The Eldritch Evola & Others
Page 21
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Harman does a better job explaining Husserl and Heidegger than my little Marrano, but then he has had another three decades to work on it. He does, however, focus mainly on Heidegger’s tool analysis, and his own, somewhat broader formulation.
For a wider focused, more objective, if you will, presentation of Heidegger, see Collin Cleary’s “Heidegger: An Introduction for Anti-Modernists,” starting here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/ 06/heidegger-an-introduction-for-anti-modernists-part-1/
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Needless to say, he never notices that his liberalism is rooted in the ultimate dogma-affirming, context-ignoring movement, Luther’s “sola scriptura.” His liberalism is such as to allow him to tell a pretty amusing one-liner about Richard Rorty, but only by attributing it to “a colleague.” On the one hand, he cringes for Heidegger for daring to refer to a “Senegal Negro” (p. 59) but dismisses Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger is a Nazi” screed as a “work of propaganda” (p. 259). See Michael O’Meara’s, “Heidegger the ‘Nazi,’” his review of Faye, here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/heidegger-the-nazi/
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“Not even Poe [another embarrassing “racist”, well what do you know?] has such indistinguishable protagonists” (p. 10).
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Indeed, “racism” is one of those principles Baron Evola evoked in his Autodefesa (http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/julius-evola-radical-traditionalism/) as being “those that before the French Revolution every well-born person considered sane and normal.”
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Kingsley Amis has cogently argued that the key to Bond’s appeal is that he’s just like us, only a little better trained, able to read up on poker or chemin de fer, has excellent shooting instructors, etc. But if we had the chance . . . See Amis, Kingsley The James Bond Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965).
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It might be interesting to apply Harman’s OOO to a film like Carpenter’s They Live. In “He Writes, You Read, They Live,” my review of Lethem’s book on the movie, reprinted in The Homo and the Negro, I mentioned liking another point, also from Slavoj Žižek: contrary to the smug assumptions of the Left, knowledge is not necessarily something people want, or which is pleasant—hence the protagonist has to literally beat his friend into putting on the reality-revealing sunglasses. Here we have both Lovecraft’s gaps and notion that knowledge is more likely something you’ll regret: Lovecraft and Žižek, together again!
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Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (London: Gollancz, 2008). See more generally, and from the same period, Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, ed. Alex Kurtagić, introduction by Kevin MacDonald (Shamley Green: The Palingenesis Project, 2011).
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Lucian Tudor, “Hans Freyer and the Quest for Collective Meaning,” here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/#more-36698
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Again, just as Burroughs applied his cut-up technique to various pulp genres.
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See my discussion of Manning in “The Hermetic Environment and Hermetic Incest: The True Androgyne and the ‘Ambiguous Wisdom of the Female,’” http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2010/12/ hermetic-environment-and-hermetic.html
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Everyday life of pre-Cambrian radiata with wings, of course.
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My suggestion was based on some remarks of John Auchard in Penguin’s new edition of the Portable Henry James, that James’s work could be seen as part of the attempt to substitute art for religion, by using the endless accumulation of detail—James’s “prolixity” as Lovecraft himself chides him for—to “saturate” everyday experience with meaning.
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Colin Wilson’s second Lovecraftian novel, The Philosopher’s Stone (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1971)—originally published in 1969, republished in a mass market edition in 1971 at the request of, and with a Foreword by, Joyce Carol Oates, bringing us back to Hilberry—introduced me to the idea of length, and even boredom, as spiritual disciplines. One of the main characters “seemed to enjoy very long works for their own sake. I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at a time. If a work was long, it automatically recommended itself to him. So we have spent whole evenings listening to the complete Contest Between Harmony and Invention of Vivaldi, the complete Well Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies. . . . He even had a strange preference for a sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwängler [presumably the Second], simply because it ran on for two hours or so.” The book is available online here: http://lucite.org/lucite/archive/fiction_-_lovecraft/14047169-the-philosophers-stone-by-colin-wilson.pdf
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With the inconsistency typical of a Modern trying to conduct thought after cutting off the roots of thought, Harman advises us that “It takes a careful historical judge to weigh which [contextual] aspects of a given thing are assimilated by it, and which can be excluded” (p. 245). What makes a “careful” judge is, of course, intuition. Cf. my remarks on Spengler’s “physiognomic tact” and Guénon’s intellectual intuition in “The Lesson of the Monster; or, The Great, Good Thing on the Doorstep,” above.
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How one can transcend the limits of secular science and philosophy, without abandoning empirical experience as the Christian does with his blind “faith”, is the teaching found in Evola’s Introduction to Magic, especially the essay “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge.” “Having long been trapped in a kind of magic circle, modern man knows nothing of such horizons. . . . Those who are called “scientists” today [as well as, even more so, “philosophers”] have hatched a real conspiracy; they have made science their monopoly, and absolutely do not want anyone to know more than they do, or in a different manner than they do.”
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“Eldritch”?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me_Deadly%20/%20Plot
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William Luhr, Film Noir (Malden, Mass: Wiley, 2012), p. 141.
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Barton St. Armond, H. P. Lovecraft: New England Decadent (Providence, R. I.: WaterFire Providence, 2013), includes plates of the works discussed, from Goya to Clark Ashton Smith.
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“You’ve seen these films! Haven’t you, my man?”—Will Graham, Manhunter.
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http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s286kiss.html
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“Can you prove you didn’t? You certainly can’t prove I did.” Ray Miland, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, 1954.
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Quoted in Luhr, p. 138.
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“Although a leftist at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, Bezzerides denied any conscious intention for this meaning in his script,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me_Deadly%20/%20Critical_response.
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Although earlier pulp detective writers had been up-marketed and used to make some well-regarded films, the Hollywood Elite drew the line at Spillane, who was far too popular, too “fascist” (unlike a good party member like Dashiell Hammett) and had even started off in the lowest depth, comic books (Luhr, p. 129). Oddly enough, KMD itself was singled out by the Kefauver Commission as 1955’s number one menace to American Youth. Chandler and Hammett preceded Lovecraft in the canonical Library of America, followed by P. K. Dick; can you imagine Spillane there?
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Later, there would be a similar panic among the “respectable” culturati over James Bond; Kingsley Amis easily shows the absurdity of Bond as a Hammer-style “sadist” in his The James Bond Dossier (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965).
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See especially the conclusion of “A Light Unto the Nations: Refle
ctions on Olaf Stapledon’s The Flames,” below. The problem is especially tricky with fascism; one doesn’t “know” anyone of such a type—Pauline Kael famously said she “didn’t know anyone who voted for [Nixon]”—so one all too easily draws on oneself and produces an accidental and revealing portrait of liberal totalitarianism; see my “The Fraud of Miss Jean Brodie,” http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/muriel-spark/. For contrast, consider Henry James’ The Bostonians; as F. R. Leavis says, “James understands the finer civilization of New England, and is the more effective as an ironic critic of it because he is not merely an ironic critic; he understands it because he both knows it from inside and sees it from outside with the eye of a professional student of civilization who has had much experience of non-Puritan cultures.”—F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: G. W. Stewart, 1948), p. 134. He later refers to this as “insight . . . utterly unaccompanied by animus” (p. 135).
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J. Hoberman, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siècle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), p. 23. Spillane was so infuriated by the portrayal that he made sure the next time Hammer was filmed to not only write and finance the movie but play Hammer his own damn self. The result, The Girl Hunters (filmed in England other than some shots of Spillane swanning around Midtown Manhattan in a white trench coat—“Just like a cop to wear a white trench coat” Burroughs had noted in the opening chapter of Naked Lunch—and featuring the pre-Bond Shirley Eaton) is . . . interesting.
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Only the Cinema: “Films I Love, #22: Kiss Me Deadly,” http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2009/03/films-i-love-22-kiss-me-deadly-robert.html.
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See Trevor Lynch’s review in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies, ed. Greg Johnson, Foreword by Kevin MacDonald (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
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As did Steven Spielberg (“Marion, don’t look in the box!”) and Alex Cox (Repo Man); Brian Wall adds Bunuel (Belle du Jour) and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive); see Brial Wall, Theodor Adorno and Film Theory: The Fingerprint of Spirit (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 67. Hoberman (The Magic Hour) adds Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.
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Hence St. Armand’s interest, as one of several stores where Lovecraft reveals and works out his Decadent and Symbolist influences.
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“Spillane also seems to have invented the sadistic quip during killings—but Bezzerides gives this role to the deadly female instead.” http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s286kiss.html
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“But there’s also “a new kind of art in the world,” as one character explains to Mike, and its embodiment turns out to be the object of his search, a leather-bound steel box.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/
03/movies/robert-aldrichs-vera-cruz-and-kiss-me-deadly-on-dvd.html.
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“KMD may have one of the best ’50s images of consumer iconography. On Hammer’s wall is a reel-to-reel answering machine. These devices actually existed in that era, and the make is Code-A-Phone.”— http://www.freepresshouston.com/film/thoughts-on-kiss-me-deadly/.
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“The detective, played by Ralph Meeker (the actor who replaced Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire), drives a Jaguar, has a futuristic telephone answering machine built into his bachelor pad’s wall, and, a bag of golf clubs in the corner, lives a version of what was not yet called the Playboy philosophy. The faux Calder mobile and checkerboard floor pattern add to the crazy, clashing expressionism.”— “Kiss Me Deadly: The Thriller of Tomorrow,” by J. Hoberman, online at: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1896-kiss-me-deadly-the-thriller-of-tomorrow
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Hoberman, op. cit.
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Luhr: “The use of the Rossetti sonnet to uncover a major clue underscores the film’s repeated references to past culture” (p. 140).
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Talk about subverting the filmmakers’ intent, some have even discovered a “liberal subtext” that makes Mike a sort of Alan Alda: “As much as anything else, it’s the positive images of women, immigrants, African-Americans, and poor people, along with Hammer’s getting on with them so well, especially the folks at the jazz club, boxing gym, and auto repair shop, that gives the film much of its leftist edge.”—Café Noir, http://mexnoir.blogspot.com/2011/10/kiss-me-deadly.html.
This “common touch” angle is especially worked in the aforementioned Girl Hunters, where a good third of the film is Hammer/Spillane collecting favors and plaudits from all the little people who are so grateful to owe him—even his landlord won’t take his back rent: “Take, take; remember when you gave?” That Hammer is played by Spillane himself and many of the little people are real friends of his gives it a rather odd tone. I leave it to the reader to reflect on what the praise of “getting on with” the poor tells us about the liberal’s rather feudal idea of his role in society.
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“The force of Soberin’s mythical invocations is the reverse of what he desires; the free-floating prestige of his examples only seems to add to the glamour of the box” (Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship [New York: Fordham University Press, 2007], p. 74).
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The film can’t strictly have a “hero” since the message is “obey the (Liberal) government.” Heroism and individualism are only good when bad fascists are in charge; then it’s “question (non-Liberal) authority.”
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Like Lovecraft’s occult gobble-de-gook.
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Of course, we also recall Lovecraft’s incantations and cosmic mumbo-jumbo; even, perhaps, the Trinity that Red Hook’s detective hales from?
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This, of course, is the note that interests St. Armond, Lovecraft’s self-image as a Decadent, an 18th-century gentleman exiled in a philistine future.
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The first look like the digitally over-restored print of Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls, the second like a lost work of Coleman Francis. Actually, the later kinds of scenes are perhaps more Clark Ashton Smith than Lovecraft, but just go with me on this.
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“The Bunker Hill area underwent a controversial total redevelopment which destroyed and displaced a community of almost 22,000 working-class families renting rooms in architecturally significant but run-down buildings, to a modern mixed-use district of high-rise commercial buildings and modern apartment and condominium complexes” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Flight#Dismantling). “In 1955, Los Angeles city planners decided that Bunker Hill required a massive slum-clearance project. The top of Bunker Hill was cleared of its houses and then flattened as the first stage of the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project to populate Bunker Hill with modern plazas and buildings. When the height limit of buildings for Los Angeles was finally raised (previously buildings were limited to 150 feet), developers built some of the tallest skyscrapers in the region to take advantage of the area’s existing dense zoning. In approving such projects, the city sought to project a modern, sophisticated image” (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Bunker_Hill,_Los_Angeles#Bunker_Hill_Redevelopment_Project).
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Op. cit., loc. 732.
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Even before Miranda, movie audiences preferred not to see such methods used by “good guys.” Mike treats every suspect and informant the way Batman does the Joker in The Dark Knight, rendering the Joker’s attempt to taunt him acting like the Joker himself nugatory. Mike is already a combination of Batman and Joker, giving his big, smarmy smile a psychotic resonance. Hoberman: “The movie stops in its tracks to focus on his excited grin as he snaps a collector’s priceless 78 record.” Presumably this is how the filmmakers—and good liberals today—think vigilantes are or would be, rather than concerned citizens performing a distasteful but needful duty. Interestingly, Mike does all his violence a
fter Pat the Fed takes his gun away; so much for “guns cause violence.” He pries a key, not a gun, from the coroner’s “cold dead fingers” after smashing them in a desk drawer.
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I’m reminded of The Black Cat, where the vengeful Lugosi flays Karloff alive . . . off screen.
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Luhr, p. 129. Similar claims, of course, are made by the advocates of the Ed Wood or Coleman Francis oeuvres. It’s been claimed online that Christina’s dubbed screams are the same ones used for Gaby at the end (or vice versa) which also nicely bookends the film and emphasizes the make-believe, but also amps up the Gaby/Lily/Christina doubling we’ll explore later.
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For a complete accounting, see Ben P. Indick, “Lovecraft’s Ladies” in Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Darrell Schweitzer, 2nd ed. (Holicong, Penn.: Wildside Press, 1995).
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“Rodgers, born Gabrielle Rosenberg in Germany in 1928, was the niece of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and grew up in Amsterdam, where she remembered playing with Anne Frank as a child; she appeared on the cover of Cosmopolitan in 1957, representing “The New Face of Broadway,” and married songwriter Jerry Leiber, author of “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” “Love Potion No. 9,” and numerous others” (http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1902-the- great-whozits).