Facing Fear

Leave a comment

The relationship between fathers and daughters is intangibly profound.  (I can’t speak for fathers and sons, from either side of the equation.)  That was the angle that Georges Franju took when approaching Eyes Without a Face.  I have to confess that I knew the basic idea behind this movie and it took years to build up the courage to watch it.  I’m squeamish, and the fear that the film might show too much was a very real fear.  After you watch a movie, it can’t be unseen.  Still, it is a classic of the horror genre (although that is disputed) and it gets referenced all the time.  In case you haven’t heard about it, a plastic surgeon is attempting to graft a new face onto his daughter after she’s mutilated in an automobile accident.  Things, as you might guess, don’t go as planned.

Critics didn’t care for the movie when it was first released, but, as we’ve seen from time to time, re-evaluation changes things.  It is now considered good enough to be part of the Criterion Collection and ratings on the usual websites are quite favorable.  It’s often cited for its poetic treatment of the subject, and the response of Christiane, the daughter, seems to bear that out as she moves from complicit in her father’s crimes to sympathetic to his victims.  Indeed, the surgeon himself is conflicted, but that father-daughter relationship is something he can’t ignore.  He seems compelled to help her at any cost—it’s the price of parenting, I suppose.  It’s not for the weak.  But we’re in movie-land, aren’t we?

Christiane is sympathetic to the animals her father uses for his experiments.  When she frees them, after releasing the last intended victim, she’s depicted St. Francis-like, with the doves.  Knowing her own suffering, she can’t bear to impose it on another.  Our bodies are how we present ourselves to the world.  We rely on faces to tell us much of what we need to know, even without words passing between us.  Interestingly, even when wearing her mask, Christiane’s eyes tell the viewer much of what she’s experiencing internally.  Poetic, as the critics say.  If there’s a monster here, however, he’s driven out of love in the context of an imperfect world.  Eyes Without a Face works as a horror film and the reported fainting that took place among viewers early on demonstrate that we tend to feel for others, just as Christiane comes to.  And the father?  Well, that’s the unanswered question.  He’s a victim in his own way.

Too Much TMI

Leave a comment

Okay, okay.  I admit I get overwhelmed.  There’s just too much stuff to read.  I currently have 25 tabs open on my browser, afraid that I’ll forget about something that seemed so urgent when I opened the URL in the first place.  (Two decades ago that sentence would’ve been nonsense.)  I limit my time on social media.  This can be a death-kiss for a writer, but for sanity’s sake (and work’s), I look at Facebook for literally about five minutes a day.  (If you want to reach me leave a comment on my blog.)  In those five minutes (or less) I often come away with two or three articles that I want to read but don’t have time just now.  I open a tab and hope I’ll get to it before I lose interest.  There’s a lot of information.  Too much.  Too much TMI.

I’m a slow reader.  I sometimes wonder if I have borderline dyslexia—it once happened on a test and led me to phone a professor at night to explain—but dear reader, it slows me down.  And a writer, no matter how obscure, needs time.  I told a friend the other day that I don’t do things I enjoy, such as painting and drawing, because writing takes up so much time.  (And work does too—it gets the lion’s share.)  But those articles!  They look so important!  Some have health implications and, if you lose your health you have even less time.  The internet gives us TMI constantly.  And this field is riddled with rabbit holes.  Just ask the white rabbit about time.

Image credit: John Tenniel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the curious to do?  I actually get an insane amount of satisfaction from closing a browser tab.  It’s a sense of accomplishment—I’ve done something that brings closure!  If I do it enough times I’ll get down to the URLs I always keep open lest I forget my place.  Some of these tabs have been open since the Obama administration.  If you’re critical of such as I you might suggest “why don’t you just read an article instead of writing about not having the time to read?”  The interlocutor here is clearly not a writer.  Or at least has different writing habits than me.  There are some non-negotiables in this world of TMI.  I suppose I’m adding to the problem.  At least if anything thinks what I present here is information.  For that I defer to Klima, who, happily, still has some time.

