Never judge a book by its movie!
(Not a MavPhil original, I am sorry to say. Source? Paging Dave Lull.)
Category: Cinema
Kamala as Zelig
Do you remember Zelig? If Zelig was the human chameleon, Kamala Harris is the political chameleon.
Who is Kamala Harris? The Language Nazi cannot resist pointing our that the author of the linked piece confuses 'errant' with 'arrant' about five paragraphs down.
The Civil War Movie
Rather than submitting to sensory assault, your time would be better spent quietly preparing in three separate senses I will explain later. I won't be seeing the movie, for reasons given by my Alypius and the Gladiators.
Addendum: Why bother watching a fictional civil war scenario when the first phases of hot civil war are unfolding right before our eyes on the nightly news? We have an advantage over St Augustine: we are able to watch the collapse of civilization on television. The big disadvantage for us is that the collapse may take a nuclear turn.
So what do our pollyannish friends and neighbors do? They piss their lives away gaming, golfing, drinking and dancing, willfully oblivious of danger, feeling no responsibility to preserve the civilization that made it possible for them to live good lives up to this point, and irresponsibly ignoring the obligation to preserve it for future generations.
The worst of this bunch are those who brazenly deny the impending disaster.
Victor Davis Hanson, historian and classicist, can help you understand the gravity of the situation. Can you pay attention for eight and a half minutes?
Dinesh D’Souza on our Incipient Police State
Here, with a link to a trailer of his new movie.
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'Terrorist' is experiencing semantic spread.
It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.' The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.
I have written sentences like this:
2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.
My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime. What does it make the regime? A police state.
So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.' Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin. Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection. There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.
Sarcasm aside, part of understanding the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion. You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.
UPDATE (10/19). Serious punch-back against demento-totalitarian police-state scumbaggery may be coming Spartacus style:
Something intriguing is happening with bitcoin. What started as a series of perplexing data “inscriptions” containing classified files from the U.S. government has now been confirmed by Bitcoin Magazine as an ongoing effort to cement information in the public record beyond the reach of government censorship.
An anonymous guardian of free speech has begun using bitcoin to republish all of the information originally published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks back in 2010. Codenamed “Project Spartacus,” the operation seeks to take advantage of several inherent bitcoin attributes:
[. . .]
Project Spartacus is just the beginning. Imagine new social media networks built from decentralized blockchains of information. Imagine an entirely new internet operating beyond the reach of corporate search engines, regulated addresses, and government permissions. With no corporation in control of the networks or in singular possession of communicated data on privately held servers, the problem of State-directed censorship disappears. No longer could corporate oligarchs operate in concert with government dictators to silence public dissent and magnify government propaganda. No longer would it matter what the Marxist Globalists at Facebook or Google think is true — or what they think should be falsely presented as truth — once ordinary people have a dependable workaround technology that allows them to share information free from Big Brother’s menacing intervention.
Discreetly shared samizdat has returned. It will soon run on decentralized blockchain.
Roberto Rossellini’s Socrates
Substack latest.
The philosopher at the hour of death.
“Not Hung Up on the Completion Thing”
In grad school I knew people who fit the above description. I used to joke about them ending up graduate student emeriti. Desultory and undisciplined, and allowed to take incompletes in their courses, they took them in spades. And so the above line from The Big Chill (1983) stuck with me.
William Hurt has died at age 71. Here he is in a memorable scene from that memorable movie.
The Enigmatic B. Traven and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Substack latest.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”
"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.
Addendum 8/26
The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth." It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.
1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth. The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.
Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.
Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.
2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:
You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves. You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things. But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you? Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'? Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing? Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good? If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as God?
Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite. But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be? So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!
Ted Kennedy’s Car
In this Age of Feeling, fact-based cogent arguments have little effect on the febrile pates of liberals. So one needs to supplement calm reasoning with bumperstickers, invective, and contumely, not that 'contumely' is a word one could expect a liberal to understand. And so, for your viewing enjoyment, I present:
Of course, cars don't kill people; people kill people with cars. Ergo, etc. Therein lies the brilliance of the bumpersticker.
If you are not aware of the backstory, see the movie Chappaquiddick. It is supposed to come out in April.
Read the lovable and avuncular Howie Carr's Boston Herald review.
And another thing. Liberals who are presently 'storming' over Trump's sexual excesses ought to look in the mirror and take responsibility for their 'normalizing' of such behavior by their complaisance over the sexual predation of the Kennedy brothers, not to mention that of Bill Clinton with the acquiescence of his hilarious enabler.
Liberals who have made our trash culture should not be surprised by the Trump phenomenon.
Addenda
- I said above that cars don't kill people. Qualification: unless they are self-driving. A recent case in Tempe, Arizona.
- I forgot to protest the restriction and demonetization of Prager U videos by Google and YouTube. If you watch these vidoes and find them in any way offensive or worthy of censure, then you are intellectually obtuse, morally defective, liberal-left filth.
Double Indemnity, 1944
I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy.
The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front. But the act is not shown. The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.' These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them. Sex and violence were part of the story line. If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.
But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.' Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade, and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people. I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook . . . Parkland and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.
You know my answer.
We ought to demand of Hollywood dreckmeisters that they clean up their act and curtail their cultural pollution. Not that these scumbags would ever show any social responsibility.
Did I Watch the Oscars?
Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.
I now hand off to Rod Dreher, Triumph of the Freaks.
The Case for Christ
As cinema and story-telling, The Case for Christ leaves something to be desired. But if ideas are your thing, then this movie may hold your attention as it held mine. It will help if you are at least open to the possibility that Christ rose from the dead.
The review in Christianity Today is worth reading, but the anti-intellectual tenor of the following bit stuck in my craw:
Alas, all that goes out the window when it comes time for the portions of the film that actually make the case for Christ. It is beyond the scope of a film review to evaluate the specific arguments and assumptions articulated by the people whom Strobel interviews, but regardless of their rhetorical and historical merits, the apologetics sequences make for bad cinema and bad storytelling. Periodically, the domestic melodrama and character development come to a screeching halt, superseded by enormous chunks of exposition that work better on a page than on a screen.
Gunn does his best to stage the interviews in an interesting way, but the results are nonetheless stilted, sometimes comically so. (A conversation with a medical professional, for example, is set in a laboratory with lots of doctors milling about, doing vaguely science-y things while ignoring the reporter who is distracting their boss with questions about the Crucifixion.) The audience is left with little to do other than twiddle their thumbs while they wait for the story to start rolling again.
Twiddle their thumbs? Are you serious? That part of the flick raised in a graphic way the issue of whether the Swoon Hypothesis holds any water, and to my mind, showed that it doesn't. To hell with story-telling. The best parts of the movie were the apologetics sequences.
But if you are looking for entertainment, or think that a man's relation with his wife is of more importance that the question of the Resurrection, then you should stay away from this movie.
Scorsese’s Silence
A review by Brad Miner. Excerpt:
As the book reaches its climax, Rodrigues feels the sand giving way beneath him:
From the deepest core of my being yet another voice made itself heard in a whisper. Supposing God does not exist. . . .
This was a frightening fancy. . . .What an absurd drama become the lives of [the martyrs] Mokichi and Ichizo, bound to the stake and washed by the waves. And the missionaries who spent three years crossing the sea to arrive at this country – what an illusion was theirs. Myself, too, wandering here over the desolate mountains – what an absurd situation!
Scorsese’s Silence is not a Christian film by a Catholic filmmaker, but a justification of faithlessness: apostasy becomes an act of Christian charity when it saves lives, just as martyrdom becomes almost satanic when it increases persecution. “Christ would have apostatized for the sake of love,” Ferreira tells Rodrigues, and, obviously, Scorsese agrees.
…………….
Related: John Paul Meenan, Martyrs Know that Apostasy Cannot be Justified
Meenan quotes an amazing passage from Newman's Apologia which is highly relevant to my thoughts in War, Torture, and the Aporetics of Moral Rigorism. Here is the passage:
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful [sic] untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
UPDATE (12/28).
Tully Borland points us to The Sinister Theology of Endo's SILENCE. A good article, but a bit smug and pat for my taste. The author seems not to appreciate the moral bind Rodrigues is in. A topic to be explored in a separate entry.
The Passion of Martin Scorsese
Not everything in the NYT is leftist crap. The new Scorsese effort is based on the novel “Silence,” by Shusaku Endo.
My copy should be arriving today. A tip of the hat to Karl White for informing me of it.
“The novel poses a very profound theological question,” Peter C. Phan, a Jesuit theologian at Georgetown who was born in Vietnam, told me. “The question is this: Are we allowed to do an essentially evil act to obtain a good result?
Robert De Niro . . .
. . . must be getting some 'Mean Tweets' along about now over his attack on Donald Trump.
I've admired De Niro as an actor ever since Martin Scorsese's 1973 Mean Streets.
Now actors and actresses have a right to their political opinions, but I can't see that most of them have a right to their high opinion of their political opinions. I wrote the following in June of 2013:
The encomia continue to pour in on the occasion of the passing of James Gandolfini. 'Tony Soprano' died young at 51, apparently of a heart attack, while vacationing in Italy. Given the subtlety of The Sopranos it would be unfair to say that Gandolfini wasted his talent portraying a scumbag and glorifying criminality, and leave it at that. But I wonder if people like him and De Niro and so many others give any thought to the proper use of their brief time on earth.
It's at least a question: if you have the talents of an actor or a novelist or a screen writer or a musician, should you have any moral scruples about playing to the basest sides of human nature? Are we so corrupted now that this is the only way to turn a buck in the arts?
Related:
Why are Actors and Actresses Held in Such Low Esteem?
Robert De Niro Calls Jon Voight 'Delusional' Over Support for Trump
Has political disagreement ever been worse in these United States? Well, yes, during the Civil War. So it could be worse. But keep your powder dry.