The Devil May Very Well Have Put Dinosaurs Here

One of my favorite musical comebacks in recent years was made by Alice in Chains, with Black Gives Way to Blue in 2009. I was sufficiently moved to blog about it at the time (on a MySpace page I can no longer access), and my enjoyment of the album has only grown in the years since. Thus, I have been eagerly awaiting a new release, and The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here does not disappoint.

Musically, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here grinds along to almost 70 minutes in inimitable AIC style: plenty of dissonance, sludgy guitars, thoughtful lyrics and healthy doses of acoustic chill and melancholy. The new AIC never comes screaming and kicking at you the way early releases like Facelift and Dirt did, but the band has mastered a polish that was inchoate before. Much more could be said about that, but it’s the album title I want to focus on.

The first thing I thought when I heard the title The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here was that according to the logic of common Christian apologetics, the Devil might very well have done just that. I’m referring to the cosmological argument for the existence of God, according to which everything is cause and effect, and since the chain could not go back to infinity, there must have been a First Cause, a Prime Mover, that got the whole shebang going.

Theologians have known for some time now that the argument doesn’t bear scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop Christian, Muslim and Jewish apologists from purveying its poor logic anyway. One of the biggest problems is that even if it proved the existence of a First Cause--and it doesn’t by a long shot, for reasons I won’t go into here--it would not tell us anything at all about what that First Cause was like. It wouldn’t tell us that the First Cause was good, still engaging with the world, or did things like send his son to earth to suffer and die for our sins. In other words, the First Cause could just as well be the Devil--and as Creator, put dinosaurs here.

The songwriters more likely had in mind the belief to which some fundamentalist types of Christian subscribe according to which the Devil put dinosaur fossils in the soil in order to deceive people about the true nature of God’s creation. They believe, according to a literalist interpretation of certain passages in the Bible, that God created the Earth less than 10,000 years ago. Since dinosaur fossils date many millions of years back, the Devil, the great Deceiver, must have put them there and made them look older than the Earth really is.

Obviously, not all Christians feel the need for such mental gymnastics to preserve their faith. I would guess that AIC count themselves atheists, but it doesn’t take an atheist to deplore the ignorance, money, hate and fear that come with some religious strains such as those of Westboro Baptist Church, which AIC clearly takes aim at in the song after which the album is named:

“The devil put dinosaurs here

Jesus don’t like a queer

The devil put dinosaurs here

No problem with faith, just fear.”

Okay, they’re just rock-and-roll lyrics, but I’ll take a voice raised for the side of Good anywhere I can find it, and I’ll add mine to it.

 

 

Han Solo: Space Cowboy and Total Conformist

I was sitting around thinking about Star Wars the other day and realized that Han Solo is the most conformist of the main characters in the films.

On the surface, Han Solo is a non-conformist character. In A New Hope, he is an outlaw who evades Imperial cruisers while smuggling goods in his ship the Millennium Falcon, ejects his cargo into space when it’s convenient, and cares little for political causes or maidens in distress. He is a misfit who exists in the dark spaces between the law (the Empire) and the opposition (the Rebellion), a space cowboy who follows no code but his own--and that code extends only as far as making some cash and saving his bacon.

Han Solo is also non-conformist at a deeper level. Star Wars is more fantasy than science fiction for the way the drama hinges around mythological and psychological archetypes, as well as dramatic stock characters. Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi are the Wise Old Man, Leia is the Maiden, the droids are the Clown, Luke is the Hero, Vader is the Father, and so forth. Han Solo clearly fits into this conceptual framework as the Renegade, but with one important difference: Harrison Ford portrays him too well. Ford brings so much charisma and swagger, as well as emotional vulnerability, to the role that his archetypal function is threatened by significant tinges of individuality. As performed, he does not conform to George Lucas’s aesthetic order.

Perhaps this is what has made Han Solo a fan favorite for decades, and perhaps the style Harrison Ford brought to the role is what lay behind many fans’ negative reaction to the prequels with all the one-dimensional characters and flat acting: No Han Solo, no Harrison Ford, no personality, no flair.

Then why do I say that Han Solo is the most conformist character in Star Wars?

Because this paragon of non-conformism eventually conforms. By the end of Return of the Jedi, he has joined a cause greater than himself, risked his life for others, fallen in love, and become a general for the Rebel Alliance. He will go on in the novels to become married (with children) and a functionary for the New Republic, the new ruling order. As a character in a work of art, he is all the more conformist for having once been a true rebel.

