Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel NEVER LET ME GO is so awful I thought I’d need organ transplants from a thousand clones to keep me alive through its 100 minutes of aching arty posturing. (Romanek could have used a brain transplant himself.) In a way, this film’s main problem isn’t much different from the dilemma faced by its protagonists. It is an example of creative cloning. The movie industry clones three sets of films: the blockbusters(usually for summertime), trashy B-movies(all year round), and ‘quality films’(usually for autumn and winter). One distressing trait shared by all three is the lack of genuine personality behind the filmmaking. Michael Bay and his ilk are the kings of blockbusters. Indie burn-outs and veteran hacks make most of the B-films. And then you have ‘serious filmmakers’ like Romanek who crafts something like NEVER LET ME GO. ‘Serious’ though he may be, personal he is not. I’m not even sure if these ‘serious’ filmmakers are allowed genuine creative freedom and if they’d know what to do with it if they had it. They tend to be technically proficient, dedicated to their craft, and well-meaning or ‘sincere’. But their films cannot be called art. It is imitation art, like so many ‘respectable’ and technically correct paintings and sculptures of the 18th century--admired in their time but later forgotten as imitative and uninspired. It would be less problematic if the subject material was as sincerely ‘respectable’ as the style and presentation. Most finely realized but rather conventional landscape and portrait paintings from the 18th century can still be appreciated for their craftsmanship in the service of good taste. And this could be said for Masterpiece Threatre’s adaptations of the Classics. Not very memorable but serviceable as middlebrow entertainment for more adult or culturally aspiring viewers.
But NEVER LET ME GO is not that kind of material. It is a freakishly perverse story requiring something more than respectable gloss; it demands genuine curiosity and imagination on the part of the filmmaker. Instead, Romanek, like the donor clones in the film, seem resigned to delivering what at was expected of him. That he did a ‘good job’ makes the movie even worse. Indeed, amateurism might have at least infused it with an oblique fractured vitality. Or, a shamelessly schmaltzy Hollywood approach, as in AWAKENINGS by Penny Marshall, might have made it more fun and engaging.
Both narratives wrestle with the futility of hope. In AWAKEINGS, the revived patients return to their catatonic states while the clone donors or clonors in NEVER LET ME GO finally accept that they have but one calling in life. AWAKENINGS is not a good movie, but it’s at least effective on the level of melodramatic manipulation(and had some interesting acting).
NLMG, in contrast, amounts to nothingness its components cancel each other out.
It is one of the movies that confuses tasteful restraint with ‘art’. It subscribes to the logic that goes, ‘since dumb Hollywood movies are loud, vulgar, and crazy, a film that is quiet, mannered, and subdued must be art’. Like WINTER’S BONE and SOCIAL NETWORK, NLMG measures quality by what it is not than what it is. Since it isn’t like most dumb movies, it must be intelligent and thoughtful. Since it isn’t obnoxious like summer blockbusters, it must be deep and complex. In the 1980s, Roger Ebert recommended a whole bunch of John Hughes teen flick productions--Hughes got too lazy to direct them himself--not for what they were but for what they weren’t. PRETTY IN PINK and SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL were better than PORKY’S. That’s not saying much, is it?
Is it just me or have others also noticed most ‘serious’ or ‘art’ films today have their own pat formulas and conventions? Films like NLMG, CAPOTE, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, ICE STORM, ELEGY, ATONEMENT, GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING, AWAY FROM HER, WINTER’S BONE, MOONLIGHT MILE, and others seem almost interchangeable in look, sound, tone, texture, and vision(or lack thereof), as if all were directed by a clone named ‘Artie D. Rector’. They all have that frigid atmosphere, intermittent piano chords or dissonant strings--haunting and/or subdued--, precious or mannered performances, and beautifully sterile visuals(created in a photolab; fittingly enough, Romanek’s breakthrough film was ONE HOUR PHOTO). It’s as if Hollywood distilled the superficial elements of genuine art films(of Bergman, Antonioni, Chabrol, etc)and blended them with middlebrow formulas appealing to a wider audience. (Some might call this Otto Preminger-ism, though Preminger was a giant compared to most current filmmakers.) In other words, NLMG, like so many ‘serious’ films, is a compromise for those wanting something more intelligent than the average dumb Hollywood product but aren’t prepared for truly daunting and challenging works of genuine artists. Since these compromise-films have little intrinsic artistic worth, they compensate with strained artiness, e.g. the precious image of blood from a botched abortion spreading across the fabric of the woman’s dress in THE REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, which may evoke a sense of tragic irony for some but had my eyes rolling at the faux visual poetics; you could almost read the mind of the filmmaker: “In a movie culture where bucketloads of blood are the general rule, maybe the understated shock of blood seeping through bourgeois apparel is art! And just look at her standing by the window, kindled in sunlight, calm and poised, yet life draining out of her punctured womb.” Golly gee whiz. Oh my, her suburban life is an abortion, a mere facade of the American Dream, buried beneath which is desperation and death. Thoughtful fare? Or hokum?
The makers of ‘serious films’ generally lack signature style or personal vision. Notable film artists have something unique in the way they make films, the way they absorb and digest humanity/world, in the eccentric nature of their temperament and imagination. They can be loud and brash, quiet and ascetic, innovative and daring, or refined and purist. This rule also applies to popular/commercial directors. Steven Spielberg makes blockbusters like no one else does; he has many imitators but none has the same touch, whose magic flows not so much from the fingers as from the heart, a deeper source harder to appropriate.
And there’s no mistaking the directorial presence of Coppola in THE GODFATHER and APOCALYPSE NOW, the NY sensibility in Sidney Lumet’s DOG DAY AFTERNOON and PRINCE OF THE CITY, the ethnic pungency of John Cassavetes, whose FACES and HUSBANDS are vitally alive films about middle class/middle age crisis. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, in contrast, is ‘quality film’ as stifling and unsatisfactory as the very social milieu it critiques.
Who could mistake Ozu for Kurosawa, Bresson for Godard, Truffaut for Chabrol, Welles for Hitchcock, Scorsese for Cassavetes, Peckinpah for Ashby, Kubrick for DePalma, or Coppola for Capra? But one could easily mistake one ‘serious’ director for another from the ‘art films’ released in autumn-winter season for maximum Oscar nod potential.
Why are most film critics unperturbed by this? Is it sympathy for anyone trying to be ‘adult’ and ‘intelligent’? Are even lackluster ‘art films’ a welcome relief from summer blockbusters aimed at teens? Are film critics chummy with ‘art directors’ in Hollywood, i.e. attended same colleges or hung around the same film festivals? If many critics are hopelessly lost amongst the trees, people don’t have to see ‘everything’ may have a better perspective on the general forest of film culture.
NLMG is almost a picture-perfect example of why these ‘quality films’ are artistic failures. They’re often artiness laminated on trite material. Or, even when the material is promising, the director is often more involved in arranging than understanding the material. A good example is Kathryn Bigelow’s WEIGHT OF WATER, a psychological drama-thriller that never gets underneath the skin of its characters, who remain shallow archetypes of neurosis, repression, and jealousy. A film need not be deep nor truthful to work as entertainment(or even as art). I would never recommend THE BIRDS or MARNIE as profound works of art, but Hitchcock understood their perverse appeal and implications and squeezed them for all they were worth. Hitchcock knew that his forte was not as an ‘art director’ but as a master entertainer of great intelligence who could signal if not spell out meanings. Hitchcock could get away with so much because, sly devil that he was, he slipped deeper meanings into movies that outwardly seemed to be mainstream romance-thrillers. One might say he was a con-artist, but the art of the con requires a special set of skills, especially if the player is slipping us the treasure. ‘Serious directors’ of Romanek’s ilk pass off their works as ‘art’, but they’re selling fake articles, and even worse, mistaking their fraudulence for genuineness; there’s nothing more pathetic than conning oneself. Hitchcock, in contrast, pretended to make entertainment but, like the spy heroes in his espionage movies, was really intimating something deeper about reality and ourselves. The dualism(entertainer/artist) of directors like Hitchcock and Welles--especially with LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL--make them more fascinating as case studies than either mere entertainers or sincere artists.
