OK, for now, let’s get back to Green Lantern. The basic idea, here, is that Hal Jordan is chosen by the Ring because he is without fear; actually, because his will is powerful enough to overcome his fear. The Ring then will enable him to fully exteriorize what he wills; this is his only “superpower.”25
The ring that gives Hal his powers, or rather, allows him to wield them, is obviously once again the Hermetic Stone. Apart from its green color, its Luciferian origin is even more obvious than in Psychomania: as the Grail was made from, or held, a green stone that had been mounted on Lucifer’s crown, or his forehead—Shiva’s Third Eye—so this ring falls from the hand of Abin Sur who literally falls from the sky—in his escape pod26—after being mortally wounded by Parallax. His vaguely Arabic name jibes with the Arabic origin of this tale,27 and his Luciferian nature—bearing the Light of the Green Lantern—is rubbed in by his red color. The latter is not exactly a pigment but rather results—an odd fact we learn from the alien autopsy—from his transparent skin, which reveals his musculature. A rather odd evolutionary detour, but it reminds us of how the Realized Man literally reconstructs his body from the inside out, of new, immortal materials, through his realized Will. Not that it helps ol’ Abin Sur . . .
So man—or at least a man, Hal—receives from Lucifer—the Light Bearer—the tool with which to develop himself and, ultimately, defeat the malign Abrahamic God. That tool, symbolized by the Ring which is charged by the light from the Lamp—is simply this instruction: so strengthen your will so as to be able to create what it wills—become as God.28
As I noted in my review of Psychomania, this notion, though arcane and hermetic, has more than a little in common with our very familiar American school of “New Thought” or “Mind Science.”
For example, here’s Wallace D. Wattles giving away The Secret in his classic The Science of Getting Rich (an American title if ever there was one):
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought, in this Substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.29
The American proponents of New Thought, such as Wattles—who bore a disconcerting likeness to Percy Kilbride of “Pa Kettle” fame—took their ideas from Emerson, but Emerson was quite clear about taking his ideas from Hegel, Plotinus, and ultimately from both Plato and Hinduism.30 Thus, “New Thought” was “new” only in the American, or Christianized Aryan context; it is, however banalized by New Thought31 or Green Lantern, the transcendent and primordial Tradition.32 As such, of course, it is also present in the Abrahamic and Christianized Aryan religion in the occluded form of “original sin” and “Luciferian pride.”33
What’s really missing from the film is the Green Lantern Corps; even the fanboys complained about how totally wasted the whole idea of the Corps is. It is, of course, a Männerbund or rather, its more modern equivalent—a Lodge or Order devoted to preserving Order in the universe.34
The Guardians of the Universe are the immortal founders and leaders of the Green Lantern Corps. Resident on Oa, they resemble a mash-up of those Star Trek aliens with the big foreheads with the creepy pulsating vein and the invaders of Mars Attacks!, although they seem to be true to the comic book original. They are ensconced atop several gigantically tall but narrow pillars, and seem pretty immobile—the heads seem to move now and then, though that could be a CGI mistake—hence the need of the Corps (though if they are masters of will . . .)35 They are altogether reminiscent of the stones that the motorcycle gang become at the end of Psychomania, although since this is a positive version of the myth it is presumably the immobility of those who have achieved the Center rather than a punishment.
At the climax of the Oa scenes the Corps sends their ring lights skyward in unison, and the effect is reminiscent of the “Cathedral of Light” at that Nuremberg rally . . . say, wasn’t that movie called Triumph of the Will? And who else had cool rings, too?
But, as we’ve seen, just when you think it’s going to be a cool movie about Green Nazis imposing their irresistible Wills upon the universe, Hal gets homesick or something and returns to Earth, and the whole thing become just another superhero soap opera.
From IMDb:
Superman’s first appearance on Earth in the Donner version had you cheering, as Superman saves our feisty, likable damsel in distress Lois Lane, from a nasty helicopter crash, in front of a diverse social cross section of the good people of Metropolis.
Green Lantern’s first appearance on Earth leaves you cold, as he saves an already established grease ball politician, from a nasty helicopter crash, in front of a gathering of over-achievers and posh-knobs who frankly you couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about.
The script had no character development. What seemed to be a story about fear and will power turns out to be about fighting a giant tumor and a giant fart.
The villains were an insult to both the general public and comic book fans intelligence. When will writers learn that smoke doesn’t work as a villain? First they did this to Galactus in the equally bad Fantastic Four sequel and now to Parallax.
Did Peter Sarsgaard really think his character could be taken seriously? Not enough with giving one of the most dull performances of all time in the first half of the movie, after he becomes a giant tumor he decides to reach levels of overacting that made him unwatchable.
Peter Sarsgaard plays Hal’s nerdy failed romantic rival Hector Hammond (Harry Haller? Hermann Hesse? Heinrich Himmler?) as an unlikeable geek and then as essentially a giant, insane tumor.36
Infected by a little bit of Parallax, his color is, like Parallax, yellow; not the true yellow of the Sun, Lion, and indeed, Fearlessness, but its earthly or demonic counterfeit, the yellow of gold, money, filthy lucre. He is, in short—short!—Alberich, especially in his misshapen mutated form. It’s as if we moved from Valhalla to Nibelungland, but never found our way back.
True to form, just as Alberich “rationalizes” and regiments the Nibelung workers, so Hector devises some kind of serum which, when injected, will produce the same mutation. We see here the typical non-Aryan who thinks that elite status can be achieved by some artificial, mechanical method, without either character development or the proper racial background. “Dress British, think Yiddish” as they used to say on Wall Street.
Hector’s true status is revealed by his basic goal of stealing Hal’s gal. Although we might think of today’s peddlers of “The Secret” as Reaganite yuppies, the original New Thinkers were resolutely opposed to the Social Darwinists, Robber Barons, and Trusts of their day; several had emerged from the Social Gospel or Christian Socialist movements, though they also abjured equally crude methods such as state control or revolution.
Instead, they exhorted their readers to “rise from the competitive to the creative plane.”37 The idea was to have the faith that one could will more, not use the will to take a limited supply from another. To think otherwise was to accept the idea—what we or the Gnostics would recognize as essentially Judaic—that “God has finished his work.”38 Wallace’s phrase irresistibly brings to mind the Biblical creation story, in which Creation is finished and Man is tasked to sweep up occasionally. But then something green appears . . .
Hal is thus able to trick the unfit Hector at the climax by offering him the ring (sound familiar?). Hector thinks he can just take it and redouble his power, but as we know, “The ring chooses you.” Hector’s powers rebound against him and destroy him—just as happens to someone who attempts initiation without the proper qualifications and predisposition.
Speaking of race—although the movie starts on the right, white note by making Hal a test pilot (a notably white occupation), the later Earth scenes work in all the usual anti-white tropes, from the evil blond Senator/father to t
he black female scientist; in the climax, Hal needs to rescue both her and a generic sassy black female character; in a more Traditional film, their predicaments would have been played for laughs.39
Apart from the racial undertones of the climactic battle between Hal and Hector, there is one interesting scene when the evil Senator40 mocks his son, pre-mutant Hector, as a mere thinker and praises Hal as someone who gets out there and does things. Hal, displaying Aryan modesty and loyalty to his friend, points out that what really matters is the ability to do both.
Plot-wise he’s taking his hopeless and ultimately treacherous friend’s side against his mean father; but actually, if you listen closely and think a bit, he’s enunciating a more nuanced view than either; what our culture must develop are not pale, abstract “thinkers” and rootless, cosmopolitan “critics,” nor dusky savages of mere “action” (most likely under the more or less surreptitious control of the former, of course) but men who can think and then act; the man who can realize his Will.
Now that would make a great movie! No wonder They didn’t want it made. Who has the Will to make it real?
“His actions are a reminder of why the ring chose each of us—to overcome fear, and destroy evil wherever it may hide. As Lanterns we must fight with all our will. Our wills have not always been united. It’s time they were.”—Sinestro!
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
January 23, 2011
WELCOME TO THE CLUB:
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MÄNNERBUND IN
PRE-WAR AMERICAN POP CULTURE
Jeffrey P. Dennis
We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love before Girl-Craziness
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007
“I, state name here, [but everyone just repeats Stymie’s name], a member of good standing of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, do solemnly swear to be a he-man and hate women and not play with them or touch them unless I have to and especially never fall in love and, if I do, may I die slowly and painfully and suffer for hours or until I scream bloody murder.”
—The Little Rascals41
“Wherever love and sex prevail, women will command sooner or later.”
—Julius Evola, L’Arco e la Clava
“If you let Andy [Hardy] get too crazy about girls, you lose your audience!”
—Louie B. Mayer42
You know I gotta love any book that not only discusses pre-’60s, or in this case, pre-’40s pop culture, especially the truly popular, beneath critical contempt “B” films or pulp fiction, but also does so with an eye for the archetype of the Wild Boy, who forms the Männerbund from which Aryan culture uniquely derives—an interest that unites such disparate observers as Baron Evola and William Burroughs.43
Unfortunately, this isn’t that book; like most things, it turns out to be more interesting in the planning than in the execution. Although reading the book—or just checking out your favorite old boys’ book or movie serial—is well worth it, the caveats I have about the book itself are relevant to more general issues in the Alt-Right area, and thus should be of some interest to Counter-Currents readers.
1. POP CULTURE & “THE CONSERVATIVE”
Before addressing these, and the book itself, I may first need to answer the reader who demands to know what all this has to do with the Alt-Right; who cares about these old movies, comic strips, and penny-dreadfuls anyway?44 The answer is, to prevent ourselves from falling from the bright light of the Alt-Right into the error of “conservatism.” A “conservative” might be defined as someone who, sensing correctly, but more or less vaguely, that Something is Wrong in modern society, but, lacking Traditional data, as Guénon would say,45 looks not up to metaphysical principles but back to some favorite period of their own past, which becomes their touchstone for “traditional” values.46
A darkly amusing example from current politics can be found amongst those “conservatives” who, lamenting the almost complete negrofication of American society—what Paul Kersey calls BRA (Black Run America)47—can find nothing more to oppose to it than laments for “abandoning the blessed ideals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.”
The “conservative” perversely argues over where precisely the clock should be set back to, while what needs to be done is to smash the clock—the original emblem and engine of cyclical futility itself.48
To see the real effect of these blinders, you must realize that an essential part of this mentality is proceeding to read back into the past the assumptions of the not-so-distant past, thus distorting and limiting the availability of the past.49 Thus, as I noted in The Homo & the Negro,50 both the “progressive” and the “conservative” assume the same distorted idea of “The Homosexual” (itself a 19th-century construct) and thus, when met with evidence that some historical figure or culture was not entirely straight, imagine them mincing around in pink togas and lisping like Monty Python’s Biggus Dickus. And so the Conservative denies they could possibly be “gay” (and, in that sense, they certainly weren’t) while the Liberal thinks it’s wonderful! that they were, and neither can truly break out of the Liberal Mindset.
Now, the great thing about pop culture is that, within certain limits, it lets us in on what people were taking for granted, back in Ye Olden Dayes, or at least what didn’t strike them as absurd or impossible. “B” movies and pulp writing are particularly valuable, since these are made quickly, to please as large a crowd as possible, with location shooting rather than expensive sets (thus documenting the physical past), and above all without the meddling of smarty-pants Hollywood screenwriting “innerlekshuls” seeking to inject some party line, or that Barton Fink Feeling.51
2. THE ARYAN ARCADIA OF BROMANCE
The author of the book under review—thought I’d forgotten about that, eh?—describes on his blog exactly this liberating experience of encountering the cultural Wholly Other, while living in a small town so small-time it even had second rate newspaper comics:
When I was a kid in the 1960s, I was jealous of the comics they got across the river in Davenport, Iowa. They got Peanuts, we got Winthrop. They got The Wizard of Id, we got Apartment 3-G. I sort of liked Alley Oop and Prince Valiant, but what was up with the single-panel strip, Out Our Way? […]
Boys in my world were expected to groan with longing over the girls who walked in slow-motion across the schoolyard, their long hair blowing in the wind. They were expected to evaluate the hotness of actresses on tv, discuss breasts and bras, and claim innumerable sexual conquests. But boys in Out Our Way never displayed the slightest heterosexual interest. Instead, they consistently mocked the silliness of heterosexual romance. What sort of world was this? Many years later, I found that the comics I read in the 1960s were reruns from the 1930s and 1940s, and even then, many had been nostalgic, evoking the author J. R. Williams’ childhood at the turn of the century. I was gazing into a time capsule, into an era when heterosexual desire was expected to appear at the end of adolescence, not at the beginning, so teenage boys were free from the “What girl do you like?” chant.52
Cross-dressing and polygamy; perfectly normal teenage behavior “out our way”
In his subsequent book, We Boys Together, Dennis extends that frisson of cultural weirdness (akin to the effect of Lovecraftian weird fiction) into an exhaustive (and, frankly, exhausting) study of how pop culture from roughly the first half of the 20th century differs radically from what “we all know” today. Here’s a pretty good summary of Dennis’s data and conclusions:
For decades adults and adolescents have assumed that when boys reach puberty their hormones begin to flood their bodies and induce in them a form of insanity that has been called “girl craziness.” . . . American popular culture-television, film, music, advertising, journalism, fiction-continues its portrayals of “girl crazy” teenage boys.
Dennis wants us to see that this was not always so.
The author’s central argument is that in American popular culture from about 1900 to the end of World
War II, a range of popular culture texts including teen fiction, film, serials, comic books, popular journalism, radio shows, and even high school yearbooks employed formulaic narratives and images for and about teenage boys engaged in “homoromantic,” not “heteroromantic,” relationships. Girl craziness in that period was seen as infantile or effeminate. Instead, boys “were encouraged to form intimate passionate bonds with other boys or with men, romantic friendships, or “homoromances” (p. ix). These relationships were more intense, intimate, and exclusive than “ordinary same-sex friendships,” but the homoerotic gaze in these representations never crossed the line into homosexual acts. Dennis wants to know why these homoromance narratives flourished when they did and why they all but disappeared by the end of World War II. He understands that “hetero-mania” (p. 1) is an ideological construct, and he aims to show the ideological work of that construct.53
We’ll have to question that “ideological” bit, but let’s sum up even more. Dennis shows that in pre-War American popular culture, the rules were:
1. All boys are straight.
2. At puberty, boys hang out with each other, or adult mentors.
3. Other than infants, only four-eyes, fatties, and fairies hang out with girls.54
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 2