Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture
Page 15
Maj. Ripper earlier clarified the code of the Männerbund:
BASE COMMANDER JACK D. RIPPER: Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence.
Only in the “modern world” would this be construed as madness or, heavens, “repressed.”311
But don’t get them wrong; when needed, under the appropriate conditions, these boys can get the job done!
PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: Is there really a chance for that plane to get through?
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know-how. I mean, you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. . . . if the pilot’s good, see, I mean, if he’s really. . . sharp, he can barrel that baby in so low [he spreads his arms like wings and laughs], you oughtta see it sometime, it’s a sight. A big plane like a ‘52. VRROOM! There’s jet exhaust, fryin’ chickens in the barnyard.
PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: Yeah, but has he got a chance?
GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Has he got a chance? Hell, Ye . . . ye . . .
And a good thing, because they will be called on to perform heroic service. That’s because despite all the cheers and smiles all around, the recall efforts end in failure, and “The Leper Colony” gets through. But wait, this isn’t the end, really; there’s more! This leads us to the Final Utopia, Strangelove’s “post-war future.”
4. STRANGELOVE’S “ASTONISHINGLY GOOD IDEA”
As all the Gloomy Guses sit around waiting for the Doomsday Machine to blanket the Earth in a “radioactive shroud,” something remarkable takes place. Despite “acting as cartoonishly evil as possible,” Strangelove is suddenly revealed as the smartest, and sanest, man in the room.
[T]here’s a brief scene with the president demanding to know who would create a doomsday device; the camera lingers on Strangelove, calmly smoking in the shadow, the president off-screen. A few minutes later, Strangelove casually suggests the mine shaft survival plan, a new system of government, including who lives and who dies. For all intents and purposes, he takes over the US government right then and there, in front of its actual leaders, who are oblivious. Nobody said the Only Sane Man has to be a good person.
Just like Odd John, “He looks and speaks like a Looney Tunes character, but everything he says is coldly rational.” Strangelove’s dark glasses recall John’s “eyes like caves.” Although his mechanical arm with a life of its own references both Rottwang and Robot/Maria from Metropolis (another curdled utopia); not only mad scientist but like Robot/Maria he seems to have two natures, embodied in the mechanical arm, not unlike Odd John’s ability to operate on two levels of consciousness, personal and communal.312
While we might imagine his arm was injured in an experimental accident, like Rottwang, or that he was crippled in the war, like Baron Evola, none of this is made explicit; Strangelove, like one of the freaks in John’s troupe, could have just been born that way. In any event, the prospect of nuclear annihilation—“brighter than a thousand suns”—literally erects him, just as Baron Evola asked to be wheeled to a window so that he could die like his Aryan ancestors, upright and facing the rising sun.
But is it the end; death and destruction? Before that climax, Strangelove has narrated his seemingly well-rehearsed utopian dream, which deserves to be quoted in full:
DR. STRANGELOVE: I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy . . . heh, heh . . . at the bottom of ah . . . some of our deeper mineshafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided.
MUFFLEY: How long would you have to stay down there?
DR. STRANGELOVE: Well let’s see now ah . . . cobalt thorium G. . . . Radioactive halflife of uh, . . . I would think that uh . . . possibly uh . . . one hundred years.
MUFFLEY: You mean, people could actually stay down there for a hundred years?
DR. STRANGELOVE: It would not be difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could, heh . . . I’m sorry, Mr. President. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country, but I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided.
MUFFLEY: Well, I, I would hate to have to decide . . . who stays up and . . . who goes down.
DR. STRANGELOVE: Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.
MUFFLEY: But look here doctor, wouldn’t this nucleus of survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they’d, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?
DR. STRANGELOVE: No, sir . . . excuse me . . . When they go down into the mine, everyone would still be alive. There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead! [involuntarily gives the Nazi salute and forces it down with his other hand] Ahhh!
TURGIDSON: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
DR. STRANGELOVE: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious . . . service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
It’s all there, the whole National Socialist utopia, complete with self-selected elite and selective breeding.
While Strangelove is conventionally seen as a “black comedy” in which the post-war doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) is ruthlessly satirized, we can see, in the light of our earlier reflections on the utopian genre, that once Kubrick or his co-writers settled, likely unconsciously, on the multi-utopian structure, he was committed to the fact that the logic of utopia leads to an apparently—but only apparently—disastrous conclusion.
The final segment then, is not really a fiery Götterdämmerung, at least not for Strangelove and Co.313 It is not Strangelove’s comeuppance, but his triumph.
We Will Meet Again: The memorable final montage plays the song of the same name over images of atomic explosions, implying the two superpowers are destined to trade blows ever after.314
A sappy WWII Brit tune; we’ve met the Nazis again; we [today] will all meet again—this time the “Allies” will wipe out each other, and the only German (“a Kraut by any other name”) in the room is the only one still standing.
We don’t know how much time passes from Strangelove’s exultant “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk”315 and his initial baby steps,316 to the Doomsday machine going off. Strangelove & Co. are presumably already protected in the War Room, and may have had time to put together some version of Strangelove’s mineshaft utopia.317
If so, Kubrick’s film has foreshadowed Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (which returns the favor by ending with a hapless soldier riding a V-2) which Dale Carter has ana
lyzed318 as presenting the posthumous triumph of the Third Reich in the form of the Kennedy-led space race:
In this book, Carter draws on Thomas Pynchon’s novel ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ to define the post-World War Two period as the ‘Rocket State’, a social form salvaging elements of the defeated Nazi ‘Oven State’ to create a totalitarian capitalist order. The rocket, based on Nazi military technology, is a central element of this as the launch vehicle for both nuclear weapons of mass destruction and the Apollo programme, highest point of the propagandist spectacle or, as Carter calls it ‘the Orpheus Theater’ where at the conclusion of Gravity’s Rainbow the spectators watch the screen as the rocket heads towards their destruction.319
Much as Strangelove & Co. must have watched the Big Board, we watch the final montage. Muffley himself recognizes the ominous parallels:
MUFFLEY: I refuse to go down in history as the greatest mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.
TURGIDSON: Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people, than with your image in the history books.
Each utopia has superficially failed, but each sets up the final one (the final solution?) which has succeeded, although the logic of the utopian genre requires, as we saw, that this one too apparently fail, spectacularly.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.320
Fail Safe?321
In a final, ironic—or rather, utopian—reversal, the bombs are dropped on the Allies, and after this new “holocaust” all the messy aspects of eugenics—exterminating the unfit—are left behind, leaving only the pleasurable eugenic tasks of Kraft durch Freude, with the males called upon to perform heroic services on specially selected females. Everyone is smiling in anticipation, and even Ambassador de Sadesky joins in:
RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
See, if you squint at Dr. Strangelove through the utopian lens we’ve provided, where the apocalypse is just a genre convention, it’s clear that the Nazis come back, and this time they win!322 I like to think this would bring a smile to Savitri Devi herself.323
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
December 23, 2013
FROM ULTRASUEDE TO LIMELIGHT:
HALSTON & GATIEN, ARYAN
ENTREPRENEURS IN THE DARK AGE
Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
(2010) Director: Whitney Sudler-Smith
Limelight
(2011) Director: Billy Corben
Party Monster
(2003) Directors: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
“I love America.”
—Peter Gatien
“All-American kid from the Midwest. This is a great American.”
—Liza on Roy Halston Frowick
Fashion and dance clubs may seem to “the Right” to be odd places to look for icons of America, to say nothing of being embodiments of Aryan archetypes. Well, too bad for them; they’re losing anyway, and that lack of imagination is why.324
The first generation of Traditionalists knew that the Tradition they defined and defended was precisely that which manifested itself in all parts of so-called “traditional” societies; conversely, even the smallest, most “irrelevant” part of a Traditional culture could serve as a vehicle of metaphysical principles; hence the importance, especially to Coomaraswamy and Daniélou, of art and music.325
These two films, Ultrasuede and Limelight, each tell the tale of a White man from the North American heartland who, imbued with the Faustian Spirit, came to New York to make his dreams come true, only to be torn down by the undermen. And if that seems too depressing, you can watch Party Monster for a (perhaps unintentionally) comic take on the whole thing.326
They also display quite different documentary styles. Ultra-suede is typical of the modern, “guerilla” filmmaking school; the director, in this case one improbably named Whitney Sudler-Smith, makes himself part of the show, gonzo-style, sort of a less uptight Michael Moore but more serious than Sasha Baron Cohen.327 Limelight is the more traditional, National Film Board of Canada style, but both are cobbled together from news footage and vérité clips, with present-day interviews added in for commentary, backstory, and reflections, all held together with contemporary music as grout.328
Whether you like the first kind of documentary is largely a function of whether you like the filmmaker. As someone once explained tenure decisions to me, would you want to have lunch with this person for the next 20 years? Sudler-Smith starts off rather irritating, but damn if he doesn’t kinda grow on yah.
Detroit, when I grew up there in the ’60s and ’70s, was not just mostly White but specifically a mixture of second or third generation Irish, recent European immigrants, mostly Polish, as well as internal immigrants from Appalachia, hillbillies, in short; the ones sung about, and singing, Bobby Bare’s country hit “Detroit City.”329
So one has to smile—well, our kind of people would—at his cherry red Pontiac Firebird with its Confederate license plates, and especially how his interview with Vogue’s Head Negro in Charge, Andre Leon Talley, is interrupted not just by his cellphone but his “Dixie” ringtone.330
All this seems to be based on some kind of Southern connection in his upbringing,331 although his mother is more debutante than Daisy Duke, and her more recent marriage to a Tribesman—Arthur Goodhart Altschul—is more relevant, as we’ll see. Smith even starts by bringing his mother on to try to explain his fascination with the ’70s, and all they can come up with is his love of watching Smokey and the Bandit on TV. Hence, the car, the porn moustache, the vaguely but not oppressively “Southern” attitude.332
Like many immigrants, internal or otherwise, he calls on his “heritage” selectively; mostly, to annoy his interviewees. Whether this is a conscious strategy, or just Judaic/hillbilly bumptiousness, is unclear.
What soon becomes clear is that the whole thing is something of a vanity project. His childhood fascination with the ’70s has become a grown-up obsession with great periods of decadence, from Babylon to Weimar, and he has become “interested” in Halston as the great symbol of ’70s sleaze.
It’s easy to imagine him simpering “Divine decadence” like Sally Bowles, so it’s appropriate that his first stop is to interview Liza Minnelli. She patiently instructs the hapless Smith to “do some research” and stay away from the gossip, but Smith is incapable of really “getting” what Halston was or what he meant to the fashion world, despite all the people he interviews, so eventually, having run out of content, he circles back to his personal obsessions and devotes a great deal of time, and news footage, to Studio 54 and Halston’s rather gruesome boy toy. He even finds time to interview Billy Joel, whose expertise on Halston is based on one line in one of his dumb songs. But he’s rich, and famous, and a Tribesman, so enjoy!333
It is interesting, though, to see juxtaposed interview subjects recalling all kinds of sex and drugs in the Studio 54 basement, with Liza’s deadpan “I never saw anything like that.” Allowing for selective memory, it’s still a testament to Aristotle’s dictum that poetry is truer than history.334 We’ll see soon what relevance, tiny though it is, Studio 54 may have to Halston.
Even within the wreckage of Smith’s wretched film, there’s enough material to suggest the real significance of Halston.
HALSTON: FASHION FASCISM, FASHION FUTURISM
Using simple shapes and luxe fabrics, Halston helped cast off the hippie look in the ’70s, and he was America’s first celebrity designer. Designer Ralph Rucci, whose first job was toiling in Halston’s workshop, described the feeling at the time of the designer’s influence, “It was going to be a new history. You knew it. Working on the clothes, you had never seen patterns like these before. You . . . had to think in different dimensions.” Vogue’s Talley emphasized the American-ness of Halston’s clothing, and its sense of post-war industriousness: “Ultimate quality for the American woman, or the international woman, with st
yle glamour and class is his legacy.”335
In order to understand the significance of Halston, I suggest we need to see him as an embodiment of the Faustian Man, Spengler’s term for the spirit of Western, White civilization—or rather, culture, a significant difference for Spengler, as we shall see. Moreover, by looking at the contradictory advice by Spengler and the Italian Futurists to Faustian Man at the end of his culture’s lifecycle, we can see how Halston’s career trajectory instantiated the Futurist option that Spengler rejected as heroic, but inevitably doomed.336
SIMPLICITY, SPACE, LIGHT
The “prime symbol” of the Faustian is “pure limitless space.”337 We see this manifested in several ways throughout Halston’s career.
Although his life was associated with excess, from sex and drugs to his six-figure orchid habit, Halston’s clothes were characterized by elegant simplicity. As Rucci fondly recalls, “Nobody looked tasteful anymore.”338
Not only his designs—simple, elegant mathematical expanses of pure fabric—but even his work methods manifested the same effortless command of space: