Doomsday

THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE! from Daniel Cowen on Vimeo.

Straight from the book and that’s the honest truth it is.

Do you wish you would die?

No. But I might wish I had died. When you’re alive you’ve always got that ahead of you.

Or you might wish you’d never been born.

Well. Beggars can’t be choosers.

(The Road, 169)

—

The dialog between the old man who calls himself Ely and the man was potent and insightful.

The man asks Ely if he tried preparing for the thing that caused the destruction. The man responds, “People were always getting ready for tomorrow…Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them.” This tone veers from the traditional apocalypse towards the neo-apocalypse. The world takes no heed of its “inhabitants.” (168)

Ely’s thoughts on God confirm this: “There is no God…There is no God and we are his prophets.” The survivors of the apocalypse, in their rags and caked vomit, show the prophecy of their creator more than tell it. Man is made in God’s image, and in this world, God is at the end of the line and perhaps not even there at all. (170)

In a story within a story, Kurt Vonnegut writes that’s Hitler’s last words were “I never asked to be born.” Putting the choice of suicide (ceasing life) aside, “never asking to be born” is a concept that concerns the man, Ely, Dr. Manhattan, and perhaps every human being ever subject to judgment. (The concept is concerned less with Dr. Manhattan’s human birth, but his God birth – becoming something that can no longer relate to human life and the moral quandaries and judgments that follow.) Ely’s response to this objection is that “Beggars can’t be choosers,” as if the natural state of our souls is supplication, as if being alive fulfills our (what exactly does “our” mean here?) most basic necessities, which may be life affirming after all. (169)

Here are the facts:

Post nuclear holocaust in the Big Apple, a nosey P.I. – ahem – journalist, snoops around for a scoop on Albertine, the mysterious drug that brings your memories to life.

You’ve heard it all before. “Right-Livelihoods” has voice-over narrative, investigation, a dark and dreary world, even a Femme Fatale, in the withered form of Cassandra. Kevin asks her for a kiss then justifies it by calling it a “reality-testing question” – right. She already “guessed” his name, hometown, scoop etc. it’s Kevin that should be testing his own reality.

Which brings us to the Cassandra complex, a psychosis put forth by Jung and explored in the film, 12 Monkeys, and plays a key role in the “Right-Livelihoods.” The Cassandra Complex directly challenges our notion of linear time, as any prophesy does, by positing a reality where the future or the past can be experienced in the present.

Sometimes I feel when I’ve planned a busy week in advance that I’m not actually living in the present, rather fulfilling a predetermined role or just putting my body in the right place at the right time. Our notions of free will seem to be based heavily on future consequences. Our notion of meaning often works the same way – for some, a meaningful dream turns sour when discovered it is a dream. What is meaningful for Kevin in his sad situation? The case? The explosion?

But all this veers away from the noir analogy.

The classic Bogart detective treads through the rain and night in his trench coat, finding temporary relief in the company of slinky red dresses and cigarettes and cares for no one but himself. Amidst murder and vice, he acts as if it’s the end of the world and he just doesn’t care. Noir rings true with a sort of neo-apocalypse the same way Westerns like “Pat Garret and Billy the Kid” do, by portraying single characters in the face of darkness and destruction all around them.

There is a sort of pathetic machismo that arises in these lonely survivors.

I watched “Strange Days” before reading Quinby’s reading, and though I agree with most, and love the Foucauldian analogy between alliance, sexuality and programmed perfection, I have a three points to quibble on:

1. “From the Book of Revelation of the Heaven’s Gate website, denial of embodiment has been a heterosexist obsession that defines itself oppositionally to women’s bodily excess and lesbian and gay sexuality.” (135)

Perhaps true for Revelation and Heaven’s gate, there are others reasons for “denial of embodiment.” In Buddhism, it is because the body and all conceptualization of self cause suffering. In Kabbalah, the body is in direct contrast to the soul, or more broadly, to spirituality. In Tristan and Isolde, the body is what separates the two lovers from union, and in some stagings of Wagner’s opera, Isolde sings her final aria while slowly humping Tristan’s dead body, as if they were both floating up together, spirits entwined, into the afterlife – at least according to Prof Long at Hunter College.

I agree the castoff of the body can be read as discriminatory towards women and gay sexuality, however this is not the sole propagation. To my dismay, this point was made then abandoned without greater discussion.

2. “Max’s desire to have Lenny jack in to his acts of rape and murder of Iris and his sadomasochistic sex with Faith fuel homophobic fears and hence fortify the “safe” and “healthy” heterosexuality represented by Lenny.” (142)

Lenny is the one, however, who is quick to offer the Lawyer at the beginning fantasies involving men and chooses for him to be an 18 yr old female washing her body in the shower. If Lenny personifies white-male heterosexuality, he is certainly comfortable with a variety of sexual practices and inter-racial love.

The greater point is that Max’s desire to have Lenny watch his rape is not homosexual. Like the argument goes, rape is more about expressing power than sexuality. Here Max uses his rape as power over Lenny, not to entwine them homosexually. Also, porn is often watched in groups of heterosexual men as a means of establishing a collective base for what’s cool and what’s not etc and certainly the heightened sense of group/communal involvement – perhaps a psychological facet of gang-rape.

