I hate that the Wachowskis have had their legacy (The Matrix films) acquired by alt-right fantasists.
The term ‘red-pilled’, an official terminology between the various demographics using the Lingua Franca of Q-Anon, refers to successful evangelism (so to speak) of respective conspiracy theories to the masses; it means having made a convert of someone, of having brought to illumination someone who was previously a somnambulist to the deceit of mainstream narratives and accepted rhetoric. It means a person has been successfully welcomed into the fold of more extremist views than the accepted party-line.
I remember seeing The Matrix films as a kid and becoming obsessed, loving the hyperstylised visuals. These movies helped with my cinematic literacy, introducing me to the notion of aesthetic languages generally; how ideas could be disseminated through not just the more expositional manoeuvres of content, but also form. That in fact the communicative possibilities of form were potentially more exciting than the mechanics of writing alone for being less limited in scope (there are always exceptions).
Reductive to binarise writing/aesthetics or content/form in this way I know, seeing as in cinema especially ‘successful’ execution is determined by their synergy, their relation. But again in a medium like cinema, which is primarily visual, for me personally form assumes a primacy. I mean, thin writing in a movie can be glossed over with curated visuals, can be transformed into an epic minimalism or high-camp by clever editing or rigorous visual signatures.
The Witches by Nicolas Roeg. Perhaps my all time favourite film from childhood. Commendable for it’s amazing practical effects courtesy of Jim Henson, along with a gloriously unfiltered translation of Roald Dahl’s deviant themes and images, where other Dahl adaptations (especially later ones) have gone the way of Disney; as in, sanitising Grimm stories from morbid cautions into all-singing all-dancing family friendly fare. Roeg’s version definitely found a place in my subconscious. I had an obsession with witches, probably because between Angelica Houston’s turn as the Grand High Witch and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, being an evil witch seemed like a glamorous fun and empowering existence, where the do-gooders seemed repressed, limited, comparatively lacking in imagination. I mean, if esoteric powers were really at hand then domination of one’s environment seems obvious.
Rewatching The Witches now, and having yet to watch the recent update with Anne Hathaway (a sadly anodyne version, apparently), I can’t believe how contemporary kid’s movies shy away from violence, pathos, sex, when I can list any number of eighties and early nineties examples which have no problem collapsing the usual thematic partitioning of kid and adult entertainments towards refreshingly subversive fare.
Several writers I like talk about the importance of boredom and how critical thinking is impossible without it, particularly Zizek whose take is that without boredom we cannot question our world, that we’d otherwise carry on with our lives like stupid contented animals, like cattle given sedatives for the march from pen and pasture to proverbial meat-grinder. I’m as allergic to boredom as anyone else. I watch horror movies and have a reasonably under control porn addiction and even now I’m writing while Jonas Akerlund’s Lords of Chaos plays in the background because my insatiable media consumption is so fragmented and contrary and heavingly disparate, that watching a film isn’t enough; I have to be simultaneously processing every other thing, skating on the surface of a movie which I’m convinced I’m getting the gist of from the tropes and cliches in my periphery (including some unnecessary compulsive heterosexuality, completely fabricated apparently), while writing just as compulsively because generating real-time commentary is what my socials programme me for. Nothing has inherent value, everything only has comparative value as a reference, as a hyperlink.
Depth of perception has less and less credibility, the hefty the multidimensional the weighty the momentous means nothing; ‘things’ and their thingness only have networked value. The intertextual having become hypertextual becoming a sort-of Akashic record, a sorting and storing of information for it’s own sake without any singular organising principle because these positional singularities were evacuated with the ultimate troll of Post-Modernity, in which we were allegedly freed from the theistic oppression of a single point of reference; when in reality, consumer-boredom was born as a crowded flatness of endless and endlessly monotonous possibilities. A new god more powerful for transcending a fixed address, for de-materialising into everything.
Revelations called it Legion, the many-faced antagonist.
Now I’m feeling sick because I only had the vaguest idea of what Lords of Chaos was really about, and I just saw the twitter feed for Varg Vikernes which I regret pursuing (feeling more sick for doing so), knowing that he exists not as an isolated fringe-provocateur but as a symptom of a Europe that regresses to a mythic insidiousness when faced with economic hardship (if history serves).
Vikerne is an older man now. The film attempts a depiction of his youth, one he has since denounced not for exploiting his crimes (arson, murder) but for it’s apparently unforgivable lack of verisimilitude. Go figure.
I see boredom as a major ingredient in Vikerne and company’s sort of purely aesthetic embrace of satanism, and beyond this a unique set of ingredients and circumstances resulting in Burzum’s specifically tragic outcome; toxic masculinity, inter generational disenfranchisement, rebelling against an oppressive Christianised culture of manners and ‘decency’. Teen horniness. Ever a factor in teenaged criminality; hormones.
Vikerne says that Euronymous, frontman for Mayhem and Vikerne’s vaguely homoerotic rival, was a closeted homosexual. He goes on to say there was an absence of partners around him by which we can assume Vikerne thinks that Euronymous’s lack of avowed heterosexual interest made him closet-gay (one thing Vikerne hasn’t denounced from the film yet is his teen self’s voracious and frankly misogynistic interest in women, with which he’s probably satisfied his straightness is comparatively exemplar).
Over the break I started reading Going Dark, Julia Ebner’s chronicle of infiltrating extremist groups both online and in real life. At the time of writing this I’m halfway through the last chapter, a tacked-on perspective on the New Zealand Mosque shooter and his gamification of terrorism, the live-streaming and very marketing-savvy release of his manifesto The Great Replacement (to clarify, The Great Replacement is a bottom-line suspicion of the white minority that their ethnic dilution/replacement is a government conspiracy, a strategic erasure of whiteness as opposed to a natural outcome of a technologised-globalised world; from which we all benefit to some degree). It’s been a horrifying read and places me deeper in an ambience of white supremacist toxins, to the point I feel surrounded, which is probably an anxiety-fuelled paranoia; or is it?
It’s an awkward sitting-position, being member to the virtue-signalling left and deploring it’s educated arrogance, it’s superiority, while becoming gradually aware of the specific type of loathing due us by a far-right that feels increasingly disenfranchised, their whiteness which at one point was a calling card, an affluent membership, suddenly less valuable in the mainstream as the popular imagination dissects and appraises how power has been historically disseminated.
Contrary to what ‘victims’ of this scrutiny of whiteness fear, being white hasn’t suddenly become the pariah-making characteristic those contemplating ethnic replacement take it for. If anything, whiteness is simply finding equivalence with the existing ethnic-metric, in as much as races and cultures circulate with equivalence in a system primed for trade, in a system in which difference is capital, novelty is commerce, identity is currency. Obviously, if you have something of value in a rivalrous climate, you defend it. As the value of whiteness shifts (lessens, becoming horizontal rather than vertical), it’s historic value as a master signifier is being defended, even while the world shifts and attempts ridding itself of the need for master signifiers generally. It’s nothing personal whites, it’s just that we’ve lost our stomach for servitude.
I’m sure you feel the same way.
I wince when I think about the fact that people exist who need me to die so they can properly inhabit their lives. Partly from my own sudden (and to some extent illusory) sense of being in danger, but also partly from pity; pity that whoever does operate in such a mode of heightened and prolonged angst will probably die prematurely of diseases related to hypertension, who have fortified their minds to such a degree that critical thinking beyond egoistic reinforcement is literally forbidden. It’s the equivalent of Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall staying in the off-season Overlook Hotel, all those rooms available and they restrict themselves to the service quarter for fear of what they might find anywhere else (admittedly Room 237 has a nasty surprise but every remaining room is probably worth exploring).
It’s an interesting proposition; that your life can only have value in as much as it is spent denigrating and, hopefully, annihilating a loathsome Other.
It’s a shame that white supremacists are so deaf to the wisdom of cultures unrelated to the aryan tree, otherwise they might’ve acquired Beyoncé’s frankly life-changing tidbit, for the better; ‘always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper’.
There’s something neoliberal about this, yes, for sure; it aggrandises success as a spiteful pseudo-spiritual pursuit, success as a way to vanquish enemies rather than success being parcel to fulfilling experiences of Self, seamless integrations of the ego with environment. Existential affirmation transcending market value, transcending monetary incentives by way of being a mirror.
You are here.
I’m personally more in favour of a neoliberal rat race than I am of having to martial myself against lethal prejudice. Even better would be a world in which the poor aren’t being exploited, where disparity is mended and no one is left feeling so criminally neglected that they weaponise themselves against an imagined foe, whether Islamic, Jewish, LGBT, whatever.
I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Tom of Finland, but I remember it changing my life. As most fags will tell you. Even more than seeing my first rain-soaked game of rugby, the sport’s channel camera-eye switching lasciviously from field to locker and back again like it was nothing; like glimpses of unadorned rugby-physiques in tantalising repose couldn’t be a more nonchalant thing (it definitely isn’t).
I feel differently about it now having realised the Tom of Finland aesthetic is lifted from the chrome and leather finish of Reich-era fascists, privy now to a confounding appreciation for/fetishisation of nazi-aesthetics in gay culture (that every gay district has an Eagle bar?). Which makes zero surface sense (seeing as homosexuals were specifically hunted by Hitler), but which I’m beginning to understand in the wider erotics of BDSM and fetishised power-dynamics generally.
What better way to psychologically manage a threat than to render it sexually appealing, by literally fucking it? It’s not a stretch, the distance between affects of fear and desire deploying similar signals in the body, viscerally gauged categories which a mind-trick could easily shuttle subjects between. I’m thinking of it now as a reclamation, as a (potentially problematic) affirmation in the face of historically death-dealing forces. An eroticised satire of the antagonist, hereby making him/her/it more digestible.
Erotics as soma (isn’t it?).
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