Let Dead Nazis Lie

It's been some time since I wrote about cheap ass exploitation films, so I figured we'd tackle three of the original Nazi Zombie films together. Even though I, like many others, have had it up to here with the recent zombie mania. Still, there are old movies out there that are actually worth seeing, as opposed to the "remakes" of Romero's films and the Walking Dead and shit like that. However the three films we're about to tackle aren't really known to be classics of the same level as Fulci's or Romero's films.

It was inevitable I guess. Zombies and Nazis are the two greatest evils you can imagine, and considering how many dark occult myths are associated with the nazis it was just a question of time before they mixed. And it's no wonder. Our fear of nazis returning to haunt us mixes well with our fear of death, and undeath. The deeply psychological image of undead nazis coming out of the deep (whether it's water, snow or the desert sands) symbolizes this well, and is used throughout all the films in the genre. This evil from the past has remained hidden for years, but is now back to exact punishment and death. It's so jungian you can cut it with a knife. Or something.

The first film to explore the genre was Shock Waves (1977), with famous actors Peter Cushing, Brooke Adams and John Carradine. That's right, Cushing didn't just blow up Alderaan in 1977 he fought nazi zombies too. And this film establishes a pattern followed by its copies. After encountering a ghost ship a group of seafarers, led by Carradine, land on a tropical island to repair their ship where they run into the marooned hermit Cushing and eventually the undead SS death squad. The film takes its time establishing mood and plot, and the first scene involving a zombie is unsettling. We immediatly understand that this dude is dangerous as well as determined. This applies even more to the scene of German soldiers rising from the water, one by one. It's a memorable scene, and as such is has been enthusiastically copied. As opposed to the two next films we're about to review it is also pretty consistently well photographed and edited, and the music is great.

It turns out that the zombies are supersoldiers developed for submarine warfare by the Third Reich. They are more or less invincible, as well as sadistic and murderous and were stranded here by their former commander. They've spent some good deal of time under water, but have recently determined to surface and get even. Slowly they murder their way through more or less the entire cast before the film ends on rather dark note. While our heroine escapes she's clearly lost her sanity and the less than living aquatic aryans are still out there somewhere.

Shock Waves is clearly the best film of the genre and it's actually a good horror film too. Absolutely worth seeing for all horror hounds out there. It's not the Exorcist, but it's certainly on par with most John Carpenter films. In fact much better than his newer films.. Establishing a link between the nazis' real interests in the occult, their horrendous medical experiments, the fierce reputation of the SS and the popular zombie genre was a brilliant idea.

Zombie Lake (Le lac des morts vivants 1981) is a strange little film, directed as it is by Jean Rollin. Yup, you heard it Jean "LSD-nudity" Rollin. He thought the movie was a piece of shit however, so he directed it under the pseudonym J.A. Laser. (Incidentally Jesus Franco, another schlockmeister pulled out of this project at an earlier phase.)

First full frontal nudity appears at about a minute into the credits, and as this Laura Gemser-lookalike is randomly and prolongedly showing us her muff in an underwater scene she is accosted by an aquatic zombie in Wehrmacht uniform. We don't get to see what he wants with her, but it's safe to say he's not out to get laid. (The underwater sequences have beautiful colors btw.)

The Feldgrün corpse and his buddies then venture forth from the bottom of the eponymous lake (which is obviously just in the film for a chance to plagiarize the memorable scene from Shock Waves) and behave like a bunch of bastards, biting people and stuff.. The results are less then pleasant, especially for the women. The reason is of course revenge. The soldiers were killed by local resistance fighters near the end of WWII, and dumped in the lake. Incidentally the zombie make up in this film is so shitty you'd guess it was done by a group of kindergarten kids with watercolors.

If you were an intellectual of some sort it would be tempting to see the film as an allegory for the nazi rape of the French nation during World War II, but that would be forgetting who directed this film. As it is with Rollin's films it has some neat scenes (fewer than usual), but it's also quite incoherent. In fact it's not even close to up to his usual insanely low hallucinatory standards. Frankly it's barely watchable and I'd rather recommend you watch some of his famous vampire movies - of which this is a pale copy. In fact, the only reason you should see this film is for the scenes of nazi zombies groping a small busload of naked women half way through. I shit you not. A busload!

Finally we have Oasis of the Zombies (La Tumba de los muertos vivientes 1982) the director of which is none other than the aforementioned Jesus Franco. Now, Jesus Franco is a chapter all to himself, but if you know his name you know what to expect. You might be disappointed though as Lina Romay is nowhere to be seen. Honestly though Rollin makes Franco look like Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg, and this movie is a great deal better than Zombie Lake (still not exactly Oscar material though). The film starts with two (clothed) women getting attacked by unseen undead nazis in an (drum roll please) oasis, filled with left overs from some long forgotten battle. As according to genre dictates you do get to know what happened, and the German soldiers are portrayed as someone worth fearing in this one. A murderous crack squad carrying nazi gold (as opposed to the whiny ass grabbers of Zombie Lake) who massacres anything in their way - untill they are "stopped".

The zombies aren't half bad, but they look nothing like German soldiers. In fact they look like a bunch of local long haired(!) layabouts in random army surplus clothes. Which is probably what they were. Still more convincing than a great deal of similar attempts. Not that that's saying much but all in all this is a proper zombie film and worth seeing if you're into that sort of stuff.

Usually Franco's films are nothing but an excuse to portray women without clothes (such as in Vampyros Lesbos or Female Vampire), but films like this one and his Dracula shows that with an honest budget and a proper script Franco could've possibly made a name for himself among others than people like me. However if you want to see an interesting spanish zombie film I'd much reather recommend Tombs of the Blind Dead, an eerily atmospheric and strange film about zombiefied knights...

Still. All these films are more memorable than the more recent Dead Snow (Død Snø 2009), for a variety of reasons. Most importantly these films have something of a genuinity that is nowhere to be seen in Dead Snow. It's better to try and fail than not to try at all. Dead Snow is a satirical collection of poorly executed scenes that look more like an overdrawn trailer than it is a film. And of course, it's much too clean. You could show it to your grandmother without blushing for fuck's sake... No depravity at all... And where are the famous Norwegian milk maid titties? Where?? If you haven't seen this film there's no reason to either. It has all the cliches such as nazi zombies coming from the deep to protect their gold, young people away for a weekend of wilderness debauchery as well as chain saw death. What it lacks however is trying to be more than a compilation of cliches.



There's more nazi zombie flicks out there. Including one called Night of the Zombies from 1981, but this one is evidently so bad I haven't bothered seeing it. And there are newer films such as the Bunker or Nazis from the Centre of the Earth. Don't waste your time on these films. They are pure shit. Blood Creek on the other hand is modern day undead nazi film worth seeing, if you're into that sort of stuff. So that's nazi zombies for ya! Now, while you're at it how about some cannibal films?

The Breathing Machine

For many years I was aware of J.G. Ballard, but I had never read anything by him. I'm a lazy reader, and usually don't bother with literature. I prefer academic books. But when so many artists I enjoy find profound meaning in Ballard's literature it's hard to overlook. Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and Gary Numan were significantly inspired by Ballard. Cronenberg adapted his novel Crash for the silver screen and there is even a Doctor Who episode inspired by one of his books. (Paradise Towers from 1987. Charming in its own eighties way.) Even Hawkwind. There's more too...

Anyway. I found High Rise sitting on shelf and picked it up, and for some reason I left it sitting on a new shelf for a couple of years before I read it. But when I finally did. Wow. In a lifetime you'll only have a few experiences where your world is permanently altered, and this was one of those. I vividly remember the brutal in medias res opening where the main character barbecues his neighbor's alsatian, before the book goes on to recount his experiences before and after this savage unsentimental meal.

The novel brought together so many elements in a story that sounds preposterous but works like a charm. The brutalist Erno Goldfinger architecture of the high rise itself conspires with the futuristic cityscape in which it lies and the modernist search for meaning and power. It was a beautiful book, and I found myself viewing the world in a different way. I immediately sprang to tackle the next book, Atrocity Exhibition, upon which Joy Division based their song of the same title - and arguably his least accessible work. The short textual fragments coalesced to form a whole that affected my perception of reality in a profound way, with their oblique mythical contents. At this time I used to ride the subway to work, and I remember sitting on the subway station listening to the sounds of automatic billboards periodically switching posters. It sounded like the city itself was on a respirator, gasping for breath in the summer heat. For a moment of clarity the humans around me stopped being people and became symptoms. The spit on the ground was a festering pool of potential evolution.

Ballard's fascination with landscapes as an extension of the human will, and vice versa, his use of medical references, his sterile lack of exposition or exaggerated back stories and his modernity all click with me, and he rapidly became one of my favorite authors of all time. Up there with Gibson, Mishima, Burroughs and quite possibly Delany (by whom I have only read one book of as of yet). Ballard's reality is our reality without clothes. His religious/erotic portrayals of life in the city and interhuman relations in the city are eye popping.

I certainly don't see cars or highway intersections the same way anymore. They are both frightening and sexy to me now. And I'm not alone in that...

I leave you with this: The Normal - Warm Leatherette

Muscles, fire, guns, the new frontier and inner city savages!

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!"
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz - Apocalypse Now

I just read that despite previous rumors that Chuck Norris' involvement with Expendables 2 meant that the film was going to a PG 13 film, it is in fact R-rated - with swearing and all. Chuck Norris is of course famously a christian conservative right wing twat, and doesn't like cussing. Murder and war is fine, cussing is not.

I grew up mostly in the eighties, a decade most of you think of as the decadent days of shoulder pads, mullets, horrible synthesizer music and pink over sized knit sweaters. This is of course true, but the eighties were also the last decade of cold war anxiety and all the implications that came with that.

A significant feature of this decade was the fact that a former movie actor turned Republican politician held office from 1981 to 1989. Fittingly his values are embedded in quite a few of the mega movies of the decade, and certainly in the meme "action film". Chuck Norris' involvement with right wing politics is not unique, to say the least.

Let's take a look at the action films of the eighties, to which Expendables plays loving tribute. We're talking Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris of course - and a million clones. In many ways however the meme was born some years earlier with Clint Eastwood and his brilliant interpretation of the role "Dirty" Harry Callahan in 1971 - a movie that spawned a handful of sequels and changed the face of action films forever.

Dirty Harry was set in the inner city in the dying throes of the hippie era, post Manson and towards the end of the Vietnam War. Social upheaval, the early clashes of the culture wars and drug culture had a severe impact on American culture, and the result of course was fear. Fear of course breeds fantasies of escaping fear, and Dirty Harry showed us that one of the most potent images was the head strong, authoritarian white cop who could look past politics and turmoil and create order with his .44 magnum revolver. The revolver is of course a unique symbol of the American frontier, and in Callahan's hands it transforms modern America into a new frontier where savages fear its powers. Dirty Harry postulates a potent urban myth wherein politicians are weak and corrupt and the law itself gets in the way of justice and order. (Incidentally: Dirty Harry's script was co-written by a certain John Milius. Hang on to that name for now, we'll return to him later.)

Several years later the film's myth would be invoked again in a whole bunch of films, but two of the most memorable are Death Wish (1974) and Cobra (1986) starring Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone respectively. The two films take different approaches to the myth however, and both are interesting:

Death Wish presents us with the common man turned spirit of vengeance, who takes the law into his own hands because the lawmen are too civilized to exert authority. He becomes judge, jury and executioner, to use a cliché, and turns his revolver on street punks and modern savages. Chaos and turmoil surrounds the common man, but with the right tools he can turn the frontier back into a home for good men.
Cobra's take is different. In Cobra the law is no longer just flaccid or corrupt, it is irrelevant. Gangs have taken over the inner city and are enforcing their own rule, with no respect for the laws or the police. They have zero qualms about open war with the police. Into this situation Marion Cobretti is injected as a self proclaimed cure. His revolver is replaced with a modern 9mm gun, and the frontier is gone. This is the normal state of our decadent civilization. Cobretti is seen as a necessary evil and the only way to take on the worst of the lawless elements. He succedes, but the viewer is warned not to follow his path - unlike the path of Paul Kersey in Death Wish. Kersey was a common man turned vigilante, Cobretti is "nietzschean" superhuman bred for war - a true child of the Vietnam War.

- The court is civilized, isn't it pig?
- But I'm not. This is where the law stops and I start - sucker!
Cobretti converses a criminal scum bag in Cobra

Stallone of course is probably best know for his portrayal of another child of the Vietnam War, and a film that spawned a whole genre of its own. I am of course talking about Rambo and the film First Blood from 1982. First Blood is also the first film that taps into the rich tapestry of the war that was lost because the civilized liberals back home didn't believe in the war goals - and even more potently that the troops were betrayed by the society for which they fought and sometimes died. (There is of course some truth to this, but I'm concerned with myth, so I'm not gonna debate that issue.) John Rambo is a veteran on his way home, out of work after the war ended and more or less a bum - despite being a highly decorated and well trained special forces combat soldier. Walking along the road he is arrested by the local sheriff, and after being subjected to ridicule and torturous treatment he flips. A small war ensues in which Rambo uses his experience from Vietnam to outwit the cops. After a climactic battle with the local constabulary he is arrested by his former C.O. Colonel Trautman. The gist of the story is that the civilized postwar society has no need of its combat damaged troops, and would easily turn its back on the people who fought in the war. First Blood is probably one of the best action films of the eighties, and deserves a much better reputation that it has. Where Apocalypse Now(John Milius again) was a film about the war and how it burns away humanity First Blood showed how society is unable and unwilling to face the consequences of sending people to war. First Blood isn't Taxi Driver, even though they share a few themes. Where Taxi Driver portrays the veteran as slightly soft in the head, Rambo is in possession of his faculties. Society in the other hand is cruel and has turned its back on its warriors.

First Blood spawned three sequels, out of which the first one (from 1985) is most memorable as it continued to tap into the mythic tapestry of the Vietnam War. This time complete with corrupt politicians and CIA operatives willing to sell out the vets in favor of appeasement. Where First Blood was ambiguous the sequel is a homage to the veterans and their sacrifice and the fiery crucible of war. Rambo is no longer a mentally damaged veteran, but a soldier in the name of justice and political irredentism. The Reagen era came of age with this film, and its muscular hero was suddenly a role model for others: Schwarzenegger's Commando (1985) and Raw Deal (1987), as well as the Missing in Action films with Chuck Norris were basically Rambo knock offs, with the same theme and the same type of action - and the same message: brutality is sometimes necessary to uphold justice and righteousness - and civilized society is unable to defend its citizens in the face of corruption and rising crime. In the words of so many others: we need a new man, a strong man, to lead us in these new times.

Apart from First Blood II the film that showcased this ideology more than anything is probably Predator (1987). A team of elite soldiers on a clandestine mission in South America is tricked by CIA, and encounters an invisible enemy which picks them off one by one. Only by casting off all the traits of the modern civilized world is Schwarzenegger's character able to defeat the technology enhanced monster. He takes a jungian dive into a lake of mud to cover his body heat, discards the modern weaponry and encounters the monster naked and armed with wood and fire. He prevails not because of his advanced weaponry and training, but in spite of it. A more obvious anti modernist tribute to raw masculine destructive force is hard to imagine. Predator is of course a brilliant film, and worth watching not just for its story but because two of its actors wound up as active politicians: Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger - serving as Governors of Minnesota for the right wing Reform Party of America and California for the Republicans respectively. Worth mentioning is of course that Clint Eastwood has served as mayor for the Republican party, and that Bruce Willis is also an ardent Republican, along with Chuck Norris. There's a lot to be said here, and not enough time. Follow the links instead.

As it is with Beetlejuice John Milius has a tendency to pop up when you mention his name a few times, and his contribution to eighties action is probably the most well formulated of all, while not as potent as Rambo or Predator in its mythic superstructure. Red Dawn (1984) is another Reagen era film full of anti communism, tributes to war and strength and paranoid anti-politician messages. It concerns a band of teenagers who fight back against a joint Cuban-Soviet invasion and consequent occupation of the American midwest. The film shows them as they progress from survivalism, through partisan sabotage and guerrilla warfare to heroes. It seamlessly blends frontier revivalism with anticommunist paranoia and criticism of politicians who didn't see the coming storm. I've said it before, but this film is fantastic - both in terms of realistic portrayal and overt political propaganda. (Where most communists in American films used Chinese copies of the iconic AK-47 this is one of the very few films where the Soviet troops actually use Soviet weapons. The level of detail in this film is amazing.) John Milius is of course a self declared fascist and "zenarchist" with a fascination for militarism, weapons and ancient roman values as well as bushido. Milius more than anyone sums up the traits of the great American action film: anti civilization, pro military, anti modernism, anti socialism, pro guns and pro might. If in doubt see his other films: Apocalypse Now, Farewell to the King, or Conan the Barbarian (not Conan the Hawaiian).

- What do you want.
- Freedom, to be like we are.
- Anything else?
- Guns. So they can't take the freedom away.
Characters in Farewell to the King sum up what Milius is all about.

Which of course leads me to the conclusion. In the post Vietnam War decades that led to the end of the Cold War American saw the rise of a unique form of pseudo-fascism. This pseudo-fascism was unique in the sense that it had almost no political significance but worked instead to form the myths of the once so liberal nation through films. A potent mix of vigilante justice, anti government sentiments, pro death penalty and anti civilization messages became common for these block busters, and the films that copied them. The question is of course: how much of current American culture can we say results from this myth complex?

I'll leave you with a trailer for Cobra. Probably the film that sums it all up better than any other film. Might makes right!

I anledning åttende mars: PUPPER

I går fikk vi vite det alle har visst lenge: Dorthe Skappel har silikonpupper. Mediene mente at dette var noe verdt å lage overskrifter av, og reaksjonene vekslet mellom indignasjon og likegyldighet. Jeg er faktisk ganske likegyldig til puppene til Dorthe Skappel, men jeg er ikke likegyldig til responsen.

Det er en sterk kulturell meme i dag et silikonpupper er feil, og at bare dumme bimboer har silikonpupper. Jeg er uenig, og jeg vil gjerne bruke at par minutter av din tid til å angripe denne latterlige dobbeltmoralens, om vi i stor grad kan takke feministene for. Ja, jeg vet at feminister er så mangt, selv om enkeltgrupperinger forsøker å kapre begrepet og definere andre ut av det. Her tar jeg for meg de tradisjonelle kvinnesakskvinnene i Ottar og Kvinnefronten og deres likesinnede. Det er et hav av forskjell fra Andrea Dworkin og Valerie Solanas på den ene siden og Jenna Jameson og Sasha Grey på den andre, men i norsk feminismediskurs er det altså Kvinnefrontens logikk som har hatt mer eller mindre hegemoni siden syttitallet.

Jeg har mange ganger hevdet, og provosert folk med, at det ikke er noen betydelig forskjell på å forstørre puppene sine og det å lage et hull i øret. Ihvertfall ikke moralsk. Det er din kropp, bruk den slik det behager deg - sålenge det ikke skader noen. (Nå skal jeg ikke gå inn i noen diskusjon rundt poenget at man kunne brukt pengene på veldedighet eller at helsevesenet kunne reddet liv istedetfor å lage fine store pupper. Jeg sier bare: la den som er uten sten osv.)

Silikonpupper handler om kropp, og når vi snakker om kvinner er kropp et minefelt av kroppsidealer. Feminismens ideal er kanskje det snevreste av alle, og for noen grupper grenser det mot det totalitære. Det er kanskje tilogmed snevrere enn det man finner i motebladene, og ihvertfall langt snevrere enn det man finner i pornografiens verden: feministenes tradisjonelle fiender.

Feminismens ideal er denne størrelsen som kalles "naturlig". Det er noe freudiansk over akkurat det begrepet. Freud identifiserte at natur-kultur og eros/libido-thanatos er to dyader med sterkt sammenfallende kulturell signifikans. Altså: vi identifserer naturen med noe positivt og fullt av livskraft, mens kulturen er død og stivhet. Det er en grov forenkling og virkeligheten er mer kompleks, men det sier noe om hvor fundamental dragningen mot naturlighet er for mange. Det er å være naturlig er et slags moralsk imperativ, og de som går mot naturen er fæle folk. Å forandre på kroppen er såkalt unaturlig.

Natur er det utemmede og ville, mens kultur kommer fra kultivere, altså å dyrke og kontrollere marken. Opprinnelig var kultur et begrep som handlet om jordbruk, og det var også med jordbruksrevolusjonen det vi i dag forbinder med begrepet ble et sivilisatorisk trekk.

Dette danner grunnen for en logisk feilslutning av de helt store, som jeg tror jeg må lede tilbake til første mosebok, hvor Adam og Eva får beskjed om at de skal legge naturen under seg. Mennesket er ikke en del av naturen, men bryter med og kontrollerer naturen. Dette er selvsagt det reneste sludder. Mennesket er naturlig, og alt mennesket gjør er naturlig. Skillet mellom natur og kultur er fullstendig overflødig - ihvertfall på et moralsk plan.

Observer forøvrig det moralske feministiske freudianske poenget i skillet mellom natur og kultur (og ekstremfeminister er ofte opptatt av Freud, gudene må vite hvorfor): kultur er å drive den skarpe spisse plogen ned i den fruktbare jomfruelige marken for å plante frø og således undertvinge seg jorden. Eros og natur er kvinnelig og fruktbar, mens kultur og thanatos er maskulin tvang og død. (Om du tror jeg trekker dette langt så sjekk ut begreper som fallogosentrisme: språket og logikken er en fallos som brukes for å underkue det feminine følelsemennesket. I shit you not.)

For de totalitære erkefeministene som Ottar får det noen komiske utslag: Du kan ikke barbere deg under armene, fordi det ikke er naturlig for kvinner å gjøre det, men du kan klippe håret kort om du vil. Noen har ment at Ottarfeminismen ikke handler om kvinner, men å tilegne seg mannens posisjon og gjøre kvinnen mer mannlig. Jeg skal ikke gå inn i det, utover å si at jeg skjønner hvor påstanden kommer fra.

Tilbake til pupper. Jeg liker pupper.

Det er min soleklare mening at silikonpupper er moralsk forsvarlig og at indignasjonen vi som samfunn føler når en vellykket kvinne står frem og forteller om puppene sine er en følge av en feministisk natur-meme som sier at kvinner har en moralsk forpliktelse overfor resten av verdens kvinner. I dette synet er du først og fremst en kjønnet person som skal bære byrden for 51% av verdens befolkning, og deretter kan du være et individ. Om du velger å forstørre puppene dine er du en kjønnsforræder.

Denne våsete propagandaen har vært effektiv. Det er flaut og skammelig å ha silikonpupper. Det skal skjules. Silikonpupper har blitt domenet til blonde bimboer, som ironisk nok fremstår som individualister i forhold til Ottar og kvinnefrontens kollektivistiske natur-ideal. Bimboene har langt lyst hår, store dådyrøyne og digre pupper som fremhever deres identitet som seksuelle og fruktbare kvinner, og det er underlig nok de verste egenskapene en kvinne kan ha i Ottars øyne. I deres øyne er det nok også slik at enhver kvinne som skaffer seg silikonpupper har falt for et slags bimbopress. Samme om du er selvstendig foretningskvinne eller politiker eller hva det måtte være: silikon er bimbologikk.


Det er ironisk å se hvordan vi som samfunn godtar tattoveringer, piercing og andre enda mer inngripende kroppsmodifikasjoner, og betrakter dem som "rites of passage" eller endog MANNdomsprøver. Å gå gjennom en smertefull operasjon for å fremheve de ypperste symbolene på kvinnelighet derimot ser vi på som å gi etter for et kulturelt og kvinnefiendtlig samfunn. Forstå det den som kan. Spesielt vil jeg rette en pekefinger mot subkulturene som smykker seg med alt som finnes av modifikasjoner og hårfarger og hva det måtte være, men plutselig skal være "naturlige" når det er pupper som er spørsmålet. Dobbeltmoralen er til å grine av.

Som avslutning vil jeg si til all verdens kvinner: puppene dine er flotte, store eller små, med og uten påfyll. De er dine, vær stolt av dem og vis dem gjerne frem.

Og for all del: bruk BH, slik som Red Sonja gjør! ;)

Pulling yourself into a new existence.

Thanks to a friend of mine, who dragged me into this with enthusiasm and conviction, and the wonderful people at Wings of Desire. I had a new experience yesterday, and I can't quite use my academic training to quantify it. This is nothing new, it happens to a lot of people, and I dare say more and more people consciously seek it out.

Have you ever taken a look at commercials from way back? I mean a real look and not just looked at the way women are portrayed as servants, but how so many of them were about selling modernity as well as a specific product. Sleek modernist design, machinery, science and urbanity were selling points in the year after the second world war. There was an air of progress, safety and techno optimism after the dark irrational forces of fascism had been vanquished. Take a look at the beatiful schematics of the washing machine here for instance. Nothing mystical about it. Nowhere, no how.

Compare this to how we sell shampoo today. It's all about emotions, and ethereal unquantifiable orgasmic experiences. Interesting huh?

Unless you're blind and stupid you've probably noticed a few social trends that fit in this very context: getting married is back, the catholic church is growing in protestant countries, along with new age, occultism, buddhism, hinduism and islam, and television shows are increasingly concerned with mystic experience, parapsychology and alternative religions - in a positive way.

Yesterday I was suspended by two hooks lodged in my back. I'm not a member of some Amazonian tribe where things like this is done to prove manhood, nor am I particularly masochistic - and yet I chose voluntarily to have my skin stretched and chance all my weight on two steel hooks and a small patch of skin.

Though I like to see myself as an individualist and not some follower of trends it would be naive not to notice a pattern here. Especially considering my other interests: ritualism, occultism, buddhism, symbology, mythology and so forth ad nauseam.

Traditionally something like this would have been a rite of passage, in the Arnold Van Gennep school of thought, and he makes some very interesting points. Rites de passages is highly readable today and perhaps one of the few books on ritualism that has really stood the test of time. His theory of course concerns moving from one type of existence into a new one - or crossing of thresholds.

This is not necessarily evident though, and I actually think modern ritualism (in this particular context) is both a result of and a continuation of a fragmentation of traditional ritualism. By result I mean antithesis: modernity has rationalized society to the point where people lack content for their lives. We are born, we live, we die, we rot and if there's anything in between that puzzles us we turn to psychiatrists with chemical explanations - and for some reason we don't feel fulfilled by this. Like there is something missing. For this reason many of us crave entry into a world of irrational thought. Perhaps even initiatory experiences (though I feel a need to point out that this initiatory experience and use of traditional ritualism should not be likened to the rather outdated "sect" called traditionalism).

Personally I am an academic, scientifically minded person who prefers Houdini's open minded debunking to Blavatsky's fraudulent bullshit when mysticism is involved, and still I find a great deal of meaning in this kind of ritualism.

And ritualism it certainly is. Structurally it even parallels the classical outline of Golden Dawn rituals. You start with a cleansing, followed by an invocation of inner strength, you perform the act, and end it with a new cleansing. (While many occultists are moving away from this somewhat rigid pattern I personally prefer it, and it works well.)

There's a reason why rituals are constructed this way - and you'll notice the very same structure even in a boring protestant church - by singing songs and playing the pipe organ. The first ritual sets the stage and clears it for the content of the main ceremony. This is done by creating a barrier between the profane and the profound. (In Jewish temples this is physically underlined by the famous veil, which separates the two spheres.) By doing this we signal that we are in a deeper and more spiritual mode, and receptive. After the main body of the ritual we need to return to the profane world, and we use more rituals to signal that we're no longer talking to the gods and our souls, and that we're once again primarily concerned with the material world. It would be anticlimactic and maybe even exhausting not to be allowed to come down after the spiritual journey you've been on.

So this is how we frame the ritual, but what do rituals contain? The answer is of course pure myth. These rituals, while being traditional types of rituals, they have been appropriated, recontextualized and cleansed of content - to the point where you can fill them with personal experience (which is why I say it's a continuation of the modernist experience). Where they were primarily initiatory experiences pre-modernity they have now become primarily personal experiences. Of course, the initiatory aspect is still present: by doing this you pass a threshold into a new understanding of yourself. You're building personal myth so to speak. It's an experience you'll always remember, and the growth you experience is something you carry with you. (Additionally there is of course the subcultural element and the obvious initiatory aspects of that, but I'll leave that alone. This is a fairly superficial blog after all...)

I feel personally enriched by the experience, in a very different way than from my earlier experiences in the field of body modification. I have a tattoo, it was great fun, doing it again. I have a scarification, even more fun, not doing it again though. I've pierced myself a jillion times, great fun, got bored, took them all out after walking around with a mask for 15 years. But this was a different camel altogether. It was the proverbial leap of faith actually.

I hoisted myself up, and the moment I let my feet off the ground was like stepping out of a reality and into a new one. The resolve I needed to muster came from somewhere very deep. While there was hardly any pain involved the mind just doesn't want to trust that this is in fact safe. Despite having seen other people do it. After that it was all about flying.

It's a completely irrational experience, and I loved it. Doing it again. Definitely doing it again. Thank you Anette. :)

Read more here:
wings of desire

Fire and the myth of the New Flesh!

One of the most central myths in human history, told by what is probably every single culture to ever have existed is the myth of fire. The most well known is of course the myth of Promethevs who stole the fire from the gods. You've all heard it.

There are several reasons why these myths are so powerful, depending on the myth itself of course, but also inherent in the common theme. Obtaining fire is about freedom to decide one's own fate, civilization, mastery of nature, predictability and about connection to the profound. Most significantly, fire was a step on the tool making evolutionary ladder which allowed humans to control a force of nature and thereby paved the way for technological innovations that came later. It's up there with the first knife, the wheel and the jar and other significant early achievements.

Mythically speaking the most significant trait of these stories would be man's ability to rise into the sphere otherwise occupied by the gods (the Sun most prominently of course). By mastering the art of fire man was no longer a slave to the gods, but master of his own destiny. Even, by mastering the gift from the gods we are able to construct a new religion and approach divinity in a new way. The innovation of fire supposedly coincided with the approach of sun worship and patriarchy, at least on some level.

The various fire myths around the world are complex, and despite following some common structure they also differ vastly. Claude Levi Straus goes into some of these in great detail, but I'm going to leave that be for now. My understanding of the symbolic meaning of many of the details, and my knowledge of mythical structures is nowhere near as impressive as his. One common theme for fire myths is that after initially obtaining fire the gift is lost, or stolen from man, and a hero must regain it for the good of his people, by going on a quest of some sort.

The movie La guerre du feu (English Title: The quest for fire) from 1981, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud concerns this exact portion of the fire myth, and it's one hell of a story, with briliant production values and direction! (Also, it's the first feature film appearance of Ron Perlman, whom some of you probably know better as Hellboy or from that horribly overrated film by Caro and Jeunet).

I first saw this film when I was about seven or so, and it made a lasting impression. The film starts out with a small tribe of stone age people who have fire, but don't know how to make it. The entire structure of the tribe is therefore geared towards caring for and guarding the kindle they carry with them, and guard with their lives. Consequently when this kindle is accidentally lost after a fierce battle with a competing tribe life takes a turn for the worse. (The competing tribe fills the role of what Lévi-Strauss called the Trickster, somewhat simplified.) It's decided that three of the tribe's members will go out and search for a new source of fire, while the rest of the tribe try to survive without it.

Wile I am certain things like this happened in real life it is evident that this is no historical drama, but a compression of cultural and technological evolution into a myth complex for retold in the language of "modernity". The stone age tribe coexists with tribes that are significantly more advanced technologically, juxtaposing the "primitive" tribe on the first step of the evolutionary ladder with the more civilized tribe - capable of creating fire, as well as other technological gizmos. Also, the cult venerated by the more advanced tribe is seemingly more complex than the fire-seeking tribe, though this is not a significant theme in the tale.

This film is of course a redux of the so called "cave man" genre, which was immensly popular back in the fifties and sixties, before nearly dying out. (The most long lived memory of that genre would probably be the Flintstones though.) Despite the name the cave man films were mostly about hot cave WOMEN, as you can witness in films like "The Wild Women of Wongo" (1958), or even better, you can drool over "the first bikini in pre-history" worn by Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966). The latter is a masterpiece in its own right, produced by Hammer Films and completely historically accurate. ;)

Structurally and thematically La guerre du feu has interesting similarities to the Welch film. Both films are of course laden with sexual imagery, and both films portray someone going on a quest and returning to their tribe after encountering a woman from a more advanced tribe, and in turn also bringing new technology to their own. (Classical Campbellian monomyth.) Also, in both of these films the advancement of technology and civilization is portrayed as relatively unproblematic, naturally, seen with our mythical hind sight. The dissemination of fire (and such) was a prerequisite for the rise of modern man, and it's hard to see how anyone could really resist such progress or feel fear in it's face.

Compare this to another and vividly different piece of modern mythology: the New Flesh as portrayed by David Cronenberg in Videodrome (1983). Videodrome is similar to La guerre du feu in that it concerns the adoption of new technology and civilization on a significant threshold (also they were released almost at the same time). They are different in that Videodrome portrays this as something we fear, while La guerre du feu sees only positive progress. Fire is something we crave, while television is a more dubious matter alltogether - somewhere between a malign tumor and The New Flesh. The New Flesh is a term Cronenberg uses to describe technology that is so intimately woven into our everyday lives that it becomes almost organic to us. Such as fire has been for millenia, and television has been since the sixties. And as we all know, and smart phones, iPads, apps and stuff like that proves: there are early adopters, late adopters and resisters.

I have no idea how humans several thousands of years ago approached fire, but the repercussions to society must have been a great deal more tumultous than the introduction of televised mass media, cable TV, video and violent pornography as in Videodrome, and I can easily see how some people must have been sceptical and even afraid of this innovation.

The interesting bit is of course how our mythic structures change over the years. Films are still portraying electronics with some level of fear, while emphasizing how intimate we are with these dodats. Think of Japanese horror films such as Ringu and One Missed Call. In fifty years time this will seem as quaint as the mechano-horror of the luddites is to most people today. Even further into the future imagining resistance against mobile phones will be as difficult to portray as resistance to fire, the wheel, iron, steel, pottery, granaries and democracy is today.

As load bearing structures of meaning myths say a great deal of the changes a society is going through, and also what's consistent, and what's important in our common psyche. I really wish there were more films out there concerning classical myth material in a "realistic" context. La guerre du deu is as good as it gets, and worth seeing. Even if you're only interested in brawny cavemen battling fierce beasts and making the beast with two backs with painted women. Atleast it's far superior to that Darryl Hannah flick...