I have always found the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi when Leia kisses him to be disappointing, because when she kisses him--essentially a marriage at the end of all the comedy on Endor--his fall into conformity is complete. He is no longer the Han Solo we have known and loved. Love and kisses, a steady job, and little progeny may be all right for real people, but not wise-cracking, hot-shot pilots who once made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

It is the diminished Han Solo that we can expect from the upcoming movies, set as they are after Return of the Jedi, but if the rumors are true, at least we will have Harrison Ford to play him.

Toward No Ideology

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of capitalism, and one strain of my reading has been in revolutionary history and leftist strains of thought. Obviously this means engagement with Marxism, and I have developed some sympathy for many of its concerns. So when it comes to ideology, where does this leave me?

Unsatisfied with the dark side of American capitalism, skeptical that alternate forms of capitalism can make a significant change, wary of drastic solutions of an anarchist or communist bent, and still trying to figure out what socialism could mean in an American context, it leaves me a pragmatist seeking any improvement--even a tweak--that can be made at all, and a philosopher willing to keep thinking, to keep looking for a new big answer to social and economic injustices.

Concerned with ideology, I subscribe to none. Dissatisfied with current options, I seek another. There is no reason that the dichotomy drilled into us by the Cold War--no-holds-barred American-style capitalism versus Soviet-style totalitarian communism--should present the only two possible arrangements for society on a national, international or global scale.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite YouTube clips of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek--someone who appears frequently in this blog and who identifies as “some kind of a communist”--in which he says that in light of all the messes in the 20th Century that arose from attempts to implement big solutions, maybe it’s time that, instead of doing something, we sat back and thought for a while:

Sometimes it’s okay just to think and to leave the perfect, big solution for later. Meanwhile, however, smaller actions can be taken for more modest improvements. And in some places of the world, such as those touched by the Arab Spring, imperfect change may be substantial indeed.

The Limits of Feminism in Queen Christina

I’ve been on a Greta Garbo kick the past year. Grand Hotel was an outstanding film all around, but Camille and Mata Hari left me unmoved. Then just the other night, I watched Queen Christina (1933), based loosely on the life of Queen Christina of Sweden. What interested me most on a first viewing was the film’s handling of feminist themes.

The movie begins in a strong feminist current. Queen Christina, who is given to wearing manly clothes, is a forceful and capable ruler who clearly needs no man, either for counsel or romance. Her court wants her to marry the national war hero Karl Gustav, and the scheming Count Magnus is never far away, but she insists, “I shall die a bachelor!” The only person she truly has an interest in is another woman, the dainty and girlish Countess Ebba Sparre. When she finds out that Ebba has a lover whom she wishes to marry, Christina flies into a jealous rage and heads out into the country with only her footman.

Here, the movie abandons its subversive feminist, bisexual and cross-dressing themes and veers toward conventional territory. Posing as a man while on the road, Christina ends up sharing a room and bed with the Spanish envoy Don Antonio. When it’s time to disrobe, her secret is out and the two fall passionately in love. Later, Christina walks around the room, running her hands over and pressing her face against various objects in order to memorize this glorious place where she found a man. Queen Christina has become a man’s woman.

Just when it seems the film has abandoned its more challenging themes--Christina has abdicated her throne in favor of setting up house with Don Antonio--the unexpected happens. Count Magnus mortally wounds Don Antonio in a duel. Christina arrives on the deck of the ship that was to carry them to Spain only to find her lover gasping out his final breaths. Christina declares the ship will set sail despite his death, and the movie ends with Christina at the bow, looking boldly out across the waves, a content smile upon her lips. Now for the first time in her life, she is truly free of men and ready to make her own destiny.

In its unrelenting ending, Queen Christina succeeds where other texts fail. Watching the 1970 movie of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (starring George C. Scott as Mr. Rochester), it occurred to me that in many of these old tales by women writers, the extraordinary female protagonist who supposedly needs no man often ends by marrying a man of wealth. Apparently, every good woman needs recognition as such by a man of considerable means and, in the movies at least, a man who also happens to have brooding good looks.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is another example. Throughout the whole book, we are told that Elizabeth is intelligent, independent and generally superior to all those frivolous women who only bother their heads with finding a man to marry. But, of course, she ends up marrying Mr. Darcy. In Joe Wright’s 2006 movie, which is otherwise excellent, these two sober heads suddenly, in the final moments of the film, become giggly dipshits!

Queen Christina avoids this betrayal of the ideals at its core.

But there are limits to Queen Christina’s feminism. What are we to make of her penchant for dressing as, and even pretending to be, a man? Is she proving how even a woman should be able to do anything she pleases? Or does she feel that a woman cannot be equal as a woman but only by becoming a man? And what of her obsessive rejection of men early in the film? Can she not realize herself as a woman except through rejection of men? There is an awful lot of man in this formulation of woman.

But perhaps these limitations cannot be avoided. After all, to be human is to be male, female or intersexual, and to exist in matrices of gender identity. The one thing you cannot do is avoid the male/female polarity altogether. Therefore, any feminist message must fall within the broader context of human biology and sexuality.

Finally, we must consider that Queen Christina’s feminism is limited because it is not the whole story--the movie’s stronger push is for individualism. Queen Christina simply wishes, beyond any aspirations of female empowerment, to be herself. Like the historical Queen Christina of Sweden, she refuses to be bound by convention.

Watching Queen Christina, I couldn’t help but feel that this role suited Greta Garbo more than any other I have seen her in--and indeed, the documentary Garbo by Turner Classic Movies draws connections between the themes in Queen Christina and Garbo’s life. Garbo is always so herself that many roles don’t seem to fit her, but she and Christina fit seamlessly, and the result is entertaining and thought-provoking cinema.

Classic Movies: Three Levels of Experience

For some time now, I’ve noticed that I enjoy recent Hollywood movies less and less. Movies I watch because they are in genres or franchises I love--like The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus or Skyfall--continue to impress, but other movies usually leave me uninterested. Meanwhile, I’ve been increasingly drawn to classic movies. I eventually realized that this was because the experience of older movies is multilayered in a way that new movies can’t provide.

The most obvious level of experiencing an old movie is the immediate experience based on its content, the way you would experience any movie. You follow the story, identify with characters, marvel at special effects, get swept up in the score, admire the performances, and so on.

One old movie that captivated me recently was Gaslight (1944). The fragile Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman, marries a devilishly tall-dark-and-handsome smoothy and the two move into her childhood home. However, she soon begins--so it would seem--to misplace items, forget appointments, and notice strange phenomena that no one else does, such as the lights dimming. Her husband, increasingly exasperated with her hysteria, suggests she is going crazy. But is she? Isn’t there something suspicious about her husband’s behavior? Isn’t it almost as if he is orchestrating her episodes for some purpose we cannot yet guess?

The movie provides plenty of excitement simply through its content. You are drawn deeper and deeper into Paula’s emotional unraveling, you are engrossed by Bergman’s performance (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), you come to loathe the villain for his villainy, you wonder if the young detective will figure it all out in time, and you are on the edge of your seat until the denouement. At this level of experience, this old movie provides nothing more than and just as much as a good thriller from recent years.

But we experience the classics on another level that we cannot experience recent movies: From our standpoint today, we experience them as representatives of the past.

One need go no further back than the 1980s--say The Breakfast Club (1985) or Pretty in Pink (1986)--to begin feeling out-of-time, but then to watch Saturday Night Fever (1977) or The Hustler (1961) or The Seven Year Itch (1955) is to feel increasingly as if you are in a foreign land. By the time you reach the 1940s and 30s, you are like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only in reverse, moving from Technicolor to a bizarre and magical world of black and white. Watching silent films is like peering at another planet through the grainy and flickering lens of some queer, lighted telescope. Can these people up there on the screen really be members of the same human race I am used to? They look and behave so differently!

Every time I watch The Wizard of Oz, I wonder why no one talks like Judy Garland anymore. Women with that particular accent are common in older movies, but I’ve never heard anyone talk like that in my lifetime. To take another example, I always find it odd in the MGM Marx Brothers’ movies how they’re a weird mish-mash of genres--like vaudeville--with slapstick next to musical numbers next to drama and so on, as if film was viewed as an omniverse of previously existing art forms. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), the prosecution raises as an example of Laura’s moral laxity how she moves when she plays pinball. Anatomy of a Murder is a gritty movie even today, but how quaint that pinball and how one plays it could be seen as dangerous and sinful! These are all examples of how a movie can stand out for characteristics that have passed into the past.

Seen across the gulf of time, the classics are very strange.

The third level of experience is where it gets really interesting. No longer are we simply experiencing a classic movie for its content, or viewing it as a curious relic from times gone by. Instead, we now see it through the eyes of its contemporaries. We assume, as best we can, the standpoint of movie-goers in the early to mid 20th Century and experience the movie as they would have at the time, as if viewing the past from the past.

A good example is Morocco (1930), which I watched just a couple days ago for the first time. In an early scene, Marlene Dietrich performs in a nightclub. She’s dressed in a men’s tuxedo. The quiet that descends over her audience immediately casts over you the viewer a sense for the gender roles being toyed with. When she flirts with a lady in the audience and even plants one on her lips, its thrilling and shocking today just as it would have been back in 1930 when the movie first screened. It doesn’t matter that I’ve seen James Franco and Sean Penn kiss in Milk (2008) or Scarlett Johansonn and Penelope Cruz kiss in Vicki Cristina Barcelona (2008). By then, the old dominant ideas of gender and sexuality, while still not entirely gone today, had long been played with in the public arena, sometimes to the point of boredom. The scene in Morocco is exciting now because it was exciting then.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood movies today are somehow inferior, only that because they are recent they lack levels of experience that movies acquire after having aged for a while. Next on my list is Notorious (1946). More Ingrid Berman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I expect it will be engaging on all three levels of experience.

Review of Clockwork Angels: The Novel by Kevin J. Anderson

As a long-time fan of Rush, I was excited when I heard that the progressive rock group’s new album, Clockwork Angels, would be a concept album. Then came word that fantasy and science-fiction author Kevin J. Anderson was writing a novel based on the album’s lyrics, which spin a steampunk odyssey conceived by Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart. I pre-ordered a copy and when it arrived, quickly read it from cover to cover.

Clockwork Angels: The Novel, tells the story of Owen Hardy, an apprentice apple farmer in the land of Albion. A ruler called the Watchmaker organizes every aspect of life in Albion with mechanical order and regularity, so that each citizen need merely follow the path laid out before him or her. This is the Stability, according to which “Everything has its place, and every place has its thing.”  Owen Hardy fully expects to settle into his predetermined course, but he also dreams of life outside his village, and upon an invitation from a mysterious stranger, he runs away, runs afoul of the Watchmaker’s law, and travels to other lands, encountering carnies, thieves, wreckers and the Watchmaker’s antithesis, the Anarchist.

Anderson’s prose is uninspired but possesses a simple elegance perfect for a story that is essentially a long parable. He puts just the right amount of flesh on the lyrics to highlight the concept of free will steering a course between Order and Chaos. Summaries of the novel make it sound like the typical Bildungsroman of which the fantasy genre has way too many, but despite my low tolerance for dreamy-boy-goes-out-into-a-world-of-adventure stories, this one never struck me as cliché and I was never bored. 

In part, the conceptual work of Peart is to thank for that. More than once as I read, I caught myself thinking that I was grateful that a musician (and a drummer, no less), rather than a novelist, had created this story and its setting. Rush’s music and Peart’s lyrics have always had their own distinct taste, and that comes across in the novel. Fans of the music will recognize the philosophical motifs Peart has woven into Rush’s lyrics over the years--and many of those lyrics are sprinkled throughout the text. (On first reading, I caught quotes from as far back as 1975’s Fly by Night.)

I can’t help but relate the novel to my other recent reading. The Watchmaker’s Stability can be described as a “totally administered society,” a phrase that appears often in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. The Frankfurt School of philosophers believed that in a totally administered society, whether that of Stalinist Russia or capitalist America, there is little room for true individuality. The totally administered society has ways of keeping us in our place. 

The Anarchist of Clockwork Angels represents the exact opposite--total lawlessness--although with his wild appetite for destruction, he is more of a nihilist of the negative sort portrayed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (The Devils). While he possesses a certain evil charm at first, in the end he is no more likeable than Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the slimy catalyst for ill deeds in The Possessed. In their crusade against the strictures of society, both are perfectly willing to destroy lives, but they have nothing positive to offer in place of what they tear down.

The beauty of Clockwork Angels is that Owen Hardy chooses neither the Watchmaker nor the Anarchist. In the words of the old Rush song “Freewill,” he chooses not to decide. He chooses to make his own way through life, with all the uncertainty, mistakes, suffering, and joy, that such a messy pilgrim’s progress entails. Owen's life with the Magnusson Carnival Extravaganza is one apart from the ideologies of the Watchmaker and Anarchist, who would impose themselves upon him and use him for their own purposes.

A final word about the book itself apart from the story. Clockwork Angels: The Novel is full of perks for the bibliophile. It has numerous full-color illustrations by long-time Rush album artist Hugh Syme, and they are among the most impressive I have encountered since I was in the sixth grade poring over the illustrations by the Brothers Hildebrandt in The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. The back of the book includes the lyrics to Clockwork Angels: The Album and an afterword by Neil Peart, with photos from a hiking trip on which he and Anderson, friends even before this collaboration, brainstormed for the novel. 

I have actually never been much of a fan of Kevin J. Anderson, but this book has made me reconsider. On his website, AnderZone, he says that Neil Peart’s favorite work of his is The Saga of Seven Suns series, so I have placed the first book, Hidden Empire, on my Long List of Books to Read.

Final Comments on Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes

A year after starting it, I have finally finished reading Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, which looks for something of value in revolutionary terror. The book held much more than I could grasp, so rather than attempt an in-depth analysis of it, I will merely post a third, and perhaps final, note (first one, second one) by commenting on Žižek’s program for reinventing “the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror.”

In Defense of Lost Causes is a long and involved philosophical, psychoanalytical, political and cultural critique of the ideologies, methods, successes and failures of revolutionary movements from the French Revolution up through today’s Leftist thought. As such, it touches on a wide range of issues, but in its final pages it comes to focus on “the threat of ecological catastrophe.” The last page of the first edition lists four points with regard to addressing this challenge, with the suggestion that they may be of use in other areas as well.

The first of the four points is egalitarian justice. Žižek gives as an example of this all nations, whether developed or developing, being made to obey the same rules with regard to environmental regulations (carbon emissions, etc.). I agree. Developing nations are sometimes allowed laxer standards and some developed nations like the U.S. simply do as they please without regard for international protocols while other nations vigorously tackle environmental challenges.

The second point is terror, which Žižek describes as “ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures.” This is the most problematic of the four points. For many, the whole premise of the book--finding what is good about some of the worst scenes in human history--is disturbing. For Žižek openly to recommend terror would seem to confirm their worst suspicions, especially when he includes in his recommended terror “severe limitations on liberal ‘freedoms.’” 

While it is clear, however, from examples throughout the book that for Žižek not all terror must be violent, he does speak almost approvingly of an execution committed by Che Guevara for the cause of revolution. It is hard to pin Žižek down on exactly what specific actions he recommends as defensible terror, and it occurs to me as I write this that this is a flaw of the book. Its analysis is endless, but precise prescriptions are fleeting and vague.

The third point is voluntarism:

“(the only way to confront the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development.”

This returns to a theme that Žižek and others like French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom In Defense of Lost Causes is dedicated, develop fascinatingly and convincingly. Capitalism is the enemy and we have, to our detriment, all accepted its logic. Some of Žižek’s passages explain how even capitalism’s opponents must speak its language, thereby acknowledging its victory.

Is capitalism the enemy? This is not something I have made up my mind about. The evils of capitalism are plain to see, but there are forms other than the no-holds-barred capitalism that holds sway in the U.S. and is quickly claiming souls the globe over. There is French economist Michel Albert’s Rhine capitalism, Bill Gates’s creative capitalism and China’s state capitalism. Žižek expresses skepticism about such halfway measures, and perhaps he is right. Perhaps only a radically new order has any real emancipatory potential.

The fourth and final point is trust in the people: “the wager that a large majority of the people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement.” He even goes so far as to say we should welcome the reinstitution of informers. The language is inflammatory, but his example is the corporate whistle-blower, indeed an informer of sorts. 

The world does not need a citizens’ thought police such as neighbors turning on neighbors and children reporting their parents as in George Orwell’s 1984, but it does need more gutsy vigilance committed to obedience to just law. The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 would not have happened if more government watchdogs had taken their jobs seriously and more employees of BP had been willing to turn on their employer and coworkers.

In Defense of Lost Causes is a cornucopia of ideas that encouraged me to review Heidegger, learn about the Cultural Revolution, rewatch Casablanca, listen more to Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and start reading about Critical Theory. It’s a book I will be thinking about for some time, and while I should reread it, I am more likely to dig into Žižek's other books first.