Mr. Bean

Leave a comment

Edamame.  I remember distinctly the first time I had it.  I was at the house of Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar (shameless name drop), by the courtesy of Neal Stephenson (another).  It was a book club discussion and although I don’t remember who else was there, I was certainly the least distinguished person in the room.  Someone had brought edamame to share.  I’d neither seen nor heard of it before.   I popped a pod in my mouth and began to chew.  After ruminating a few moments, I figured this cud wasn’t going to break down and when others put their—relatively intact—pods in the discard bowl, a lightbulb clicked on.  Sheepishly, I pulled my mangled pod from my mouth and slipped it, I hoped unobtrusively, into the bowl.  If anyone noticed they were too sophisticated to say anything.  Blue collar through and through.

I repressed that memory, which is strange.  I tend to remember, and replay, the embarrassing things I’ve done.  This memory slipped, however, until our daughter reintroduced me.  She was in college, or recently out, and she showed us how to do it.  When that pod hit my tongue, the memory sprang back.  Edamame has become a standard of our house since then.  In case you’re unfamiliar, you put the pod in your mouth, keeping hold of one end.  You extract the beans, generally by using your teeth as an immovable obstacle—like artichoke leaves.  Discard pod, chew and swallow.  We sometimes dress ours up with a sauce.

The last time we had edamame, however, one of the beans shot to the back of my throat while the other two laughed.  I couldn’t tell which way, but it was clear the renegade bean was going down on its own.  I spent the rest of the evening worrying that I’d aspirated a bean.  Aspiration becomes more common as you age—something about nature trying to send us a hint, I guess—but I didn’t cough at all.  No wheezing started.  No pain.  Probably I swallowed at the last possible second.  If I did it was reflex because I couldn’t think what to do.  The next day, with no ill effects, it seemed funny.  Amusing enough to remember a time when really accomplished people were interested in what I had to say.  That time has largely departed, like an empty edamame shell.  But the memory remains.  There are hidden  hazards to eating edamame, it seems.

Which Mountain?

Leave a comment

Disney movies—and I still think of Disney primarily as a movie studio—were part of my childhood.  A small part, but there nevertheless.  We didn’t go to theaters often but we caught some movies on television (do you remember eagerly reading TV Guide to find out what was going to be on that week?).  We did watch The Wonderful World of Disney and some of their series—I recall the one ones on Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket.  Still, I missed a lot.  I didn’t see Mary Poppins, for example, until I was in college.  So the other day I got curious about Escape to Witch Mountain.  I’d not seen it as a child and never saw any reason to watch it as an adult.  I’ve been taking a break from bad movies, and, as it turns out, Disney.  So there may be spoilers below, in case you’re waiting to see it.

I didn’t know the backstory or the plot, so seeing this the first time I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The movie shows its age (I was a mere lad of twelve when it was released), but the story is interesting.  Tony and Tia are adopted but have to be sent to an orphanage.  We quickly learn that they have “powers,” and that adults like to exploit such things.  A wealthy villain has his fixer pose as their long lost uncle to get them to his house, under his control.  The children realize that they must escape to, well, Witch Mountain.  Actually, that takes some time and a sympathetic adult who can drive.  In the end it turns out that they’re aliens, not witches.

Not cheery like many Disney films, Escape to Witch Mountain, although you know it will end well, has a fair bit of tension.  Especially scary is the mob mentality that takes over the locals when they start their literal witch hunt.  Armed and dangerous, those who want to preserve the uniformity of small-town mentality are serious about their convictions.  As usual, they focus on the enemy without getting to know who, or what, they really are.  Obviously, there are larger issues to consider, as there are when anyone has an advantage.  But the kids, aliens, are sweet and mean nobody any harm.  All they want is to get back to their people.  Can humans, however, ever be satisfied knowing that there are others out there more advanced than we are?  Perhaps there’s a reason for cover-ups, after all.  Disney often says more than it’s given credit for saying.  Even if I missed it until now.

Springing

2 Comments

Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Just Ask

Leave a comment

I see a lot of headlines, and not a few books, that puzzle over something that there’s an easy way to resolve: why do evangelicals (I’m thinking here of the sort that back Trump despite his pretty obvious criminal, predatory nature) think the way they do.  The solution is to ask evangelicals who’ve come to see things a bit differently.  I’m not the only one, I can assure you.  Many professors of religion (particularly biblical studies) and not a few ministers came from that background.  If they were true believers then, they can still remember it now.  At least I do.  I was recently reading a report in which the authors expressed surprise that evangelicals tend to see racism as a problem of individual sin rather than any systemic predisposition society imposes.  To someone who grew up that way, this is perfectly obvious.

I’m not suggesting this viewpoint is right.  What I am suggesting is that there are resources available to help understand this worldview.  To do so, it must not be approached judgmentally.  (I sometimes poke a little fun at it, but I figure my couple of decades being shaped by it entitle me to a little amusement.)  I don’t condemn evangelicals for believing as they do—that’s up to them—I do wish they’d think through a few things a bit more thoroughly (such as backing Trump).  I understand why they do it, and I take their concerns seriously.  I know that many others who study religion, or write articles about it, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the concerns evangelicals have.  It’s only when their belief system impinges on politics that anybody seems to pay attention.

Maybe this is a principle we should apply to people in general.  Pay attention to them.  Listen to them.  Care for them.  Relentless competition wears down the soul and makes us less humane.  Religions, for all their faults, generally started out as means for human beings to get along—the earliest days we simply don’t know, but there is a wisdom in this.  In any case, if we really want to know there are people to ask.  Who’ve been there.  Whose very profession is being shoved out of higher education because it doesn’t turn a profit.  Learning used to be for the sake of increasing knowledge and since that’s no longer the case we see guesswork where before it would’ve been possible to “ask an expert.”  I often wonder about this, but as a former member of a guild that’s going extinct, I simply can’t be sure.

Panic Inducing

Leave a comment

Many movies appreciate in value over time.  The Devil Rides Out (also known as The Devil’s Bride) was not well received initially, but has become a highly regarded horror classic.  One of the few with a G rating, no less.  It’s also hard to see in the US, due to lack of streaming (at least where I stream) and DVDs coded to Europeans viewers.  Anyway, taken from a Dennis Wheatley novel, and screen-written by Richard Matheson, it features Christopher Lee in an heroic role during the days just before public concern about Satanism would become downright panic.  The story itself, effective if long-winded, develops among the aristocracy in England during the 1920s.  It was released, by the way, the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, which helped play into the Satanic panic.  Movies do influence the way we view “reality.”

I’ve never read any Dennis Wheatley novels, but it’s safe to say the story is pretty Manichaean in its outlook.  A coven of Satanists wants a young man and woman to complete their number but the chosen young man has a couple of older friends who quickly comprehend what is happening and attempt to put an end to it.  The Satanists, however, control real power and the movie is pretty much a tug of war between the young man’s friends and the coven.  This is done in such a way that you see very little blood, no gore, and surprisingly for the subject matter, no nudity or sex.  The Satanists here are old school—they want to worship the Devil in exchange for personal power.  It’s pretty clear that some research was done before undertaking all of this, even if the paranoia born of such things was fueled by largely imaginary scenarios. 

I’d been wanting to see this film for some time because of its clear connection between religion and horror.  There’d be no Satan, as we know him, without Christianity.  Indeed, there’s heavy Christian imagery in the film, in keeping with Wheatley’s outlook.  Crosses cause demons to disappear in an exploding puff of smoke.  Interestingly, however, there’s no crucifixes or holy water.  This is a Protestant view of the Dark Lord.  The Satanists, however, are defeated by the spirit of one of their own who refuses to allow them to sacrifice a young girl.  The ending stretches credibility a bit more than the rest of the movie, but still, overall it isn’t bad.  A Hammer production, it never had the box-office draw of its contemporary Rosemary.  Still, The Devil Rides Out was influential in its own right.  Even if finding a viewing copy requires almost selling one’s soul.

Technologies of Hope

Leave a comment

Having an immediate family member with cancer means that you look for hope everywhere.  Those who’ve brushed up against this family of diseases hopefully know that support groups abound.  Given my schedule, I don’t get out much on workday evenings, but we recently attended a survivors’ event hosted by the Andy Derr Foundation (donations accepted).  Two prominent local oncologists spoke and their tone was hopeful—always hopeful.  What really struck me was how much cancer treatment has progressed even just in the last five years.  The “cure for cancer” does not yet exist, but many technologies of hope do.  I sat there awestruck.  There are women and men spending their lives working to treat what used to be nearly always a fatal condition.  It was inspiring.

On the way home I was musing about how much we could advance in human health care if we had the budget of the military.  A vlogger we follow, John Green, happens to be a bestselling fiction author.  He is now writing a nonfiction book on tuberculosis.  This disease, for the most part, is completely treatable.  His efforts have led to lowering the cost of supplies to treat it for cash-poor countries.  I suspect he knows the same thing.  Our government decides which priorities it will fund.  Our fear—let’s be honest about this—funnels billions and billions to military budgets.  (And you wonder why I watch horror movies?)   I’m a dreamer, I confess.  But what if, world-wide, we put our money into medical budgets?  Can you even begin to imagine where we’d be by now?

I know most medical personnel are paid quite well.  My family member’s cancer medication costs more than she makes in a year, per single dose.  The technologies of hope those doctors were describing would be phenomenally expensive.  If only as a nation we had trillions of dollars at our disposal.  If only.  None of this, of course, should overshadow the tremendous work being done by nonprofits like the Andy Derr Foundation.  Channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars into research and treatment, they are making a difference.  Those beautiful survivors there that night are proof of the lives they’re helping save.  We have the ability to do amazing things.  If we support, and love one another, we can overcome a scourge that many, many families will experience, if they haven’t already.  Good work is being done.  And the good will behind it is cause for great hope.

Planetary Thinking

Leave a comment

It’s Monday, and I’m feeling like a holiday.  Good thing it’s Earth Day.  Many businesses (who still don’t consider Earth Day important enough to make it a paid holiday) are emphasizing being green these days.  Really, with global warming proving itself no myth it’s just good business to try to adapt to sustainable practices.  Those of us who are vegan find more and more companies offering animal-free options—our dependence on beef is a major environmental hazard.  It’s still a challenge finding shoes that aren’t leather based, but things are improving.  And more and more hybrids and electric cars are on the roads.  We are making progress.  We still haven’t, however, gone so far as to declare a day dedicated to preserving our home an official holiday.

I’m not jaded or capitalistic enough to think our only hope is to find off-world parking.  To raise the future of humanity elsewhere.  It’s just that people fall in line after bullies and bullies only think of themselves.  And who, thinking that an afternoon on the links can be counted as work, would consider giving mere employees a day off?  A day when we might shut down commuting schedules to save power?  A day to rest from the brutality of constant commerce.  After all, a typical weekend consists of a day for chores and a day for church.  (Still, that is, for many people.)  And then back to the office not really feeling refreshed but knowing that you can’t long survive in a pandemic-ridden world without more cash coming into the coffers.  Inflation may be going down but grocery prices aren’t.

From NASA’s photo library (public domain)

A day to celebrate home seems like a no-brainer.  Especially when it comes on a Monday or Friday.  Ah well, we’ll do our best to celebrate it around work, shall we?  We’re moving late into April.  There’s been a bit of sun mixed in with April showers, as is typical around here on this planet.  Days are growing longer and the trees are leafing out.  Spring welcomes us back to the outdoors (after work, of course) where green now predominates over brown and gray.  While we may not have the day off, we can at least take a moment or two to consider how we might be better to our planet.  How we might drive less, use less electricity, generate less waste, spare a few cows.  Who knows, it might become a habit?  If that were to happen maybe every day would become Earth Day.

