Solaris. Tis lm was made by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in the wake
of Kubricks :oo: and mostly because Tarkovsky hated it. Kubricks techno-
logical vision seemed too grand to him, the human beings in his technoscapes
rendered too ineective by the Jack Kirbyesque gigantism of his machines. In
response, Tarkovsky sets out to restore human warmth to Kubricks terrify-
ing silences of eternal space with a lm about human beings having spiritual
problems in an environment that just happens to be set amongst the stars.
Tarkovskys sensitivity to the visionary dynamics of the psyche is what makes
this lm so special, for its lead character Kelvin is a man of science who is
skeptical of the possibility of having dreams and visions in which spiritual
beings communicate to humanity, until he himself has one. Tis encounter
with a being from the otherworld is so disturbing to him that it changes his
life.
Te Godfather. Te rst mega-movie of the New Hollywood. Te highest
grossing picture of its time, and also one of the best lms ever made. Te
declining genre of the gangster lm here received its apotheosis and has never
been topped, or equalled, since (except by the sequel). Other remarkable
examples of the genre, like Scorseses Goodfellas or Sergio Leones Once Upon
a Time in America, as good as they are, dont come even close to Coppolas
lm. (Spielberg has remarked that he thought it was probably the greatest lm
made by any living director.)
Fellinis Roma. One of my favorite Fellini lms, this one is packed with
imaginative anecdotes. For example, the crew building a subway for modern
Rome stumble across a buried Roman villa from the days of the Empire, and
while they are admiring the beautiful frescoes, the air from outside travels in
and causes them to fade out of existence within seconds: a wonderful allegory
of the disintegrative eects of industrial society upon culture.
Aguirre: the Wrath of God. Herzogs rst great lm is also his best, and a key
inuence on Apocalypse Now (see pp. :c,:c; above).
:,;y
Te Golden Voyage of Sinbad. One of animator Ray Harryhausens last lms,
and also one of his best, this hearkens back to the monster lms of the fties,
and before them, to the pulp ction of the twenties. Te inuence of this lm
on Spielberg and Lucass Indiana Jones movies is signicant.
:,c
Westworld. Michael Crichton, in his prototype for Jurassic Park, here picks up
the torch from Kubricks :oo:: A Space Odyssey, and gives us a theme park lled
with robots who simulate epochs of the past like the old west, medieval Europe
or ancient Rome. Ten the robots start killing everybody. Te nal sequence,
in which Yul Brunner hunts down Richard Benjamin, is the prototype for
both James Camerons Terminator and John Carpenters Michael Myers in
Halloween.
Te Exorcist. Te scariest lm of all time. Stephen King in his Danse Macabre
says that this lm was really about the fears of an adult generation whose
children had been kidnapped by foul-mouthed, rebellious spirits who criticized
them. What, Freud and Marx as child-stealing demons? But maybe the lm
was scarier than that; maybe it was about . . . real demons?
:,;
Te Godfather Part II. Here it is, the rst number II. Coppola performs the
rare feat of making a sequel that is better than the original.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: Te Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Herzogs
bizzare genius strikes again in this true story about a mysterious foundling who
appears in the middle of the city street one day and who, it turns out, had
spent his entire life in a cellar. Despite his attempts to educate himself, Hauser
decides that he misses that cellar. Te world is too cruel for him, but ultimately
the same unknown man who raised him returns to murder him.
Dersu Uzala. My favorite Kurosawa lm tells the true story of a group of
Russian soldiers who encounter an old Japanese shaman in the middle of the
Siberian wilderness. Te soldiers are astonished and puzzled by his chosen
self-exile, but the shaman teaches them the ancient, pre-agrarian values of
individuality and self-reliance.
:,;,
Jaws. Te third mega hit after Te Godfather and Te Exorcist. Te number one
money-maker of its time. With this lm, Spielberg inaugurated a new epoch
of monster movies, including Alien, Piranha, Gremlins and every third rate B
movie that followed, such as Anaconda, Lake Placid, Species, etc. Te lm has
a fresh, timeless feel to it that makes it seem as if it could have been made yes-
terday. And indeed, it is still being imitated, most recently by the independent
lm Open Water (:cc).
:,:
Barry Lyndon. Kubricks research into the eighteenth century for his planned
Napoleon fullls itself vicariously in this rich masterpiece that moves with
almost glacial pacing but yet never bores. Just like one of those old things they
used to call novels. Remember them?
:,;6
Logans Run. Just as the eighteenth century novel chronicles the migration of
the lower classes from the country to the city, this lm begins to show us the
reversal of the overheated medium in the form of a migration from the city
back to the country. Tings have got to be really bad in the cities for us to feel
nostalgic about returning to the zoological struggle for survival. Tis lms
planned remake, furthermore, indicates that the myth is still pertinent to our
contemporary situation.
Te Omen. Here, the theme of the devil child from Rosemarys Baby is elaborated
into the birth of the Antichrist himself. Te rst installment in this trilogy
concerns only his childhood and the mysterious mishaps met by anyone who
happens to be ill-fated enough to realize what he is. Tis gure, mythologically
speaking, is the counterpart to Kubricks Star Child, for his purpose will be to
block the Star Childs mission by creating an army of materialist consumers
who will be hypnotized into believing that nothing is more important than
getting and spending.
Heart of Glass. Another of those brilliant, weird Herzog movies, this one
concerns the fate of a village which loses the secret of making its unique ruby
red glass and subsequently declines into madness and chaos. Spengler would
have enjoyed this lm.
:,;;
Wizards. Ralph Bakshi a sort of Richard Corben turned lm director here
tells the very same story as Star Wars, that of a battle between the technopolists
and the humanists, only here the setting is within the trappings of a Tolkien-
esque Middle Earth that has resulted from the collapse of civilization. Like
the Disney lms, it is animated, only here you will nd things that wouldnt
turn up in Disney, like a sexy fairy princess, and a foul-mouthed wizard who
murders his brother with a pistol shot.
Star Wars. Tis is the second movie, after Kubricks :oo: that involves its directors
conscious attempt to make use of mythology. Lucas, as he puts it, set out to create
a fairy tale for twelve year olds, but in the process he created something much
:,:
larger and more signicant: a miniaturization of the entire history of twentieth
century popular culture, from pulp ction to science ction and fantasy novels, to
comic books. Te lm is loaded with visual quotations and literary references to
everything from Flash Gordon comic strips to Isaac Asimovs Foundation novels,
Frank Herberts Dune, the samurai movies of Kurosawa, the Westerns of John
Ford and the World War II movies of John Wayne. Lucas, in reading Campbells
hero journey narrative saw the archetypal structure common to all these heroic
genres and in pulling it out and making it visible for everyone to see, made Star
Wars into a textbook example of a movie based on mythological archetypes. Te
other important aspect of the lm is the development of a theme introduced
by the HAL ,ccc sequence of :oo:, namely, the problem posed by living a
human life in an over-technologized society. Unlike Te Lord of the Rings, the
movie poses and then answers its problem without insisting that machines be
thrown out altogether. (Luke Skywalker, moreover, is the earthly incarnation of
Kubricks Star Child, and hence the antithesis of Damien, the devil child born a
year earlier in Te Omen.)
Close Encounters of the Tird Kind. Tis is Spielbergs response to the kind of
wonder and awe that was evoked in him by Kubricks :oo: and which he tried
to communicate to the audience in his inimitable Everyman lowbrow fashion.
Te movie is elitist eschatology for Everyman, the Disney-ication of the Book
of Revelation, and as such it is a celluloid ziggurat in which not just priests,
but the masses may ascend the grand staircase in order to commune with the
gods in the temple at the summit. (In :cc,, incidentally, Lucas and Spielberg
will come full circle in a way, when Lucas releases the nal installment of his
Star Wars trilogy in May while Spielberg returns, during the later summertime,
to the same thematic territory as Close Encounters with his War of the Worlds
remake.)
Te Last Wave. One of Australian director Peter Weirs best lms, this is a
creepy meditation on the coming end of the world by a gigantic ood. But
Weir never shows us the actual ood; for that you have to rent the directors
cut of James Camerons lm Te Abyss. Both lms are communications to us
from the earths etheric body that the elemental beings inhabiting its rocks and
trees and waterways are not happy with industrial society.
:,;8
Piranha. Made by Joe Dante for Roger Corman, Spielberg has said that this
is his favorite of the Jaws rip-os. I think it was made in a week, but actually,
:,,
its fairly watchable. James Camerons very rst lm Piranha II: Te Spawning
(:,,) is unwatchable by comparison.
Halloween. Te rst of the big mad-slasher icks after Psycho, and one of the
most nancially successful independent lms ever made, this one put John
Carpenter on the map as the premier director of modern B-movies.
Superman. Te opening sequence shows us what happened to Kubricks Star
Child after it entered the earths atmosphere in the form of a meteorite. Tis,
incidentally, was the rst of the big superhero movies, and still the best.
:,;,
Nosferatu. My favorite Werner Herzog lm, this is one of those rare cases in
which the remake of a classic tops the original. I think part of it has to do with
the fact that Draculas castle is shot on location in a real castle that is so creep-
ily Eastern European, that if Dracula didnt live there, then he should have.
Dawn of the Dead. One of the ten best horror lms ever made, this wonderful
allegory of spiritually dead consumers walking through shopping malls like
the zombies they really are is a lot of fun to watch. Mythologically speaking,
this is what the army of Damien the devil child from Te Omen would
look like if the war of the human spirit against the materialist impulse were to
fail, Luke Skywalkers mission having been in vain.
Alien. Ridley Scott said he decided to do this when he realized after seeing
Star Wars and reading Heavy Metal magazine, that science ction didnt have
to look antiseptic, but could also be grungy and worn out. Tis movie is
part of the new wave of monster movies inaugurated by Spielbergs Jaws, but
unlike all the others, it is pure visual genius. Journeys through outer space by
the working class have never looked so convincing, and the life cycle of the
monster never taken so deadly seriously. Upon closer examination, we realize
that the movie is a misogynists journey through the landscape of the female
body, its imagery bursting with eggs, toothed vaginas, serpents, wombs and
the dark suocating fear of the Terrible Mother. On the other hand, all this is
redeemed by the fact that this movie features cinemas rst ever female dragon
slayer, an earthly incarnation not of Kubricks Star Child, but of Tarkovskys
Planetary Mind, a modern Penthesilea come to slay the mechanical dragon of
science, like Princess Leia at the side of her twin brother, Luke.
Te Brood. David Cronenbergs rst great lm. Tis, he said, was his visceral
response to Kramer vs. Kramer, and indeed, the dierence between the two
:,
lms is something like that between a Norman Rockwell painting and one by
Francis Bacon. Te Greeks would have known what Cronenberg was talking
about here, for Cronenbergs vision is essentially an updating of the Terrible
Mother, like Medusa with her brood of cranial snakes.
Apocalypse Now. One of the ve greatest lms ever made, this gargantuan
colossus of a masterpiece demonstrated that American lmmakers can make a
work every bit as rich and dense with literary allusions as that of any European.
Coppolas epic retelling of Te Odyssey combined with Conrads Heart of
Darkness is a totally unique cinematic vision. Again, as with Kubrick and
Lucas before him, the mythic structures are consciously intended, as Coppola
shows us in the climax when his camera pans over a shelf of Kurtzs books to
reveal copies of Jessie Westons From Ritual to Romance and Frazers Te Golden
Bough. Te central myth of the lm is the death of the old sick king and along
with him, his entire crumbling kingdom of Iron Age madmen. Te look of the
movie has been imitated again and again, but never successfully, for Coppola
creates a visionary landscape like something out of a fever dream, in which
the sinking ruins of Western civilization are caught in a terminal moraine of
dying gods and ageing heroes, like the conclusion of Wagners ring cycle (from
which Coppola borrows.) It is a millennial journey through the land of the
dead, a movie made by a man who was himself at the time nearly insane. After
this movie, Coppola went on his lithium and his creativity has never been the
same since.
:,8o
Te Empire Strikes Back. After Te Godfather Part II, the second example of
a sequel topping the original. Tis is a very good movie, one of my all time
favorites.
Te Shining. A lot of people didnt like this lm, but it has become a classic.
Te initial objections had to do with the fact that very little of Stephen Kings
book made it onto the screen, but just try watching the made-for-television
remake that came out in the :,,cs, in which King faithfully adapted his own
novel, and youll realize how really bad Kings writing is. Along with Steven
Spielberg, who initially hated it, I think this is one of Kubricks best lms.
Altered States. Te main character, Dr. Jessup, in William Hurts rst screen
role, is a variation of Faust, but like Terence McKenna, a Faust obsessed with
psychedelics. Here the American consumer mentality that was parodied
in Dawn of the Dead, with its image of zombies eating everyone in sight,
:,,
