The bad

"The conch shell shatters, down you go."
— Pink Floyd, "The Wall

Hollow Man (2000) Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Plato had a parable about a man who first turned invisible and then turned into a fiend. His point was that most people are good because they know they're being watched. (You drive the speed limit when the cop's around, speed when he's not.) Invisible, people would be monsters. Plato's fable was the germ of H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man and James Whale's 1933 movie based on it, which was frightening mainly for the psychological effect the Invisible Man had on the village he terrorized. Verhoeven's incarnation has psychological horror, too, plus the kind of state-of-the-art, digitally rendered geysers of blood we've come to expect in a Verhoeven movie. If you get past that, there's a philosophical core here. Where invisible Claude Rains was driven insane by the chemical, invisible Kevin Bacon turns evil because he can get away with it. As Plato predicted, a man who doesn't have to be good becomes very, very bad indeed.

Lord of the Flies (1963) Directed by Peter Brook. Forget those idiotic reality TV shows. For real fun, start with World War III, take a planeload of refugee boys from a British private school (they'd call it a "public school," go figure) and crash them on an island in the South Pacific while killing all the adults on the plane. Watch as the kids reenact, in microcosm, the workings-out of original sin that led to World War III. Starting out all mannered and proper (the stately choir walking down the beach singing "Kyrie Elieson"), the lads soon revert to savagery (a British boy's idea of savagery). Folks have called this film racist, but that misses the point: Civilization has a very thin skin, and the beast within is close to the surface, ready to leap out and kill. Brook makes this point via naturalistic performances by untrained child actors, hauntingly filmed in minimalist black and white. It's easy to find fault with this film (why are the uniforms clean?), but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and it's wholly disturbing. (See also The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade by the same director.)

Rashomon (1950) Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Contrary to urban mythology, Rashomon (the film) is not about the relativity of point of view. (The original short story is, but that's a different story.) Like Plato, Kurosawa was obsessed with the beast within. How much human "goodness" is merely conventional — because the eyes of society are watching? How bad would people be if there were no eyes to see? In Kurosawa's fable (set during the social chaos of a Japanese civil war in the 1600s) a bandit ambushes a pair of newlyweds in the woods; later on a woodcutter stumbles into the rape-and-murder scene. Later, the people involved (including a ghost) tell their stories of what happened; the stories are later retold to a group of refugees huddled in the wreckage of the Rashomon gate in old Kyoto. Everyone's story is different, not because there is no truth but because all the characters are lying to make themselves look good. Contrary to popular opinion, in Kurosawa's Rashomon we do know the truth — and the truth is everyone acts badly. Hearing this ugly truth almost destroys a Buddhist monk whose deepest religious principle is compassion — but it's not the whole truth. Kurosawa doesn't agree with Plato — people aren't entirely rotten; goodness isn't entirely an act. As the movie ends, a final act of kindness restores the monk's faith in humanity.

The good

"And do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
— Antoinine Artaud

Outside the "no rules, just right" campaign for Outback Steakhouse, anarchist utopias on film are hard to find. This is partly because utopias are boring, partly because society-hating filmmakers are more interested in mayhem than utopia. This has the odd effect of making anarchic films by society-haters look a lot like the films by society-lovers. In either case, anarchy is filled with rape, murder and destruction, though the society-haters try to show the mayhem from the point of view of the perpetrators, putting the "spree" back in crime spree with films like Natural Born Killers, The Doom Generation, etc., a bad selling point for potential crime victims. Topping the list of anarchic crime sprees:

The Weekend (1967) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. "Mr. Hurlot's Vacation in Hell" as filmed by Jacques Tati on bad acid. The plot, to the extent I grasp it: A dysfunctional family (husband and wife both intent on murdering each other) goes on vacation, hitting the road after the odd bit of screwing, some dirty talk and a parking lot shootout or two. On the road, something bad seems to be happening. They keep passing violent accidents — bloody bodies strewn about like some French driver's ed film. This is either a spontaneous breakdown of civilization or the deliberate result of anarchist attacks. (One scene makes this incoherent movie worth viewing: a twistedly fascinating 15-minute pan of an endless traffic jam punctuated by weird vehicles and arty car wrecks.) Eventually, the couple is kidnapped by forest dwelling anarchists. More screwing, violence and car wrecks ensue. Throughout all this, everybody keeps talking; it's like secondary audio programming filled with pseudointellectual left-wing pontificating. (Ionesco's influence is the rhinocerous in the room; everything's disconnected, acausal, at cross-purposes. Where this illogic is funny in the hands of an apolitical Tati, Godard's political ax-grinding makes it merely boring, unless you hit the fast-forward button.) Eventually, the anarchists turn to cannibalism, yielding, perhaps, the origin of the phrase: "eat the rich."

The existential

"Outside society — that's where I want to be!"
— Patti Smith

I call these films existential because, while they're filled with crime, the point is the liberation the crime leads to, rather than the crime itself.

Deliverance (1972) Directed by John Boorman. Based on James Dickey's novel, this film is all about some Atlanta yuppies who get set upon by buggering, murderous mountain men on a canoe trip, right? Wrong. Forget the surface details, (especially poor Ned Beatty cursed to spend the rest of his life trying to live down that "squeal, piggy!" scene.) Boorman's point is that out on the river, there's no bullshit. Some people are trying to kill you; you're trying to kill them first. Stripped of bullshit, that's what human life is. The yuppies go through hell, one of them dies — but they get to be real. They've been delivered from the usual bullshit, which is why this film is called Deliverance.

Fight Club (1999) Directed by David Fincher. God, I love this movie. Without giving too much away, let's just say there's a 20-something guy (unnamed, though probably "Jack") enduring a typical life of quiet desperation in a Dilbert cube. Typical, except that he suffers from insomnia. His new-agey doctor doesn't believe in pills, though. "If you want to see real suffering, check out the testicular cancer support group." The insomniac does — and becomes a self-help junky, moving from support group to support group in the hours of sleepless night. He eventually finds a woman to have sex with (Helena Bonham Carter as another self-help junky) and good clean male bonding with a guy named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who wants to destroy civilization as we know it. The dude creates a cult of personality centered on illegal underground "fight clubs" — no need to get buggered on a canoe trip to be real when you can beat the shit out of somebody in a basement, right? It's all about instant self-actualization, like the scene where Tyler sticks a gun in the face of a guy working in a convenience store and asks him what his real dream is. The clerk says he wanted to be a veterinarian. Tyler tells him, "If you're not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead," and takes his driver's license to track the guy down. The fight club begins to look more and more like a mindless militia. Our insomniac eventually wakes up to the fact that he's trapped in a nasty little subculture. He tries to stop Tyler from destroying civilization because that's not what he really wants, is it?

The historical

"What are you rebelling against?"

"What have you got?"
— Marlon Brando, The Wild One

Here are a few films that don't fit the category of "good, bad, existential." Films about periods in history when social breakdown was more than a concept....

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Directed by Sam Peckinpah. If an anarchist utopia ever existed, it probably existed in the American West. (If it didn't, that's where most of us would like to think it did.) This film is one of many mourning the passing of that no-rules utopia. (See also Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) Peckinpah's film is an elegiac spatter-poem about the death of that utopia as Pat Garrett (representing the long arm of the bought-off law) is paid to slaughter his former outlaw friends (including Billy the Kid) and is eventually slaughtered himself by the same robber barons who paid him. Conventional material, maybe, but unconventionally filmed, this movie is stuffed with haunting characters and haunting death scenes — like Slim Pickens shot full of holes, bleeding his life out in a river to the tune of Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." In a way the film is one long death scene: the death of freedom, the death of friendship, the death of the West.

Ragtime (1981) Directed by Milos Forman. What's a movie about the turn of the century doing in a list of films about anarchism? Forget the nostalgic images; in many ways, the time was similar to the 1960s. There was a subversive, new music moving up from the black ghetto into mainstream white society, a class struggle, a struggle for black civil rights, along with dedicated revolutionaries willing to blow things up. This movie is about what drove certain people into radical action against the power structure — and the cost of that action. Based on E.L. Doctorow's left-wing novel and directed by Forman, a Czech refugee from Communist oppression, the resulting movie isn't so much anti-Capitalist but anti-power. If you want to understand anarchists, see this movie. (See Forman's 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as well.)

Rude Boy (1980) Directed by Jack Hazan, David Mingay. Flash forward to London in 1978. With the Clash on the soundtrack, a kid in punk gear wanders through a rotting, modernist housing project where racists and leftists square off against graffiti-scrawled walls. ("SWP stands for shitty white people!") Like the walls, the movie is scrawled with politics that the kid passes by without really noticing -- skinhead National Front types to the right of him, punks and hippies to the left. Despite his punk gear, the kid is apolitical. His background should make him sympathetic to leftist punks like the Clash (he's from the same city, the same class) but there's something about the socialists and anarchists parading in the street that pisses him off. "There's always going to be people driving big cars. I fink I wanna be one of those people, y'know?" The story takes place against a backdrop of political frame-ups, Clash concerts (see with your very eyes where Rage Against the Machine stole their act!) and Margaret Thatcher posters. The film's obvious message: Social disorder is the prelude to social control. Which is just another way of saying ... anarchy is the policeman's friend.

Secret History

Looking back on the throbbing gristle of the last decade ...

If there is a secret history, I suspect it'll say the core Right wing strategy has been to cut off supply lines to the Left: unions, public schools, colleges, the press...etc. This includes intellectual supply lines. This strategy has worked to the extent that voicing honest Left-wing rhetoric in the American mainstream is political suicide, leaving honest Leftists/Liberals the choice of staying on the fringes or entering the the mainstream and going down in flames like McGovern and Dukakis.

Clinton, no honest Leftist, outsmarted the bastards. He out-Reaganed Reagan and snuck into the White House under false colors (when an honest man would've flown his true pinko colors and honestly lost). 

This is why the Right hates him -- (goddamnit, we cheated you fair and square; y'aint supposed to cheat us back!); that, and the fact Clinton represents the faction that felt that, in the Vietnam war, the USA was the bad guy. (Old wounds, dontcha know.)

Once in, Clinton had the choice of going down in flames as a one-term President fighting for his true convictions or watching out for his own ass and selling everybody out while getting blow jobs....and, of course y'all know what happened.

Gore probably figured he wouldn't sell out once he got in. He didn't get the chance because (A) he ran a shitty campaign (B) G.W. Bush stole the election -- more properly, some fatcats paid for it. It's pretty damn obvious that, way back when, some folks with a lot of money decided Bush would be President no matter what it cost.

So, to recap, Clinton stole the towels, Bush stole the election.

We live in interesting times.

Clone Jesus

Say, here's a great idea: Why not clone Jesus?

It ain't my idea. It's the core premise behind clonejesus.com

Evidently, the resurrection wasn't good enough.

Evidently ONE resurrected Jesus isn't good enough. We need an ARMY of Jesuses -- like the clones of Hitler "The Boys from Brazil."

Yeah. You heard it here first. Some loonies want to clone Jesus, figuring there must be a stray cell or two in one of the leftover pieces of the “true” cross. I’m not shitting you. Behold....”The Second Coming Project”...


Clone Jesus

See? I'm not making this up. Evidently, there are people out there who want to clone Jesus. It’s such a freaking bizarre concept. I get this R. Crumb-y vision of an endless line of robed, grinning, identical Jesuses trucking towards us from the horizon. Tootling around the country in a tour bus. Mass bookings at the Holiday Inn: WELCOME JESUSES! All those Jesuses hogging the pool, doing that walking-on-water thing and scaring the kids.

Every Christian denomination, sect, cult, etc. could have its own personal Jesus.

Then, inevitably, would come the “OUR Jesus is better than your Jesus” conflicts.

Wait a second, we already have that!

One of the Jesuses could be a game show host. Like, say, on a reality TV show -- “Damnation Island”...?

ANNOUNCER: Jesus and 12 disciples are trapped for 12 weeks on Damnation Island! Our contestants are going to find out, being a disciple is a lot harder than it looks!

JESUS: One of you will betray me. At the end of 12 weeks, we're going to find out who!

There's a fast train coming

OK. More thoughts on the referendum for a Tampa-Orlando-Miami high speed rail corridor.

High speed rail makes sense in every way. Like it or not we are moving to a post-petroleum paradigm and this kind of transportation is the wave of the future. If we wait till 2040, we'll be buying trains from China instead of selling trains to China. The energy we put into (essentially) single-rider vehicles is unsustainable.

Critics attack the bullet train with a cost-benefit analysis, basically saying it won’t have enough passengers and won’t turn a profit. How the hell do they know? That’s an assertion, not an argument. But it also misses the point.

Infrastructural investment isn’t based on immediate profit.

None of America’s massive infrastructure projects, from rural electrification to the Interstate highway system to the Tennessee Valley Authority, were based on a firm income projection. These infrastructural networks were created for the benefits they would give the public , not the benefits to investors, based on a hard-and-fast profit model. In most cases, these projects generated profit — eventually. But it was never a sure thing from the gitgo — and the profits never come until after the networks are built. That's the reason these projects had to be created with a public investment in the first place. These networks require such a massive capital outlay, a slight miscalculation could ruin a private investor. Basically, the risk of these massive infrastructural investments is too great for a private company — unless it’s a monopoly. Historically, these networks can only be built by the government, a public/private partnership guaranteed by the government, or a monopoly.

So, granted that we need this infrastructure, granted that private enterprise isn’t building it, the government is the only entity left that could possibly build it. The government has a reason to build it (the people’s common good, not profit) and a constitutional right to do it (rooted in the commerce clause). Though libertarians may disagree, that’s the legal basis for the government’s right to regulate interstate commerce, to establish roads and highways and to regulate (or subsidize) infrastructural industries like the power industry and communication. And high speed rail.

Without government investment in infrastructure, we would not have the internet, we would not have atomic power, we would not have a national interstate system, and any number of other things.

Now allow me to make a simple, obvious, possibly stupid point.

Creating jobs isn’t the point of government spending on infrastructure. It’s a side benefit, sure. But it isn’t the point.

The point of a Postal Service isn’t to give jobs to postal workers. The point of maintaining a massive infrastructure of roads and gas station isn’t to give jobs to road workers, traffic cops and car mechanics. The point is the benefit to the public these networks create.

The point of a bullet train is the train itself. Not only the direct benefit to the people who use it, but the benefit to everyone else in the country who need a similar system. High speed rail in Florida would be a demonstration model that shows the concept can work in America – and can be repeated in other states.

The assault against high-speed rail is an exercise in knowing hypocrisy.

Critics of the project think it’s bad for the government to pay for trains. But planes and automobiles? That’s different! It’s good when the government pays for them!

These critics turn a blind eye to the massive investment our government makes maintaining the infrastructure (physical and regulatory) for airplanes, roads, cars and trucks. Government handouts for cars and plains are good; handouts for bullet trains are creeping socialism.

The dice are loaded; the game is fixed.

If high speed rail is such a bad idea, why does it work in Europe, China and Japan? Would they be better off with a massively congested highway system like we have? More importantly, is the true motive for the massive resistance to high-speed rail in America a high-minded sense or financial responsibility or a love of big checks from the auto, oil and airline industries?

Let's say the referendum passes. Let's say by 2009, this thing is up and running. Let's say high speed rail works. What then?

If high speed rail works in Florida, it could work anywhere. The auto and airline industry might sorta see that as a threat, dontcha think?

Just saying. It's probably a moot point.

I've got a feeling the referendum is going to pass.

All on board, kids.