3. “When Mace turns to Stickland as her champion, activism is replaced by a reassertion of authority of the white-controlled state.” (145)

This feels overly pessimistic. Why “replaced?” And not, “activism working together with authority?” Also, why is it important that the chief is white? If he were black, would it be a reassertion of the black chief who sold out? Authority will perpetuate and so will activism, the two should work together.

However, it does point to the weakness in the storytelling of having a good man at the top but corruption omnipresent beneath him – but then again, Kathryn Bigelow is not a filmmaker known for her consistency but rather adrenaline-pumping male-centered action films.

Lastly, techno oppression has already manifested in our society and will continue to do so. However, technology seems more to me like the great and final democratizer. Cyborgian culture will rip down the walls between gender and all other classical notions about what it means to be human. From our insides to the outside, our economic and social infrastructure will change. A collective consciousness will arise. Governments won’t be necessary… But these are just my crazed, pseudo-prophetic ramblings, not be taken seriously, for sure.

Is the distinction between us and them bent on destruction and evil or is it a matter of unity in the face of oppression or merely reality? Though the texts that we’ve read focus more on the destructive consequences of us and them, where could us and them be necessary or meaningful in our readings? Is there room for more than dualistic thinking in our texts and film, perhaps in “On the Beach”?

http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

Be ready!

In Glorious Appearing, Jesus doesn’t seem to mind the color of one’s skin or where they were born. Everyone is spoken to in their own tongue, even their own accent! And we’re reminded of this more times than the number “7” appears in Revelation.

It becomes a sick joke, particularly when Ming thinks Jesus is speaking directly to her and is asked to step forward only to find a million others stepping forward too (295). It’s even worse when Chang thinks “The message his Savior imparted was definitely for him alone…” when this same false assumption was made just a dozen times before (326).

I disagree with Quinby in her reading that this text is racist and McAlister in her reading that GA displayed “impressive changes in race politics (17, McAlister reading).” The characters were not particularly westernized or Christian but essentially without identity, meaning Chang was a Chinese character to match a Asian tech-whiz stereotype, not because his Asian status was of importance to his character. The embarrassing caricatures of Carmela and Shaniqua do not grapple with the question of race but use awkward Ebonics to highlight the pervasiveness of the word. The only thing that mattered was coming to Jesus.

By Jesus describing Chang’s previous religion as “aberrant,” one could assume the book was using a racist, imperialist tone, especially after Mac refers to the west Texan accent as “the language of Heaven.” (325 & 341) Though in that same scene everyone gets a joke at the same moment, as if their minds were strung together in a collective unconscious, they even hear “Jesus laugh at Chaim’s Manna crack.” (341) The community, or lack of individuality, is startling. Even Jesus isn’t allowed a spotlight, as despite his “magnanimous comments about Himself, Rayford was struck by how lowly, humble, and compassionate [Jesus] sounded.” The point is that if you are saved, your nationality and race amounts to the language in which Jesus speaks to you.

I heard Tuvian throat-singers a few hours ago at the Rubin Museum of Art and I’m still shaking a bit.

You should hear a decent throat-singer perform before you die.

The museum was celebrating Jung’s “Red Book,” his recently released private journal.

I flipped through a few pages until I came upon a conversation he had with his soul.

His soul said, “the great work begins.” The context was murky, so I can’t explain much there.

Kushner reads German (he translated Mother Courage and Her Children for the Delacorte) – maybe he was inspired by Jung.

We spoke today about Kushner’s democratic values as what he believes is his “great work.”

Jung probably meant something else. What is your “great work?”

And what is it about the end that often brings about great works? Desperation?

“While both the authors and the publisher have claimed that thousands of readers have experienced a Christian conversion due to the novels, scholars such as Frykholm have been unable to document even a single case in which a reader experienced a Christian conversion. When Frykholm requested evidence of conversion from the publisher, Tyndale submitted only seven cases; four were reportedly hearsay and three were reportedly readers that had reaffirmed their lapsed faith in Christianity.”

– Frykholm, A. “Rapture Culture” 2004: p. 161

63,000,000 read it, but like me, did their concentration wane during the 4-page sermons?

“I’ll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending, but don’t cheat, and don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina.”

Robert McKee to Charlie Kaufman – Adaptation.

Though I’m only at chapter eleven, I think I know how it’s going to end. Part Tom Clancy, Sunday sermon, Mel Gibson and call to action, Glorious Appearing thus far has been predictable.

Jews for Jesus makes a lot more sense now. For if you are sure that Jesus will return and that the bible was “God’s love song to the Jews,” then Jews believing in Jesus becomes mightily important. The same way that if you believe that millions will suffer due to global warming and you are an altruistic sort of person, then you’ll change your day-to-day life to compliment your understanding about the future of our planet.

Perhaps the comparison is a bit unfair, as belief and scientific theory are different, but as Nicholas Wade points out in his review of Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, “When Dawkins asserts that evolution ‘is a fact in the same sense as it is a fact that Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere’…he has let himself slip into being as dogmatic as his opponents.”

Humans have had a proclivity towards using dogma as a means of asserting our views as truth. Sometimes rigorous arguments just don’t do the trick.

Knowing how it’s going to end is a fine source of capital – especially for book sales.