becomes the mistaken notion that spiritual illumination can be had simply by
consuming the right psychedelic. A remake of this lm is in the works.
:,8:
Te Road Warrior. Supposedly the Australian lmmaker George Miller got the
idea for this one after his friend producer Byron Kennedy visited Hollywood
on a scholarship during the production of Star Wars, and George Lucas intro-
duced him to Joseph Campbells Hero with a Tousand Faces. One of the most
imitated movies ever made, it continues the tradition of the Western and the
samurai lm which, beginning with Star Wars, transmigrated from those dy-
ing genres into the new, mythic universe of contemporary science ction.
Te Howling. Brought to you by Joe Dante, the guy who gave us Piranha, and
then later, Gremlins. Tis was the kick-o to a whole series of werewolf lms
in which the repressed sexuality of :,cs middle class suburbanites in the
epoch of AIDS returned in werewolf form. Tis was also the rst lm to
actually show a man changing into a werewolf instead of cutting away or using
lap dissolves. Before the light can be attained, the animal aspect of our being
must rst be integrated, and so this wave of werewolf movies will serve as a
preliminary stage in the process of balancing the spiritual and the material.
Escape From New York. In the rst ten minutes of this John Carpenter ick,
Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists and sent crashing into the skyscrapers
of New York City. Tere is a shot in which you see the jumbo jet headed for
the skyline a miniature built by James Cameron that seems disturbingly
prescient of the ,/:: disaster. Here the image of the city-as-prison is a metaphor
for the entrapment of humanity swallowed up in the belly of the Machine.
Snake Plissken, like the Holy Spirit in Manicheanism, must descend into the
materialist realm in order to rescue the President of the United States who,
like the Anthropos, has been swallowed into matter and requires rescue from
without. Plisskens mission here is a miniaturized version of that of Kubricks
Star Child.
Raiders of the Lost Ark. Originally conceived by Lucas and Philip Kaufman
as a tribute to the serials of the :,cs and :,,cs, it was then reconceived by
Lucas and Spielberg on the beaches of Hawaii during the opening days of
Star Wars, when Spielberg was in the mood to do a James Bond-style ick.
Along with Te Road Warrior from which Lucas and Spielberg borrowed
the truck chase scene (or rather, reclaimed it from George Miller, who had
taken it from Spielbergs early made-for-TV movie Duel) and Star Wars,
:,o
these three lms signied the period of the rise of mythologically inspired
cinema to the mainstream. Also, all three lms constitute a miniaturization
of the entire history of genre cinema: science ction, the Western, the World
War II ick and the samurai lm. (Notice that in contrast to Snake Plisskens
descent into the machine, Indiana Jones who happens to be pathologically
afraid of snakes, since he is a solar hero, whereas Plissken is a lunar hero
must descend into the Underworld of Ancient Egypt to retrieve the Ark of
the Covenant, a vessel bearing what essentially amounts to the worlds rst
alphabetic document. Tus Indiana Jones, it would appear, is attempting to
rescue the alphabet i.e. the vanishing Gutenbergian world of the printed
book from being swallowed up into the belly of electronic society.)
Clash of the Titans. Te last lm featuring the special eects miniatures of Ray
Harryhausen, a sort of John the Baptist gure in this movement heralding the
coming of Lucas, Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, all of whom
were inuenced by his animated monsters, from the cyclops with satyrs legs
in Te Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (:,,) to the dancing gure of Kali in Te
Golden Voyage of Sinbad recycled in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (:cc:) and
the ghting skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts (:,o,) the prototypes for
Camerons Terminator robots.
Heavy Metal. Tis animated science ction lm based on the famous magazine
contains cinemas second ever appearance of a female monster slayer in the
lms last story, which is loosely modeled upon Moebiuss Azrak strips.
An American Werewolf in London. Te other important werewolf movie to
feature impressive visual eects of the man-animal metamorphosis. Tis was
done by director John Landis and makeup eects artist Rick Baker, the same
pair who concocted the Triller video for Michael Jackson. Te story concerns
two young men traveling in England, one of whom is killed by a werewolf,
the other only bitten, but the young American tourist suers not only from
his transformation into the wolf, but is also haunted by the dead ghost of his
friend, who is trapped in Limbo. Tere is a :,cs AIDS subtext here.
:,8z
Fanny & Alexander. Bergmans last great lm is also his best. A story about
two children raised by a creepy minister who locks them away in his house,
the boy, who is Bergmans autobiographical alter ego, is followed around by
the ghost of his dead father, but the story captures his fascination with the
world of the imagination through the artistry of puppets. Tis is one of the
:,;
few lms that actually replicates the experience of reading a nineteenth cen-
tury classic novel. In many ways, it is comparable to Tomas Manns Bud-
denbrooks.
Fitzcarraldo. Werner Herzogs last truly great lm. In Les Blanks documentary,
Burden of Dreams, you can see early footage that Herzog shot in which Jason
Robards played the lead role that later went to Klaus Kinski, and in the early
version, Robards had Mick Jagger as a sidekick. Robards, however, fell ill, and
Jagger had a new concert tour a classic example of blessings in disguise.
Poltergeist. Spielbergs attempt to outdo Kubricks attempt to outdo William
Friedkins attempt to outdo Robert Wises Te Haunting as the scariest lm
ever made. Poltergeist really isnt very scary, but yet it comes the closest any lm
ever has to actually reduplicating the experience of the fun house ride with
things leaping out at you around every corner.
E.T. Te Extraterrestrial (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Go of my
Childhood Myths While the Technocrats of Archimedean Science Hunted Tem to
Extinction?)
Te Ting. Tis lm was drowned by the box o ce successes of E.T. and Poltergeist
it was released just weeks after them but it is probably John Carpenters best
and one of the scariest ever made. Its semiotics, like that of Alien, deals with the
breakdown of the immune system during the :,cs. (Te Sci-Fi Channel has
promised a miniseries sequel to be scripted by Frank Darabont.)
Blade Runner. Another box o ce bomb that has since become a classic. One
of the most imitated lms of all time in terms of its vision of the future, but in
my opinion, its look has never been equalled, although the car chase sequence
in Attack of the Clones comes close. Two essential works of science ction came
out right at the start of the :,cs: William Gibsons novel Neuromancer, and
Ridley Scotts movie Blade Runner. Gibson claims to have walked out of Blade
Runner, so similar was it to the kind of world that he had been imagining
in his novel. And indeed both narratives are similar in their depiction of a
futuristic America governed entirely by huge corporations with a concern
for creating the simulacrum and the articial product at the expense of the
authentic and culturally genuine. Of the two, however, Blade Runner is more
concerned with mythic themes, and in particular the anxiety of the king who
is about to be killed and wishes to break the life cycle imposed upon his reign
by the priesthood of science. (Te four year life cycle of the replicants is an
echo of the four year cycle imposed upon kings in Greece; the Olympics are
:,
a vestigial holdover of this tradition, as is our presidential elections). Also, the
movie is an updating of Gilgameshs quest for the plant of immortality that
will allow him to escape death. Bound up with these ancient archetypal themes
are modern themes which question the value of the corporate replacement of
nature with cheap, disposable junk.
:,8y
Videodrome. One of Cronenbergs best lms. Like Carpenters Te Ting
both of which were nanced at the same time by Universal studios this one
also bombed at the box o ce, but it has turned out to be one of the most
prescient lms ever made about how electromagnetic technology erodes the
immune system. Te Ting actually shows us the viruses attacking the cells
that have been weakened by ELF elds. Tese two lms are classic examples of
art making invisible environments visible.
Te Hunger. Directed by Ridley Scotts brother, Tony, this is one of the most
aesthetically pleasing vampire lms ever made. And come to think of it, this
one may also have a :,cs disease anxiety subtext.
Return of the Jedi. Originally titled Revenge of the Jedi, this is the weakest Star
Wars lm so far, but still entertaining. And incidentally it contains cinemas
third appearance of the female dragon slayer as Princess Leia in her role as
killer of Jabba the Hut.
Te Dead Zone. Other than Frank Darabonts very good lms Te Shawshank
Redemption and Te Green Mile, this is probably the best adaptation of a
Stephen King novel for celluloid. In Videodrome, David Cronenberg gave us
the story of a paranoid who murders corporate executives who have stolen
his life from him; in Te Dead Zone, he gives us the story of a metanoid who
sets out to assassinate a man who he knows will destroy the world in a nuclear
war. Te deep structure common to both lms, however, is an anxiety that
corporate powers have taken over the world and pushed the individual, with
his dreams and visions, out of the way.
:,8
Te Terminator. James Camerons second lm as a director, in which he has
taken motifs from :oo:, Westworld and Ray Harryhausen movies and combined
them into a vision of the end of man at the hands of the machine.
:o:o: Te Year We Make Contact. Ive forgotten where, but someone once put it
perfectly: :o:o is :oo: rewritten as Clarke wanted it, that is to say, with all the
:,,
ambiguities attened out by literalism.
Dune. Te success of the Star Wars lms ensured that Frank Herberts
mythopoeic novel would be lmed, only with the wrong director. Aesthetically,
the lm is quite beautiful its production design and set decoration is of
a quality rarely seen in science ction lms and the acting isnt bad, but
you can sense Lynchs discomfort with the trappings of space opera sci- all
throughout. He wants to subvert the genres clichs but his style is too avant
garde for this sort of material.
:,8,
Back to the Future. Robert Zemeckis, imitating the style of his mentor Steven
Spielberg with total delity, here gives us one of the most entertaining time
travel movies ever made. And, incidentally, in having his protagonist travel
back to :,,,, he shows us the inward relationship which the Spielberg-Lucas
approach to lm shares with the popular culture of that era: comic books like
Weird Science and pulp ction magazines like Galaxy; alien invader icks like
Te Day the Earth Stood Still, Invaders from Mars or War of the Worlds; not to
mention the novels of Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.
Mad Max Beyond Tunderdome. Tis sequel to Te Road Warrior isnt as good
as its forerunner, and yet it is paradoxically richer. Like Moses, Max is a hero
who delivers an entire people to their destiny, but isnt allowed entry into
the Promised Land. George Miller is still promising another sequel, the long
delayed Mad Max ,: Fury Road.
Brazil. Im listing this here only because in a visionary chronology of cinema
that would pretend to the slightest trace of objectivity, it would be wrong not
to, but for the record, I am neither a fan of Terry Gilliam in general, nor of
this lm in particular. Gilliam is a displaced caricaturist la Ralph Steadman
and I think his talents would be better used in a cartoon medium rather than
on celluloid. I nd myself getting physically ill whenever I watch one of his
movies, for his sets are so busy and crammed with claustrophobic noise as
to be disorienting.
:,86
Aliens. Another lm about the breakdown of the immune system, Camerons
third movie is also one of the best sequels ever made. His creation of the egg-
laying queen at the lms climax, with its battle of Kali vs. Durga, is superb
science ction mythography.
:c
Te Fly. Another lm about the breakdown of the immune system? Or does
Cronenbergs revisionist Frankenstein have more to do with the poor souls
trapped into the misery of living in defective bodies that will be the side eect
of genetic engineering?
:,8;
Full Metal Jacket. Te rst half is one of Kubricks best lms; the second, one
of the most interesting experiments in his stated attempt to liberate cinema
from the inuence of the three act play and the novel.
Empire of the Sun. Like Full Metal Jacket, the rst half is one of Spielbergs
best strips of celluloid, whereas the second suers from a loss of decisiveness.
Spielberg and Ballard dont mix well since Ballard, like Kubrick, is fascinated
with death and decay, whereas Spielberg is more concerned with growth and
burgeoning, new life. Consequently, the lm fails not because of storyboarding
for the staging of the shots is magnicent but because of Spielbergs
elimination of the books morbid imagery.
:,88
Te Last Temptation of Christ. A for eort. One of Martin Scorseses rare
forays into the visionary mode was an attempt to lm Kazantzakiss novel as a
homage to Pasolinis Gospel According to Saint Matthew, and it almost worked,
but the major problem was the casting: none of it worked.
Dead Ringers. Now, heres a quiet little masterpiece: Cronenbergs dream
transform of a real life case of twin gynecologists who became addicted to
drugs and committed double suicide. To really appreciate Cronenbergs genius,
try reading the pop novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which was
inspired by the same events. (Te scarlet gowns worn by the twins while they
operate seem to have been borrowed from the little known movie Futureworld
[:,;o], the sequel to Westworld.)
:,8,
Batman. Everybody was hoping for Frank Millers graphic novel Te Dark
Knight Returns, but instead we got a mindless superhero movie with an excel-
lent actor playing Batman. One of Tim Burtons worst lms.
Te Abyss. Here Cameron makes the rst big budget movie lmed almost
entirely in a watertank that was designed for a nuclear reactor and then later
abandoned. Prior to lming Titanic he actually journeyed to the North Atlantic
::
grave of the ship. At one point, he wanted to go up into space prior to lming
a Mars epic for television. What, Faust Goes to Hollywood?
:,,o
Santa Sangre. Alejandro Jodorowskys comeback lm tells the story of a man
whose arms play stand-in at the piano for his mother, who was mutilated.
Tis lm contains one of the great scenes of celluloid history: a dead elephant
is placed in a huge casket and pushed over the edge of a cli where it crashes
into the ravine below, and a group of the impoverished descend upon it and
tear it to pieces.
Jacobs Ladder. In a discarded chapter written for the present book, I compared
the scene in this lm in which the protagonist is abducted and taken down
for surgery into a hospital that resembles one of Dantes circles of Hell with
the scene in Fire in the Sky (:,,,) in which Travis Walton is abducted by
extraterrestrials and taken up to a spaceship for examination. Te screenwriter
of Jacobs Ladder has admitted to borrowing purposely from Te Tibetan Book
of the Dead, which contains archaic residua from Tibets shamanic Bon Po
religion, and so it occurred to me that shamanic initiation ordeals in which
abductees are taken by demons and torn to pieces, while their bodies are
reconstructed with diamonds, rocks or special stones may be the key to what
is going on in accounts of extraterrestrial abduction.
Edward Scissorhands. A charming miniaturization of the Frankenstein story,
this is one of Tim Burtons better lms, although it suers from a kind of
empty hollowness of purpose.
Te Godfather Part III. Undoubtedly Coppola went back to his early
masterworks for the same reason that George Lucas went back to his namely,
to recapture some of that early, pre-money genius and the results in both
cases, are about the same: awed, but good. Tat is, we didnt need these lms,
but its nice to have them, particularly for fanatics of the originals who get
tired of watching them over and over and would like to have more of the same
but dierent. Teres some bad acting in Part III, to be sure (and it isnt Soa
Coppola Im talking about), and the storyline has the feeling of having been
sewn together out of a number of discordant set pieces, but the last , minutes
at the opera house, stolen from Hitchcocks remake of Te Man Who Knew Too
Much, is even better than Hitchcock.
::
:,,:
Terminator :. Camerons invention of a Terminator made out of liquid metal is
a wonderful retrieval of the spiritus mercurius from alchemy, and the climax of
his lm, in which the creature is done away with by dumping him into a steel-
works factory, is a brilliant synopsis of the origins of our industrial world in
seventeenth and eighteenth century mining operations (both the steam engine
and the railroad were by-products of the mining industry). Just as in Te Lord
of the Rings, in which the ring as symbol of the machine has to be destroyed by
returning it to its source, so here the machine is returned to the mines from
whence it came.
Naked Lunch. Cronenberg originally wanted to lm this on location in Tangiers,
like Bertoluccis gorgeous lm Te Sheltering Sky, but the Gulf War ended that
possiblity. Te lm, consequently, suers a bit from the claustrophobia of
soundstages, but otherwise, it is a meditation on the relationship of bodily
organs to the creative imagination, a point of view you dont come across very
often.
:,,z
Bram Stokers Dracula. Coppolas eort to recapture his early genius here re-
sults in a awed but entertaining lm. Te rst half hour, with its stylized
imagery, is very good. With his trinity of female vampires who suck the life
out of Jonathan Harker, we are enabled, for the rst time in Dracula mythol-
ogy, to contemplate him in light of the myth of the dying and reviving serpent
moon god and the triple goddess: that is, Hermes and the Tree Fates in the
original Judgment of Paris, or the Tree of the Hesperides guarded by a dragon
and three women. Casting Gary Oldman as Dracula was a stroke of genius,
for his performance is probably the best Dracula put on lm. And check out
Tom Waits as Reneld.
:,,y
Jurassic Park. Certainly the best dinosaurs ever put on lm, although the char-
acters are cardboard and uninteresting. Tis lm, along with James Camerons
True Lies, marks a threshold in the development of special eects cinema,
for it is the rst lm to make use of CGI convincingly. From this point on,
CGI will come to be used more and more often in special eects cinema,
displacing such old school eects as the animated miniatures of Ray Harry-
hausen or the matte paintings of Albert Whitlock. George Lucas, who nished
:,
implementing the eects on this lm so that Spielberg could begin work on
Schindlers List, has characterized this shifting in special eects as a movement
from lm as a medium modeled upon theatre, to one now modeled upon
painting, in which absolutely anything visualized by the artist is possible. Te
only problem is that in pointing up this analogy, Lucas forgets that painting
is not a medium that just came down to earth from heaven ready made, for
artists have to learn how to see things in certain ways. Te development of
sfumato, for example, by Leonardo, is a subtle form of depth perspective in
which the distant horizon line is not in the same focus as the foreground, but
is visible as a bluish haze. With CGI-painted images, likewise, as they stand
now, there is no such distinction between foreground and background, for the
two are in exactly the same focus and show no dierentiation of color perspec-
tive. Te shots, consequently, look nowhere near as realistic as they are touted
to be, but instead have caused lm to look more and more like video games.
Perhaps the use of CGI as an all-purpose solution to visual problems should
be curtailed either that or visual eects technonerds should be required to
take courses in art history.
Te Nightmare Before Christmas. Tis claymation feature is a pure delight
of Tim Burtonian genius: the confusing of Halloween with Christmas is
inventive and funny, and I love the scenes with the kids opening their ghoulish
presents which have been delivered to them, not by Santa Claus, but by Jack
Skellington, the Spirit of Halloween, who has kidnapped Santa Claus.
:,,
Te Crow. Well, Im a fan of Alex Proyass Dark City, which was thoroughly
original, but this lm is overrated: there is not one fresh moment in it. It
watches almost like a replay of Robocop only with a vampire (or better, Charles
Bronsons Death Wish as Tim Burton would have lmed it). Te dialogue is
ludicrous, the acting caricatured, the special eects overblown.
Little Buddha. One of Bertoluccis rare forays into the visionary mode, this is
also the best lm made so far about Buddhism. Its recounting of the mythology
of Buddhas life is charming and gorgeous to look at, although Keanu Reeves
playing the most enlightened one in the universe is sheer casting irony.
Ed Wood. Tim Burtons best lm, this biography of Ed Wood, the worst
lmmaker of all time, is one laugh after another. Te lm appropriates all the
tropes of the classic inspired-man-of-genius-who-succeeds-against-all-odds-
:
story, like Coppolas Tucker, except with the ironic twist that Ed Wood was
precisely the opposite of a genius and had no talent whatsoever, and yet became
famous anyway.
Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. Filled with unintentional laughs, Kenneth Branaghs
attempt to outdo Coppolas redo of Bram Stokers Dracula didnt turn out so
well. (And neither, for that matter, did his pretentious remake of Hamlet).
:,,,
Strange Days. Here Cameron borrows from William Gibsons short story New
Rose Hotel, which director Kathryn Bigelow had at one point intended to
lm. Later, it was made into a very bad lm with the same title, starring Wil-
lem Dafoe. Strange Days isnt a great lm, but its an interesting variation on
the virtual reality theme.
:,,6
Dead Man. Jim Jarmuschs brilliant black and white Western is a rare attempt
to paint the realism of the Old West with a thin coat of surrealism. John-
ny Depp plays a man named William Blake who is befriended by a Native
American who is familiar with Blakes poetry and makes constant jokes about
his companions name. Te haunting and lyrical beauty of the Indians of the
Northwest Pacic Coast, with their supernatural totem poles looming out of
the fog is a region of the West rarely encountered in the Western, dominated
as it still is by Fords Monument Valley-style settings. But perhaps the visual
detail of Jarmuschs images, which are texturally quite dense, had an inuence
on the look and feel of HBOs magnicent series Deadwood, a suprising com-
bination of stark, utter realism with Shakespearean inected dialogue.
Escape from L.A. John Carpenters sequel to Escape from New York isnt as good
as the original, but its an almost exact remake, so that watching it gives you
a rare sense of what the same lm would look like made rst in the :,cs
and then again in the :,,cs. Even the special eects arent as good; James
Camerons miniature models have been traded in for CGI video game eects
which look tacky by comparison. (Its vision of an L.A. that has broken o
the continent and sunken under water forms an interesting counterpoint to
Spielberg and Kubricks sunken New York in A.I.)
Mars Attacks! Tis is actually one of Tim Burtons best lms, though its not
one you hear much about. Te audience my wife and I saw it with hardly
laughed at all, but we thought it was hysterical. Te aliens at rst pretend to
:,
be friends, but they are really monstrous imps who enjoy killing o human
beings with green death rays.
:,,;*
Lost Highway. Critics hated this lm, but I think it is not only one of David
Lynchs best, but also one of the nest examples of non-linear storytelling Ive
ever seen. As Stanley Kubrick emphasized, unless lm continues to attempt
breaking free of the narrative formulas of the novel and the three act play, it
will never become its own, truly unique medium.
Crash. When this lm premiered at Cannes, the director Bernardo Bertolucci
called it a religious masterpiece. A special prize category for daring and
audacity had to be invented for it. Tis is the kind of thing that great literature,
from Les Fleurs du Mal to Gravitys Rainbow, used to do.
Princess Mononoke. One of the best Japanimation lms ever, and also the
highest grossing lm ever made in Japan, its vision of animals transformed
into demons through poisoning by industrial technology is conrmation that
it is not just the West which is having nightmares about its machines, but the
entire planet.
Gattaca. A lm that is so visually polished, it actually glistens. Tis was written
and directed by Andrew Niccol, who did the screenplay for Te Truman Show,
and it is almost as brilliant.
Titanic. Camerons best lm so far, this one actually comes the closest to
capturing his overall vision of the end of civilization. Try this some time: take
a copy of Jungs Psychology of the Transference down o the shelf, and turn to
the series of illustrations he has taken from an alchemical text known as the
Rosarium Philosophorum, in which a king and a queen join hands while standing
in a fountain that gradually rises, submerges them both, and while underwater,
they fuse together into a single hermaphroditic being that surfaces from the
abyss. Is it just me, or does Camerons lm not replicate this sequence exactly?
*
Tere is a dearth of good visionary lms in the rst half of the :,,cs, for the
decade seems as weak as the cs were strong. Te reason for this escapes me,
although I have noticed that it is at just about this time, in the early :,,cs,
that a fresh crop of very high quality realist lms appears, kicked o in :,,c
with Scorseses Goodfellas, and then followed in :,,: by Oliver Stones J.F.K.,
Spike Lees Malcolm X in :,,:, Spielbergs Schindlers List in :,,,, Scorseses
Casino and Stones Nixon in :,,, and the Coen brothers best lm to date,
Fargo in :,,o. It is not until :,,; that the tide begins to turn and a new ood
of visionary lms begins to pour forth.
:o
:,,8
Dark City. Here it is: what society will look like if the System succeeds in its
endeavor to squash individuality, creativity and autonomy out of existence a
dying society with a hive mind that cannot understand why it is perishing but
has the feeling that somehow it has something to do with that strange quality
which human beings possess, known as Individuality. Rudolf Steiner would
have liked this lm.
Te Truman Show. Tis lm uses as its central metaphor the question that
humanity has asked itself all along, What is out there, anyway? An almost
awless work of celluloid art, this will be remembered as one of the great
works of cinematic literature.
X-Files: Fight the Future. Not as good as the actual television show, which
articulated the late twentieth century mythology of the paranoid narrative
better than perhaps any other work of literature or lm, with the exception of
Pynchons Crying of Lot ,) or the novels of Philip K. Dick.
Pi. Kabbalah, Chaos theory, geometry, Judaism and paranoia. Kafka would
have loved this.
What Dreams May Come. Te best descent into Hell sequence ever put on lm,
in an otherwise forgettable movie with a lousy Hollywood happy ending.
:,,,
Being John Malkovich. Spike Jonze and the brilliant screenwriter Charlie
Kaufman here team up with this small masterpiece about reincarnation and
the souls relationship to the body excavated via the metaphor of puppetry.
Te Matrix. Despite what the crowd thinks, I dont think this is a very good
movie, although some of its virtual reality imagery is arresting and beautiful.
Te lm belongs in the genre that explores human resistance to dehumanization
by machines, but so little of it is truly original that it scarcely merits discussion
in this book. Te action sequences, as well as the general premiss, were stolen
from the lms of James Cameron Terminator :, in particular and the
slow motion montages which everybody thinks are the real McCoy are in
fact retrievals from Sam Peckinpah Westerns. But the worst part of it is that
the lm suers from a vacuous sense of purpose: we know that the characters
are rejecting a mechanized way of life, but, consistent with the bibliophobic
nihilism of Los Angeles, we dont know exactly what they are standing up for,
:;
and consequently, have no idea of what type of society they would construct in
opposition to that envisioned by the Matrix. Indeed, the lms rip-o premiss
is just a frame upon which a pointless series of disconnected action sequences
have been nailed. Te Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed this
piece of Hollywood garbage, need to learn from James Cameron how to tell
a story, and then worry about the action sequences. But since the box o ce
receipts back them up, they feel vindicated, and so have proceeded to make
two even worse sequels.
Existenz. Cronenberg here picks up the virtual reality theme that he had been
prescient enough to introduce in his earlier Videodrome, and continues to
explore the ways in which electronic technology distances us from our bodies
by hypnotizing us with its wonders.
Star Wars Episode I: Te Phantom Menace. Let me just say rst that I love the
new prequels, they are Star Wars lms, after all, but I admit that theres a
certain irony here: they have the sti, clean Borders and Barnes & Noble feel
to them that the original trilogy did not have, for this new set seems as though
it had been made by the very corporate powers that the rst trilogy depicted
its heroes ghting against. Tose lms were made by a scrawny, desperate nerd
named George Lucas who was on re with genius and determined to prove
himself. Te new set has the feel of corporate complacency, made not so much
by Lucas as by Lucaslm Ltd, and its airbrushed digitization smells like access
to too much money. Te characters have lost the wit and charm of the original
group; it seems like Lucas has just told them to hit their marks and say their
lines whether they feel up to acting or not. As a result, the new lms dont feel
that they were made out of necessity. Tat said, and as anyone will realize who
has read the above chapter on the Star Wars lms, I love them anyway.
Eyes Wide Shut. Another masterpiece that will age well with time, as all
Kubricks lms do. Critics didnt like it, and neither did audiences, but then
neither group liked Blade Runner, Videodrome or Te Ting and those lms are
now regarded as classics.
Te Sixth Sense. Te young Indian director M. Night Shyamalan almost single-
handedly reinvents the horror genre by bringing subtlety back into it. Tis is a
truly spooky lm, and perhaps it takes the innate Hindu sensitivity toward the
astral plane to understand that real ghostly phenomena are quiet and creepy.
Te Green Mile. Ive given this a listing, but not Frank Darabonts equally
brilliant Stephen King adaptation Te Shawshank Redemption, because the
:
latter is straightforward realism, whereas this one, with its story of a mysterious
convict who can heal a ictions as Jesus could, is not. Incidentally, both lms
are also among the best prison movies ever made.
Bicenntenial Man. Tis is probably the best robot story ever written, certainly
Asimovs best, anyway, and this isnt a bad lm adaptation of it, either. Its
awkward and needlessly silly at moments, but basically entertaining. Here, the
Gnostic structures that plague Asimovs narratives are more evident than ever,
for the robots desire to become human, even to the point of undergoing aging
and death, is isomorphic to the fall of Nous into Physis.
zooo
X-Men. Finally! A super hero movie that is actually watchable (not counting
Superman, of course).
Te Cell. So far, the Indian director Tarsem Singh has not made a second
lm, though hes directed scads of commercials and music videos, including
R.E.M.s Losing My Religion. On the DVD commentary, Singh states that
he saw Cronenbergs Existenz seven times, and that goes a long way toward
explaining the beauty and originality of this lms virtual reality sequences,
which are even better than those in Te Matrix. Singh is art savvy, too; so far,
this is the only lm to borrow imagery from the artwork of Norwegian painter
Odd Nerdrum, perhaps the greatest living artist in the world. (I keep waiting
for people to discover this guy, the way Alien uncovered Giger). Singh, like
his compatriot M. Night Shyamalan, is possessed of potential genius, and if
these two can avoid being mangled by the Hollywood money machine, then
perhaps they will bring to cinema a new and much needed Hindu sensitivity
to all things astral.
Red Planet. One of the more entertaining lms on the subject of machines gone
awry. Invites a certain comparison to Stanislaw Lems novella Te Mask.
Unbreakable. People complained about Shyamalans second lm, but I liked it.
I thought it was creepy and weird. A fresh twist on the superhero theme.
zoo:
Mulholland Drive. David Lynchs best lm is a wonderfully creepy fantasy
about a young girl who dreams of stardom and goes to L.A., only to nd out
that it is a city populated by demons and evil, soul-sucking spirits who prey
:,
upon the young and naive. If youre one of those people like me who always
feel that somehow L.A. is a gigantic necropolis in disguise, lled with lost
souls, haunted Edward Hopper-like emptiness, and the walking dead, then
youll love Lynchs X-ray vision into the astral plane of Los Angeles.
A.I. Almost everyone I discuss this lm with thinks Im crazy, but my feeling
is that it will go down not only as a classic, but as one of the greatest lms
ever made. Every frame of this masterpiece is saturated with mythological
intelligence and a kind of quiet, elegiac mourning for the inevitable passing
of our mechanical civilization. For it will pass, despite all the faith in progress
of the corporate idiots who are currently ruining this planet and then smugly
congratulating themselves on a fortune well earned for the future generations
whose world they have guaranteed will be a mess of toxins and global warming.
Te human beings of the next Ice Age if there are any will sift through
the ruins of our machines and the remnants of our literature, paintings, and
stories, trying to piece together just what it was that happened to us. Tey will
regard us perhaps in the very way those astronauts in the lm Alien pondered
the ruins of that derelict ship, with its dreaming fossil of a space navigator,
wondering what magnicence of imagination it was that could have produced
such a society.
Final Fantasy: Te Spirits Within. Four years in the making, this joint Japanese-
American computer animation lm borrows its imagery so heavily from the
movies of James Cameron Aliens in particular that youd almost think it
was a James Cameron lm, except for the fact that the director doesnt have
nearly the kind of grasp that Cameron has on basic storytelling. Te lm starts
o promisingly but soon the plot becomes murky, and the pacing wooden.
Too bad. It cost a lot of money: s:c million, most of which it never made
back.
Apocalypse Now Redux. I wanted to see this additional footage ever since I rst
heard about it, and just as I suspected, its improved the lm in nearly every
respect. Roger Ebert claimed that it only made a long lm longer; but for me,
it made a rich lm even more texturally dense.
Te Lord of the Rings: Te Fellowship of the Ring. I had my doubts about this,
but it turned out to be an exquisite work of art, the best swords and sorcery
lm ever made (not that there are any good ones.) It is to that genre what :oo:
and Star Wars were to science ction, and so it should open up some new doors
for fantasy lm adaptations based, perhaps, upon the novels of Robert Jordan
:,c
or Stephen Donaldson or Terry Brooks. Tere is, however, a deep pessimism
regarding technology in this genre, particularly evident in Tolkien, and the
Dark Lord or Evil Magician in these kinds of stories is nearly always associated
consciously or not with industrialization and the all consuming lust of
technocracy to rule the world.
zooz
Spider. Although this lm received rave reviews, it is not one of Cronenbergs
best. It comes across as a private, self-absorbed obsession, and does not really
communicate to its audience. Its fascination with Freudian psychology seems
dated, and the metaphor of the web clichd.
Invincible. Tis lm is a ne return to form for Werner Herzog who, ever since
Fitzcarraldo, seems to have grown bored with dramatic narratives and turned to
documentary lmmaking. Te story concerns the strongman Zishe Breitbart,
who became famous amongst the Nazis for his Siegfried impersonations. Little
did they know, however, that Zishe was Jewish.
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Te best Star Wars lm since Te
Empire Strikes Back, although it is even stier and more subtly lifeless than Te
Phantom Menace.
Minority Report. Another masterpiece from the Spielberg workshop, this one is
a glittering display of mythic fossils embedded in science ction strata: here is
Cassandra, complete with her utterance from Aeschyluss Oresteia of Murder
as a prescient forewarning of plot development; the blind motif from Greek
mythic gures like Oedipus and Tiresias; the Mother Goddess of the plant
world, out of whose imagination the three psychics have arisen; the entombing
of Osiris in his sarcophagus, with an attendant resurrection at the end. And
the lm enfolds a cultural archaeology of science ction noir, as well, in the
form of visual quotes from Blade Runner, Logans Run, A Clockwork Orange,
Existenz and others. Spielbergs talents, thus far, show no signs of waning.
Roger Ebert is right, this was the best lm of :cc:
Signs. Shyamalan almost pulled this one o, but not quite. It is scary, and
its a lot of fun. But somethings missing: the last half hour needed a more
interesting pay o. Shyamalan owes a huge debt to Spielbergs Poltergeist,
although his work is much more subtle than Spielbergs. And indeed, this
lm closely resembles a project called Nightskies that Spielberg had originally
intended to undertake before it bifurcated into E.T. and Poltergeist: a lm about
a rural family of farmers terrorized by malevolent aliens (Te lm contains a
:,:
subtextual fear of the eects of new technologies on rural environments. Te
aliens are possibly metaphoric of the invasion of ELF elds from above, i.e.
satellites and cell phones, and the isolated farmers with their rustic fears of
collectivization into a global electronic hivemind based on e-commerce and
agribusiness.)
Simone. Heres a clever little lm by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Te Truman
Show screenplay) one of the most promising and inventive lmmakers on the
horizon. Essentially a retelling of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, the lm
examines our relationship to electronic technology via the metaphor of the
simulacrum: what happens when technology becomes too good at generating
articial realities? Its also a wonderful analysis of the artists relationship to
his muse, which puts it in the same category, though not on the same level
artistically, with Tarkovskys Solaris and Fellinis :/:.
Te Ring. Like Jacobs Ladder, this lm is replete with imagery culled from
shamanism: the axial world tree; an ascent to an upperworld via a ladder
followed by a descent into the underworld by way of a well, in which the
shamanic feat of liberating a soul trapped in Hell is attempted; the fear
of blood guilt from the vengeance of the dead; omens, stigmata, strange
coincidences and the like. A wonderful summing up of Jean Gebsers Magical
Consciousness structure.
Spider Man. Te best superhero movie since Superman, although it loses its
charm during the lms last third in which a mindless battle scene is recycled
from Tim Burtons Batman.
Solaris. Tis is quite simply one of the worst American remakes of a European
lm ever made. Te point of the Lem-Tarkovsky version has grown wings and
sailed over Steven Sodherbergs air-brain Hollywood head, for instead of a story
that evokes ancient myths of a god-like superbeing that incarnates itself in
human avatars in order to contemplate the signicance of the human condition,
we are given a sci- monster movie with an invasion of the body snatchers rip-
o plot about how earth is on the verge of being taken over by clones. Or
is there a deeper signicance here after all? Something about the American
production of cheap simulacra without substance or value of any sort?
Te Lord of the Rings: Te Two Towers. Not as good as Fellowship of the Ring,
which spent more time developing its characters, for here, as in the new Star
Wars trilogy, characters are traded in for bigger and better action sequences
which begin to make clear how video games are slowly taking Hollywood
:,:
over. And like Star Wars, these lms are made by techno-nerds whose culture
consists of playing the video games that they grew up on instead of reading
classic works of literature. Consequently, the problems to be solved by the
medium are strictly visual: how to make Gollum the most realistic video game
character of all time, for instance.
zooy
Northfork. Here is an American independent lm made by Michael Polish
that succeeds in imitating the way such lms used to be made by European
auteurs like Fellini and Bunuel. Te lm is ostensibly set in Montana in :,,,,
and concerns the attempt to evacuate and relocate the town of Northfork,
since a new hydroelectric dam has been constructed and soon the town will
be engulfed by a ood. One man is building an ark for his two wives; another
is a priest who refuses to leave because he is caring for a sick orphan boy who
also happens to be a fallen angel; and in the astral plane, meanwhile, three
human-like individuals are searching for the boy. Tis is visionary lmmak-
ing at its nest.
Adaptation. From Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the team who gave
us Being John Malkovich, comes a wonderful subversion of book to movie
adaptations. Instead of a direct translation of Susan Orleans Te Orchid Tief
to lm, Kaufman pulls a Calvino and writes himself as frustrated screenwriter
into the story. Brilliant, witty and smart, but not as good as Malkovich.
Daredevil. Here is another disappointing superhero adaptation, especially
for those who have read the Frank Miller Elektra issues, which are among
the best comic books ever written. Here all the chemistry and sexual tension
has vanished, having been boiled down instead into a standard Hollywood
formula. Te action scenes are dull and the acting uninteresting.
Dreamcatcher. Tis is a good science ction lm that is loaded with modernized
imagery of the astral plane. Tis was the rst novel Stephen King wrote after
being nearly killed in a car accident, and like the main character in the lm
who suers a similar fate, he has apparently brought back with him a new,
and even sharper sensitivity to the spirit world. In fact, the lms imagery,
from my point of view which treats lms as collective dreams, has the feel of
a cultural nightmare, and the marks of what tribal peoples would have called
omen written all over it. Read the images: oods of animals leaving the forest
in a mass exodus; the United States military genocidally wiping out a race of
extraterrestrials; a horde of amphibian-like aliens that invade, and mimic, the
:,,
human body, and who plan to infect our water supply so that they can spread
more e ciently (subtext: the earths sensitivity to its poisoning by toxic waste;
global warming?).
Te Hulk. One of the better superhero movies, it actually takes the time to
develop its characters so that the viewer can sympathize with them when they are
in trouble. Its displacing of the superhero narrative to San Francisco, however,
indicates that the superhero mythos is becoming dislodged from its mooring
in New Yorks cultural harbor, and along with that, is in process of changing
its meaning. It is no longer a provincial, city-bound mythology, as Gilgamesh,
say, originally was before the rest of Mesopotamia took it away from the tiny
city state of Uruk and transformed it into a universal Near Eastern mythology.
Terminator ,. Tough this lm was not directed by James Cameron, it is
rendered by Jonathan Mostow in Camerons style with almost perfect delity.
Second sequels are usually weak, but this one is surprisingly good, and continues
to fathom the implications of the human war against mechanization.
Te Lord of the Rings: Te Return of the King. Peter Jackson climaxes his Tolkien
trilogy with one of the best fantasy lms ever made. Te battle sequences are
superb probably the best of their kind since Lucass Return of the Jedi. Te
lm is three and a half hours long, and yet the time passes almost without
notice. Tat in itself is an achievement, but when one considers that what
Jackson has actually done here is to create the worlds rst twelve hour movie
and one, moreover, that does not bore for a second, even with the extended
footage added in the DVD versions one can only marvel at the artistry.
Perhaps lm is here moving into the phase of its sunset eect, and is beginning
to manifest terminal phenomena: this is what happened with opera in the
days of Wagner and Berlioz, or in the case of the novel, with Robert Musil
and Marcel Proust. Te works, that is to say, become longer, grander and take
on an ever greater sense of spectacle, signifying, however, that the respective
medium in question is about to vanish.
zoo
Big Fish. Tis delightful little scherzo is Tim Burton at his best. He even goes
to the trouble of carefully placing a copy of Te Hero with a Tousand Faces
on the nightstand beside the dying father to indicate that he is consciously
continuing the myth movement in Hollywood. Te lm is essentially about
the importance of myth, of lies, as Nietzsche would say, for the living of life.
By the end of the lm, the son realizes that realism sucks, and that it is the
:,
visionary that makes life worth living, since it distills the core truths of exis-
tence in a way that realism never can.
Spiderman :. Tis lm is much better than the original, and in fact, it is one
of the best superhero movies, period. It works mainly because its villain is so
interesting, and because it achieves a pleasant alternation between ght scenes
and character development.
Hellboy. Mike Mignolas Hellboy graphic novels are superb, exquisitely drawn
superhero stories of demons ghting demons. Tis lm, however, while not
terrible, simply does not do the graphic novels justice. It is murky and wooden,
lled with prefabricated Hollywood ght scenes that are so standardized they
might as well have been cut from a mold.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here is another gem from the workshop
of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, a Philip K. Dickian narrative about a man
having memories of a painful relationship removed by a strange clinic. He
decides, at the last moment, that he wants to keep those memories, and so the
ght with the System takes place in this lm inside the protagonists mind as
he desperately scrambles to save his memories from being erased. A very good
lm.
Te Terminal. Tis Spielberg lm was originally a project of Andrew Niccols,
but its premiss is so close to that of Te Truman Show that he would have been
merely repeating himself had he gone on to do this. It is a variation of the
theme of the human being swallowed up inside the machine, and desperately
trying to nd his way out. Te Ariadne gure here provides only false leads,
and the bittersweet ending is reminiscent of a :,,cs love story. Tis is one of
Spielbergs lighter eorts: not his best work, but not bad, either.
Te Stepford Wives. Tis remake of the :,;cs original is clever and funny, if
not particularly sophisticated. It is yet another rehearsal of Bowmans battle
against H.A.L.
zoo,
Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. After Return of the Jedi, this is the
second weakest lm of the entire series. Directorially speaking, it is a wreck,
and magnies what had been minor aws in the earlier two prequels into
huge cracks in Lucass magnicent ship. Te dialogue scenes are too short
and by comparison with the novelization one senses that they have been
:,,
liberally sheared; and whats worse, the dialogue is delivered with manikin-like
solemnity. Worst of all, the action sequences themselves are rushed through
so quickly that it seems as though they are on fast forward. Here Lucas seems
to have lost all patience for things like tension, pacing and staging, and as a
result his eagerness to nish up his magnum opus has caused him to make
it a work of celluloid kitsch that watches with the choppiness of the last half
hour of Welless Magnicent Ambersons. All that aside, the lm is nevertheless
still entertaining and packed with arresting mythological images: the scene in
which Darth Vaders exoskeleton is assembled around him by a group of robots
is the ultimate image of the fall of humanity into the Machine; the four-armed,
light-saber wielding General Grievous is an allusion to Harryhausens dancing
Kali out of Te Golden Voyage of Sinbad; the dragon upon which Obi-wan
Kenobi rides is an even more glaring homage to the one which Harryhausen
designed for Te Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Te twins who are born as sparks
of Light when the darkness is darkest Luke and Leia are of course the
physical incarnations of Kubricks Star Child and Tarkovskys Planetary Mind,
for it will be their task in the next three episodes to rescue humanity from its
fall into the Machine.
:,o
Appendix II
Two Film Reviews:
Te Village and
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
1.Te Village: Shyamalans Best Film so Far?
When this lm came out in the summer of :cc, it was panned by critics and
largely ignored by audiences (after, that is, a huge opening weekend). Tis is
ironic, for Te Village is actually Shyamalans best lm so far. Film critics, by
and large, are not literate individuals, and so very often they miss good the-
matic material. I have noticed a pattern in Hollywood lmmaking in which
an established director will take a risk by creating, not a repeat of previous
work, but a leap forward into a new sensibility that becomes too complex for
audience tastes, and the director, consequently, is made to feel a buoon for
departing into fresh waters. Neither critics nor audiences want their directors
to depart from expectations, for the familiar is comforting, and above all, it
does not challenge.
With Shyamalans Te Village we have a similar situation. Audiences and
critics wanted a repeat of Signs, and indeed, the trailers and posters led them to
expect just that, for they featured what appeared to be a remote village under
attack by monstrous beings. Shyamalan, however, pulled a more sophisticated
maneuvre by doing a :c and instead produced a commentary on his own
work. Te so-called surprise ending of this lm, which critics made fun of by
claiming that it surprised no one, actually had nothing to do with the sort of
O.Henry mentality that they were claiming it represented. Te ending, which
I will divulge in this review, had more to do with a meta-narrative reex that
enables an artist to step back from, and examine, what sort of thing he is doing
as an artist, just as David Cronenberg in his lm Existenz, performed a self-re-
ective analysis by assuming the persona of a video game creator whose virtual
realities were having a disorienting eect upon its participants. Cronenberg,
in that lm, was having the same sort of doubts about the validity of his work
as Tomas Mann was when he wrote Doctor Faustus as a self-examination of
:,;
the creative mentality of the German mind, sunken into its own romantic
wallowing in death and decay.
In Te Village, Shyamalan creates a movie set within a movie and then steps
back and pulls the curtain aside at the last moment to reveal that the reality
he has created is an experiment in manipulation, just as Shakespeare in Te
Tempest, with the metaphor of Prospero as a magician doubling for himself
as playwright, was commenting on the kinds of trickery used by the theater
troupe to achieve its eects. Shyamalans movie set looks something like
this: imagine a society not much dierent from that of the world described
by Hawthorne, in which omens, signs and miracles are everywhere and are
looked for in everything. Men speak in the language of dreams and riddles;
monsters are real, they live in the woods, and special ritual taboos must be
taken not to disturb them. In fact, far from propitiating them, oerings are
made not to get them to do ones bidding, but rather to go away. Dreams are
taken seriously in this milieu, and one mans nightmare, recounted amongst
the townspeople the next day, can bring the entire commerce of a village to
a standstill.
It is perhaps di cult for us jaded moderns, living in our gleaming urban
landscapes surrounded by labyrinths of steel and concrete, to believe that men
ever lived this way, but in fact, they did. And the question which Shyamalans
lm at rst seems to ask is: in the creation of modernity, how much of what
we have gained is an improvement over what we have given up? Is material
comfort and protection from starvation an equal, or better, trade o for the
recognition of spiritual powers at work in the cosmos? Is a taboo-ridden men-
tality that becomes so obsessive that it jams up the living of life better or worse
than an urban one in which life is so cheap that violence and criminality are
expected as of the order of the day?
As the narrative of Te Village progresses, we discover that the monsters
which the townspeople are so terried of are actually fake. Tey are a sort of
fairy tale made up by the village Elders like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy,
but this is a secret they dare not divulge to the younger generation whom they
have raised within the town limits, lest their experiment fail. And that experi-
ment, it turns out, involves the rejection of living in modern cities, for the
Elders of the village are exiles from the modern day who have ed back into
the woods in order to resurrect an ancient and vanished way of life, like the
Amish or some insane religious cult. Life in big cities, the Elders feel, is simply
a degradation of the value of human existence, for such a world is one shorn
of meaning and signicance, in which life is cheapened and human beings are
killed in robberies and self-detonations of rage.
Two Film Reviews
:,
As a lmmaker, Shyamalan is also performing an act of make-believe: He,
too, is hiring actors to put on masks and to maintain the ction of a simulated
reality for the purpose of scaring, and entertaining, his audiences. His doubts
about the value of what he does for a living are here evinced through the moral
equivocations of the Elders regarding the ctions that they must maintain
in order to preserve their simulated way of life. But this is only one level of
Shyamalans complex narrative.
When a girl is sent forth by the Elders to retrieve medicine for a man who
is dying of a knife wound, she makes her terrifying way through a forest in-
habited not by real monsters, but by a man dressed in a suit determined to
scare her to death. Once she has battled past him, however, like Truman at
the climax of Te Truman Show, she steps outside of an essentially false envi-
ronment into the real one when she leaves the chain link fence behind and
encounters a highway. In this real world, we learn that the property of the
woods in which the villagers have set up their forest is a sort of special pre-
serve, set apart and protected from the modern world, like a theme park. Te
idea that the villagers have chosen to reject modernity in favor of a retreat to
an archaic way of life is a particularly relevant question nowadays, in which
the value of modernity is being seriously questioned all around. Islamic fun-
damentalists, for instance, are motivated by this kind of hatred of cities, and
their smashing down of the twin towers was tantamount to a rejection of life
lived in servitude to the dollar bill as the highest ethos. And even within our
society, we are nding messages that question modernity: part of the popular-
ity of Tolkiens Lord of the Rings, for instance, hinges on this very point, for
Tolkiens work was analogous to a Hebrew apocalypse lled with hatred for
life in big cities, condemning the modern Babylon brought into being by the
industrial revolution.
Tat Te Village failed to please a mass audience may have something to
do with the complexity of its message: return to a spiritually archaic con-
sciousness, or continue with a soulless, empty and pointless existence within
our megalopolises? Nobody wants to mull these things over consciously; they
would rather have our artists and lmmakers take care of that for them, even
if they too are mostly unconscious of what they are doing.
Since these are the kinds of questions that Shyamalan raises in his lm, I
fail to see how this is supposed to be a trivial work, as critics have maintained.
Tis is a thoughtful lm, carefully crafted and multi-layered. Perhaps the crit-
ics should go see it again, or else pick up a few books and learn something
about the history of human consciousness. It is Shyamalans best work so far,
and promises more to come. Unless, that is, he becomes so discouraged by the
:,,
reviews that he decides--as Im guessing he probably will--to remake Te Sixth
Sense or Signs in order to keep the money owing. Hes right: modernity is
confusing.
2. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:
Te New Indiana Jones?
Tis is the best imitation to date of an Indiana Jones movie. In fact, director
Kerry Conran has made one of the best rst movies ever made by a newcomer
to the screen, a rich homage of references to the history of science ction
movies and pulp ction magazines. Te lm itself is actually an elaboration of
a six minute black and white short made by Conran as a tribute to the Flash
Gordon and Buck Rogers-style serials of the :,,cs, which of course was ex-
actly what Lucas and Spielberg set out to do with their Star Wars and Indiana
Jones lms, and so, in a way this lm is a double homage, both to Lucas and
Spielberg movies, and also to the kind of movies that they were hearkening
back to.
Te lm is preoccupied with the pop culture of the :,,cs: indeed, much of
it can be regarded as a moving gallery of covers taken from pulps of the period
like Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Science Fiction. In one shot of
the Empire State building the silhouette of King Kong can be made out climb-
ing the docking tower. But it is loaded with references to other decades as well.
Te lm noir of the :,cs, for instance, serves as a moody lighting model for
many of the shots. Indeed, the lms primary strength rests upon its visuals,
which watches like a cross between Ridley Scott and Orson Welles. Te lm-
makers claim that the lm was shot in black and white and then colorized, so
the colors have an exaggerated, fantastic feel to them, like something out of
a comic book. When an army of gigantic marching robots lands and invades
New York City, we can only imagine that the imagery is not far o from how
Orson Welles might have set up his shots once, long ago. Tere are also refer-
ences to the pop culture of the :,,cs, for at one point, a newspaper montage
which features a headline story from Japan shows the unmistakable silhouette
of Godzilla attacking a building. And the lms nal, climactic rocket ship is
taken straight out of Destination Moon.
Te music sounds suspiciously like a John Williams score, but this is ap-
propriate since we nd visual quotations in scene after scene from Lucas and
Spielberg movies. Te bringing down of the giant robots watches like a rerun
of the ice battle in Te Empire Strikes Back with the giant walking cargo cranes.
Te cloud city of that lm is reduplicated by a oating fortress in which our
Two Film Reviews
:oc
protagonist encounters an old friend who he is uneasy about, reminding us of
Han Solos relationship with Lando Calrissian. And the graphics display for us
visual maps which track our heroess progress across the globe, as in Indiana
Jones. Indeed, the witty repartee between the lms romantic leads played by
Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow recall the banter between Harrison Ford and
Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it is all done in good fun, with taste,
and, unlike Te Mummy, without camp.
Te story, on the other hand, succeeds less well, for it is a series of largely
self-contained set pieces that have an episodic feel to them which seem discon-
nected from the larger narrative. Indeed, the framing narrative in which they
are contained is so thin that sometimes one forgets what the individual scenes
have to do with it. But all of that is forgivable, since the grandeur and epic
sweep of the episodes is handled so expertly that one forgets the storys aws.
What, by the way, is the story? Well, lets see: something about a mad scien-
tist who builds an army of robots who go around stealing the earths animals in
an attempt to build a gigantic space ark, leave the earth behind, and watch it
explode from orbit. You know, the usual war against the machines with which
our contemporary psyche has become so obsessed. Here, the planets ecology
is surrounded and encapsulated by a mechanical environment that attempts
to hijack it, like Biosphere II. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, ever
since Sputnik, we have placed the planet inside an articial environment, thus
turning it into the worlds rst global work of art. Te ecological consequences
of this act will be disastrous, however, but that is another theme handled by
other lms.
Spielberg and Lucas discovered the rst upstart to their kingdom with James
Cameron, who came along on their heels in the :,cs and showed that you
didnt have to be a member of the lm school generation of the :,ocs to do
good popcorn cinema. But now, that generation must make room for Peter
Jackson and Kerry Conran, the new kids on the block. What tricks these two
will have up their sleeves remains to unfold before us in the next couple of
decades.
:o:
Appendix III
My Top Sixteen
After seeing M. Night Shyamalans Top Ten List in a recent issue of Newsweek,
I realized that, in fact, there is a generation gap, for he and I are about the
same age, and our lists overlap as far as Te Godfather, Star Wars, Te Exorcist,
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws are concerned. Tis conrms my suspicion
that most critics spin out the ten best lists of the lms which imprinted their
neurons while their minds were still labile in early youth, and then later simply
congealed and froze into that state of development, incapable of absorbing
anything new. After a certain age, the mind simply shuts down and stops
growing, becoming a walking museum of facts and nostalgia collected and
stored from decades past. Meanwhile, the culture has evolved onward, leaving
such geriatric petrifaction behind. Here are the great lms of my generation:
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Apocalypse Now
3. Te Star Wars lms (all of them, but especially, Te Empire Strikes Back)
4. Te Godfather lms (Part II, in particular)
5. Close Encounters of the Tird Kind
6. Alien
7. Blade Runner
8. Videodrome
9. Raiders of the Lost Ark
10. Te Shining
11. Te Exorcist
12. A.I.
13. Schindlers List
14. Te Road Warrior
15. Titanic
16. Jaws
:o,
Abyss, Te (Cameron), :, ,, ,n.,
o, :c:, :,:, ::, :,:, :c:
Adaptation (Jonze), :,:
Aeneid, Te (Virgil), , :;
Aeschylus, :,, :,c
Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Herzog),
:, :c,, :,:, ::,
A.I. (Spielberg), :,, ;, ,c, :c, :;:,
:;,, :;;, :;,, :;, :,,, :c
:c,, :::, :::, :, :,, :oc
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), ,
Alien (Scott), :;, ,;, o:o, o,,
:,,o, :,;, :c, :c:c,, :,c,
:,,, :,;, :, :,, :oc
Aliens (Cameron), :, o, :,o, :,,,
:,
Alien , (Fincher), :,,
All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy), ::
alphabet, internalization of, :,:
Alphabet vs. the Goddess (Shlain), :,,
Alphaville (Godard), ,:n.
Altered States (Russell), ,, :, :,,
Always (Spielberg), :;,
Amadeus (Forman),
American Gra tti (Lucas), :,, ,:n.
American Werewolf in London, An
(Landis), :c:, :,o
Amistad (Spielberg), :;,
Anaconda, :,c
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky), :;, ::,
Anthropos, Te, o, ;c, ;:, ;,
;,, , :::, :oc See also myth,
Gnostic
Anthroposophy, :
Antonioni, Michelangelo, :o
anima motrix, :,,, :,o, :,,, ::,. See
also Neoplatonism and Plotinus
anima mundi, :,,
Annunciation, Te (Leonardo), ,
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), ,, :;, :c,
::,,, :c;, :,, ::,, :,, :oc
Apocalypse Now Redux, ,:, ,n., :,
Apollonius of Rhodes, :,, :,
Apology (Plato), :;:
Argonautika, :,
Aristotle, :;:
Arnheim, Rudolf, ,
Aryan Papers, Te (Kubrick), :;
Asimov, Isaac, :,;,, :::, :
At the Mountains of Madness
(Lovecraft), ,
Attack of the Clones (Lucas), :o:, :o,,
:,;, :,c
Aurelius, Marcus :,
Austerlitz (Sebald), ::
Back to the Future (Zemeckis), :,,
Bacon, Francis, :,,c, ::;
Bacon, Roger, ::,
Baker, Rick, :,o
Bakshi, Ralph, :,:
Badlands, ,:n.
Ballard, J. G., ,,, o,, :;o, :,,n., :c
Bareld, Owen, ,,
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick), ;, :,, :;;,
:;, :;,, :, :,:
Index
:o
Batman, :,, :,, :,, :,c, :,,,
Batman (Burton), :,,, :c, :,:
Battle Angel (Cameron), :,o
Battle Beyond the Stars, ::;
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), :;
Beethoven, Ludwig van, :o:;, :;,
Being John Malkovich (Jonze), :o
Bells From the Deep (Herzog), ::,
Bergson, Henri, ::c
Berman, Morris, ::
Betolucci, Bernardo, :,
Bicenntenial Man (Columbus), :
Big Fish (Burton), :, :,,
Bigelow, Kathryn, :
Birkerts, Sven, :::
Birth of Tragedy, Te (Nietzsche), o,
:,:c, :;
Birth of Venus (Botticelli), ,;, :,,
Biskind, Peter, :
Blade Runner (Scott), :, ::, :,
::, :,;, :;, :,c, :oc
Blatty, William Peter, :,:
Bocklin, Arnold, o:, ,:
Book of Lost Tales, Te (Tolkien), ,,
Book of the Netherworld, :;
Book of Revelation, :c
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), ,:n.
Borges, Jorge Luis, :,
Botticelli, ,, ,o, ,;, :o, :o, illus.
Boyd, Arthur, ::n.
BrahmavaivartaPurana, ::
Brando, Marlon, ::
Brazil (Gilliam), :, :,,
Brood, Te (Cronenberg), o, ;:, ;:,
;, :, :,,,
Buddenbrooks (Mann), :o:, :,;
Buuel, Luis, :o, :,, :,:
Burden of Dreams (Blank), :,;
Burning Chrome (Gibson), o,n.
Burton, Tim, :,,, :c, ::, :,,
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, :
Burroughs, William, :, :
Byron, Lord :
Calvino, Italo, ::, :,:
Campbell, Joseph, :, ,, ,, :, ::, :,,
o, :
Cameron, James, ,, :,, oc, :,, :,o,
:,:, :,,, :,o, :,, :;, :,
Capek, Karl, :::
Carnal Knowledge, ,:n.
Carpenter, John, ,n.
Carrie (King), :,
Carter, Chris, ,n.
Casino (Scorsese), :,n.
Catch Me If You Can :;,, :;,
Cell, Te (Singh), oo, :,;c, :
Chariots of the Gods? (von Daniken),
:, ,:n.
Chimes at Midnight (Welles), :o
Chereau, Patrice, ,:
Chronicles of Riddick, ::;
Chuangtzu, ;
Citizen Kane (Welles), :,, :o, :c;
City in History, Te (Mumford), :,
::n.
Clarke, Arthur C., :, ,,, c, :, ,
o, ,,
Clarissa (Richardson), :,
Clash of the Titans (Davis), :,o
Clockwork Orange, A (Kubrick), ,o,
,:n., :;;, :;, :::, ::, :,c
Close Encounters of the Tird Kind
(Spielberg), , :;, :c, ,
o:, :;,, :;,, ::, ::, :,,
:cc,, ::, :,:, :oc
Cobra Verde (Herzog), :c
Color Purple, Te (Spielberg), :;,,
Index
:o,
:, :o
Concrete Island (Ballard), :c
Conrad, Joseph, ::, :co
Conran, Kerry, :,,,
Conversations with Eckermann
(Goethe), :;
Cooper, Merian C., ::,,c, :,
Coppola, Francis Ford, , ,, :o, :,,
::, :,, :o, ,c, ,:, ,:, ,,, ,, oc,
:c;, :;,, ::,, :,c, :,, ::
Corben, Richard, :;, :,:
Corpus Hermeticum, ,
Corrections, Te (Franzen), ::
cosmology, as changing imago
mundi, ,, ,,o; Ptolemaic,
c; Manichean, c; and angels,
:, ; cyclical vs. linear, ,,;
Homeric and Hellenistic, :c,
See also myth, Manichean
Crash (Ballard), ,,, o,n.
Crash (Cronenberg), oo, ;, ,c,
,:, :,
Creative Evolution (Bergson), ::c
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), ::
Cronenberg, David, ,, :,, :o, oo,c,
:c, :;,, :c, :,,
Crow, Te (Proyas), :,
Crying of Lot ,), Te (Pynchon), :,,,
:o
Culture of Cities, Te, (Mumford),
:c,n.
cultural archaeology, :
Danse Macabre (King), :,c
Darabont, Frank, :,;, :,, :;
Dark Angel (Cameron), :,o
Dark City (Proyas), ,, ,c, :::,,
:,, :o
Dark Knight Returns (Miller), :,:
Dante, :, c, ,o, :,, :,;, ::o
Daredevil, :
Daredevil, :,:
Dawn of the Dead (Romero), :,,, :,
Day After Tomorrow, ::;
Day the Earth Stood Still, Te (Wise),
:,,
Dead Man (Jarmusch), :
Dead Ringers (Cronenberg), :, oo,
;,:, ,, ,c, :c
Dead Zone, Te (Cronenberg), :,
oo, ;o;, :, :, :,
Death Wish, :,
Decline of the West, Te (Spengler),
,, o:, o,n., :,o, :;cn., ::c, :::
De Corporis Fabrica (Vesalius), illus.,
:,,
deep structures, :, ,:,:n., :::, :::
Deliverance, ,:n.
Demoiselles dAvignon, Les (Picasso),
,o
Denby, David, :
Depp, Johnny, :
Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa), :, :,c
Descartes, ::, ::;
Descent of the Virgin Into Hell,
Te, :::,
DeviMahatmya, ::,
Disappearance of Childhood, Te
(Postman), :
Dispatches (Herr), :
Divine Comedy, Te (Dante), :c, :;,
:c, :::
Doctor Faustus (Mann), :,,
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick), , :;,,
::, :o
Don Juan (Byron), :
Don Quixote (Cervantes), , :,, ::,,
:c, ::,
:oo
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, :o, ::,
Dracula (Browning), ::,,c, :c:
Dracula (Coppola), :o, ::
Dream of Scipio, ,,c
Dreamcatcher (Kasdan), :,:
Duel (Spielberg), :,,
Dune (Lynch), ,, :,,
Dune (Herbert), :,, o,, :,;, :,,,
:o,, :,:
Easy Rider, ,:n.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Biskind),
:
Ebert, Roger, ,c, :,, :,c
Eco, Umberto, ::
Edward Scissorhands (Burton), ::
Ed Wood (Burton), :,
Egyptian Book of the Dead, oc
Einstein, ::c
Eisner, Will, :,,
electronic, media, ::; technology,
:::,; eects on literacy, :,;
society, :c:
Eliade, Mircea, :
Eliot, T. S., ::, ::,
Empire of the Sun (Ballard), :;;
Empire of the Sun (Spielberg), :;o,
:;, :;,, :, :o, :;, :c
Empire Strikes Back, Te (Kershner),
,, ,n., :o,, :c, :,, :,c,
:,
: Enoch, :,
Enuma Elish, ::;, :,:
Escape From L.A. (Carpenter), :
Escape From New York (Carpenter),
:,,
E.T. (Spielberg), ,, :, :;,, :;,o,
:;,, :, :;, :,;, :,c
Eternal Present, Te (Giedion),
:coc;
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
:,
Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), :
Euripides, :,
Even Dwarfs Started Small (Herzog),
:c,, :co
EverPresent Origin, Te (Gebser),
,n., ,n., :,, ::, ::o, ::n.
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), :;,, :;,
:;,, :;, :;
Existenz (Cronenberg), oo, :, ;
,, ,c, :;, :, :,c, :,,
Exorcist, Te (Friedkin), ,o, ,:n., o:,
:,:,, :,o, :c, ::, :,c, :oc
Fall into the Machine, the , ,,,,
,o, oo, o, ,:, :o, :,:; see also
myth (Gnostic) of the fall
Fanny & Alexander (Bergman),
:,o,;
Fargo (Coen), :,n.
Fata Morgana (Herzog), :c,, :co
Fellini, Federico, :,, ::, ::,, :,:,
:,:
Fellini Satyricon, ::
Fifth Child, Te (Lessing), :c
lm, and dreams , o;; as
Gesamtkunstwerk, ; and myth,
,, :; and the novel, :, ,; and
popular culture, ,; and the
superhero, :,:; as Xray of
electronic society, :,o
Final Fantasy: Te Spirits Within, :,
Fire in the Sky, ::
Fistful of Dollars, A (Leone), :,,n.
Five Easy Pieces, ,:n.
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog), :c, ::,::,
:,;, :,c
Index
:o;
Flaccus, Valerius, :,, :,
Fly, Te (Cronenberg), :, ,;, o, oo,
;;,, , ,, :, :c
Forbidden Planet , ::;
Ford, John, :o, :;
Forman, Milos,
Foundation (Asimov), ;o, :,;,,
:,,, :,:
Foundations Edge (Asimov), :,
Frankenstein (Shelley), :,
Frankenstein (Whale), ::,,c
Franzen, Jonathan, ::
Frazer, James, ,
French Connection, Te, ,:n.
Friday (Tournier), :o
Friedkin, William, :,:
Friedrich, Caspar David, :::
From the Earth to the Moon (Verne),
:;
From Ritual to Romance (Weston),
::, :,, :,
Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick), :;,, :;,
:o, :;, :c
Gaia theory, ::,
Galileo, ,o;
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais),
Gattaca (Niccol), :, :::, :,, :,:

Gebser, Jean, ,, ,n., ,, ,n., ::
:,, ::o:;, ::,n., :,:
Genesis o, ::, ,
Ghost of Slumber Mountain, Te, ::,
Gibson, William, ,o, o,, ;,, ;, ::,
:,;
Giedion, Siegfried, :co, ::n.
Giger, H. R., o:, o, oo, :,, :,,, :
Gilgamesh (as character), o, :,, ,;,
::;, ::n., :,,
Gimbutas, Marija, :,, :cn., ::n.,
::n.
Glass, Philip, :;
Godfather, Te (Coppola), , :, ,o,
,:n., :c;, :c, ::,, :,c, :oc
Godfather, Te (Puzo), oc
Godfather Part II, Te, :,, :,c, :,,
:oc
Godfather Part III, Te, :o, ::
Godzilla (:,,), :,:
Goethe, Johann, ,, o:, :o:, :;,
:,,n., :,
Golden Ass, Te (Apuleius), :,c, :c,
Golden Bough, Te (Frazer), ,, :::,,
:, ,:, ,, :,
Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Te
(Hessler), ::,, :,o
Goodfellas (Scorsese), :o, ::,, :,n.
Graduate, Te, (Nichols), ,:n.
Gravitys Rainbow (Pynchon), :o, :,c,
:,,, ::n., :o:, :,
Great Chain of Being, ,o, :::, :o,
:,o
Greek Myths (Graves), :
Green Mile, Te (Darabont), :,, :;
Gremlins (Dante), :,c, :,,
Ground Beneath Her Feet, Te
(Rushdie), ::
Guernica (Picasso), ,, ::,
Gutenberg Elegies, Te (Birkerts), :,,
:::, ::n.
Gutenberg Galaxy, Te (McLuhan),
:, ::, ,;
Halloween (Carpenter), :,c, :,,
Hamlet (Branagh), :
Hamlet (Shakespeare), , :,, :oo;,
:,,
Harold and Maude :
:o
Harryhausen, Ray, :,c, :,, ::,, :,o,
:,, ::
Haunting, Te (Wise), :o, :,;
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), ::, :o,
:,, :c;, :,
Heart of Glass (Herzog), :c;, ::c:::,
::,, :,:
Heavy Metal, :,,n., :,o
Hebbel :,
Heidegger, Martin, ,,, :c,n., :::,
::,n., :;o, :,,n.
Hellboy, :,
Herrigel, Eugene, :o;, :;cn
Hero With a Tousand Faces, Te
(Campbell) :n., ,, ,, :,, :, :,,
:,,
Herzog, Werner, ,, ,, :c, :c,, :c
::,, :,,, :;, :,c
Heston, Charlton, ::;
Hidden Fortress, Te (Kurosawa), :oo
Hillman, James, ,c, ,,n., :::
Hirst, Damien, :,
Hitchcock, Alfred, :;, ::
History of Violence, A (Cronenberg),
oo
Hobbit, Te (Tolkien), ,, ,,
Hook (Spielberg), :;;
Hollow Men, Te (Eliot), ::, ::,
Homer, o, ,;, ,, :c
Howling, Te (Dante), :c:, :,,
Hulk, Te (Lee), :,,, :,,
Humbling of Indra, Te, ::,
Hunger, Te (Scott), :, :,
Ibsen, :,
If on a Winters Night a Traveller
(Calvino), ::, :,,
Iliad, Te (Homer), , ::;, ::,
Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds
of Myth and Science (Tompson),
,,n., ,:n.
Inferno, Te (Dante), , :;, :, :,,
:::
Island of the Day Before, Te (Eco), ::
Invaders From Mars, :,,
Invincible (Herzog), :c, :,c
I, Robot (Proyas), ::;
Jackson, Peter, :, :c:, :c,, :;,, :,o,
:,,, :,,
Jacobs Ladder (Lynne), ,, ::, :,:
Jakob, Dennis, ::
Jason and the Argonauts (Chaey),
:,o
Jaws (Spielberg), , :, :,,, :,;, :;,,
::, ::, :, :o, :,,, :c:, :c:,
:,c, :,,, :oc
Jeers, Robinson, :c:, ::n.
Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso),
J.F.K. (Stone), :,o, :,n.
Johnson, Diane, :,
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(Verne), :;
Joyce, James, ,, ::, :o, ,:, :o, :c,
:,
Jung, C. G., :,, ,:, ,n., o,, ::, :,,
:,;, :::, :,
Jungian, :n., o, ,c, ,, :, , ,, :,:
Jurassic Park (Spielberg), :,o;, :;,,
:;,, :, :o, :, :,c, ::
Kalevala , Te, ;,, o, ,;
Kaspar Hauser (Herzog), :c;, :c
::c, :,c
Kant, Immanuel, :,, :;, ::, ::,
:,
Kaufman, Charlie, :o, :,:, :,
Kaufman, Philip, :;,, :,,
Index
:o,
Kena Upanishad, ::, ::,
Kepler, Johannes, quoted, ::;
King Kong, :,
King Kong (Cooper), ::,,:, :,o,
:,, :,c
King Lear (Shakespeare), , :,, o
King, Stephen, :,, ::, ;o, ;;, :,,
:,c, :,, :,:
Kinski, Klaus, :co, :c, :,;
Kirby, Jack, :,,, ::,
Klee, Paul, ,
Koestler, Arthur, :
Kubrick, Stanley, ,, ,, :c, :,, :o, :,
:, ,:, ,;, ,,, o, ;, , ,, ,c,
,, o,, ;, ::,, ::;, :,,, :;::,,,
::,, :,, :,;, :,, :;
Kurosawa, Akira, :oo
Lake Placid, :,c
Landis, John, :,o
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, :,o
Last Picture Show, Te
(Bogdanovich), ,:n.
Last Wave, Te (Weir), ,, :c:, :,, :,:
Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese),
:c, :c
Lazarillo de Tormes,
Lem, Stanislaw, :
Leonardo da Vinci, :o, ,, :;,, :;,
::,, :,
Lessing, Doris, ::, :o,
literacy, erosion of, :,:, :,, ;,
Little Buddha (Bertolucci), :,
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Herzog),
:c
Logans Run, :,:, :,c
Lolita (Kubrick), :;;
Lolita (Nabokov), :;,, :,,
Lord of the Rings, Te (Tolkien), ;,
:,, ,:, ,, ,, ,,, :cc, :o, :,;;
compared with Star Wars, :c:,
:o,o, :,, :,:
Lord of the Rings, Te (Jackson), :o,
::,, :c, :, :c:, :c, ::
Lost Highway (Lynch), :,
Lost World, Te, :,c
Livy, :,
Lowry, Malcolm, ,:
Lovecraft, H.P., ,, o,
Lucas, George, ,, ,, ,, :o, :,, :,, :o,
:,, ;, ,, :,,, :,;, :,, :oc, :o,
:o, :o,, :;,, ::,, :,:, :,, :,,,
:,o, ::,, :,, :,,; compared
with Tolkien, :c:
Lucan, :,
Lumires (brothers), :,
Macbeth (Shakespeare),
Mad Max, :, oc
Mad Max Beyond Tunderdome
(Miller), :,,
Magic Flute, Te (Mozart),
Magnus Annus, ,on., ,,, :oc
Mahabharata, Te,
Magic Mountain, Te, :c, :o, :o
Mahler, Gustav, :;
Malcolm X (Lee), :,n.
Man a Machine (La Mettrie), ::;
Man and Technics (Spengler), ,,,
o,n.
Man Who Knew Too Much, Te,
(Hitchcock), :o, ::
Man Without Qualities, Te (Musil),
:o
Mandelstam, Osip, :::, ::,n.,
Mann, Tomas, ,, ::, :, :o, :o:, :,,
:,,
Margulis, Lynn, :,c
:;c
Marschall, Ken, oc, o,n.
Mars Attacks! (Burton), :
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, ::
Marriage of Figaro, Te (Mozart),
Mary Shelleys Frankenstein
(Branagh), :
M.A.S.H. (Altman), ,:n.
Masks of God, Te (Campbell), :
Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), ::
Matrix, Te (Wachowski brothers),
oo, :o;, :
M.Buttery (Cronenberg), oo, :,
,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman),
:, ,:n.
McKenna, Terence, :::, :,
McLuhan, Marshall, :, :n., ::, ,,, ,;,
o,, ;,, ;,
;,, :c:, :,,, :, :,, :o,, :,o, ::,
:,,
Mean Streets (Scorsese), ,:n.
Mechanical Bride, Te (McLuhan),
,;
Mechanization Takes Command
(Giedeon), :o:
Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), :,
Melies, George, :,
Melville, Herman,
Memoirs of a Geisha (Golden), ::, :
Metamorphosis, Te, (Kafka), ::,
Metropolis (Lang), ,:n., :,,, ::n.,
::, :::
Michael Kohlhaas (Kleist), :c
Michelangelo, ,, :o, :;,, :;
Midnight Cowboy, :, ,:n.
Milosz, Cszeslaw, ::c
Milius, John, ::, :,, :,
Miller, Frank, ::n., :,:, :c, :,:
Miller, George, ,, :, :,
Minority Report (Spielberg), :;,, :,c
Mirandola, Pico della, :o, :;cn.
Moby Dick (Huston), , :o, :c:
Moby Dick (Melville), :,, :,;, :c, :c:
Mona Lisa (Leonardo), :;,
Monadology (Leibniz), ::
Moebius, :;, :,o
Moore, Michael, ;
Mozart, :o:;, :;,
Mulholland Drive (Lynch), :,
Mumford, Lewis, :, ,, ,n., :cc, :c,,
:c,n., :o,, :c,, :::, ::n., ::,n.
Musil, Robert, ::, :,,
Muybridge, Eadward, :,, ::, :::
myth, and lm, ,, :; contrasted
with folktale, :n.; movement in
Hollywood, ,; function of, ;;
Gnostic (of the Fall), , ,,,,
,o, oo, ;,, , :,, :; and
cosmology, ; of progress, ,;
Manichean, o;, :cc, :::, :oc;
of the goddess, :,,,,. See also
Anthropos and Fall
:),: (Spielberg), :o
Naked Lunch (Cronenberg), oo,
:,, ::
Neoplatonism, ,, :,,, :o, :o,,
:;:. See also anima mundi and
Plotinus
Nerdrum, Odd, :
Neuromancer (Gibson), o,, ;,, :,;
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ,, o, :, :,:c,
:,, :,, :;,, ::,, :,,
Night of the Living Dead (Romero),
o,, ::
Nightmare Before Christmas (Burton),
:,
Nixon (Stone), :,n.
Index
:;:
Northfork (Polish), ,n., :,:
Nosferatu (Herzog), :c;, :::::,, :,,
Nosferatu (Murnau), :::, :c:
Nostalghia (Tarkovsky), ::,
novel, decline of, :,
OBrien, Willis ::,,c
Odyssey, Te (Homer), , :c, :;, :,,
:::, :,
Oedipus (and the Sphinx), :,:,:,
:,c
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), :,,
Oldman, Gary, ::
Omen, Te (Donner), ::, :,:
Once Upon a Time in America
(Leone), ::,
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
(Forman), :
Open City, :;
Open Water, :,c
Optical Tesaurus (Alhazen), ::,
oral culture, contrasted with print,
:o;
Oration on the Dignity of Man
(Mirandola), :o,
Oresteia, Te (Aeschylus), :,,, :,c
Origin of Species (Darwin), ,
Outline of Occult Science (Steiner),
Othello (Shakespeare),
Ovid, :,
Pallas and the Centaur (Botticelli),
:o, :o, illus.
Pantheon, ::c, :: illus.
Paradise (Morrison), ::
Paradise Lost (Milton), , :c, ,, :c,
:,;
Paradiso (Dante), :, ,:n.
Paths of Glory (Kubrick), :;
Peter Pan (Barrie), :;,, :;,
Petrarch, ::,
Perfect Storm, Te, o
Perfume (Sskind), ::, :c, :;,
Petronius, :,, ::
Phaedo (Plato), :;:
Phantom Menace, Te (Lucas), :,o,
:,;, :oc, :o:, :o,, :oo, :;, :,c
Pi (Aronofsky), :o
Picasso, ,, :o, ,o
Pinocchio (Collodi), :c, :;,, :;;,
:;, :,c, :::
Piranha (Dante), :,c, :,:, :,,
Piranha II: Te Spawning
(Cameron), :,,
Planet of the Apes, ::;
Plato, ,, :o,, :;:,, ::,
Plato Prehistorian (Settegast), :c
Plotinus, ,. See also Neoplatonism
and anima mundi
Plutarch, :,
Poltergeist (HooperSpielberg), :;,,
:, :o, :,;, :,c
popular culture, and modernism ,;
and the novel, :,; and lm, :;
Postman, Neil, ::, :
Princess Mononoke, :,
Primavera (Botticelli), ,o
Proust, Marcel, ::, :o, :,,
Proyas, Alex, ,
Pushkin, :, ::,
Pynchon, Tomas, ::, ,:, ,n., ,o,
:,c, :,,, ::n. :,
Pythagoras, ,
Quashie, Sid, ,n.
Rabid (Cronenberg), ;c, ;:
:;:
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg),
,, ::,, :c, :c, ::, ::, :,
:c,, :,,o, :,,, :oc
Ramayana, Te, :,:, ::;
Raphael, :;:,
Reaves, Keanu, :,
Red Planet, :
Rembrandt, :o:;, ,,, :
Remembrance of Tings Past (Proust),
:,, :o
Republic, Te (Cicero), ,,
Republic, Te (Plato), :o,
Return of the Jedi, :,c, :,c, :,, :,,
Return of the King (Jackson), :,,
Revenge of the Sith (Lucas), :o,,
:,,,
Revisioning Psychology (Hillman),
,,n.
Revolt of the Masses, Te, ::
Rheingold, Das (Wagner), ,:, :::
Ring, Te, :,:
Rig-Veda, ::
Road Warrior, Te (Miller), ,, :, :,
oc, :,, :,,, :,,, :oc
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), :,
Robocop (Veerhoeven), :,
Ronin (Miller), ::n.
Rosemarys Baby (Polanski), ,:n., ::,
:,:
Rules of the Game (Renoir), :;
Rushdie, Salman, ::, ::
Ruskin, John, :o:, :;cn.
Saint Brendan, ,;, ,, illus.
Sandman, Te, (Homann), :::
Sanjuro (Kurosawa), :oo
Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky), ::
Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg), :;
Seneca, :,, ::
Settegast, Mary, :c, ::n.
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa), ::,, :,,n.,
:oo
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (Juran), :,o
Scanners (Cronenberg), ;:, ;
Scream of Stone (Herzog), :c
Schindlers List (Spielberg), :o, :;,,
:;, :, :o, :;, :,, :,n.,
:oc
School of Athens (Raphael), :;: illus.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, :,, :;
Scorsese, Martin, :,, :o, ,;, :c
Scott, Ridley, :,
Shadow, Te, :,, :;
ShahNama, Te, :,:
Shampoo, :
Shawshank Redemption, Te
(Darabont), :,, :;
Sheltering Sky, Te (Bertolucci), ::
Shikasta (Lessing), :o
Shining, Te (King), :,, :;,
Shining, Te (Kubrick), :, :;;, :;,
:c, :,, :o, :;, :,, :oc
Shivers (Cronenberg), o,
Shlain, Leonard, :,,
Shuster, Joel, :,, :,c
Shyamalan, M. Night, :;, :,
:,,, :oc
Siegel, Jerry, :,, :,c
Signs (Shyamalan), :,c, :,
Signs of Life (Herzog), :c,, :co
Silmarillion, Te (Tolkien), ,, ,,
Silver Bullett, :c:
Simone (Niccol), :::, :,:
Sinbad the Sailor (Klee), :c:, :c:
illus.
Singh, Tarsem, :,, :c
Sixth Sense, Te (Shyamalan), :;,
:,
Index
:;,
Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow (Conran), :,,
Song of Roland,
Sophocles, :,
Solaris (Lem), ::o, ::,
Solaris (Sodherberg), :,:
Solaris (Tarkovsky), :c, :c,, ::o::,,
:,:; contrasted with :oo:,
::::, ::,, :,:; and Christian
theology, :::
Species, :,c
Spengler, Oswald, ,, :, :,, ,, ,,,
o:, ::,::o, ::: ::,n., :,o, :;cn.;
quoted, :,,, ::c, :::, :::,
::n., ::,n.
Spider Man, :,, :,:
Spiderman (Raimi), :,,, :,:
Spiderman : (Raimi), :,
Spider (Cronenberg), oo. :, ,,c,
:,c
Spielberg, Steven, :c, :,, :o, ::, :,,
;;, :,;, :;::,,, ::,, :,:, :,,,
:,o, :,,, :c, :,, :,c, :,, :,,
:,,
Stalker (Tarkovsky), ::,
Star Child, Te, :, ,on., :, ,c, ,,
, ;,, ::o, :o:, ::, :,:, :,,, :,,
Star Trek, ,, ,;, ::;
Star Wars, ,, , ,, ::,, ::, :o, ,;,
,,, o:, ,,, :,, :,,;c, :;:,
:,c, :,, :,::, :,,, :,,, :,,,
:,, :,:, :,:, :,; compared
with Te Lord of the Rings, :c:,
:o,, :,:
Stepford Wives, Te, (:,)
Steiner, Rudolf, c, , ,:n., ,:n.,
,:, ,,, :c,n. ::,, ::,, :o;
Ahrimanic beings, ,,
Strange Days (Bigelow), :
Straw Dogs (Peckinpah), ,:n.
Stone, Oliver, :,o
Stones of Venice, Te (Ruskin), :o:
Stroszek (Herzog), :c;
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, :;
Stck, Franz, ,:
Study of History, A (Toynbee), ::, :,
Suetonius, :,
Superman, :,, :;, :,c
Superman (Donner), :oc, :,,, :,
:,:
Sskind, Patrick, ::, :c
Suzuki, D. T., :o;, :;cn.
:oo:: A Space Odyssey ,, , ,, o, ,,
::,, :c, :,, :o,, ,:, ,, ,n.,
,o,:, ,:n., ,, :c:, :c, ::;, ::c,
:oc, :;, :;,, ::, :,, :, :o,
:;, :,:, :::, ::, :,c, :,:, :,:,
:,, :,, :oc; contrasted with
Solaris, ::::;
:o:o (Hyams), ,;, :,,
:o:: Odyssey Tree (Clarke), ,n.
,oo:: Te Final Odyssey (Clarke), on.
Tacitus, :,
Tarkovsky, Andrei, ,, :c, :c,, ::,
::,, ::o, :,,, ::,
Tarzan, :,
Technics and Civilization (Mumford),
:cc:c:, :o:, :;cn.
Tempest, Te (Shakespeare), :,o
Ten Commandments (Demille),
:cc,
Terminal, Te (Spielberg), :;,, :,
Terminator, Te, :, ,;, :,o, :oc, :::,
::, :,c, :,
Terminator : (Cameron), ::, :o
Terminator , (Mostow), :,,
Teogony (Hesiod), ,,
:;
Ting, Te (Carpenter), :, ,n., o,
::;, :,;, :,, :;
Ting, Te (Hawks), ,n.
Tompson, William Irwin, ,:, ,,n.,
o, ,:n., o, :c,n., :,c, :,,
:cn., ::n., ::n.,
THX::, (Lucas), :,
Trone of Blood (Kurosawa), :oo
Tibetan Book of the Dead, Te, ,, ::
Timaeus (Plato), :,,, :;:, :;,
Time Out of Joint (Dick), :::
Titanic (Cameron), :o, ,;, o, :,:,
:,c, :c, :,, :oc
Tolkien, J. R. R., ,, :c,, :c,n.,:c,
::o, :,,, :o,, :,c; as anti-
modern, ,;, :cc
Tom Jones (Fielding), :,
Tournier, Michel, :,
Toynbee, Arnold, :, ,
Trial, Te (Kafka), :o, :;, ::,
Trial, Te (Welles), ,:n.
Trip to the Moon, A (Melies), c
True Lies (Cameron), ::
Truman Show, Te (Weir), ,, o, :,,
:,, :::, :,, :o, :,:, :,, :,;
Tucker (Coppola), :
Twilight of American Culture, Te
(Berman), ::, :,
Twilight of the Clockwork God
(Ebert), ::,
Twilight Zone: Te Movie, :;o
Two Towers, Te (Jackson), :,:
Ugetsu, :;
Ulansey, David, ,:
Ulysses (Joyce), :c, :,, :;, ,:, :o, :c
Unbreakable (Shyamalan), :
Under the Volcano (Lowry), ,:
Understanding Media (McLuhan), ,;
V. (Pynchon), ,o;, :,,, ::n., :,
Vesalius, c, :,,
Vico, Giambattista, ,
Videodrome (Cronenberg), :, o,
;,o, ;;, ;, :, :, ,, ;, ,,
,c, :,, :;, :oc
Village, Te (Shyamalan), :,,
Virgil, :,, :, :,;, :,,
visionary, vs. realism, :,; in lm, :
von Dechend , Hertha, ,:
Voyage of Saint Brendan, ,
Wagner, Richard ,:, :;, ,,, ,:,
:,,, :,;, :o,, :, :,,; and
Gesamtkunstwerk, ,
Waits, Tom, ::
Waning of the Middle Ages, Te
(Huizinga) ::
War of the Worlds, :,, ;, :,n., :,,
War of the Worlds (Spielberg), :;,,
:;,, :, :,:
Warner, Marina, :,c, :,o, :cn.
Wartime Lies (Begley), :;
Watchmen (Moore), :,:
Waterworld (Costner), o
Waste Land, Te (Eliot), ::::; :,
Weir, Peter, ,
Welles, Orson, :o, :;, :o, :,
Westworld, :::, ::, :,c, :,, :c
What Dreams May Come, :o
Whelan, Michael, on.
Where the Green Ants Dream
(Herzog), :c:, :c
Whitlock, Albert, ::
Whitehead, Alfred North, ::c::
Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), :o
Wilber, Ken, ,c, ,:n.
Wild Bunch, Te (Peckinpah), ,:n.
Wizard of Oz (Fleming), :,, ;
Index
:;,
Wizards (Bakshi), :,:
Wolfen, :c:
Woyzeck (Herzog), :c;, :c
XFiles: Fight the Future, Te
(Carter), ,n., ::;, :o
XMen, Te, :,,, :
Yojimbo (Kurosawa), :oo
Zen Buddhism, and Star Wars, :oo
o, :o,, :;:
Zimmer, Heinrich, ,c

Celluluid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons

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Celluloid Heroes

environment, our contemporary celluloid myths are attempting to attune us

in which a group of extraterrestrials de-

If we look at discarded drafts of the novel

* In fact, Camerons lm Te Abyss may have been inspired by a discarded earlier

waking, which is subtly paralleled by art vs. reality.

Tus when, as a philosopher of culture, I take into consideration the im-

Gattaca (Niccol), :, :::, :,, :,:

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Celluluid Heroes &amp; Mechanical Dragons

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Celluluid Heroes &amp; Mechanical Dragons

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Copyright:

Available Formats

Celluloid Heroes

environment, our contemporary celluloid myths are attempting to attune us

in which a group of extraterrestrials de-

If we look at discarded drafts of the novel

* In fact, Camerons lm Te Abyss may have been inspired by a discarded earlier

waking, which is subtly paralleled by art vs. reality.

Tus when, as a philosopher of culture, I take into consideration the im-

Gattaca (Niccol), :, :::, :,, :,:

You might also like

Celluluid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons

Celluluid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons