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Book Party, Sunday June 5 - 3PM

Book Party,
Sunday 3PM
June 4

Come Celebrate!

5 Books - 5 Poets

Martine Bellen
Ruth Danon
Jordan Davis
Caroline Hagood
Jerome Sala

Books available
Refreshments

Jefferson Market Library
425 6^th Avenue, NYC
FREE

Find out more here!

“The Witch” vs “Hellhole”, or from Modernism to Postmodernism

It’s a wonderful feeling when your faith in an idea long dormant is restored. I recently experienced such a restoration after watching the Polish horror film Hellhole on Netflix. There is a segment in this film that shamelessly borrows a visual motif from The Witch, Robert Eggers' arthouse masterpiece of 2015. But the self-conscious way it uses such elements reinforced the usefulness of a concept I had personally consigned to my mental trash bin: postmodernism.

In fact, comparing The Witch and Hellhole is a good way to differentiate modern from postmodern style.  Doing so, you (re)discover what was (is) great about postmodern art in the first place: its ability to accommodate feelings that don’t normally fit together. In the case of Hellhole, the mixing disgust with hilarity.

The borrowing between Hellhole and The Witch doesn’t involve plot or setting. The earlier film is staged in colonial times and involves a family attempting to settle the American wilderness. The forest is full of witches, who the daughter eventually joins to worship of the Devil. Hellhole is set in contemporary Poland. It tells the tale of an undercover detective investigating a monastery in connection with a missing persons case. The detective eventually becomes possessed himself.

Authentic vs. Inauthentic

One of the qualities that makes The Witch so compelling is its authenticity. Director and writer Robert Eggers devoted years to researching his subject matter. He read diaries of the time (circa 1630) to match belief systems and diction. The cabin in the film was built according to architectural notes and other documents from the Smithsonian. This finely detailed realism achieves a historical consistency that makes you feel like you’ve been transported backwards through a cinematic time machine.

Hellhole, by contrast, is historically discordant, and, at times, comically inauthentic. Though set in modern times, the monastery locale is a throwback to medieval Europe, closer to a ruin than a place inhabited by living beings. It’s a mini-universe that reeks of decay.  Such a setting is appropriate for a set of rituals and beliefs that seem absurdly out of step with the times. The monastery is almost like an exorcism factory, churning out one after another. And it’s a profit center—the Vatican pays them by the possession. To add to the weirdness, we eventually discover the monks are worshipping, rather than exorcising, the devil and that cannibalism is a key part of their rituals.

The films, in short, couldn’t be more different—except for one striking scene. Both movies end in a similar way. In The Witch, the lead character, filled with the demon’s powers, joins the band of witches in the woods, in a dance in which they all levitate in a circle together. In Hellhole, the monks of the monastery, now under control of their demon, also levitate and, in their case, are suspended upside down. Like in The Witch, the monks’ levitation is accompanied by spooky voices and music—and there is enough similarity to the scenes that it seems like Hellhole is paying tribute to this earlier possession flick.

The visual imagery, though, is where the similarity ends. In The Witch, the scariness of the scene is mixed with a kind of release, even pleasure: as tragic as the story is (the young protagonist’s family is killed), you feel relieved she is freed from the oppressive puritanism of the film. The monks’ case is different: you feel they get what they deserved for all their ghoulish cannibalism. When they levitate, they are turned upside down along with the crosses in their monastery—an image in keeping with the carnivalesque overturning of belief systems in the film—where good becomes bad and holy profane.

But the most significant difference of all between the two levitations is that The Witch’s version is completely serious, while Hellhole’s is rather funny. This is because, in the case of Hellhole, there is a scene right before this one, that subverts its genre—and ultimately, the religious belief systems it plays with.

A Conjuring Gone Wrong

The premise of Hellhole will be familiar to anyone to anyone who has seen Rosemary's Baby or The Devil's Advocate. A group of devil worshippers, in this case the monks of this weird monastery, wish to assist Satan’s appearance and conquest of the world. In the case of Hellhole, we discover that the detective investigating monastery is destined to be the body/soul the demon will use to facilitate his return. Bringing this about involves a ritual that requires cannibalism, blood drinking and the reciting of blasphemous invocations. Two monks meticulously accomplish all this in front of their order. However, when they do so, nothing happens.

In this scene, the movie abruptly shifts tone, from scary to comic. The monks look puzzled, beginning to seem like a couple of fuckups. The spooky and pompously solemn aura of their ritual becomes undercut by the mundane quality of their self-doubt. “Did we forget something?” one monk asks. “I don’t know,“ the other replies, “there aren’t any instructions [pointing to an ancient book], just some notes.” The monk goes on to suggest that perhaps they interpreted the instructions symbolically when they should have been literal. “It’s not possible,” the other monk counters, adding: “We sacrificed seven innocents, one for every cardinal sin, and the eighth was even a virgin!” “You said this would work,” one monk mutters. “Oh, so you’re blaming me now,” the other shoots back.

Finally exhausted by all the finger pointing, one of the lead monks announces to the perturbed congregation: “This may have been a mistake; let’s act like nothing happened. After all, we meant well.”

This truly funny scene brings the whole film down to earth. It makes the plot and the genre itself seem ridiculous. This is why the levitation scene and the horror tropes that accompany the end of the film seem more a tongue-in-cheek exercise than anything you’d take literally. In this sense, the film is the diametrical opposite of The Witch.

And, rather than merely a kind of nihilistic joking around as some postmodern art is accused of, the absurdity of Hellhole serves as a tool of political critique. Eastern Europeans filmmakers, whose cultures have suffered through Fascism and Stalinism, are probably especially aware of the dangers of powerful “master narratives.” In this context, Hellhole might be read as a questioning of the overweening power of the Catholic Church, whose political influence is significant in Poland (a fact alluded to in the film). The obsession with ritual throughout the film and the decrepit setting suggests the whole edifice is out of date.

More than that, the heretical theology the film invents offers a cutting comment on dangers of any ideology if it gets too influential. If one wonders why Catholic monks would conjure evil personified, the rationale is provided near the end of the film. The head monk states:

 “God and the Devil sit side by side. They have an understanding. Always have. Since the beginning. But the Devil is not evil. People are. They deserve to be punished. And punished they shall be.”

In the context of the film, it’s hard not read this statement as a classic postmodern comment: any ideology, even one that preaches the good (don’t they all?), is liable to turn into its opposite if it becomes too powerful.  The result: rather than helping people, it punishes them—and the pursuit of the good goes hand-in-hand with evil.

The image we’re left with at the end of this film makes this point in a striking way: freed from hell, the first action the demon takes before enacting his mayhem is to pray to a crucifix.

 

Michelle Yeoh, Platonist? Thoughts on "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

How do you find meaning in a life that seems absurd?

This is the question the film Everything Everywhere All at Once keeps asking. Such a query, of course, is one that has haunted modernity since at least the days of existentialism. But the way the film goes about answering it is distinctly contemporary: it presents us with a blizzard of spectacular imagery from which to draw our conclusions.

The film’s basic plot is reminiscent of classic visionary narratives of the past, such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and especially The Wizard of Oz, except that it updates the dreamlike quality of these classics with the popular new trope of the multiverse.

If you haven’t seen it, the narrative works like this: Evelyn, the central character portrayed in a virtuoso performance by Michelle Yeoh, begins the film as a stressed, small business owner. She is trying to run a laundromat without much assistance from her spacey husband, rebellious teenage daughter and demanding father who has come to live with the family. To make matters worse, their enterprise is facing an audit from the IRS, and they are being grilled about receipts and expenses by a stern agent, played tongue-in-cheek by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Amid this turmoil, Evelyn discovers a new ability: she can travel through alternate universes, each of which presents a different version of her life. Such variations, we are led to understand, are the result of small choices she’s made. In one universe she is an opera singer, in another a high-society Brahman, in yet another a kung-fu messiah who is faced with the task of saving a world. The threat, in this case, comes from an alternate version of her daughter who is manipulating a black hole (that takes the hilarious shape of a cosmic “everything bagel”). There is even a universe where everyone’s fingers take the shape of rubbery hot dogs.

Shifting with Evelyn at eye-blink speed from one universe to another, the film calls to mind an experience a lot more banal than a multiverse: you feel like you’re searching for something to watch over our constantly proliferating streaming media choices. But whether scary, goofy, comedic or dramatic, the worlds presented in the film share a common trait: each seems more fun than the one she’s living in. This is why it’s mildly surprising that in the end, the universe where Evelyn finds the most meaning is the one where the film began: the laundromat business.

