300: Contemporary Fascist Film-Making, American-Style

When I watched the movie 300 about two months ago, I was astounded, in the proverbial jaw-dropping way, to be seeing a film that struck me as one of the purest examples of a fascist aesthetic ever filmed, rivaling even a film like Triumph of the Will for the sheer promotional quality of its ideological implications, and in fact exploring more deeply than Triumph many aspects of fascist ideology. It’s amazing, in fact, that 300 makes Triumph of the Will look rather reticent regarding the ugliest parts of fascism. That a film this starkly fascist could have been made in the U.S. in 2006 and toured the usual run of suburban and urban multiplexes seems to me both intensely fascinating and horrifying. Whether it surprises me is something I’m still trying to figure out.

When I posted a brief Facebook (where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately) comment about the fascism of 300, a friend of mine wrote back to challenge me to define what I meant by “fascist aesthetic.” So, thanks to John, I put together the list below.

This list doesn’t for the most part describe my individual take on fascist art. I consider it just more or less a description of the main elements of fascist art work as it was defined by Hitler and other artist-fascists at work in the Nazi regime and elsewhere. If you would like my personal take on fascist art though, I’m happy to offer it: I don’t like it. Now there’s a surprise. Fascist art works through an avoidance of history and any actual material conditions of the world. It offers a violent mythology and epic cartoon designed to blur and hide anything resembling actual history.

As Michael Theune pointed out in his response to me on Facebook, another thing that 300 illustrates is that a fascist aesthetic can indeed result in a boring film, not to mention an absolutely preposterous one. Still, by watching the film with the sound off and my own alternative soundtrack blaring, as well as with a generous serving of long commercial breaks courtesy of TNT (you don’t think I rented the damn thing, do you?), I was able to watch 300 in compact snippets that really highlighted the film’s affects and goals.

Of course, an argument can be made that the Spartans, the subject of the film, really were the world’s first main proto-fascists. Still, nothing about 300 is designed to be historically accurate, so claiming that historical accuracy was the reason behind taking such an approach obviously won’t wash.

And now my list of the basic characteristics of fascist art:

1) Belief in the moral corruption and physical and mental inferiority of dark-skinned people, homosexuals, and the physically disabled (all of which groups are, in fact, more or less interchangeable, in some degree).

2) Belief that the only true calling for a man is that of soldier, and that there is no greater honor than to die for one's country.

3) A promotion of the muscled male physique in a standardized, glorified way.

4) Belief that governments and democracy are corrupt hindrances to the activities of great moral soldier-leaders, who deserve the right to make decisions for all without the input of corrupt, morally and physically weak others.

5) A monumental, cleanly lined architecture whose goal is to emphasize physical strength both of building and of human physique.

6) Obfuscations about freedom and conformity; all free men must look, think, and act alike.

7) A sense of being a small, embattled moral elite in a world of corruption and decadence.

8) As that small, embattled elite, the group must finally die in defense of its values. Oddly, in fascist art, success is less beautiful and emotionally fulfilling than death.

9) A mythological landscape on which the fascist drama can be played out, one that describes even the environment of the world as a pure function of fascist values. No actual material messiness is allowed in the details.

This list may not be complete, but I hope it’s at least a good start. Of course, many of these values can be found in other art that is by no means fascist. It's the total combination of these characteristics that makes for fascist art, and that also makes 300 such a significant and unexpected new addition to the genre.

And have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Are Men Allowed To Write Blog Posts Like This?

I’ve had almost a month now of time for my own reading and writing, without teaching, and it has been a pleasant experience, if difficult at times. Except for the occasional e-mail exchange, I’ve been avoiding social involvements and instead taking some time to try to understand myself and my own writing in a way I often can’t when I’m busy. And I haven’t been thinking much about my blog either. Amazing though how much suddenly having time to write makes it easy to want to fill one’s life with meaningless clutter. Still, I’ve spent every morning writing and exercising, and every afternoon reading and writing and going for a walk, then in the evening watching a film or listening to music.

It’s strange to live in the state of California, where the government makes such bad decisions, many of them based on panicky responses to their bad decisions of the past. Maryland didn’t do that sort of thing. DC did, but for the most part the government of DC didn’t have enough power to really screw over most of its citizens. California, however, is better at that. Right now, the depression and financial crisis we have is an excellent example of what happens to a state when it gives all its money away to corporations, essentially with very little payback or oversight. Because corporations can “choose their own tax plans,” they pay almost no taxes and take the money in and out of the state as they please, and the state has no money. And all of it doesn’t benefit anybody other than a few ultra-wealthy people who maybe don’t even live in California. Does anybody in California really still believe that corporations create a lot of jobs? Maybe so, but that doesn’t make it true.

I have been a fan of the TV soap opera The Young and The Restless for 25 years. It’s on when I’m at home and eating lunch. Sometimes I don’t watch the show for several months, but more often I manage to watch it about once a week. Lately it coincides perfectly with my post-exercise lunch break. What do I like about it? All the characters are ultimately ambiguous, capable of generous and selfish acts by turns. Also, they’re all so messed up all the time that it’s a lovely lesson in the messed-up, waste of time lives of the American wealthy. Immature, deluded, vicious. Even the frequent homilies to family life and love and children, which I can’t really stand, are undercut by people’s actual behavior. Whatever they say, they don’t take care of their children and they don’t love anyone but themselves, and their corporations are mainly just a way of trying to take revenge on each other.

Why is it that many blogs written by women discuss a number of issues in each post, but that there are almost no blogs by men that do that? Blogs by men tend to focus only on a single issue with each post. Some women focus only on one issue per post, and others do it differently, but male blogs almost uniformly discuss only one issue per post, unless of course they’re doing a round-up of recent magazines or readings or something like that, and even then the round-up tends to focus on one main issue. Ryan Walker’s blog is an exception, except that it’s possible also to say that all his blog posts are about the same thing.

It doesn’t seem like anybody has much idea yet what’s going to come of the massive Iranian protests. Overturning the election seems unlikely without even more revolutionary change, and while that’s definitely needed, how likely is it? Are a lot of people going to die before this situation is resolved? A few already have. The situation is still changing as of this minute, obviously, and some election results are being reconsidered.

The most interesting music I’ve been listening to recently is the 2005 CD The Eleventh Hour by the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. With his continuous breathing techniques, Parker has long been one of the strangest and most original musicians currently performing, and the range of odd sounds the ensemble makes here create a series of fascinating textures unlike anything I’ve heard. They do have some similarity to Parker textures on other releases but this CD pulls them almost into big band like arrangements. I’ve also been listening to a fair amount of blues and country and alt.countrypop (thumbs up for the best cuts on the somewhat uneven sun kil moon sampler ) as well as to the live 2004 Iggy and the Stooges CD Telleuric Chaos, which is really energetic and also sloppy in a great way (with only a little toneless hard rock thud), making their recent studio release The Weirdness sound even worse.

A lot of my reading this summer has been critical books on the history of science fiction and some key science fiction texts, along with poetry and much else of course. I may be teaching a science fiction course in the next year or two. Oddly maybe, I had never heard of Alfred Bester until this summer. I still think I might like science fiction less than either horror fiction or detective fiction, while at the same time, the greatest books in science fiction are certainly more profound than those of detective fiction. I find sci-fi most interesting when it includes a psychological component in thinking about science and alternative societies. I’ve really loved the Ursula LeGuin work I’ve read so far. I’m teaching her book of stories The Birthday of The World this fall, and actually I’m a little worried that it’s too sexually explicit for some of my California students. Imagine: I’m living in a place where Ursula LeGuin might just be too blunt.

The city is still perhaps best defined by the concept of the stranger. In cities, frequently encountering those you do not know is inevitable and part of what many residents are seeking. The stranger is a direct function of circulation. In contrast, the suburbs seem defined by the desire not to know anyone you don’t want to know and having no more than brief contact with them.

The kinds of loneliness that the city and suburbs create are therefore very different.

I just played Van Morrison’s song “Evening In June” last night for the first time this month. It’s from his album How Long Has This Been Going On and it’s a song that creates such a perfect longing for June that I usually play it frequently every June so I can feel like it’s June while it is June. Yes, I need a song for that. Know what I’m saying? Every day I’ve been telling myself I wanted to play that song yet by the end of the day I still hadn’t played it. But last night I finally did.

Just watched 1967's In Cold Blood for the first time ever on Sunday and on Monday watched Capote, which I had also not seen. In Cold Blood may be the book that gave me the most powerful emotional reaction I’d ever had from a book when I read it 25 years ago: revulsion and fascination and a big headache. I still remember much of the book and have never wanted to read it again. The movie was grim and compelling but didn’t stun me as much, perhaps because in the movie the characters of the murdered Clutter family were not as developed as they were in the book. Extra real-life painful twist; the actor who played neurotic murderer Perry Smith so effectively is of course Robert Blake, who was found not guilty after a long trial of the 2001 murder of his wife. Blake was later found guilty in a civil suit and ordered to pay $15 million to his wife’s three children. Almost everything connected to this book is horrifying.

Speaking of which, Capote was an intriguing examination of Truman Capote’s character and the kinds of manipulation he used to get information for the novel, an effort which ended up having genuinely destructive effects not only on the people who were the subject of the book but on him as well. Still, Capote was another example of the only kind of movie about artists that Hollywood seems capable of making, with rare exceptions: that of the tortured genius who looks into the heart of darkness and transmits it to us while being destroyed by it. I really get tired of that.

Yes, creative writing can be taught. And a lot of poetics debates circle the same ground over and over again with no new insight.

I’m flying to Paris July 1.

The Dunwich Horror

"You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did."

What Is Tasteless?

Let me be clear that I’m not recommending that you watch Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. In fact I’m recommending that you don’t watch it unless you have some idea of what you’re getting yourself into. Let me say also, in my own defense, that I only watched it at the request of a graduate student with whom I’m working who may be including a reading of Visitor Q in his thesis. And let me say, in his defense, that I think he has interesting things to say about this film and its relationship to the taboo. Besides, do I really need a justification for watching a film that many people claim is an important work of art? Even if I don’t though, in this instance it feels like I do.

All disclaimers aside, I think it’s not going too far to suggest that Visitor Q sets the contemporary standard for what’s tasteless. If there’s any more tasteless contemporary film around, I’m not aware of it and I’m not sure I want to be. Well, okay, I want to be aware of it. But watch it? I don’t know.

The only other film that I can think of that covers similar territory to Visitor Q is Pink Flamingos, a movie which is better than Visitor Q in almost every way. In fact one main problem with Visitor Q is that it’s just not very enjoyable to watch, or at least wasn’t to me. Its opening soft core porn incest scene, for instance, which turns out to be one of the gentlest in the film, is not only dull and interminable but also ridiculous. It’s perfectly transparent that the actors involved aren’t really a father and daughter, so the pretense that they are comes off as laughable. Similarly, the film’s rote attempt to shatter one taboo after another almost proceeds like a checklist: let’s shatter this one, and this one, and don’t forget this one. None of the characters or situations is ever believable for more than a few moments, which is part of the point perhaps but nonetheless not very interesting.

The idea of the tasteless obviously depends on the idea of taste. Both concepts are part of what we used to call back in the olden days of theory a binary opposition, like the concepts of good and bad art, the masculine and the feminine and many others. And taste of course is culture and class bound. One goal therefore of consciously tasteless art is to critique the social limitations of taste, showing it to be the property of the repressed, the controlling, and the power hungry. And certainly that’s part of what Miike wants Visitor Q to do.

But I’ve been wondering about an aesthetic of the tasteless and what value there is in it. Once the tasteless makes clear that it’s a critique of the limits of taste, isn’t it in some perverse sense making a bid for itself to be recuperated as somehow tasteful, at least in the sense that in showing problems in the idea of taste, it puts itself in the position of having a superior understanding of taste when compared to art that simply tries to reproduce cultural standards of the tasteful? Or to push this idea further, by showing that taste is no more than a set of biases, hasn’t it undermined both the idea of taste and therefore the idea of the tasteless by showing them both to be shaped by conditions of social power, in which case it’s not tasteless but something else? To remain tasteless, a work of art would have to accept normative standards of taste and therefore accept its own tastelessness. Many lowbrow American comedies, like the American Pie series, do something like this. Or else it would have to fail in its attempt to critique standards of taste and therefore remain tasteless.

The second of these possibilities is how Visitor Q achieves its own unique tastelessness. Its message, at the end, is that all we have watched has been part of the struggle of these characters to understand and accept themselves, and now that they have, they’ll be more capable of loving themselves and each other. Since it’s nearly impossible to believe that any of the characters could be actual people, the standard happy ending family message seems falsely tacked on, or else one more final tasteless joke in a series of such tasteless jokes. Believe me though, the ambiguity here is less interesting than it sounds.

Which is to say, Visitor Q remains genuinely tasteless because its critique of the oppression of social taboos is almost never convincing. Visitor Q remains tasteless because it doesn’t work.

Finally, I’m not sure how much interest I have in simply reversing the binary and celebrating the tasteless. Pink Flamingos, for instance, is gross, but because it succeeds as art it creates its own alternative standard of taste, that of the John Waters vision of the universe. Visitor Q remains tasteless mainly because it’s just not really that interesting. I can certainly acknowledge that someone might like this film because it’s both boring and tasteless. They might like it because it explores taboos and attacks middle class squeamishness even though I don’t think it does that very well. But what I can’t seem to acknowledge is that boring and tasteless art is automatically interesting simply because the idea of taste is a problem.