Doomsday

Angels in America challenges dogma and relativism by creating its own moral universe. But this new universe is at odds with variety of other universes, for example, the Mormon universe, which considers homosexuality an affront to G-d. If you create a moral universe you’re bound to step on someone’s toes. The skeptic steps on everyone’s toes.

Skepticism, it seems, is a means to a democratic end, which to the best of my knowledge is a means to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But “the pursuit of happiness” always sounded like an empty phrase and certainly not one of the cardinal goals in life. Can one pursue happiness? Should one to pursue happiness? Or to be straight – wouldn’t the pursuit of “satisfaction” or “contentment,” words that encompass a greater scope of human experience, be a better goal?

Victor Frankel says that as long as there is meaning in occurrences the human mind can bare the pain.

And on the topic of pain: Malunkyaputta once asked the Buddha a number of questions including, “is the universe eternal?” “Is the soul the same as the body?” “Does the Tathagata (Buddha) exist after death?” The Buddha replied, “The holy life does not depend on these views.”

A moral world is necessary for greater good and questions are necessary to come to a moral understanding, but should every dogma be questioned? Sometimes the hermeneutics of trust are a greater means to moral understanding, but then again, the end goal must be defined.

Note: I published a link to an interview with Kushner – Mother Jones – that Prof Q refers to in her book. Maybe he felt like he didn’t need to justify or explain what “progressive” meant for the magazine, but his end goal is unclear. I’m wary.

Until Prior received his prophecy I wasn’t sure why we were reading Angels in America for this class. All I was picking up on was obnoxious Jews, a Mormon marriage built on Valium and lies (yes, let’s all make fun of the Christians…), saintly former drag queens and AIDS. Maybe this was the 90s and Kushner felt that we all needed to hear it, but to be honest I feel like I’ve been hearing this message ever since and ever louder. Was Angels in America the inspiration for Larson’s Rent?

Back to academics, I agree with Ariana in her assessment – though Angels in America fits within Quinby’s algorithm of doom, I do not consider it an Apocalypse. Not to deny the enormity of the death of a loved one, but it feels melodramatic to consider such a death an apocalypse. Even when stretched to the communal level (nearly everyone in the story is dying of AIDS), it is still not an apocalypse, rather a call to action.

For me, the play felt like the funeral for the glitzy drag queen with twenty professional Sicilian mourners – so over-the-top one forgets to cry. But I shouldn’t have expected much more after Kushner’s Munich, a film I once saw aptly shelved next to a cheap porno in a bodega.

Louis’ rambling, though it could be dismissed as the sad rant of a guilty Jew, about how there are no angels in America because “there is no [singular] spiritual past,” is a question that did leave me thinking. How do we reconcile our individual and communal choices with G-d when there are so damn many of us in this country? Though heaven is infinite, can it handle the vastness and variety of human psyches? Can it handle the neuroses of guilty Jews?

Though not pronouncedly apocalyptic in nature, Darren Aronofsky’s film, The Fountain, focuses on collective death, in contrast to eternal (personal) life. Over the course of two lifetimes, Tommy fails to sacrifice his own ego (borders/I/self) for his loved one Izzi. In Tommy’s third and last “life,” he must choose between eternal life or letting his body melt into the cosmos to join Izzi, who had died from a brain tumor.

Rosen observes that “when Swamp Thing reads Woodrue’s report and realizes that his former human self is unattainable,” Swamp Thing is devastated and lies in the swamp and becomes rooted there (9, Rosen). This is his turning point, for when Swamp Thing sheds his single human perspective he begins to experience the whole of nature. Buddhism 101 – being one with all.

Ozymandias’ hope is that a great multinational (collective) death will unite humanity – see the last page of chapter XI, where the white newspaper salesman and young black reader fuse into a single being.

In Snyder’s Watchmen (the film adaptation), it is not an alien that wrecks havoc, but John. This was a clever way to tie up some loose ends and cut down an already beefy film (162 minutes.) I think, however, that though John is rather alien, he was still too human enough to cause a uniting of humanity. As we all know, the easiest way to make a friend is to find a common enemy. The alien, with its strange tentacles, beak and single eye was the common enemy, stranger than any variation in our human gene pool – even a blue demigod.

In Promethea, Moore writes himself into the final ending, showing a panel with his picture bleeding to white (and confirming to some extent, as I’ve been told, that he believes imagination and belief are more than mere brain stuff, but maintain tangible reality on some plane.) In keeping with the real life newspaper headlines signaling environmental catastrophes strewn between panels in Swamp Thing, Moore wants his readers to realize that they are not a passive audience, but are complicit in This reality – in its unity or downfall.

The Duck and Cover film, though intended to be educational, was confusing.  Who were they (the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the Safety Commission of the National Education Association)  trying to fool?  The kids?  The adults, or “grown-ups” rather?

From the wiki article:

“Acting on the human body, the shock waves cause pressure waves through the tissues. These waves mostly damage junctions between tissues of different densities (bone and muscle) or the interface between tissue and air. Lungs and the abdominal cavity, which contain air, are particularly injured. The damage causes severe hemorrhaging or air embolisms, either of which can be rapidly fatal.”

Besides the force of the blast, the radiation was another deadly force – as we’ll see this Tuesday in On the Beach.  The scientists knew from observational evidence that these were the effects of a nuclear blast, so why with the, “look at father shrewdly covering the skin of his neck with a newspaper!  Oh my, he will be saved!”

Whether secular or religious, hope emerges minutes to midnight.  Be it G-d’s benevolence or a picnic blanket, “THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER.”  It was curious to read in Strozier’s essay how on one hand his interviewees were convinced of the inevitability of John’s Revelation yet they still hoped that G-d will save us all (page 71).

Another facet I found interesting was the notion of collective death, a recurring theme in the interviews with the fundamentalists.  I think that’s because it’s comforting to know that you won’t be alone when the end comes.  “But there might not be any grownups around when the bomb explodes,” the narrator says, wrapping it up, “then, you’re on your own.”  That was the scariest line of the film.

Daniel, Thanks for finding this.  FYI, I went to the site you posted, clicked the “share” link at the bottom, and copied and pasted the “embed” code into the HTML. It did give me an issue, however, and I switched to YouTube…-John (ITF)

Pain is inevitable and redemption is uncertain.  Our feet shall kick upon a floor of marbles like Chaplin in a death-act until the very end.

Sleep, a janitor at a camp I once worked at told me, is 1/60th of death.  In PTA’s film, There Will be Blood, Daniel Plainview is woken from his slumber a half dozen times, always to impending disaster.  If he couldn’t sleep-off life, then hating it and fighting it with all the bitter poison his body could manufacture was the next best thing.

This is getting at: as long as you’re alive there is imbalance.  Death is balance.  Balance is peace.  Transcendence is finding peace while alive.  We seek palatable notions about the universe (i.e. “truth” or “truths”) to clear the marbles.

Kermode posits that the beginning and the end are the bookends maintaining our library of stable notions.  “The great majority of interpretations of the apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near.”  If the apocalypse were not near, it would not be palatable and thus its purpose would be defunct.  Kermode explains that this nearness “disconfirms” but does not “discredit” the apocalypse.  To discredit the apocalypse would be to dismiss the natural human tendency to find balance amidst the chaos.  (It seems to me, at least for our purposes, that the apocalypse matters most as a tendency of the human mind.)

A skeptic might say that an apocalyptic end is not balance, or that the idea of an “end” is so abstract that groping for the finale is turning one’s back on transcendence.  Let’s work with something a little more observational, shall we?

In chapter 6, Quinby explains that gender lines are emboldened in the apocalyptic context, for the male rule needed someone to blame.  The enemy/sinner is a nice and stable notion amidst a sword-mouthed Jesus and seven frightening seals.

Male and female.  Alpha and Omega.  A pattern emerges.  The chiaroscuro produces a shelter of context.

Expect contrast in times of doom.  Expect division.  Expect that stumbling blind fool, the human, crazily stomping around for a steady surface while the earth quakes beneath him as it always has.