Poe’s Novel

Leave a comment

Certain authors, some great among them, excel at short stories.  I know from personal experience that trying to publish a book of such stories is a very hard sell.  For a writer like Edgar Allan Poe, who was trying to live on his words, it often led to periods of poverty.  Thinking of him as a short-story author, I had never read his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Hailed by fellow brief-tale writer Jorge Luis Borges as Poe’s best, I figured I’d better give it a try.  I’m glad I did.  I had, however, no idea what to expect.  Those who write on Poe seldom pay it much mind.  He was famous for his poems and stories, and this gothic, sea-faring novel was, according to the introduction, suggested to him by those who felt his making a living as a writer might improve if he used long form.

Concerning the edition: the novel is in the public domain.  Penguin Classics, however, often contain nice introductions.  Indeed, the intro by Richard Kopley in this edition is excellent.  A few of his observations stood out to me—this novel was, in some measure, about Poe’s family.  Both the protagonist and the author have five-syllable names with the same cadence, ending on a three-letter surname beginning with P.  Also, as both the introduction and notes make clear, Poe was deeply steeped in the Bible.  You seldom read about Poe and religion.  Writers from America’s first generation, however, were uniquely brewed in it.  I’d never considered that about Poe before.  There are many editions of Pym available, but I recommend this one because of its introduction.

The story ends without resolution, just so you know.  Pym, talked into an adventure by a somewhat devil-may-care friend, goes out on the ocean on a boat after a night of drinking.  And herein hangs the tale.  Well, actually, the friend convinces the young man with a taste for the sea to stow away on a whaler that his father captains.  A mutiny, however, leaves Pym “buried alive” onboard.  A shipwreck leads to near starvation and a boon companion survivor.  Picked up by an explorer headed south, they discover a surprisingly temperate Antarctic circle where a native tribe turns treacherous because of their fear of the color white.  It does seem that there’s a race narrative taking place here too.  I enjoyed the story although the chapters about longitude and latitude don’t quite rise to the level of Melville’s maritime writing.  It’s a tale worth the read, however, but find one with a good introduction and it will be smoother sailing.

Wolfing Hour

Leave a comment

It’s not that I didn’t grow up watching horror; it’s that I didn’t grow up watching horror in theaters.  I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have had it, and besides, we could only afford movies spread apart by wide intervals.  You’d think that now I’m an earning adult (or so I’m told) that I’d have more control but watching is a kind of addiction and money’s still not abundant.  Every once in a while, however, I’ll splurge and pay for a film.  Mostly when they’re not available via any streaming service.  Like many Christians who’ve never read the whole Bible, I know the canon only piecemeal.  So I came to watch Hour of the Wolf, the Ingmar Bergman classic.  Now (at least then) streaming nowhere.  Intellectuals have always flocked to Bergman films since they’re full of symbols and not easy to understand.  (If you want to “get” Robert Eggers, though, you’ve got to do your homework.)

Hour of the Wolf is generally considered psychological horror.  It’s black and white—how scary can it be?  Pretty, depending.  The story of an artist’s wife (Alma) who lives with him in a small shack on an island in Sweden, it’s a tale of unraveling.  Nightmares become difficult to distinguish from waking realities.  The wife reads the artist’s diary, foreshadowing Wendy in The Shining, to discover that he seems to be going insane.  The island’s not abandoned, as they thought.  Soon Alma begins seeing other people too.  And attending their awkward dinner parties.  They speak freely of her husband’s previous affair.  There also seems to be an instance of a real person on the island that the artist keeps secret.

If this doesn’t give you enough to piece it together, well, it’s a Bergman film.  In college we watched The Seventh Seal.  And at least part of Wild Strawberries.  But in 1968 I wasn’t an intellectual and we were poor.  If I’d even heard of Ingmar Bergman it was via reference in some TV sitcom.   I knew to expect strangeness.  These days the box elder bugs are mostly gone from the house.  The weirdness started when, having never seen the film before, I began to pour a glass of water at the very second the artist picks up and begins to pour a glass of wine.  Strange coincidence, I thought.  Several minutes later I saw something edging around my glasses.  A box elder bug crawled right over my right glasses lens.  Like a scene in a Bergman movie.  I knew I’d have to ponder this for some time.

Morte d’Author

Leave a comment

I recently learned of Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author.”  Originally written in French, Wikipedia warns it’s not to be confused with Le Morte d’Arthur.  Or is it?  Barthes’ idea is that to truly appreciate a piece of literature you must dissociate it from its author.  I’m of conflicted feelings about this.  To truly understand an author you should read everything they’ve written.  Perhaps that’s a task best left up to biographers and historians.  I have trouble, especially when an author’s name is well known, and perhaps the very reason I purchased a book, of leaving the author out of the equation.  On the other hand, sometimes I’ll read literature merely for the experience, and the author is often someone I know nothing about.  If the book moves me, however, the first thing I start to research is the author.

Said author may not give the ultimate meaning to the story, but I believe it’s a more subtle  interaction than “La mort de l’auteur” might suggest.  It’s not unusual to enter into parasocial  relationships with an author.  In fact, I suspect it’s quite common.  After reading a Neil Gaiman novel I sometimes think we’d recognize each other across a crowded room.  Compelling writing will do that to you.  And from a writer’s perspective, what you write does contain part of you.  Captured in literary form.  As much as—no, more than a photograph does.  An author does not determine the final meaning of what s/he writes, but they mean something by writing it in the first place.

When writing fiction I often find myself exploring themes that require other stories I’ve written to give them fuller texture.  Perhaps this is why finding publishers is so difficult.  I’ve had people tell me that they understand my nonfiction better after they get to know me.  There’s a natural progression here, in this age of endemic loneliness: a story, blog post, or book catches your attention.  You want to know more and what do you do?  Await the death of the author or reach out to the writer?  I’ve done both, and I generally find that reaching out to an author can be satisfying.  It depends, of course.  Some don’t like to be disturbed by those they don’t know, their parasocial paramours.  Of course, there is a way to get to know an author, even remotely.  Read what they write.  It won’t give you the whole story, of course, but the more of their work you read the better you’ll get to know them.  Thus I’m conflicted about “La mort de l’auteur.”

Image credit: Florence Harrison, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Wondering Wailing

Leave a comment

You have to wonder, it seems to me, if the western, imperialistic gaze sometimes overcompensates for its past sins.  We remain reluctant to say we don’t understand something and sometimes even declare such things superior to what we produce.  That was the feeling that came over me upon reading about The Wailing.  Don’t get me wrong—I like K-horror well enough, but I’m not sure that I would say, with some critics, that it leaves American horror in the dust.  It’s good, yes, and it’s very long (two-and-a-half hours seems too long for a horror film).  The story doesn’t answer all the questions it raises and I was looking for some kind of religious message.  That’s why I watched it in the first place.  

What’s it about?  That’s hard to say.  The best that I can do is it’s about the doomed family of a Korean police officer in a small village.  As others have pointed out, this movie has ghosts, demons, zombies, exorcisms, and other horror standards.  There’s a considerable amount of Christian versus shamanism interplay.  And it seems okay, when someone else is doing it, to suggest a foreigner is the Devil.  None of this is intended to take away from the fact that the movie is effective.  I particularly found the shamanistic exorcism scene fascinating.  The thing is, you never really learn if the self-admitted Devil at the end is working with the shaman or not.  Or if the third potential villain, a woman named “No Name,” is in on it with them.  Or maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.  Maybe the policeman’s family is simply doomed.  Nothing they can do changes that.

The movie suggests that such things are like fishing.  You can’t be certain who’s going to take the bait.  According to those who know, apparently a deleted scene at the end helps to clarify this a bit.  There is a lot of talk about belief, and a Christian clergyman confronting the Devil.  For me, however, I need to be able to follow a story well enough to figure out whether I’m misinterpreting or not.  The problem with a movie this long is finding the time to go back and rewatch it.  It opens with a quote from the Bible and it uses biblical tropes, such as the cock crowing three times, to make some strong points.  In fact, the opening quote from Luke 24.37-39 implies that the ghost may be God.  One thing is certain, I’ll be mulling over The Wailing for some time.  And maybe someday I’ll start to understand.  In the meanwhile, I’ll still watch and appreciate American horror, inferior though it may be.

Monopoly by Statute

Leave a comment

The Bible is an odd book.  It is foundational for the modern world, no matter how much we might want to deny it.  Even so it’s a strange book.  The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is a masterpiece of English literature.  There’s not one King James Version, however, as several variants exist.  Nevertheless, the KJV remains quite popular among some religious groups and it is still studied in English Departments as part of our cultural heritage.  It is also in the public domain, which means anyone can print and sell it.  Unless, of course, you wish to do so in the United Kingdom.  Here’s where the story gets interesting.

Because of England’s troubled religious history—remember the whole Catholic v. Protestant monarch thing?—the printing of religious books became a contentious issue shortly after the adoption of the printing press.  In 1577 a monopoly on Bible printing went to one man, Christopher Barker, the Royal Printer.  Ostensively to control the version of the Bible approved for use in the Church (of England), this royal privilege became law.  In perpetuity.  Now rights, as commodities, can be bought and sold.  And this happened from time to time.  Cambridge University, however, had been granted a royal charter earlier—also perpetual—to print “all manor of” books.  Since this arguably included the Bible (a lucrative business) it wasn’t prevented from printing them as well.  Oxford University was granted a similar charter some years later and so the two ancient universities and the Royal Printer were the only ones allowed to print the Bible for sale in the United Kingdom (except Scotland, but that’s a story for a different time).

Image credit: Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

This privilege, which still exists on the books, did not apply to later versions of the Bible.  The KJV became wildly popular and really wasn’t challenged much for over two centuries.  By the nineteenth century British lawmakers, presumably, had better things to do than argue about who could print the Bible.  Meanwhile other translations divided and conquered the profits coming in from the sale of what had been, in essence “the” English Bible.  As late as 1990 the Royal Printer status landed with Cambridge University, so the sale of rights continues.  A similar story accompanied the Book of Common Prayer, which has always been in the public domain but can only be printed in the UK by the two major university presses.  The story of the Bible is a fascinating one, and since it has shaped western civilization, it seems appropriate to give it the last word: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Why Not Love?

2 Comments

I learned a new word the other day: incel.  I’m not too proud to say that I had to look it up.  Although I’m on the internet quite a bit, I’m not really part of “internet culture.”  Incel is a shortened form of “involuntary celibate.”  It refers to an internet culture of mainly white, heterosexual males who consider themselves unable to find (generally) female companionship.  They often lash out at women, and sometimes at any sexually active person.  In general it seems to be a self-pitying, hateful crowd.  They tend towards misogyny and racism and, one suspects, conspiracy theories.  They apparently suffer what a friend of mine called “DSB” (deadly sperm buildup).  But the thing is, love would seem to be the cure.

Certainly women aren’t to blame.  Look, if I managed to find a woman willing to marry me there must be hope for the rest of my gender.  I’m no catch.  And why is it frustrated men take it out on women?   And underplay the achievements of women?  The Women’s March in January 2017 was the largest single-day protest in history.  Accurate numbers are difficult to attain, but it has always struck me that the U.S. Park service agents, with feet on the ground, estimated a million and a half in D.C. alone.  So we were told.  It’s almost as if nobody bothered to count because it was women.  Why is this still an issue?  How incelular are we?  Is it so difficult to give credit where credit is due?

I wonder if anybody foresaw that the internet would develop such subcultures.  Yes, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash gave us a metaverse where individuals lived virtually online, but did we fully realize then that sexually frustrated guys would eventually merit their own title and that some of them would perform acts of real life violence based on their own rhetoric?  Rogue males have been part of human culture all along, but the internet has offered a place to band together and become radicalized.  I, for one, had no idea that such subcultures existed.  It took reading an academic work about female leadership to learn about them.  And it makes the world a less comfortable place knowing they’re there.  Learning love is our only hope.  There are people who sublimate their frustration to hate.  What if we tried to make the internet a place where love, with or without physical entanglements, became the dominant meme?  Even those of us who work largely in isolation can see the hope in that.

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash