The Homo and the Negro
Page 24
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A similar triangle occurs in the WWII German film Opfergang; see Derek Hawthorne’s “Opfergang: Masterpiece of National Socialist Cinema,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/ 12/opfergang-masterpiece-of-national-socialist-cinema/
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“I wonder that my very simple stratagem could deceive so old a SHIKARI,” said Holmes. “It must be very familiar to you. Have you not tethered a young kid under a tree, lain above it with your rifle, and waited for the bait to bring up your tiger? This empty house is my tree, and you are my tiger. You have possibly had other guns in reserve in case there should be several tigers, or in the unlikely supposition of your own aim failing you. These,” he pointed around, “are my other guns. The parallel is exact.”
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See the essays mostly collected in The Eldritch Evola … & Others and Green Nazis in Space!
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The ascension of first, Chandler and Hammett, and then Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, to the Library of America indicates a bit of a sea change, though accompanied by the usual grumbling from contemporary Edmund Wilsons who value bourgeois status quo rather than Tradition.
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The Eldritch Evola contains “Mike Hammer, Occult Dick: Kiss Me Deadly as a Lovecraftian Tale,” which considers the parallels between the overly-inquisitive protagonists of detective fiction and Lovecraft’s weird fiction.
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The Books in My Life (Charlottesville, Vir.: Hampton Roads, 1998); see Chapter 5, “Sherlock Holmes, the Flawed Superman.”
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Symptomatic of which illness is the other new character type, the anti-Holmes, the master criminal such as Prof. Moriarty, or fiend, such as Jack the Ripper.
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I don’t really agree with Wilson that this was some kind of evolutionary leap, “the most decisive steps in the evolution of man since the invention of the wheel”; but certainly, after centuries of Christian cretinizing, it was a distinct improvement.
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As well as ideologues like Tom Wolfe; see his polemical articles on the New Journalists as The New Realists reprinted as the introduction to The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). “Believe me, there is no new journalism. It is a gimmick to say there is . . . Story telling is older than the alphabet and that is what it is all about.”—Jimmy Breslin, quoted in Philip M. Howard, Jr., “The New Journalism: A Nonfiction Concept of Writing,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of Utah, August, 1971; quoted on Wikipedia, op. cit.
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I discuss the maniacal accumulation of detail as a key method in writers as different as Lovecraft, Henry James, and Baron Evola in “The Eldritch Evola” and elsewhere in The Eldritch Evola, op. cit.
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See the remarkable analysis of Taxi Driver and Manhunter, “God’s Lonely Men: Cinema Psychopaths” at The Niles Files, http://nilesfilmfiles.blogspot.com/2011/04/gods-lonely-men-cinema-psychopaths.html. Here’s a sample:
More interestingly, they both have the same cinematographer, Dante Spinotti. But whereas Red Dragon briskly moves along with its plot and suspense thriller tropes in terms of how it uses lighting, music, editing, and sound, every element in Manhunter is able to be savored again and again: the compositions, the colors of window blinds behind a character, Mel Bourne’s amazing production design, the moody synthesizer music, the highly experimental editing and sound. All this could at first be perceived as a flaw of over-stylization; indeed, whereas The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon come off as gothic horror, Manhunter feels like a cousin to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. But this criticism is off-set by two things: Mann is totally invested in his characters and his meticulous research reveals itself in the slightest nuances of his performers; (even the fantastic Fiennes feels trivial and shallow when compared to Noonan’s Dollarhyde; and Ed Norton’s Graham seems to have no struggle whatsoever); and secondly, the aestheticism of the film is integral to the substance, being that Francis Dollarhyde, one of cinema’s great creepy gazers, looks and then elevates or perverts everything that he sees. Like Mark Lewis, he is a filmic cyborg and what we see in Manhunter is filtered through a lens of complete aestheticism.
For more on the intense re-view-ability of Manhunter, see my “Essential Films … & Others,” https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/
02/essential-films-and-others/.
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Here again, Poe was first; his detective, Dupin, already lives shut away from the Paris noise, preferring to live by night. Other than the aesthetic veneer, on might compare such creatures to today’s basement-dwelling video-gamers.
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Wilson later devotes a chapter to “Huysmans: The Ultimate Decadent.”
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See my review of his Aiming Higher Than Mere Civilization: How Skeptical Nihilism Will Remind Humanity of Its Long-Forgotten Purpose (Emericus Durden Philosophy Series Book 1), https://www.counter-currents.com/2015/05/aiming-higher-than-mere-civilization/.
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In The Hermetic Tradition, Evola discusses how the Realized Man rebuilds for himself a new, glorified body (the Body of Light in various traditions); see Chapter 32, “The Red Work: Return to Earth.” In his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar, Evola explains his interest in Guénon and Tradition as arising from the idea that the Absolute Ego that he had arrived at in his studies in philosophical Idealism needed to be “grounded” in history, and this he identified with the historical founders of the various Traditions, such as Manu, Solon, or the Yellow Emperor.
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Bhagavad Gita, 4.7. I discuss this avataric role in “The Babysitting Bachelor as Aryan Avatar: Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty, Part 2,” https://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/the-babysitting-bachelor-as-aryan-avatarclifton-webb-in-sitting-pretty-part-2/, as well as its relevance to the Männerbund theme in “‘God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables,” herein.
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“The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” in the last collection, His Last Bow.
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As I have frequently emphasized, unlike “moral” fiction, in genre fiction the death of a character—especially a Big Bad who, as Trevor Lynch notes, is usually the only spokesman allowed for Traditional, or non-PC, views—results only superficially from “just retribution” (the cover story) but simply because there is nothing else to be done with him. “When you get the message, you hang up the phone,” as Alan Watts liked to say. Tura Satana’s character in Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill is herself killed at the end not because the wimpy girlfriend triumphs but because the film has to end at some point.
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See The Spiritist Fallacy (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2003) and Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001).
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A somewhat hostile critic calls Wilson “somewhat innocent and over-trusting, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Both Conan Doyle and Wilson gave credence to the Cottingley fairies, for example” (https://philosophynow.org/issues/85/Colin_Wilson_As_Hydra). For his part, Wilson said:
Like Joe Cooper, I am willing to believe the girls were telling the truth. Both had had many psychic experiences, which Joe records (and which anyone who wants to explore further can find summarised in my son Damon’s article on fairies in our joint book Unsolved Mysteries Past and Present). Joe’s book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies received little publicity and is still not widely known. This has given me the opportunity to speak of my own attitude to these things, and to explain why, like Joyce [Collin Smith], I accept the reality of these ‘elementals’, as did the poet W. B. Yeats and his friend Lady Gregory, and as did the writer and researcher Evans Wentz in his classic book on the subject, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. (http://www.joycecollinsmith.co.uk/an-introduction-by-colin-wilson)
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Before publishing
the more modest New Annotated Lovecraft we reviewed https://www.counter-currents.com/2014/10/notes-on-the-new-annotated-h-p-lovecraft/, Leslie S. Klinger prepared The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, described by Wikipedia as “a series of three annotated books edited by Leslie S. Klinger, collecting all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes. The books were originally published by W. W. Norton in oversized slip-cased hardcover editions. . . . This publication of the Sherlock Holmes canon has been called ‘definitive.’”
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Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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Of course, this also reminds us of Jim Garrison’s method of “guilt by geography,” where, for example, a “connection” is established between Lee Oswald and Guy Bannister by noting they had offices in the same building; see Patricia Lambert’s False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: Evans & Co., 2000).
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Whether McCrea intends it or not, that word always recalls to my mind F. R. Leavis’ journal, Scrutiny, as well as the certainly unintended “Central Scrutinizer” of Frank Zappa.
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The Ur-text is “‘God, I’m with a heathen’: The Rebirth of the Männerbund in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables,” herein. As the future M, Judi Dench, intones at the beginning of The Chronicles of Riddick: “In normal times, evil would be fought with good. But in times like these, well, it should be fought by another kind of evil.”
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See James Neill, The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies and my review-essay thereon, available as an Amazon Kindle. Needless to say, this is all subverted by the “gay” identity manufactured by the Left, in which marriage and family are “redefined” so as to merge the happy homosexual in the mix: he’s just like us! As Ann Sterzinger puts it in her review of our Green Nazis, “can you imagine William Burroughs writing about the Wild Boys with an adopted baby strapped to his chest and a yuppie husband yapping in his ear about Glee?” (https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/05/
fashy-homos-and-green-nazis-in-space/).
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The ethnic outsider tears down and “develops”—like Caddyshack’s Al Czervik—while the homosexual of one’s own ethnic group reclaims and gentrifies the old; see our “This Old Gay House,” herein. Is it not the Jew, with his “family values,” that gifted us with capitalism and its obsessive concern with the new and the future? A concern shared by the Marxist, with his “New Soviet Man” and the total destruction of the old order.
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Keynes is often “explained” this way: “Well, he said ‘in the long run we are all dead’ because he was queer, you know?”
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Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), which I’ve frequently called the very model of genre criticism.
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Op. cit. Trevor Lynch has noted the same essential opposition when reviewing the new Batman vs. Superman movie:
In any matchup between Batman and Superman, I side with Batman. I’ve never liked the character of Superman, because he is not a man at all. He’s basically a god. He’s not a human being who has raised himself to the pinnacles of human excellence. He’s an alien who is simply endowed with superior abilities. There is nothing heroic about Superman, because he is almost invulnerable. He faces no risks. There’s nothing he must struggle to overcome. Batman, however, is a true Nietzschean superman, a man who has made himself more than a man, a man who faces injury, death, and imprisonment night after night in order to fight evil. I don’t want to live in a godless universe, but frankly I would prefer that we make ourselves into gods rather than find them readymade. (https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/05/batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice/)
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Right-wing types who might cheer Bond/Fleming’s homophobia should note that Fleming associates sexual deviance with “furriners” including the US. For the film version, Tilly was ret-conned as straight, and Pussy Galore became a fantasy lipstick Lesbian who would succumb to Bond’s charms. In the book, however, Pussy’s backstory is: ‘‘I come from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case, I couldn’t run as fast as my uncle. I was twelve. That’s not so good James. You ought to be able to guess that.” As Tricia Jenkins points out, “Here, Fleming specifically implies that Pussy’s lesbianism emerges from the familial and cultural dysfunction of the American South, and given the Bond formula, this deviancy can only reflect the degeneracy of the United States.” See her invaluable essay “James Bond’s ‘Pussy’ and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality,” http://www.the007dossier.com/007dossier/post/2014/06/04/James-Bonds-Pussy. While American “conservatives” laud down-home Southern family values and sneer about the British queers, Fleming sees “degeneracy” right there in the Flannery O’Connor heartland, not from “cultural Marxism” but from the primitive conditions of the family-obsessed conservatives of the colonial world; real men are the bachelor products of public schools, like Bond.
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The American Bond phenom’ really ran on the coat-tails (a two button, soft shouldered, single-vented suit, of course) of the Camelot mystique, when JFK, supposed champion of “youth,” averred to having a Fleming novel at his bedside. One wonders who was fooling whom; after all, how much time did JFK really spend in the White House bedroom per se? “My bedroom! Where my wife sleeps! Where my children play with their toys!”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part II.
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By contrast, Bond rip-offs and spoofs like the Derek Flint or Matt Helm series have their heroes surrounded by veritable harems, the typical exaggeration of satire. I suspect any adult woman would be immune to, and able to easy handle, or break free from, Helm’s boozy “charm.” Austin Powers’ comically frustrated satyriasis is fully in line with Fleming’s creation. On Matt Helm and other pseudo-Bonds see Jef Costello’s “‘The Flash in the Pan’: Fascism & Fascist Insignia in the Spy Spoofs of the 1960s” in his collection The Importance of James Bond (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017).
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Bond kills Blofeld in the book You Only Live Twice using only his own hands, an intensely up-close, personal, one might almost say sadistically homosexual way; typically, movie Bond, having become Roger Moore, picks up the wheelchair bound Blofeld with a helicopter and dumps him into a factory smokestack (sexual inversion?) as he pleads “I’ll buy you a delicatessen—in stainless steel!” Perhaps that curious line is meant as a taunt about Bond’s Judaic, middle-class mindset?
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“Dear Agent Scully; Did not appreciate your lawyer’s tone . . .” Mystery Science Theater, Episode 1010, The Final Sacrifice. “Look, he’s filed all his letters to Gillian Anderson.” Episode 1005, Blood Waters of Dr. Z.
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Jane Bond Meets Thunderballs (Jack Remy, 1986), and various sequels. Or so I’ve heard.
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Unless, of course, we go full video-game, or virtual reality. And indeed, this isn’t the first time Anderson has been to this rodeo. Season 7 of The X-Files brought us “First Person Shooter” by none other than William Gibson himself, where Scully ultimately needs to enter the virtual world of a video game to save Mulder from a rogue female warrior. Interestingly, critics regard this episode as “legendarily bad,” while it “became one of Gillian Anderson’s favorite episodes, despite ‘its reliance on big guns and raging testosterone.’ Anderson explained that she enjoyed the opportunity ‘to show Scully wearing heavy metal and firing oversized weapons’” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
First_Person_Shooter_(The_X-Files)#Broadcast_and_reception). This doesn’t bode well for an Anderson Bond.
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“The name’s not Jane Bond: why 007 can never be a woman,” The Telegraph, 25 May 2016, http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/films/
2016/05/25/the-names-not-jane-bond-why-007-can-never-be-a-woman/. Jef Costello made similar points about the ultimate unsuitability of a female M in his review of Skyfall, op. cit.
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The titular Skyfall is the Bond manor, I suppose.
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As the film series was “modernized” M of course became a mother figure (the last season of TV’s The Avengers had already given us the wheelchair confined Mother), and Bond ultimately the Judaic Daniel Craig. Book Bond is almost embarrassingly enthused about Sir Hugo Drax at the start of Moonraker; Dr. No hosts Bond to dinner because he thinks he’s smart enough to appreciate his status, but dismisses him as “only a stupid policeman.” Goldfinger absurdly carries Bond to Kentucky (New York in the book) to witness Operation Grand Slam. As always, the question is: why don’t you just kill him? Because, of course, Bond is the potential apprentice; “there are always two.”