Pessimism, declinism, millennialism...it's all a belief in what a bummer tomorrow will be. The argument for downward trajectories of any kind is tempting but intrinsically misleading. It's easy to think of something great from the old days that isn't around anymore, or has been perverted. And it will be easy to reflect back on 2009 as a golden era.
If ever there was an era to feel gloomy about European affairs, it was the aftermath of World War I. Nationalistic aggression and incompetent leadership had brought about a slaughter of unprecedented scale. There goes our Whiggish self-improvement: sorry children, and children's children. Unfortunately, as Richard Overy points out in "The Morbid Age," the civilizational pessimism had much in common with incipient fascism, including the intellectual vogue for eugenics.
Today the bogeymen thought to undermine our seemingly steady world are moral relativism, shrugging permissiveness and atheism. These vices leave us open to the fundamentalists in our midst, assert Christopher Caldwell and Theodore Dalrymple. These thinkers are right to lament a lack of serious debate about the ramifications of immigration, and the blurring of personal emotions with broad political concerns. But they are wrong to believe that these unresolved questions can only hurt society.
Caldwell's anxiety about Muslim integration hinges on the primacy of Christianism to any respectable civilization. This view is out-of-date by at least one hundred years. Secularism is as valuable to the modern world as any of the teachings of Jesus. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, "isn't it time to restore the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace?"
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
The Baader-Meinhof Complex
This brutally literal film has landed in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Red Army Faction was farcically reprised by Patti Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In this depiction, Andreas Baader and his co-conspirators are plenty farcical themselves, swilling beer and firing their guns in no particular direction. Moritz Bleibtreu as Baader has all the gravitas of Brad Pitt in Snatch.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex unfurls a suite of violent episodes, always punctuated either by strident Marxist rhetoric or defeated whimpering. The bank-robbing terrorists don't articulate long-term goals or even a theoretical success beyond their own martyrdom. Director Uli Edel is particularly hard on Ulrike Meinhof, once a prominent dissident journalist, who is eventually railroaded by her brattier counterparts.
This leaves the conscience of Germany to Bruno Ganz, who plays statesman Horst Herold. Only he can conjure some kind of meaningful context for all the slaughter. The Oliver Stone-style "upheavals of the sixties" montage doesn't contribute much--what does the RFK assassination have to do with any of this?
Most beguiling is why any of the gang's escapades had to happen. Meinhof abandons her children and career to follow thugs into a life of violent crime. The decision is portrayed as a choice to hurtle herself through an open window and on into the "underground." It is hard to imagine Naomi Klein picking up an assault rifle. But Meinhof was not the only roiling German seduced by mayhem: the Red Army Faction was a teenage sensation, inspiring a spate of pro- and anticommunist murders.
The killers are even more attractive in the film than in real life. But their startling popularity failed to materialize into an authentic challenge to state power, and their actions gained coherence only after their incarceration. The cruelest irony: in prison, the revolutionaries turn into cunning negotiators and bookish study-buddies, where before they dismissed theory as "intellectual masturbation."
Very little moralizing or historical cause-and-effect is presented in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, although one seeks meaning from both films and murders. Complaints that the film suffers from hero-worship are off-base, and rest on an assumption that all movie violence is titillating. Edel takes the killers on their own terms, although he does not give any time to the contention that the Nazis have been replaced by a new imperialist brutality. No attempt is made to contrast the RAF with an excessively obedient culture. And why are the police actions against the RAF and the Munich Olympics kidnappers so sheepish and non-committal? Because Germany was trying to shuck its Nazi tendencies through cowardly appeasement.
To Christopher Hitchens the cycle of cruelty, sexuality, extortion and self-manipulation is predictable, and he praises the film's debunking of radical myths. In that regard, The Baader-Meinhof Complex could be judged an anti-thriller, in the way that Unforgiven is an anti-Western.
The film wins the Award for Most Outlandish Use of Bob Dylan. "Blowin' in the Wind" is the closing credits music, moments after the last body hits the ground. The juxtaposition goes some way to reviving the worn-out ballad, its rhetorical questions all the more cryptic when directed at German terrorists.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex unfurls a suite of violent episodes, always punctuated either by strident Marxist rhetoric or defeated whimpering. The bank-robbing terrorists don't articulate long-term goals or even a theoretical success beyond their own martyrdom. Director Uli Edel is particularly hard on Ulrike Meinhof, once a prominent dissident journalist, who is eventually railroaded by her brattier counterparts.
This leaves the conscience of Germany to Bruno Ganz, who plays statesman Horst Herold. Only he can conjure some kind of meaningful context for all the slaughter. The Oliver Stone-style "upheavals of the sixties" montage doesn't contribute much--what does the RFK assassination have to do with any of this?
Most beguiling is why any of the gang's escapades had to happen. Meinhof abandons her children and career to follow thugs into a life of violent crime. The decision is portrayed as a choice to hurtle herself through an open window and on into the "underground." It is hard to imagine Naomi Klein picking up an assault rifle. But Meinhof was not the only roiling German seduced by mayhem: the Red Army Faction was a teenage sensation, inspiring a spate of pro- and anticommunist murders.
The killers are even more attractive in the film than in real life. But their startling popularity failed to materialize into an authentic challenge to state power, and their actions gained coherence only after their incarceration. The cruelest irony: in prison, the revolutionaries turn into cunning negotiators and bookish study-buddies, where before they dismissed theory as "intellectual masturbation."
Very little moralizing or historical cause-and-effect is presented in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, although one seeks meaning from both films and murders. Complaints that the film suffers from hero-worship are off-base, and rest on an assumption that all movie violence is titillating. Edel takes the killers on their own terms, although he does not give any time to the contention that the Nazis have been replaced by a new imperialist brutality. No attempt is made to contrast the RAF with an excessively obedient culture. And why are the police actions against the RAF and the Munich Olympics kidnappers so sheepish and non-committal? Because Germany was trying to shuck its Nazi tendencies through cowardly appeasement.
To Christopher Hitchens the cycle of cruelty, sexuality, extortion and self-manipulation is predictable, and he praises the film's debunking of radical myths. In that regard, The Baader-Meinhof Complex could be judged an anti-thriller, in the way that Unforgiven is an anti-Western.
The film wins the Award for Most Outlandish Use of Bob Dylan. "Blowin' in the Wind" is the closing credits music, moments after the last body hits the ground. The juxtaposition goes some way to reviving the worn-out ballad, its rhetorical questions all the more cryptic when directed at German terrorists.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Dream Home Heartache
I just returned from breakfast at IKEA--they have a cheap though basic breakfast cafeteria and all-you-can-drink coffee for just one dollar. From the atrium, in my angular modern plastic chair, I looked out at the panorama of California freeway cloverleaf. A Mexican fellow climbed into the palm trees and chainsawed down the dead fronds.
IKEA is a triumph of consumerism as an aesthetic, rather than as an offering of commodities. The store transports you into a smarter, sleeker Scandinavian universe, never mind the garbage-furnishings that are for sale. It's so easy to get lost in there, with the different levels and the clever traffic patterns. You're supposed to get lost.
Another key to the IKEA mystique is the strange names for each product. A loveseat is known as Klippan, the Swedish word for "cliff." The DVD tower goes by Benno. The naming practice is due to founder Ingvar Kamprad's dyslexia.
Americans have flocked to their IKEA stores and have swallowed the Scandinavian design completely. For centuries French products were taken to be luxurious and desirable, but recently the Swedes have seized the upper hand by slashing prices. H&M and IKEA are two of the most famous European brands. The first Latin American store is due to open before 2010 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
IKEA boasts of their contribution to an eco-friendly lifestyle, which is a joke to anyone who has carried any of their furniture. Razing Brazil and Indonesia for cheap disposable trinkets is only "green" in the sense of "greedy."
In Every Dream Home a Heartache by Roxy Music
IKEA is a triumph of consumerism as an aesthetic, rather than as an offering of commodities. The store transports you into a smarter, sleeker Scandinavian universe, never mind the garbage-furnishings that are for sale. It's so easy to get lost in there, with the different levels and the clever traffic patterns. You're supposed to get lost.
Another key to the IKEA mystique is the strange names for each product. A loveseat is known as Klippan, the Swedish word for "cliff." The DVD tower goes by Benno. The naming practice is due to founder Ingvar Kamprad's dyslexia.
Americans have flocked to their IKEA stores and have swallowed the Scandinavian design completely. For centuries French products were taken to be luxurious and desirable, but recently the Swedes have seized the upper hand by slashing prices. H&M and IKEA are two of the most famous European brands. The first Latin American store is due to open before 2010 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
IKEA boasts of their contribution to an eco-friendly lifestyle, which is a joke to anyone who has carried any of their furniture. Razing Brazil and Indonesia for cheap disposable trinkets is only "green" in the sense of "greedy."
In Every Dream Home a Heartache by Roxy Music
Holocaust What? Part 2
I observed here that World War II does not bring out the best in American filmmakers. Most of them find themselves in too deep water. Now Quentin Tarantino has turned that quagmire into a waterslide.
The success of Inglourious Basterds in European markets is a strange moment of cultural communion: the movie is set in Europe but celebrates cocky Americanness. Its auteur has walked the line between Francois Truffaut-style cinéphile and Kevin Smith-style video store geek. August is traditionally the time for mindless shoot-em-up flicks and not weighty Holocaust fare, but the new movie appears to deliver both.
Farce is the new tragedy now that almost all the war's veterans are dead. Pat Buchanan and Nicholson Baker see no reason to go to war against the Nazis. This German reviewer is thrilled that Tarantino can bring as much unreasoned lunacy to depicting the Third Reich as they brought to their task of world domination.
But the joyless Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Inglourious Basterds offensive and likens its director to Sarah Palin. The critical community has tended to agree, and holds that Tarantino has no moral authority whatsoever.
Which is funny because Tarantino's greatest theme is the dissolution of moral authority in the age of talking images. The vile doings of his characters are viscerally exciting and often go unpunished. His misspelled new movie seems a culmination of a tendency to shirk serious questions about violence. The cinema of Tarantino is not so much amoral as anti-moral: he thinks cheap titillation serves the movies better than historical lesson-learning.
All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations...Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
--Walter Benjamin, from "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction"
The success of Inglourious Basterds in European markets is a strange moment of cultural communion: the movie is set in Europe but celebrates cocky Americanness. Its auteur has walked the line between Francois Truffaut-style cinéphile and Kevin Smith-style video store geek. August is traditionally the time for mindless shoot-em-up flicks and not weighty Holocaust fare, but the new movie appears to deliver both.
Farce is the new tragedy now that almost all the war's veterans are dead. Pat Buchanan and Nicholson Baker see no reason to go to war against the Nazis. This German reviewer is thrilled that Tarantino can bring as much unreasoned lunacy to depicting the Third Reich as they brought to their task of world domination.
But the joyless Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Inglourious Basterds offensive and likens its director to Sarah Palin. The critical community has tended to agree, and holds that Tarantino has no moral authority whatsoever.
Which is funny because Tarantino's greatest theme is the dissolution of moral authority in the age of talking images. The vile doings of his characters are viscerally exciting and often go unpunished. His misspelled new movie seems a culmination of a tendency to shirk serious questions about violence. The cinema of Tarantino is not so much amoral as anti-moral: he thinks cheap titillation serves the movies better than historical lesson-learning.
All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations...Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
--Walter Benjamin, from "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction"
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Will Occidents Happen?
"Urbanization" carries a connotation of deracination and oppressed flight from the country. At least in America we like to imagine rural farm cultures as our original, unspoiled society. But the truth is that the explosion of the world's urban population is beneficial to humanity. Subsistence farming is always perilously close to starvation, whereas 21st century cities will be rookeries of high-tech communications.
Environmentalists also insist on high-density urbanism as a more sustainable human lifestyle. Less space around you means less carbon output, more proximity to jobs and social activity, and more competition to overwhelm failures. Not living off the land also means less incentive to breed. This guy wants to bet you that global population in 2060 will be less than it is today.
So...cities. Paul Romer wants to build new ones in the developing world, and use the capital and political structures of the first world. These "charter cities" would provide a non-coercive lure to locals and offer Western-style prosperity to the teeming global south.
The way that Romer packages his concept is pedantic and unpersuasive. He leans heavily on the terms "rules" and "choices." Why does he make up a post-colonial British name for his protagonist? Why does he decline to mention the actual country Wilson (Nelson?) is from? Romer invokes China's rising "GDP per capita." This is a trick of the free market crowd that disguises discrepancies between rich and poor. There are lots of wealthy people in China today but many more who live under a toxic brown cloud.
Instead of syncretic, Romer's generalizations are vague. He would do better to come clean: he is a capitalist, and wants to undermine the power of developing world bureaucrats by entering their subjects into the global free market. His analogy to the British Empire is apt, but his struggle is to recast Charter Cities as different from colonialism, or even from the fiendish free-trade pacts.
Romer should be lauded for taking philanthropy out of its paternalistic mindset. And brand new, well-managed cities harnessing the frantic ingenuity of the third world seems like a promising marriage, if still very politically sticky.
Environmentalists also insist on high-density urbanism as a more sustainable human lifestyle. Less space around you means less carbon output, more proximity to jobs and social activity, and more competition to overwhelm failures. Not living off the land also means less incentive to breed. This guy wants to bet you that global population in 2060 will be less than it is today.
So...cities. Paul Romer wants to build new ones in the developing world, and use the capital and political structures of the first world. These "charter cities" would provide a non-coercive lure to locals and offer Western-style prosperity to the teeming global south.
The way that Romer packages his concept is pedantic and unpersuasive. He leans heavily on the terms "rules" and "choices." Why does he make up a post-colonial British name for his protagonist? Why does he decline to mention the actual country Wilson (Nelson?) is from? Romer invokes China's rising "GDP per capita." This is a trick of the free market crowd that disguises discrepancies between rich and poor. There are lots of wealthy people in China today but many more who live under a toxic brown cloud.
Instead of syncretic, Romer's generalizations are vague. He would do better to come clean: he is a capitalist, and wants to undermine the power of developing world bureaucrats by entering their subjects into the global free market. His analogy to the British Empire is apt, but his struggle is to recast Charter Cities as different from colonialism, or even from the fiendish free-trade pacts.
Romer should be lauded for taking philanthropy out of its paternalistic mindset. And brand new, well-managed cities harnessing the frantic ingenuity of the third world seems like a promising marriage, if still very politically sticky.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Whither Moldova?
Sandwiched unpromisingly between Romania and the Ukraine, Moldova is by some measures the poorest country in Europe (its rival for this dubious honor is Albania). Personally I often confuse it with Malta. The country of four million somewhat inadvertently stormed global pop culture with the boy band O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" and the subsequent viral Internet permutations of that track.
Moldova is split between its EU aspirations and a dependence on rogue Russia. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian soldiers are still installed in the separatist region of Transnistria. The Kremlin, of course, holds the ace card of petroleum: Gazprom can pull the supplies and bring the country to its knees, as it has done in Georgia and the Ukraine.
Which is what makes the Moldovan Communist Party a curiosity. A final, pyrrhic victory for President Voronin makes his the only Communist government left in Europe, although he has pledged to work towards a "European Moldova," with friendly ties to East and West. Unpersuaded protesters rocked the capital city of Chisinau upon his re-election, and now a new coalition government may or may not take shape.
Moldova will remain backward no matter how this political spat works out, a long way from joining the global community.
Moldova is split between its EU aspirations and a dependence on rogue Russia. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russian soldiers are still installed in the separatist region of Transnistria. The Kremlin, of course, holds the ace card of petroleum: Gazprom can pull the supplies and bring the country to its knees, as it has done in Georgia and the Ukraine.
Which is what makes the Moldovan Communist Party a curiosity. A final, pyrrhic victory for President Voronin makes his the only Communist government left in Europe, although he has pledged to work towards a "European Moldova," with friendly ties to East and West. Unpersuaded protesters rocked the capital city of Chisinau upon his re-election, and now a new coalition government may or may not take shape.
Moldova will remain backward no matter how this political spat works out, a long way from joining the global community.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
The Mask of Childhood
Zetterling is a Swedish filmmaker whose work explores sexual malaise and often features political outsiders. Temple of course is the greatest child star in the history of cinema, a tireless patriot who later become a prominent California Republican.
The Mask of Childhood begins when Temple resigns from the festival's panel of judges over Zetterling's Night Games, which Temple found obscene. The antipathy is not reciprocated though: Zetterling idolized Temple from a young age.
European art film had a reputation during the period for being sexy and open-ended, while Temple's movie musicals did all they could to endorse militarism and reinforce power structures. Zetterling's career was full of dilemmas and irresolution but achieved a lasting integrity.
The Mask of Childhood by Burke Bindbeutel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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