Plato’s advice on choosing between alternate lives

As I alluded to, such an outcome recalls the end of the Wizard of Oz film, where Dorothy concludes: “there’s no place like home.” But the film brought to my mind a more ancient tale. I am thinking of “The Myth of Er,” the fable that ends Plato’s Republic. In this afterlife parable, souls are asked to choose their next life from an array of possibilities (such reincarnation tales seem a predecessor to today’s more “scientific” myth of alternative universes). The lives offered in Plato’s myth, as in Everything Everywhere…” range from the glorious to the mundane. Souls are counseled to make wise decisions. Here is from Alain Badiou’s hyper contemporary translation of the classic:

“let us learn above all how… to choose an admirable life rather than a degraded one. For then we will have learned that a life, regardless of how lowly it may seem, is admirable when it’s oriented toward justice and that being oriented toward injustice, no matter how brilliant and famous one may be, is tantamount to ensuring one’s own degradation. That’s the only criterion. We must hold this conviction in ourselves, even into the world beyond…"

In Plato’s tale, a great hero of the past has seemingly learned this lesson better than most. Here is how, in Badiou’s translation, Odysseus chooses his next life (he is last in the line of souls making a “next life” selection):

“The memory of his arduous wanderings had cured him of all ambition. He spent ages trying to find the life of some ordinary person who’d been completely uninvolved in public affairs. With difficulty he managed to ferret out, off in a corner, the hard-working, never-changing life of a poor, industrious check-out woman at More Is Better, who, as she was the single mother of four children, got up every day at 5 a.m., did the housework, mended the clothes, washed the sheets, counted her pennies out one by one, and had nothing but the routine of domestic life to fill up her existence. Needless to say, none of the other dead had wanted that life. Odysseus immediately took it and said that even if chance had given him first dibs, he would have made the exact same choice.”

 Where Evelyn, a contemporary Odysseus, concludes her journey is not so different from this ancestor. Like this heroic figure, she ends up at the end of the film as head of a family that struggles like hell. One of the reasons she is dissatisfied with more “glorious” lives is precisely their lack of justice. In the alternate life in which she is the universe’s savior, for example, the way she is to accomplish her mission is by murdering her daughter (which she refuses to do).

Further, in the final few scenes of the film, Evelyn shares with her daughter the discovery she’s made through her “arduous wanderings” across alternative universes. In the film’s most Platonic moment, she states that, despite the absurdity of this excess of lives, one ideal still holds out as truth/meaning: the love she feels for her daughter and family. Thus, it is only her more worrisome and mundane life as laundromat owner that answers the question of “what does it all mean?” In his book on love, Badiou comments:

“Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea… In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that.”

The moral of both The Republic and Everything, Everywhere…then, seems to be: to find meaning, one must become immersed in something bigger than one’s own self-interest, something “universal” as Badiou puts it. In this light, compared to the truth of love, the many alternative lives flashing through the film at warp speed seem like so many bullshit media images—or, in more classical terms, illusory shapes projected over the walls of Plato’s Cave.

But certain details in the film cast a shade over such a sunny conclusion. Before Evelyn went on her universe-hopping journey, her family was on the verge of disintegrating because of the financial and emotional stress running a small business created. It would seem that even traditionally unassailable ideals such as love require material support to flourish.

All of which leads one to conclude that leaving the cave of illusion for the land of truth is certainly desirable—if you can afford the admission fee.

Holiday Party at La Mama, Dec. 13 - Doors Open 7:15

Poetry, Music, Art, Performance — a major blast!

Info here:

https://www.lamama.org/shows/poetry-electric-the-naughty-n-nice-list-2021

The White Lotus, or, the dissociation of everyday life

There is a scene in the 2^nd episode of HBO’s The White Lotus that struck me as both jarring and familiar. It occurs at lunch time at the Hawaiian vacation resort that is the setting for the mini-series. Rachel Patton (Alexandra Daddario) a freelance journalist on her honeymoon, stops by the table of Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton), the CFO of a popular search engine, there on vacation with her family.

Rachel is worried. She has just gotten hitched to a real estate mogul who urges her to give up her career (it’s just “disposable garbage…clickbait” he tells her) and enjoy all luxuries that come with marrying into wealth. Though her job is low-paying and, as she puts it, “mediocre”, she fears abandoning it will relinquish whatever personal autonomy she has achieved. She looks up to Nicole, a successful professional woman with a family, and, after introducing herself, asks for her wisdom.

Nicole is happy, and somewhat flattered, to be approached as a mentor. “You’ve got to keep your own orbit going,” she advises, “don’t give up your power.” Rachel thanks her, and Nicole adds, “Women have a lot to navigate and I just think it’s really important to support women."

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, just as this warm encounter is about to end, the interaction between these characters darkens dramatically. Rachel shares that she wrote a piece praising Nicole, naming the publication where it appears. “That was a fucked-up piece,” Nicole tells her.  She feels the article made her “come across as some Machiavellian gorgon, using the victimization of the other women in my company just to further my own craven ambitions.”

Rachel is taken aback, thinking her piece did nothing but praise her idol, though she admits the profile was “re-purposed content”, based on another publication’s work. “That’s bad journalism,” Nicole snaps. Then, without missing a beat, the two smile warmly, wish each other a happy stay, and part.

Seamless dissociation

What struck me about this scene is that it captured an experience rarely portrayed in popular entertainment. There are those moments, especially in working life, when the person you are speaking to transforms without warning—almost like a friendly dog that turns vicious. Then, just as suddenly, perhaps out of social convention, the situation goes back to friendliness. You’ve witnessed a shift from one to personality to another, but the person you’re speaking with seems unaware that the switch has occurred.

There is an amusing story Liza Minnelli tells about such an abrupt change of persona. She describes an early experience performing on stage with her mother, Judy Garland. At first, she felt the warmth of motherly affection. But once the performance got going, her mother “was like a lioness that owned the stage and suddenly found someone invading her territory…the killer instinct of a performer had come out in her.”

Minnelli relates that later she and Garland howled with laughter about this twist in personality. It was as if another self had overtaken her mother in the midst of their duet. “You’re a force to be dealt with,” Garland commented. “I created it and now I’ve come up against it.”

A self for every social role

What accounts for such momentary schizophrenia? In both of these examples, one of the characters shifts from one social role to another. In each, the bonding, nurturing self gives way quickly to the professional one. Both Mossbacher and Garland have images they need to cultivate. Their public selves, concerned with reputation management, play by competitive rather than the cooperative ethics.

In my own experience working for various employers, such shifts result from similar causes. The natural social bonding that occurs between people who work together can grow cold quickly when a professional imperative intervenes. A typical scenario: a person you work for, and are friendly with, announces there will soon be “restructuring” or “downsizing.” Your previously warm interactions grow cold; the boss adopts a game face.

New forms of class animosity

One of the impressive aspects of The White Lotus mini-series is the fact that, underneath the requisite melodrama, there is a sophisticated awareness of contemporary class alliances and antagonisms. At the resort, we see interactions between the wealthy clientele and the service staff, as well as the staff and the employees they supervise and other social dynamics.

This aspect of the series makes the clash between Nicole and Rachel particularly contemporary. Each is representative of a relatively new class created by the information economy. Nicole, as the CFO of a major search engine, is a member of what media theorist McKenzie Wark has named the “vectoralist class.” These are new members of the ruling class. They are distinguished from, say, the real estate barons that populate the show, rather like old money is from new. One is based on property; the other, on the control and/or ownership of information.

Rachel, the freelance writer, is from what Wark terms “the hacker class.” These workers earn their precarious living through supplying not just the code or programming, but “content” that populates the networks the vectoralists control. In Wark’s words, hackers “turn the same old information into new.” Rachel’s article about Nicole is a case in point: her piece “re-purposed” an older article, rewriting, tweaking, supplementing, etc., to make it new.

In this light, you can almost read Nicole’s scolding of Rachel as the super-egoic voice of the Google algorithm; it’s no secret that the search engine’s technology ranks totally original “content" higher than the “re-purposed.” Of course, Rachel was probably ordered to reuse the older story by her employer. The person who assigned the piece, no doubt, didn’t have the budget for the labor time involved in original research or interview. Rachel's low pay is probably the standard for “hack work.”

In any case, though Nicole, as vectoralist, is in a more powerful position than Rachel, the animosity the former displays hints at the small power the precariously paid freelancer nevertheless possesses. What Rachel writes contributes to the public image the powerful CFO presents. Those who live by information can also die by it. How investors perceive the C-suite executives of a corporation can affect stock recommendations.

As William Davies points out, in an information economy “reputation” becomes a kind of social capital—one that has economic consequences. Davies comments: “If a reputation can be invested in and grown over time, it is equally possible to be ‘shorted’ by this quasi-financial market—harmed by trolling or concerted online attacks.” Though Rachel’s piece is by no means an attack, in a reputation-intensive economy Nicole is sensitive to even the possibility that this portrayal could provoke sneers.

The future is dissociated

Such dynamics lead me to wonder, as we all become increasingly sucked into the information economy, whether our own dissociation will increase. Science fiction tales are already envisioning a future where our private selves become public to such a degree that even casual conversations are regularly invaded by “the professional self” and take on an artificial, promotional tone. How can they not? After all, we’ve got reputations to manage.