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From "American Sniper" to ... "Triumph of the Will"?

''American Sniper'' is a movie for those who enjoy feeling protected and

safely individuated—disconnected from other people—rather than for those

eager to lose themselves into a brotherhood. Chris Kyle is a sniper—his

organs and privates are always covered as he lies on the ground to ''snipe.''

He becomes a famous sniper—his fellow troops don't see him so much as

 just one of them as a hero protector who guarantees them victory. His

mission is not the same as everyone else's, as much as he might pretend that

it is: while the rest of the troops take out the ordinaries, he is bound to face

off against the great devil Mustafa, who picks off vulnerable soldiers like a

death vulture pounced direct from the sky. He can personally handle some

adulation—one soldier who hails him repeatedly as ''the hero'' before the rest

of the troops, is dealt with with a plate of flung food, humbling the alert state

of newly-drawn attention with the drowsiness of the narratively known—but

when other's well-meant appreciation means him feeling requited to

receiving and accepting, to him becoming a passive receptacle to other's

needs, PTSD lets him off the hook by making background noise suddenly

remind of traumatic previous war encounters, and he's only half there to

receive anything. His wife has never had the advantage of him. He

approached her after attending her shooting down the approach of another,

and his familiarity with her technique means he's able to buttress whatever

riposte she has left in her. Thereafter he's involved in a war they both believe

in, so something along the lines of the devastating attack  James Wolcott

levied against those who diminished war-serving Salinger in favour of Lena

Dunham, is always at the ready, if need be.

But this is Eastwood when he's still pro-growth. He'll do a film like ''Gran

Torino,'' which suggests that in becoming accustomed to Korean neighbours,

the curmudgeon main protagonist isn't so much adjusting to the new as

keeping fidelity with familiar values—now housed in physically different

people—but which overall feels in favour of adaptation and change. He'll do

a film like ''Jersey Boys,'' which lands us back in the conservative 1950s, butwhich features a flamboyant gay producer who's portrayed favourably—

whip-smart, innovative, self-interested but also overall a good friend. And

he'll do ''American Sniper,'' which does lend support to the liberal position

that the government needs to fund therapy for war-afflicted troops. When he

tilts the other way—and he will—he'll start doing films more like ''Triumph

of the Will,'' where there will be nothing more gleefully forsaken than one's

http://patricksjustincasesite.blogspot.ca/2015/01/from-american-sniper-to-triumph-of-will.htmlhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/120027/not-kind-girl-review-lena-dunhams-callow-grating-memoirhttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/120027/not-kind-girl-review-lena-dunhams-callow-grating-memoirhttp://patricksjustincasesite.blogspot.ca/2015/01/from-american-sniper-to-triumph-of-will.html

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individuality, and where the main protagonist will gleefully catch any shared

emotion you might want to intermingle with him so you’re all that much

more ''one.''

This change will occur because anyone who needed to protect his own

growth with defensive strategies, came out of a early matrix that was

smothering. Such a matrix was also claiming ... and in abandoning it one felt

upon withdrawal its massive disapproval, its accusation that you are a bad

boy/girl who deliberately abandoned a wholly selfless, endlessly generous

and provisioning source for flippant and narcissistic—i.e. entirely selfish—

reasons. One cannot handle feeling abandoned, unworthy of one's mother's

—i.e. the ''mountain'' ground within the early matrix—love forever ...

accumulating before you is how apocalyptic this first felt to you when you

experienced it as an infant, and it eventually drowns whatever positive self-

evaluation you've mustered for yourself in your individuated adult life. So

off is shuck your distinctiveness, and you merge within a body

masochistically as but added cells to a corpulent grand madame. You

become like Germans when they in the millions forsook their individuated,

growing Weimar selves—something wondrous but totally new and heartily

anxiety-provoking—and lost themselves into the provincial stupidity of the

''volk.''

One of the interesting things that will happen is how the idea of the

sheepdog, the protector—a recurrent idea in Eastwood's films—will change.In ''American Sniper'' the idea was introduced not just to explain the source

of Kyle's behavioural inclinations but to add another empowered patriarch

into a scene—Kyle’s dad instructed him to be a sheepdog—an empowered

patriarch felt by Eastwood to add a barrier that could succeed against any

giant, bloated, maternal sea-monster's efforts to reach out of the swamp and

yank poor Kyle/Eastwood back into a digesting stew. Those with any

trepidation, those who are frail, won't be seen as worthy of being guarded—

as they are to some extent in this film, perhaps most especially with the

marines, who didn't receive the training the Seals did ... who just six monthsbefore were civilians. They'll be seen as adding nothing to the prowess of the

group, as being vile for being useless, and the protector's role will be to

protect the vitality of the group and expunge them—that is, in a sense, to kill

the sheep.

They'll be portrayed a bit like Kyle's younger brother, whom Kyle is

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delighted with and proud to see enlisted but whom the film shows as a pale

shadow to Kyle, and who's weak soul couldn't bear the tarnish that a single

tour would incur upon it. They'll seem more like Mark Lee, who dies shortly

after questioning the wisdom of the war and the virtue of warrior

persistence, but that much more as a result of their being in truth aliens thatshould have been expunged from the brave collective effort of war that

much earlier. They'll seem a bit more like the damaged vet who killed Chris

Kyle, whom his wife espied as a dark demon in vet-clothing as soon as she

spotted him, but who was clouded from acting to save her glorious husband

by the credibility of the idea of keeping faith with the weak—a ''foul''

concept "now" revealed as meaning that such a thing as the greatest warrior

in your history, would be left to be downed by a fart of a man.

Eastwood will be vilifying the weak not just within the group, but outside it.

Within, the weak saps the strength of the group, and is hated for that reason;

outside, the weak and vulnerable are guilty of representing what you mostly

were when you felt targeted within the maternal matrix, and are therefore

targeted because you’re now completely in mind to keep your mother

unblemished in her holiness. So in future films ''enemy'' children that are

being targeted by hero-snipers won't be targeted with trepidation, but shot in

the manner of how Kyle in real life actually shot them—totally self-

righteously: down goes another little savage! … serve up another! And since

all villainy must be outside the group, all the negative aspects of your

mother must be projected there as well. This means that in future films whenwoman come into view needing to be shot for their carrying bombs, we

won't be meant to think of them as tools of the men who commanded them

—as we are to a significant extent in this film— but as issuing forth oblivion

from out of their own selves. It'll mean that the exotic persian Orientalism

won't be found in the "beautiful" Mustafa, the ''sheepdog'' sniper on the side

of the terrorists, but in the ''queen'' at the centre of the hive—''the

butcher''—''herself,'' who'll be made to possess traits that identity ''her'' as

our split-off villainous mother.

''She'' won't be made to carry a purse, necessarily, but ''she’ll'' surely be

made to lurch over a doomed child in a way that can't help but remind of a

witch adding salt to the bare delicious exposed flesh of the helpless child.

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two towers being brought down and knows the right thing to do is to go

where-ever "savage-hiding" desert his nation tells him people responsible for

this atrocity can be found. And in the course of serving, he will incur PTSD,

an affliction liberals like to think of as making these naive, uneducated men

damaged, ruined ... as used and cast-aside by a corporate society thatpretends faith with them but really doesn't give one damn.

Eastwood has his way into making a film assuming a reasonably 'cross-

Hollywood sympathetic approach to Kyle, and he uses this proxy to re-

experience a good part of what was comfortable for him about the 1950s. No

where in this environment is there any family which isn't clearly under the

dominion of men. A woman and a child come into Kyle's sights as possibly

carrying explosive devices, but we were shown their being sent there first by

a man from his cellphone. A woman presents her wounds to Kyle to show

the degree of savagery of "the butcher," but she was ushered to by her

husband, who more or less snapped his fingers to acquire her summons.

Kyle notices that a man they're dining with has bruised elbows—and

therefore is likely not the civilian he claims to be but a soldier—but the fact

of his being at the head of the table, with his son by his side, and with his

wife, barely a presence, quietly taking away and bringing dishes, is meant to

be outside our critical appraisal, like it would be if we were of the 1950s and

were in the 1950s.

Kyle is very hardworking and genuinely shown to be, if not keepingcivilization intact, certainly doing good work—killing brutal men who'd drill

holes in children and the like—and Eastwood makes PTSD serve merely

what hardworking 50s men were ostensibly afflicted with after their arduous

daily grind, battling other men in a competitive society and keeping their

families afloat. 1950s men could not help but "bring work home" too ... and

that's why social norms had it that the wives' full-time occupation once their

husbands were home was to nurse them: not to confront them with the

problems arising from their own day but bring them drinks, serve them

dinner, soothe them down and spoil them—then, and only then, would thedaily toil accrued from the outside world be met and matched. If a wife

instead started screeching, berating her overworked husband and betraying

the role society needed of her, she could expect to be shamed for it ... just

like Kyle's wife would be shamed, if on the phone to Kyle she started

harping on what his being away was doing to her and he responded, "What

was that dear? ... I couldn't hear you for my jeep turning over and my buddy

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 just being shot through the head."

Eastwood embraces the idea of PTSD only because it can suggest stature

rather than weakness. If you have a heavier case of it, it's surely because

you've been out on the field longer, endured more of an unsparing

environment ... a frail-looking, elder therapist notes that Kyle has had 180

kills, and you wonder if he's thinking more on how to treat him or how to

become the faintest shadow of him. One of Kyle's good friends, the fellow

sniper Mark Lee, remarks that war is something like kids proving

themselves by seeing how long they can hold on to an electric wire, but

when he dies shortly afterwards it does seem to be out of Kyle's supposition

that he was no longer ready to meet the daily grind. He's disillusioned, but

the film provides no reason for it: there are plenty of very bad guys

out there, and if you're not at your best, good men on your side will die for

it.

In short, Mark Lee makes it seem as if being a soldier is like being a

salesman out of "Death of a Salesman," you just go on to prove you're strong

when what you are really are is being depleted, to no point, while no one

else out there cares. Kyle's retort is what a buoyed 1950s salesman would

winningly reply to this 1930s—"Death of a Salesman" is about someone

working in the Great Depression—world view: "What on earth are you

talking about? We keep at it because we're needed and it's our job. It's just

that simple."

18, 2015

Parting ways, in Ridley Scott's "Exodus: Gods and Kings"

Ridley Scott is known for his strong female protagonists, but there is a

feeling he nestles into this story of ancient lands because he thinks it's one

where tested older male rulers have gotten women who might contest them,

securely contained, and where if these men have had a long enough tenure

over their boys, when power descends to them, the momentary dislocationincurred when power trades hands won't be sufficient for even an

experienced female-at-court to take advantage of. Elder, governing "fathers"

are like guardian sentinels that keep chaos at bay; but are meant to crumble

down at a certain point where hopefully an even better erection of

themselves can immediately step in to keep things generating rather than

succumbing to amend-making, and other things that mean retreat from

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"your" own business.

These fathers are strong, secure and kind, but not without damning flaws

that should mean that at some point they need to exit the scene. Marcus

Aurelius in "Gladiator" nurses his great general Maximus fondly, and has

kept a confident realm, but is warranted in asking if ultimately he'll be

remembered as just cruel—he has launched armies afield that perhaps have

spread civilization but for sure have butchered multitudes. In "Kingdom of

Heaven," Godfrey de Ibelin arrives in time to offer shelter to his insecurely-

placed son, but he came to visit him in part to apologize for having had sex

with his mother—who had no choice but to lay with him—and is revealed as

someone who hasn't put much thought into how to provision his terribly

drought-vulnerable desert estates. And in "Exodus," the beneficent pharaoh

Seti is implicated in still listening to gods that may foretell truth but are

serpentine, probably overall uncaring and indifferent, and properly not due

any respect, and of course in being part of the lineage of pharaohs that have

built their grand civilization on the backs of slaves.

But when these shielding "husks" are off—even if it is not consciously

understood as so by Scott— whatever these sheltered "sons" do afterwards

in the space now birthed to them is presented as right, just for the sheer fact

that what they do unravels their own course. They are prepared to beat back

other predators thinking of seizing upon their terrain, and make the world

landscape reflect, rather, their own dispositions. "Gladiator's" Commoduslearned enough about statecraft, about people, from his father that the

senators immediately besieging him to concern himself with what they think 

most urgent, can in fact be ignored entirely, as after a brief delay, where they

succeed in unsettling him, making him perhaps think they'll hold sway over

him, he quickly recovers so that the first, second, and third order of business

actually becomes what he wants, how he wants to initiate his reign. He has

garnered enough experience with the wily that his older sister, who is first

presented to us as perhaps Rome's foremost expert in deception, can actually

become ... scared, disarmed from effectively impinging on him. Balianlearned enough about being a knight from his father that he is able to keep

afloat a people and save a city from complete ravaging, sticking to his own

principles while a beautiful queen offers him such a cornucopia in

apparently guilt-free satisfaction that it would appear unaccountable he not

change course and belittle as well the idea/ideal of the perfect knight. And in

"Exodus," Ramses has been allowed enough nurturant days with his

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"brother" Moses, enough sincere encouragement by his father to always

keep faith with him, that when his mother starts dictating terms, insisting it

would be unaccountable if he not immediately slay Moses—the foretold

threat to the throne—he brushes her aside, and as much as possible stays

loyal to him. Shipping him off, yes, but shipping him off armed  with asword that'll deflect any assassins sent by his mother and lend him a credible

future.

You might think that Scott would prefer that the likes of Commodus,

especially, obeyed the experienced and wise when they insisted on his

beginning his rule by following their dictates. But in any situation where

someone is being pressed into making a decision s/he feels under

compunction to heed, whether it might be in accord with what s/he might

come up with on his own or not, is one where I would argue Scott is actually

pulling for the one under “assault,” the one being undermined—there is no

way he would have thought to structure a film where the new young

emperor, good or bad, is effectively hemmed in. He was going to need to

have Commodus find a wily way to avoid the fate he momentarily seemed

obliged to, just as he was going to need Maximus to only seem beholden to

his fate to be executed, just to be willing to journey with them as principle

protagonists. For Scott, to be attendant to others is to impinged ... you feel it

notably in such movies of his as "Prometheus," where the captain, the one

who has rule (over a starship) but who has never been allowed to free herself 

from the dictates and machinations of her father, is tight, bitter, frustrated,wholly unhappy.

 It is important you make your own decisions, it is important that you not be

dis-swayed ... are not thoughts ever aired in "Gladiator," but the former is,

overtly, in "Exodus," and Scott has publicly chided himself for allowing the

opinion of test audiences to sway the form of the released version of

"Kingdom of Heaven." He put his film up for test viewings and end up

heeding the audience's reactions, thereby ruining his efforts by putting a

forth a film shortchanged his own highly astute editorial judgment/skills. Heknows he ought to have been Commodus, confident even if unpopular and

apparently wholly astray, he knows that everything new should be granted

the aggressive stance of being allowed to change people before people

should commence their assault on it, and kept faith with himself.

What he explores in this film with the avenue cleared from obstacles—with

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"the parted sea"— is what happens when two brothers need to do the mature

thing and test whether a close friendship that worked in an environment

which didn’t allow one of them to really shine, makes any sense at all when

both have come to know what suits them best. This isn’t “Kingdom of

Heaven,” where when two brothers meet after a long time away the youngerbrother’s becoming greater, becoming “an actual baron,” is meant to

humiliate the older. Rather, the film is sympathetic to the brother who,

owing to no other fault other than just being more limited, really would now

 just be a hinderance. So while we do see Ramses behaving abominably—

commanding in one instance a family be hanged—Scott’s attention to him is

so much someone who is shedding a friend regretfully that even more

attention is put to Ramses’ kindnesses, his virtues and strengths.

Scott attends to Ramses' manner with his wife, which is loving, and most

especially to his child—whom he truly cherishes. When he loses his son

owing to God’s wrath and his reaction is not just to pursue vengeance but to

spend a long moment with his dead son, speaking to him tenderly—“you

know the reason you sleep so peacefully … it is because you are loved”—we

know that something remarkable has been chastened. He even works to

challenge how implicative and reverberant we’re to allow the hanging of the

family to remain, making it also an occasion for a joke where Ramses is

intended our full sympathies (he didn’t quite have mine, as the one hanged, a

court “scientist,” was commendably bang-on in making sense of the

sequence of the blight upon them, even if he wasn’t conversant as to thewhole damage fleas might leave behind, i.e. disease theory).

But Moses is a better person, a much more evolved sort. It shows in his

being able to readily empathize with those not part of his immediate family.

It shows in his attitude towards authority; tradition doesn’t bide him to defer,

something he shows in his taking ready amusement at the silly “science” of

prognosticating from animal guts—a practice that no one else is really quite

ready to abandon, not even his brother, who only pretends wholesale

agreement with him. And it shows in the kind of relationships he prefers,where challenges, contestation, is seen as reflecting the strong independent

soul that inspired the birth of respect and love in the first place.

His wife and his child are by no means beholden to him as their patriarch.

When he leaves them to help his people—the Hebrews suffering under

Egyptian reign—both confront him with challenges, with their honest

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feelings, rather than cozy him with the reassurances he was at some level

hoping for. When his son informs him he doesn’t believe he’ll actually be

coming back to them, he says, “good for you. Don’t ever just say what

people want to hear” … and it reads as entirely sincere.

For at that moment Scott is surely both “in” the son and “in” Moses … to

him, you can’t begin your life if you’re overly respondent to those who

could get your agreement just because you’re not fortified enough to

withstand their rejection. These people don't contest or challenge; they sap

from you the very ability to respond independently.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies

One of the arduous things about watching Peter Jackson's "Lord of theRings" trilogy was experiencing the intense parent-child tumult. Arwen

gains independence from her father and pledges fidelity to her love for

Aragorn above all else, but it involves her devolving into a frail state,

becoming as fragile as all the rest of Middle Earth before Sauron's ascension

and the elves' retreat. Faramir gains recognition from his impossibly

stubborn father, the steward of Gondor, but not even after essentially

throwing his life away in a hopeless battle and only after being mid-part

cooked in a bonfire of his father's own contrivance. This is an older

generation's sturm und dang; a break-through occurs — stern authority isbreached — but it's so exhausting you have to hope that once it's been

successfully had out that none of the parties involved ever re-acquire the

stamina to re-stage it. "The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies" threatened a

repeat of this sort of thunderous clash — Bilbo's "unforgivable" "betrayal"

of Thorin — but it seems Peter Jackson had perhaps more how

contemporary parents and children might handle their children breaking

away from them — how he might handle it, with his own children — rather

than what baby boomers like himself had to brace themselves to expect with

their more authoritative parents. For in this film autonomy is recognizedwith some grace by elders, and the definition of what "youth" does that

deserves respect is expanded beyond being evidently in the right to simply

possessing persuasive drive.

The scene where Bilbo reveals to Thorin that he gave the outside armies the

Arkenstone is hardly Bilbo's most important scene with him. The attention is

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barely on their confrontation, for Thorin's attention is still so much also on

the outside armies at his gate that Bilbo immediately finds an opportunity to

scamper off. We note that Bilbo stands strong in the encounter; he declares

what he did without apology; but it seems the most diluted version of what

Jackson could stand to have offered without belittling the significance of itin the book and his fidelity to the characters. So what is left mostly

unchallenged in impact is a previous encounter between the two where Bilbo

reveals that he's taken an oak seed he'd found along their adventures,

intending to plant it back near his home when he gets back. What he thereby

shows to Thorin is that, not only was he very much interested in helping the

dwarves reclaim their homeland — so that they could enjoy the same

pleasures Bilbo knows he'll eventually be returning to — but in taking

" their" homeland back with him. Not as a memento, but in the great,

imposing form of a whole oak tree. He does enormous honour both tohimself — the dwarves have meant something to him — and to Thorin ...

indeed, in Jackson's version Thorin's gifting to Bilbo of the mithril armor

almost seems a makeshift equivalent gesture: he grabbed for himself Thorin

Oakenshield's "shield"; Thorin provides him the matching armour. Basically

this encounter, which also involves Thorin once again showing his

appreciation for Bilbo and his sense of him as an equal, is about immediately

breaking the possible predatory stance between them for one which restates

what had been accomplished between them in the previous film. Thorin may

go whole-hog regression with the rest of the dwarves, but it's kept to asurprising minimum with Bilbo in this movie, seemingly because the

exhaustion of having to climb the whole way back doesn't seem something

Jackson wants to degrade them with.

Jackson could be pretty hard on hobbits in "Lord of the Rings," forcing them

to go a long way to redeem themselves after having accomplished feats that

should have kept them bullet-proof for awhile. For instance, Merry and

Pippen were primarily responsible for one of the two towers going down,

manipulating the great Ent army into a war they'd just decided not to involve

themselves in. Yet early in "Return" they're back to being pests,appropriately scowled at by Gandalf, just as they were when he first met

them and were recklessly blasting off his best fireworks and making a mess

of a party. But in this film Gandalf gets ready to release a heavy scowl on

Bilbo but Bilbo is allowed by Jackson the kind of stature that would

immediately have Gandalf draw back. Bilbo decides he's going to cross an

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active battlefield to warn Thorin of news of another approaching army, and

Gandalf replies: "you'll be seen" ... "it's out of the question." Bilbo doesn't

reproach Gandalf for the couple of heavy insults he'd implicitly handed him

here — one, that since he'd advertised the importance of Bilbo joining the

 journey in the first place as owing in part to his being so small he couldsuccessfully trespass places others would be seen in, he'd basically been

bullshitting both Bilbo and the dwarves about his worthiness of setting out

on the adventure; and two, that the only reason he arrogantly decided for

Bilbo that he was going to go on the adventure, marking his door so a party

of dwarves could turn his place into a tumult, wasn't because his ongoing

existence, sans adventure, and continually amongst all his mother's doilies,

wasn't worthy of respect, but apparently because this was something he

thought he could inflict on Bilbo regardless. He reacts by convincingly

showing that to him what is important is the fact of his own decision, whathe wants to do, regardless of how even good friends see him for it. And

Gandalf recedes, registering that he'd been opposed by someone who in that

moment was probably more in the right than he.

This isn't something you often see happen to Gandalf. In "Lord of the Rings"

everyone who does so is made to seem the fool Gandalf assesses them as ....

Theoden refusing Gandalf's request they meet the army in open battle,

insisting his people would be safe at Helm's Deep; Denethor refusing to

calling for aid. Gandalf's "rightness" is apparently somewhat contestable in

this film, however ... enough so in fact that just before Bilbo doing itThranduil kinda does it as well. Thranduil, the elf king, could have been

made to seem appallingly narrow-focussed in this film — the king we were

prepared to encounter given previous references to him as jewel-dazzled and

of a "more wild" race of elves. But when he refuses Gandalf and insists on

pulling his troops away from conflict, Jackson insured that we'd been

witness to his previous instant willingness to have his elves join the dwarves

in battle when truly dire opponents showed themselves, and experienced

from his perspective a long look at all the dead glorious elves littering the

ground ... at the ghastly waste of what is clearly Middle Earth's mostprecious resource — what shouldn't be put at risk of complete decimation

without risking starving the world of a singularly important source of

delight.

Thranduil is mostly spared, kept safe from, the harsh judgment the previous

film looked like it might assign him mercilessly. We remember him

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belittling Thorin by assessing that he was probably moved primarily by

impure motives ... "burglary, and things of that nature." But in this film

effort has been put into ensuring that we notice that when he mistakes

people's motives he doesn't malign them but assesses them admirably .... he

won't acknowledge Gandalf's claim of an approaching army, but does laudhim for his loyalty to the dwarves, his effort to save his friends. He of course

does bear down hard on Tauriel, but his violence is later requited by doing

massive repair work to keep her from coming apart after Kili's death. And

he's barely a baulk to his son Legolas's future, without seeming to mind that

this is so: when Legolas declares he's leaving his long-known elf home and

venturing out on his own, Thranduil implicitly communicates how wrong

objection would be to his son's thought-through stance by giving no

objection at all, and only adding information that might compliment the

direction he guesses his son is venturing. There are several scenes in themovie where we are made to feel that much of what has defined Thranduil

— his relationship with and loss of his wife — had nothing to do with

remaining home, forever pledged to fathers, but about himself having set off,

facing fiery dragons and terrible northern forts.

This finish isn't elder-heavy. The expectation on them — elders, or anyone

who is allowed a position over another as potentially exploitive as one of

parent over child — is to graciously part ways, let go, and they do. The

tumult that might greet one generation finally reaching the age where they

might contest the one ahead of them is to be avoided, if possible, with eldersrecognizing the rightness in another generation standing up for itself, making

its own imprint, offering if they can, maybe modestly offered guidance —

maybe they haven't a clue as to what the next generation needs? — but for

sure fulsome love and support. You notice in the film how conspicuously

Jackson puts attention to Bard's relationship with his children. You notice

how Jackson's own children, in, I think, every film of the series, beginning

with "Fellowship," have come of age. You wonder if what is shaping

Jackson's making of Tolkien's finish of "the Hobbit" are thoughts not solely

on preparing things for the already-done "Lord of the Rings," but preparingan audience to consider their children's eventual introduction to them of a

completely open field: the civilization created out of their own drives and

inclinations, however crazy and impossible to us it might be to register them

as society-improving rather than ruining.

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How else to understand the strange case of Alfrid, the servant of the vile

Master of Laketown? He was lent to us after "The Desolation of Smaug,"

ready for our oblivion — if this guy makes it through his master's

destruction by the dragon, it's only in a sense for our killing. And yet what

Jackson does is treat us as if we were the dwarves at the beginning of "theHobbit," in completely disbelief over the choice of Bilbo for the company,

with him making a case for him a la Gandalf. He plays us. Or tries to. We

are meant to enjoy seeing Alfrid repeatedly humiliated, beginning with his

being (literally, and figuratively) dumped by his master and then afterwards

by repeatedly being proven an incompetent at any job the likes of Bard and

Gandalf have assigned him, but in doing so almost feel that we've agreed to

allow that he deserves credit for at least earnestly trying — the beginning of

rehabilitation. He's been ordered around a lot, and however bitterly,

complied with everything directed to him ... and by people we'd have to feelshame in doubting their willingness to task jobs to him, to trust  him. And

then not long after when he dresses as a woman in an effort to escape

fighting and flee the town, Jackson seems to almost task us with undue

prejudice if we're still absolutely bent on seeing him destroyed. An angry

older woman sees him in female-dress and charges him as lacking all

courage and bravery, and Alfrid's reply — "Not every man is brave enough

to wear a corset" — does requit some: even in this heroic film-world, our

outside world that increasingly prefers heroes that are open to being ascribed

as feminine and that views thorough he-men as part of a narrative of gay-hatred and rape culture, seeps in (we remember how Jackson rebuffed he-

men in “Return of the King,” Merry’s being mocked as un-battle worthy by

the Rohan warriors but of course proving himself as as able as anyone not

Legolas or Aragon). Jackson shapes Alfrid’s next fate as if given avenue: he

lets him load himself up with gold and be allowed by Bard to head away

from battle and on to enfranchising his own open future. His only rejoinder,

“Alfrid, your slip is showing,” if not affectionate, is a very gentle chide, and

implicitly recognizes that he’s not a dullard incapable of appreciating wit,

i.e., that he's at a different level, a bit more human, than the dullish womanwho accosted him.

Alfrid’s not “Catch 22’s” Yossarian in this epic, but he is somewhat what

Tolkien’s generation’s would have viewed the war-avoidant and feminine

men of the post-war 1960s … who perhaps baby-boomer Jackson would

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ultimately acknowledge as much affinity with as he would the world war-

saluting Tolkien, which wiped out a whole lot of people. A whole lot of

 young people — in the first one, pretty much an entire generation — who

would have been better off if they’d stuck to joyous feasting, drinking

brandy, and enjoying the comforts of home. That is, if they’d been more likethe default for hobbits … and for the "vile" "Alfrids" and "Masters of

Laketowns" and dragons content to long-rest in gold, for that matter.

Fury

Very few people who find themselves on a battlefield are ever actually new 

to it. When you see in a movie like “Fury,” warriors that are having to

function even as people by their side are being blown apart, where who they

are mostly is crazily vulnerable to death, they are not people who’ve

discovered some new capacity in themselves. These are not people who’ve

gotten used to blight after having grown up in civilization. Rather, what you

are seeing people who are paying part of their very familiar past a close

revisit.

That sense of vulnerability, that is, is what they knew as infants and as

young children. Crazily vulnerable, obsessed with their own possible

extinction, as they were initiated into the world by caretakers who arepossessed of demons that have them simply unable to look at their children

and feel only love. The child, so attuned to their moods, their intentions,

takes in deep their sadism, their intention to hurt, to extinguish them. To

survive, children project these monstrous intentions outside their caregivers

onto outside monsters — monsters under the bed, trolls under the bridge.

But the looming eyes that chase them down in their nightmares are theirs.

So in war that early childhood environment that was foundational but may

have lapsed away from conscious record, “blooms” back into view —menace, death is everywhere: black blight. That early nightmare

environment is restaged … and it’s reassuring to have what was still nagging

your life as a more mythic and relevant reality back into full view for your

negotiation, your maybe-control. You survive it, you beat it, and somehow

tight muscles will relax in you that had always been hard braced against …

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something.

Since many of us still have had childhoods of this kind, as we watch “Fury”

we’re in a hurry for the newbie fresh to war and the tank crew to become

“acclimatized.” Even if we’ve already made our everyday life seem suchthat whatever we’ve been up to we’ve played the role of the veteran who’s

seen hell, war movies are usually successful in fobbing onto us the new

recruit who’s yet to barf at blood and gore as our way into the film. We want

war to feel a world so different from our everyday — so to be a realm where

fears and demons can be met and bested for good — and the film creators

know and exploit it.

So it’s not true that we’re aghast at the gore the newbie has to clean up in the

tank — the remains of the veteran warrior he’s replacing. We’re relievedhe’s encountered and soon about to best stage one of his initiation into

warrior. And it’s not true that we’re aghast at him having to learn how to

shoot a captured “kraut,” a man with a wife, a family, but relieved that he’s

passed stage two where he’s shown that he’s at least got the base now upon

which familiarity and competency can be layered on. And we’re not aghast

that he beds the German belle, cooperating in making their visit into the two

women’s home not an adventure (into foreign female company and sex) but

conquest (whatever the preamble, the narrative will be one of spoiling), but

relieved that he’s now at the point where his veteran crew now have nothing on him but having done everything he’s now done a lot more.

The greatest danger the film shows is not being killed, but being killed in a

humiliating fashion. A bunch of kids are responsible for a soldier’s death,

and you know that not even all that warrior’s experience and war cred will

cleanse him of being done in like that. When the six Shermans go up against

the Tiger Tank — here’s where it would be okay to die. The Valkeryie

picking up the dead will pick up every one of these, no matter how splattered

everywhere on the battlefield.

When their one Sherman prepares to go up against a squadron of

experienced SS — to save a supply train that otherwise would be decimated

— it isn’t their dying which is a concern but their being equal to what’s

being staked. If they die quickly, it’ll come across as dying for vanity: a

preposterously heroic finish … something truly Smaugish in stature slain, a

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whole supply train saved. Which would shorn them of all they’d accrued.

Fortunately the movie lets most of them die … in the afterlife we feel them

entombed with the moment-to-moment capacity they’d demonstrated in

battle. The one that actually lives, the newbie, is the one told he’s a hero; but

his escaping the tank and hiding in the ground is mostly how we associatehim now. That battle belongs to the dead men … those that started in N.

Africa, moved onto France, and now into Germany. What he can take back

with him is that he met the war, his own childhood horrors, and made do

pretty okay … with a guide. “Bilbo” when “Gandalf” was hovering all over

him, not while alone succeeding in Mirkwood.

Still, not bad. But he still feels like us in being only proximate to something

we crave familiarity. Blown up towns all around us, and us acclimatized and

surviving. So no surprise for us, ISIS, Ebola, blackouts, avalanches, WallStreet crash, and not so much the Paul Krugman assessment that, no alarm

bells, people, we’re actually doing okay.

Guardians of the Galaxy

In one of the initial scenes of "Guardians of the Galaxy," when “Ronan the

Accuser” has a badly tortured Xandarian before him, do we think the

audience is in any way identifying themselves with him? Not at all, ofcourse. If audience sympathy goes towards the Xandarian culture, it won’t

have anything to do with it first being represented by this guy. And when

Yondu Udonta and his collection of bullies arrives to ask another Xandarian,

“the Broker” — the elderly merchant — about the location of the infinity

stone, looking very much like they’re just going to kill him after throughly

confounding and terrifying him, is the audience in any way just wishing the

bullies would leave the poor guy alone? Again, not likely. In fact, maybe

they too would be looking at this quaking, isolated, precious and mannered

man as deserving being confused with child babble before being dispatched— Who does this pretentious bag of bones think he is, anyway? And when

“the Collector” instructs his slave assistant, Carina, on her knees scrubbing

the walls, to work harder lest she suffer her sister’s fate — living her life

despondent in a cage — does the audience in any way hope the “Guardians

of the Galaxy” will help her revenge herself against this slaver? Again, not

at all. They’re probably hoping the guardians do nothing in their meeting

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with him to show they too are possessed of a bullyable side that might have

the Collector thinking they, pretenders to being street-wise bounty-hunters,

co-equals, might actually be managed into becoming specimens — and not

when deceased, as he proposes with Groot, but humiliatingly, tellingly,

while still alive.

The film is not about bonding together to defend the weak, but about

defending oneself against feeling weak. Indeed, even Peter Quill’s obsession

with his mother’s soundtrack, with his mother — normally something that

would make an adult endlessly shamed by his friends — is ultimately about

that.

The mother in the film — the cancer victim — is a fantasy. Or perhaps more

accurately: camouflage. Boys at adolescence, the age age Peter Quill is whenhis mother passes of cancer, often find themselves more or less permanently

removed from their mothers, gone off to a culture "that’ll make a man out of

them" — which basically means instructing them on how to keep a tight lid

on expressing their emotional needs; bullying, aggressively teasing those

who do express them; and showing their many scars as evidence of how

much violence they’ve “manly” been able to sustain through life. They

sometimes, however, are allowed to express their neediness — like when

they’re badly sick, for example, and get to stay at home with mom. Or if

something horribly tragic happens to them — like their mother passing ofcancer, which, if it happened early enough, can actually be tested as

permitting one to obsess over her lifelong.

But being distanced from your mother at adolescence isn’t really the source

of trying to absolve yourself of ever having your experiences as a needy

person claim conscious acknowledgement. The need, the requirement, that

you not ever be reminded that this is who you still are, comes about from

associating feeling vulnerable to becoming easy monster bait, to being

viciously murdered, which arrives pretty much at infancy. Freud of coursenoted how many children were concerned with death, and decided that we

must all therefore be born with a death instinct. But his associate, Sandor

Ferenczi, as well as other psychoanalysts like Dorothy Block and Joseph

Rheingold, observed that this fear owed not to “instinct” but to the rational,

the acute and accurate assessment of the child that their caregivers actually

had  murderous inclinations towards them. Mothers, still in most families the

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foremost “caregivers” of children, revisit the punitive experiences they

suffered as children upon their own children. Historically, they have tended

to do the like of hallucinating their children as adult accusers — as their own

parents, who in their screams once again express disappointment and anger.

They have tended to see them as requiring bullying, threats and realizationsof overt abandonment, so that they actual fulfill what they were born for —

in so many cases, to satisfy their parents’ own unmet needs. To the infant,

the absolutely vital mother, the primary “object,” is also quickly realized as

a terrorizing titan, which s/he later learns to displace onto “monsters” to

absolve her/himself the guilt, the fear, of consciously realizing what s/he

suspects her/his mother would kill it for having an inkling of. All of this

applies, by the way, not just to children who’ve descended from one of the

sadder generational chains, but to many, many genuinely more hopeful ones,

where mothers from generation to generation were progressively given moreresources so to be able to lend more love to their children than they

themselves received … to the children in playgrounds in more liberal parts

of New York , for example.

Expected to fulfill their parents’ — again, mostly their mother’s — needs for

love, and to serve as poison container and/or as a fetish object — the

provisioning breast, denied to them in their own childhoods — their own

development was seen as a threat, a threat met by maternal distancing and

fury: to the child, by apocalypse! This happens early, so early that theostensibly inherent superego, which is actually created by the child’s brain

to save the child from individuating too much and thereby find itself outside

maternal favour for life, can understandably be mistaken as something born

out of genes and DNA rather than defensively out of experience. When the

child becomes an adult, when it realizes the individuation and self-

determining freedom available as an adult, it re-experiences the terror of

being abandoned as a child for its initial attempts at individuation. It expects

a revisit of all the tortures and punishments, something warded off for

awhile by pursuing the trauma itself, initiating it or chasing it down, andthereby showing some confidence-inspiring control (herein, an explanation

for this ice bucket trend?), but which eventually demands full capitulation

and retreat. The adult finds some way to shorn him/herself of the new

freedoms and bond back to some group he fills with injections of his mother

— which is in his own mind becomes essentially her corporeal self, a home

country, a “Mutterland.” He or she experiences and succumbs to “growth

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panic.”

 A hero is someone who is suffering from growth panic. Out of retreat, he has

fused with the inner Terrifying Mother (i.e. the super-ego) that’s been

installed in his brain’s right hemisphere, home of the amygdala, our brain’salarm system, and distances himself from past allowances, freedoms,

pleasures, that are making him/her feel terribly anxious, so to feel more pure

again — forgiven. Our “guardians” in this film, we note, are prepared to do

exactly that: putting their lives at the service of “the galaxy,” which though

it means no longer being freewheeling rascals — i.e., individuated pursuers

of their own self-determined pleasures — means having all their sins

expunged and counted by even the most selfless as those properly to count

oneself indebted to.

The group is not infused with properties of the person the film has

delineated to serve as Peter Quill’s mother, however. That bald, ghostly

white young woman looked nearly a child herself, and probably served as a

child representation of Peter Quill at threat of infanticide — all the

converging, insistently demanding grandparents — he could later imagine

saving by hallucinating Gamora — an abandoned, farmed-out child herself

— as his lost self perishing in amniotic space. Given the ethos of the film,

the mother had to have been powerful, not evaporating; and part of powerful

her is found in Glenn Close’s “Nova Prime,” the supreme leader of theXandarians —the part believed all-provisioning, fair, decent and good. But

the rest, with all the terrifying aspects, which at the moment are most

meaningful to the child, are out into other powerful beings.

So, yes, “Ronan the Accuser” does at times represent this terrifying,

infanticidal mother. Especially when he’s about to crush innocent victims,

like that hapless Xandarian soldier, who’s blood will quickly be collected

into some drain Ronan is part of; especially when he represents a source

from the conservative past who is furious at all the guilty modernisms beingentertained. But when he is someone feeling furiously betrayed by the titan

Thanos, when he means to rival, strike back and humiliate him, then he

represents part of ourselves we are in urgent need to disown — the part, of

course, that has solid justification for being furious at our mothers for their

treatment of us. Otherwise Thanos, who farmed his children out to a

perpetuator, who sits on a grand maternal throne, casually expecting

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everyone — in order to do something about the terrible possibility of him

springing a surprise visit upon “us” — to of course stage our coming to him;

who’s visage is twice in the film represented at a scale that dwarfs even

great Ronan into an infant; serves in the movie as the imperious “object” the

Terrible Mother is mostly interjected into.

But Ronan possesses the hammer, the stick, used historically by mothers to

beat their children, and when he absorbs the power of the infinity stone and

is about to kill a world of Xandarian innocents, he is just the Terrible Mother

with infanticidal thoughts towards forsaken people. The exultation he

demonstrates just before he is about to annihilate all life on Xander, with his

back bent and arms outstretched in a big body laugh, is like that captured

mother representatives were made to do at periods of growth panic in Aztec

culture, where as Lloyd DeMause says, “female victims first made aprodigious show of their female power … [before being] laid down on their

backs and [having] their breasts cut open and their bodies torn apart.” And

Ronan afterwards too is slain, by the power of the infinity stone.

The stone, like the swords used upon subsequent victims, after first being

used to rip apart Aztec mother-representatives, is empowered by the

destructive power of the Terrifying Mother. When Peter Quill absorbs the

power into himself, he is like a Javaro, who after the maternal fusion, who

after “sucking at [his] mother’s breasts, [having taken] n/um, [having drank]n/um, [which even though it] would [make him] cry, and cry, and cry, [and

even though he] was afraid of the n/um, [though it was] hot and [it] hurt,”

experiences something akin to a “temporal lobe epileptic seizure. [Which]

like these seizures, provides convulsive tremors and feelings of powerful

violence, as the master of [the] n/um continues his energetic dance, [and] the

n/um heats up and rises up the spine, to a point approximately at the base of

the skull, at which time !kia results, [an] explosion [which] throws [one] in

the air … bursting open, like a ripe pod,” as he “then they go[es] out to kill

anyone [he] encounters, believing [he is] superhuman.” As he beams aclimactic red glow, he becomes like the “warriors [who] became the

symbolic equivalent of menstruating women [,] [since] both bloody warriors

and menstruating women were charged with powerful destructive energy.”

He is bathed in the equivalent of “red hematite [as if he’d] expropriated the

destructive power of menstruating women [by] ritual nose bleeding or sub

incision [of their penises].”

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So the infinity stone’s power is the destructive power of the mother to

murder infants because every anthropological tribe — all insanely sacrificial

and war-prone — borrow the power of the menstruating woman so to feel

superhuman before they go off into war? Yes. The infinity stone’s power isthe destructive power of the mother because psychoanalysts who don’t just

assume a death instinct find for children everywhere “the fear of infanticide

could already be their central occupation,” “that [for them] the world

‘abounded in beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches and monsters who

pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery,’” and that “the identities

behind these imaginary, terrifying figures [were] the child’s own parents”?

 Especially, yes. But also because the infinity stone is twinned with another

object in the film overtly associated with maternal prowess — Jack Quill’s

precious cassette tape.

Rohan the Accuser exults when he’s in possession of the stone; arriving on

Xander, he casually kicks aside vermin — the raccoon, Rocket — accosting

him. But Jack Quill, singing his mother’s favourite tunes, is still brazen

enough to approach and challenge him to a dance-off. He says he’s just

distracting him, still a marginal figure, despite the attention temporarily put

to him, but there’s a strange sense already of appropriate direct rivalry —

my power against yours, dude: the songs he’s singing were those he was

listening to when he broached the lair containing the infinity stone, where hetoo felt immune to everything that’d accost him, casually kicking aside all

the lizards that approached to threaten and ostensibly devour him. It’s like

with his long possession of the cassette — a fetish object, coveted, by him at

least, as eagerly as the infinity stone throughout the movie — he’s already in

possession of an aspect of the power of the stone: the good aspect  heroes are

allowed to know of the mothers they’ve fused with, one that still knows of

some levity, permitted because all freedom has been sundered to her. Jack

has coveted every song his mother wanted him to at the cost of listening to

what others might have introduced to him, at the cost of developing his ownlife “soundtrack”; he has installed her as a saint he would sacrifice his own

life to recover; and for already in this sense being such a good boy before

becoming an overt hero, he already feels in possession of some of mommy’s

terrible power. He’s like Bilbo, knowing the ring’s — an object primarily

about mass genocide — powers of invisibility, as well as the jokes and

riddles … the good fun, associated with his use of it, and so actually not so

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odd a creature to take on directly the destructive power of a dragon, whom

he could not just trick and distract but obliterate if ever the ring took full

control of him.

Peter Quill is the right possessor of the infinity stone because he’ll use it todestroy the split-off terrifying aspects of our mothers, while fused

completely with the good. And that it doesn’t destroy him, that he contains it

for as long as he did, is because he’d already been imbibing maternal power,

through devout loyalty, his whole life, not really because of his father’s

DNA. (Question: Was Bilbo able to handle the power of the ring for as long

as he did because before going on adventures, he’d long been someone loyal

“to his mother’s doilies,” rather than to the gallivanting about Gandalf would

like rather to have seen him on? And is this why Gandalf is more or less kept

out of the crucial relationship between the ring and Bilbo — a subtle butsubstantial humiliation of him — until “LOTR”?) He’ll use it destroy the

part of himself that would dare accuse a perpetrator for Her past abuse. And

he’ll use it to destroy “two” more: legions of the vulnerable, as well as his

now even-fully-mother-loyal own self.

He’ll use it to kill the vulnerable? Yes. He is fused with his Terrifying

Mother alter, and that mother was seen by the child as fully correct to abuse

him, to punish the weak, a life-saving conclusion, as it keeps the absolutely

essential primary caregiver benign and loving. The child concludes that itmust have been “his worthlessness that made them hate and even want to

destroy him. After the child is convinced he is bad and deserving to be

destroyed, every incident in his life becomes proof of his responsibility for

unhappy events: Is there a death in the family? — he’s a murder. An

accident? — he’s the secret perpetrator. His ‘badness’ causes his mother to

leave him for a job … and drives his father to absent himself on business

trips … he is the subject of every quarrel and the author of every disaster

[even of] divorce.” I’ve suggested that the exact person chosen to represent

the dying mother doesn’t adequately reflect the type of maternal influencethat infuses every creation within this film world — weak and dissipating,

vs. surreally powerful and scary — but Quill’s feeling guilty over her death

for, by appearances, just showing some sanity in not letting himself get

sucked into his mother’s own extinguishment, does gets the relationship

between mother and child right. He is fundamentally a neglectful, guilty

child, and fused with his Terrifying Mother alter his task is to punish and

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destroy the same.

He and his guardians to some extent are doing this when they start

obliterating Ronan’s forces. Drax mocks them as “paper people,” and Groot

takes delight in dramatizing their weakness, in humiliating them, bythrashing columns of them about with his two arms, and this — mocking

their weakness — is what occurs when mother-fused soldiers attack their

“enemies.” Seeing them primarily as their own “guilty,” weak childhood

selves, they call them the exact names they were called by their parents as

children — Germans in World War Two, for example, called their captives

“shit babies,” and “useless eaters.” And we’ll find in most films where

“good” forces are up against the “bad,” the bad, whatever their initial scary

show, end up seeming strangely, humiliatingly, impotent … they’ve

become, rather, our own weak selves that deserved to be destroyed and sopile up readily into accumulations of the dead while the good lose maybe

one or two for their (sometimes) several hundred. But as initially noted, it’s

not just soldiers but civilians that are being set up as deserving death. If

you’re adding vitality to the group, as John C. Reilly’s Corpsman Dey and

his glowingly healthy family are made to seem, you’re cherished. But if you

look like you might be contributing weakness, are single, solitary, or sick,

you’ll come to be hated. Bad and despicable, for the crime of weakening the

glory of the maternal whole.

Killing worlds of vulnerable people is what the infinity stone is all about,

and it’s what war is all about too. After people do the initial fusing with their

maternal alters, they enter wars which end up killing far more civilians than

soldiers. This fact is incredibly obvious today, where in Gaza all we seem to

hear about are this group of youth or that one being targeted and slaughtered.

Are we likely to see something along these lines in the sequel to this film,

where not soldiers but evident “evil” civilians and their families are

“justifiably" killed? Not guaranteed: some things our conscious minds will

not permit. No one overtly gloated over the number of civilian deaths in theIraq war, for example. But it’s the fact that the Iraq war ended up killing

over 300 000 people, mostly children, that enabled Americans at the time to

feel so good about it (ninety percent approval rates for Bush). At some level

we know the extent of the carnage, who exactly got killed … and when it’s

legions of civilians, we feel empowered, as the vitality of these extinguished

lives get sucked into us … sacrificed Xandarian blood, into Ronan, and boy

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doesn’t it feel great!

And finally, heroes seek to sacrifice themselves. Being shorn of freedoms

and completely fused to their mother alters, the glory of once again being

good boys and girls again still has one better: namely, being permanently fused to her, through death. The guardians agree to try and take down

Ronan, even after acknowledging it’s sure suicide … and are in this like the

Japanese leaders in World War 2, who when “deciding whether to attack

Pearl Harbor and begin their war with the United States, [realized after

several ministers gave their assessments that] it was obvious that an attack

would be suicidal for Japan. Whereupon Tojo told those present, ‘There are

times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things — like

 jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!'” They

are like Hitler, who too “spoke in suicidal, not economic, imagery,promising Germans glorious death on the battlefield and calling himself a

‘sleepwalker’ as he lead the German people over the suicidal cliff,” to war

against the whole rest of the world.

The raccoon, Rocket, is the one who offers an alternative — “You know, we

could just make our way to the far ends of the universe and, like, enjoy our

lives” — but of course is ignored because it doesn’t satisfy their need for

mommy-and-me fusion, as they'd lie as blooded corpses on the consoling

battlefield, with their mother imagined as coming down to collect them, orshrouded in white swaddling cloth in caskets, back permanently home with

their mother's sorrow, appreciation and sympathy. And we shouldn’t expect

any film about heroes to allow the dissenter’s — i.e., someone less switched

into a suicidal mental state — opinion any weight. We do see such

occasionally, though. Though Peter Jackson doesn’t lend too much credit to

Balin’s —Dwarf prince Thorin’s chief advisor’s — insistence that there was

another way, that “you don’t have to do this [— i.e., attempt to destroy a

city-destroying dragon without any real plan as to how to actually defeat him

—] [for] you have built a new life for us in the Blue Mountains,” there issome … Balin’s going to remain sane and good-humoured throughout, while

we know Thorin will lose his sanity. And we remember Jackson gave

enormous credit to Gandalf’s insistence to Faramir, in “Return of the King,”

that he shouldn’t “throw away [his] life so rashly” just to please his clearly

insane father, however sadly little he gave to Saruman’s intriguing claim that

Gandalf himself possessed a suspect tendency “to sacrifice those closest to

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him, those he professes to love,” which, well, if we aren’t looking at him all

rose-coloured, maybe we’ll acknowledge he kinda did.

I’ve heard many people say they found “Guardians of the Galaxy” novel. I

couldn’t relate, because the film felt like I’d entered a child’s rumpus room,a “Chucky Cheese” full of rides, “swooshes,” and banal melodies you’ll

remember your eight-year-old self was completely lost to. Perhaps the

differing experience is explained because when people don’t get sick of but

cherish listened-to-over-and-over-again songs, it’s because what they want is

the simple, protective, and repetitive — something completely isolated from

anything adult and new that’d threaten by maybe drawing you into

considerations that’d lead to an undiscovered and independent self, as even

superhero movies like “the Avengers” — with its wild, cantankerous,

family-squabble scene, where a lot of valid opinions get thrillingly expressedin a very compressed few moments — and “Iron Man 3” offer. What they

want are fetishes … objects barnished and handled so many times — each

time deposited with accrued power rather than depleted of interest. What

they want is a film which isn’t so much inspired by a catalog of films we’ve

all loved, but which recalls them in a sense that if they somehow appeared

on scene — the originals, the actual creators and creations, on stage,

suddenly, before someone merely “covering” — “you’d” shut yourself down

without complaint and just let the original role: weren’t you just trying to

summon, anyway? So this film takes you into “Star Wars,” “Raiders of theLost Ark,” “Footloose” … films you’ve seen a million, bazillion times,

because like the creators you want to be back polishing them like a genie

bottle, hoping for a Great Visitation, ever grateful for your devotion and

complicity to the fully-bordered-up infantile.

The movie feels like it took pleasure from building itself up from a restricted

“alphabet,” well aware it was gloriously shunning a larger one available.

Watching it, you don’t take in a lot, but take pleasure in how securely it only

offers repetitive, unsurprising things … hammer on the nail (or actually, inthis film, usually over the head), over and over again. Like a politicians’

repetitive, simple-words baby talk, it probably is helping us trance into

agreeing to a future horrible societal direction, by accessing the normally

hidden, less conscious parts of our brains — the parts hypnotists play to. It

helps us anticipate a time when like autistic soldiers, we isolate ourselves

into repetitive motions, march to drums — become more overtly, “infants

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fearing death." But also participating in doing something (horrible) about it

— becoming guardians, to our “galaxies.”

— finis —

Apres: all quotes from Lloyd DeMause’s works, especially “Origins of War

in Child Abuse.”

Boyhood

Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" tells the story of a boy, Mason, and as much

as the title articulates our applying his story somewhat to all boys, the"chapel" within advises caution. Since Mason's biological father is a major

influence on the boy, it's not quite fair to slough off his inspiration --

 Lennon, Paul, George and Ringo -- as "divinities" to seek greatness from,

but it's clear what has clearly replaced the trio of God, Christ and church in

this film is the university, and the supreme research psychologists who've

worked there to incur relevant understandings of what makes human beings

tick.

Behavioralism is the first psychological theory we hear discussed, and it's allbut rejected in the film ... not only because it's mouthpiece turns out an

alcoholic, wife-beating, dictatorial brute, but because it's clearly linked to a

cynical take on human beings and ultimately corrupt societal applications --

like the irresistible dopamine hits corporations know we receive when

people "like" us, that Mason references as part of his dislike of popular

culture. We hear of John Bowlby's "attachment theory" next, from Mason's

mother, and the implications of his theory aren't to take all human beings as

essentially the same but to imagine a cut -- only not  that of boys and girls.

According to the theory, if you were a well-attached infant and child, of

either sex, so long as your society's not prohibitive, the future's open to you.

If you weren't -- you'll be insecure, plagued by demons, who won't amount

any significant adventure into life ... one of Harlow's distraught, self-isolated

monkeys, who knew too little of their mother's breast. Since children can be

suckled close more as a source of nurturance for the parent , however, being

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well-attached isn't necessarily a matter of time spent. More if

they truly loved you, rather than from the start, immediately began to reject

and even hate you.

The interesting thing about this film, helped out by the setting which issomewhere in Texas ... a state which in some parts is a "high-tech, social

democracy", and in others, a "Protestant fundamentalist taliban," is that you

could take the same "facts" in the life of this boy and show two very

different fates -- one that leads to a well-adjusted adult with a bright future,

and another as him part of those shortchanging any such a bright and

beautiful thing. All depending on whether or not the primary caregivers in

his life wasn't compelled or unconsciously intent to abandon her children.

The first fact we are introduced to about Mason's life, is that his parents arerecently divorced, and that his mother has decided to uproot him and his

sister further by retreating from their first self-acquired home, back to her

mother. But in the film, the mother's intent throughout is portrayed as mostly

loving ... and so as much we are directed to note that this move will cost

Mason his very first best friend, who in all likelihood he'll never see again,

and how his older sister plants herself heavily against the move as if moved

by the most basic elements of her, shaking her into saying something strong

lest their young organism is requited into something that can't be recovered

from, we know it's something that's maybe probably best in that her mother'sdifficulties in keeping their family afloat will be greatly eased by the move,

and she'll be able to attend to them subsequently in less of a harried and

more of a focused manner.

The mother gets her children back into a home that'll allow them each their

own space, their own rooms, and has provisioning enough for herself now to

go to college. There, like any new student entranced by the opened world

of knowledge -- and therefore further entranced by those familiar with it ,

she crushes on a professor, which for her develops into marriage.Unfortunately, however wonderful his world not just of knowledge but of

palatial affluence is -- his home is a McMansion, spared our contemporary

derogatory assessment of them as homes for those who borrowed much but

were doomed back to "pumpkinhood" once the investment world sobered

-- it turns out home life with him means sequestering all of them to a litany

of constant rules, of lines not to be crossed, and herself, also, to the

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occasional beating. Again harried with stress over this -- of innocently

having inflicted this man on her children, and not quite knowing if departure

or weathering-through is the wise solution -- she doesn't quite acknowledge

Mason's complaints about him, doing her best to pretend homage to the idea

that ... "we all have our faults."

But when he grossly grabs Mason and forces him into a military cut of his

longish hair, her true feelings are expressed, without any resolve not to upset

the perpetrator and raise family stakes by placing herself on one side only.

And when he gets close to physically harming her children, smashing plates

and glasses before them -- he's done. Mason's mother assembles the required

phalanx of guard-women to block him, while she grabs her children, and off

they're again to a refreshed life.

Mason's adolescent life is mostly made to seem about plenty of harmless

experimentation ... which'll lead to smart sifting and targeted development as

he enters young adulthood and university. He does booze, drugs;

experiments with dress. He knows being bullied, but also hanging with older

boys whose talk is macho and who play with "knives." And though it isn't

him who asks the if-your-so-cool-why-are-you-hanging-out-with-grade-

8ers-on-a-friday-night?, it's implicit as well in his overall manner with them:

they have no affect. He dates women, and seems already to possess naturally

the genuine interest in them as individuals his biological father advises himto learn quick to separate himself from the pack. His childhood interest in

spray painting, forging a signature, branches into an interest in finding a

vision through photography, which stakes him purpose and resolve, and also

impressed elders, who want to attach themselves to his promise as he

eventually leaves home for university.

On the cusp of departure, his mother breaks down and admits

how his leaving seems to mean her own life is over; but he's allowed his

retort, as he mostly always is with her, and it's to explain the clear absurdityof what she is saying. His mother is completely for his own adventure,

however, and so while promise is abundant as he first experiences his life

there, it's shallow of guilt.

But if she wasn't attached to her children, if she meant to hurt, harm, or

abandon them, the film would have veered ... like this. The divorce from her

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husband would have been paired with her retreat from her independent

life/home, in that both would meant abandoning the pretensions to a good

life-partner and a new beginning away from her own mother: self-realization

and pleasure. Her ex-husband, who is treated defensively when he arrives to

see his kids, and who is to some extent blocked away by the grandmother, isrevealed as the film goes along to have been a vastly better man than any of

the others she subsequently marries, as well as being a much better person to

have had around their kids. But she didn't feel she could keep him because

she felt under compulsion to sacrifice her first start, bring her kids around

her mother's orbit, so her mother wouldn't get angry at her for making

herself the centre; for aspiring to greater happiness than her mother allowed

herself. Late post-partum, with kids given/sacrificed to her mother so she

could be spared terrible hauntings of seeing herself driving them into a lake.

She would have been revealed to have been attracted to the psychology

professor, already sensing he would treat her brutally ... his talk of flashing

meat powder before a dog to make it salivate, an anticipation of how he'd

possess a belittling and all-knowing sense of the motives of children,

whipping children into shape through rewards and punishments. The

freedom-killing home life he instituted, would have been something she's

wished for her children, so that aspects of herself, projected onto the

children, that she felt required containing -- actually great things, like one's

desire to explore and grow -- would have found themselves stifled andbound up. When Mason came to her and complained of him, she wouldn't

have shown underneath obvious sympathy but only the refusal: how selfish

of you to only see a person's flaws!

Adolescence wouldn't just have been about exploration, but showed more

genuine signs of troubles, delinquency, as his mother spent most of her time

at university and home life was dominated by a thug. His interest in hanging

out with older boys who pretend ninja, would have been him wanting to

distance himself from his aloneness and vulnerability. The fact that theywere all boys and cast all girls as "whores," would have been an attraction ...

a homosexual shell against the rest of the world. The painting of his finger

nails wouldn't, then, have shown femininity, but interest in approbating the

power of the maternal. His ear-piercing, a fascination in self-cutting ...

where control of pain is clearly yours. His dark worldview wouldn't have

shown he wasn't a fool for corporate manipulation, but that the only way he

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intuited he could allow himself to participate in adult freedoms is if tainted

that terrain with gloom beforehand.

 But even that wouldn't prove sufficient for much subsequent adult license,

because his mother would have wanted to know that his abandoning her foruniversity meant he was bad -- guilty. And so after enjoying some time self-

actualizing in university, he'd eventually be with those others who first

enjoyed liberality before renouncing it thereafter for conservatism -- the

fiercely conservative taliban, everywhere, who's leaders so often knew for a

time American licence before garbing themselves back into caves and no

running water.

Lucy

Her dress might not look like it, but Lucy is a student devoted to her studies.

She's certainly ready to party, but her life course is not open to anything

really untoward and divergent ... to anything that might spark her onto a path

of self-exploration that hasn't been approved for her, like study-hard-and-

get-a-staid-safe-job, clearly has. She's forced onto this path, however,

clamped down, and the results aren't the riches promised to her but rather

along the sort of ghoulish fate a disapproving super-ego would have chased

onto her for the grotesque approbation. It involves -- pretty much in thesame heartbeat in which a new path was presented -- the brutal dispatch of

her new lover/friend, a floor-platter of corpses, and a long incision made into

her abdomen/pelvic region, degrading her into the role of a container. She

emerges out of total obliteration, and first thing, calls her mother -- to tell

her over and over again how much she loves her; how she is, ostensibly, her

perpetual devotee.

Well of course this isn't exactly what went on, which would of had it follow

all films infused with some awareness of how growth and self-actualization-- that suitcase of Pandora opportunities, suddenly sprung upon you as a real

possibility in adulthood -- will necessary lead you to be chastened by

terrifying fears of punishment and abandonment, a la "Eyes Wide Shut,"

that'll have you curling back to your regular routine, beholden to habitual

chasteners, in no time. And I think the reason is that Lucy, despite being

someone who'll learn to use 100 percent of her brain capacity and become

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the first human to reach godhood, or full actuality, is really breaching her

somewhat trepidatious and fearful regular self to become the sort of grand

hag that emerges in certain historical periods -- a witch, as one of her

opponents in the film calls her -- that daunts the rest of us back into being

quiescent good boys and girls.

Yes, this film is another one this year that follows that so long as you as an

audience member feel that you'd be with those who'd let the great beastie in

the film have Her way -- whatever the hell she might be up to -- you get to

participate in the thrill of knowing she's going to be devouring others, not

you, while vicariously enjoying her assertion, her casual, thrilling trespasses

(at one point she barges through the multiple cars ahead of her the wrong

way on a one-way street as if X-Men's Storm scattering a gallery of

approaching hell-bent sentinels) and power. "Godzilla," where the humanssave themselves by not  interfering -- by correctly choosing to see the

monster as a necessary correction to human arrogance -- is of course one.

"Maleficent," with the massively powered witch who toys with destroying

an innocent youth just to revenge herself against her father, and who's

resolve to ultimately save or destroy her is something we wouldn't want to

interfere with and which only seems amenable to the victim's total sacrificial

willingness and devotion, one of the many others. In "Lucy," you could

imagine yourself the police captain, who's basic response to Lucy is,

"whatever you want lady ... as if there's any chance I'd say no to you!"Followed later, as he kills to ostensibly protect her, by capitulated full

devotion. Or as the great scientist, who despite the film's long build-up of

him as a master into new terrain, fielding hopeful -- and hopefully

provocative and notice-worthy -- questions from the most promising of

young educated minds, is instantly made impotent and historically irrelevant

by Lucy's full knowledge of brain capacity, compared to his really only just

being on the right track.

Not bad ... a police captain, a great scientist, however deflated; but thoseobliged to a power -- about stilling everyone else -- which is horribly

corrupt. The rest of humanity who oddly opts out is put in the position of

those gangsters which strangely are allowed to linger in this film when their

relevance seems kaput the moment Lucy shows herself able to defuse a

packed hallway of threatening men at mere 20 percent brain capacity. It is

one of these gangsters that ends up identifying her, not as Lucy, the great

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mother, but as an obvious witch -- as the complete corruption of one. And I

took this as bait for the audience.

These gangsters may have lingered in the film to satisfy the terms of a plot

set up at the beginning ... but really, I think to be honest with ourselves,there was little in the way of requisite demands, as they cou