Anyway, director choosing to make sincere ‘art films’ must understand that ‘art’ isn’t just a matter of appearance but of meaning. An ‘art film’ that is long on looks but short in meaning is like a shallow pool. Dive in and break your neck. (Bigelow seems more at home with physical than psychological reality, which may explain why K-19 and HURT LOCKER work in ways WEIGHT OF WATER does not.)
NLMG is many times worse than WEIGHT OF WATER, which at least features something of Bigelow, a big personality(perhaps even Athena-like according to one movie critic).
Whatever that’s Romanekesque in NLMG is the staple of countless other ‘quality films’ made in the last 20 yrs. Romanek’s claim to fame is ONE HOUR PHOTO, which has garnered a certain cult following, not surprising given its theme of obsession, the very essence of cultism. Incidentally, ONE HOUR PHOTO is one of those bogus thrillers pandering to cretinous film buffs who wanna justify their own twisted voyeurism and sadism--practiced through an addiction to cinema--as intellectually legit inquiries about the mind. It is their EMANUELLE, a cheapie porn flick passed off as ‘art’. If porn-as-art never caught on, art-as-porn seems to have fared better, judging by the critical praise that greeted NLMG and its ilk. Whatever the collective delusions about these films as ‘art’, they are as formulaic as porn. You can spot one right away a mile away. Of course, they are mental than genital porn. Thus, the viewer can flatter and pleasure himself in the cerebrogenous zone with the knowledge of being a serious person.
Kazuo Ishiguro has long been considered as an important English writer since the 1980s. Though I never read him, I did see REMAINS OF THE DAY, the best of the Merchant-Ivory productions. Though finely directed and acted, it’s really little more than a refined shtick of manners. The story involves an aristocratic Germanophile snob(Edward Fox)--with a whiff of antisemitism about him--and his ever faithful servant(Anthony Hopkins). Interestingly enough, the servant isn’t so much devoted to his master as to his professional calling. He’s a servant to servanthood. One surmises that he would have been no less good a servant under a Germanophobic aristocrat or a rich Jewish tycoon of a great estate. It was as if the fellow had no identity, meaning, and significance outside his servant-hood, like a trained dog is always supposed to serve somebody, anybody. Throughout the film, the servant lives for one purpose, which is to be the very best at what he does. He is a master craftsman at the art of the servant profession. Had it been any other profession--carpentry, masonry, ceramics, clockmaker, musical instrument maker, etc--, we would find little that’s disagreeable about the man or the profession. But being a servant, no matter how skillful and well-situated, doesn’t get much respect. No matter how experienced, meticulous, and masterly a servant is at what he does, he is regarded as something of a toady to an unjust social order(from our democratic point of view). Of course, ‘progressive’ rich people have servants too but they’re called something else to make things seem more just and pleasant.
The Hopkins character in REMAINS is one hell of a servant, absolutely superb at what he does. Yet, his utter devotion to his profession has negated anything like a personal identity or life. Even when he’s slighted or insulted by others--social superiors or colleagues--, he remains unaffected or at least maintains an air of indifference as showing emotions would get in the way of his absolute devotion to servant-hood. To be a good servant means to be calm and collected. He’s so devoted to his ‘calling’ that he’s the same person at work and off work.
In a way, one could say he’s an absolute zero as a human being, an individual without individuality, a highly skilled dog. Yet, we can’t help sensing an air of sainthood about his commitment, despite the lack of any moral or spiritual component to his profession.
We also wonder, is he the way he is because of his natural inclination/temperament or because of his social upbringing? We learn that his father too was a servant, and maybe his kind was meant to be born, live, and die as servants--or bred as servants.
It’s as if he never conceived of a life outside being a servant--like Chance the gardener in BEING THERE knew of no world beyond the walls of the house he grew up in. Accepting his lot, he chose to become the perfect servant. There’s an element of ‘radicalism’ or ‘fundamentalism’ in any kind of purity, even the most servile kind. It could just be possible that his total devotion is a kind of rebellion unbeknownst to himself and others. After all, he succeeds where his master fails. His master, pretending to know so much about world affairs, oversteps his boundaries and succumbs to political/social ruin. In contrast, the Hopkins character, from beginning to end, remains the perfect and flawless servant. He is better in his role than his master in his.
There’s a scene in RAN where Lord Hidetora meets Lady Sue, his daughter-in-law whose family he destroyed. One might think Lady Sue would be seething mad with Hidetora, but she is ever the dutiful daughter-in-law(and devotee of Buddha). She feels no ill-will towards the man who murdered her parents and blinded her brother. One might call her a tail-wagging dog, but in a way, her purity of devotion unwittingly challenges Hidetora’s power. After all, she has perfectly lived up to everything expected of her station whereas Hidetora, the so-called ‘great lord’, lied, cheated, backstabbed, and murdered to his rise to glory and power. And in feeling no hatred for for her father-in-law, she also defies the laws of nature. Her servility is a kind of transcendence.
Of course, there’s nothing in REMAINS to indicate that Hopkins is a good Christian, Buddhist, or moralist of any kind, but there is a purity, a silver-plated integrity, in his utter devotion to duty. His single-minded flawlessness may be a character flaw in its own right, but it is a kind of perfection, and all kinds of perfection challenges a world filled with imperfection. And this aspect of his being even moves the Emma Thompson character to feel a mixture of respect and pity. He’s a man trapped in a servile mentality to the end of his life, but one who has attained a kind of grace within it, a quality that eludes someone like her who can’t give herself to anything. It’s also complicated by the understanding that her love could never be reciprocated by a man with a shell around his soul. This raises another question: does he have a soul? Or is the shell his soul? Using the Western concept of soul, there is something wanting about his inner-life. Soul in the Hellenic or Christian sense requires an element of free will and moral choice. Though Jesus said, ‘meek shall inherit the Earth’, meekness here is a spiritual virtue, not merely a social form or manners; Christianity calls for pacifism but not for passivity. Turning the other cheek is a kind of rebellion against unjust social order, a demonstration that one has the courage to rise above rage and hatred.
The servant in REMAINS not only renders unto Caesar what is his but serves unto Caesar all that he himself is. There’s an element of amorality in the servant’s devotion. The aristocrat, being a Germanophile, flirts with Nazi-sympathies, and at one point ordering the servant to fire the Jewish cook, only to revoke it later. If the servant’s devotion was based on an ideological affinity for his master or, on the contrary, if the servant, outraged by his master’s views, sought to subvert the master’s instructions, one might a note a moral aspect to this character. Even immorality is a form of morality, i.e. one man’s morality could be another’s immorality.
But, what of a person without any ideological or moral position whatsoever? A person who chooses to myopically shut out all reality except his ‘dutiful’ lot in this world? Can such amorality be said to be moral or immoral?
Morally, it seems that the aristocrat errs by pretending to know more than he does about matters outside his world whereas the servant errs by caring to know only the things inside his world. But given the servant’s serious devotion to work, the reason can’t be laziness. It’s as if his commitment to professional perfectionism cannot spare time or energy for anything else.
His is the ultimate in the art of specialization, almost to the point of spiritual fanaticism.
Alas, even though he unerringly carried out his duties, his kind too is doomed for a servant is nothing without a master; and the decline and fall of Imperial Britain and the rise of a more demotic social/class order portends a future without aristocrats who prize servants for whom servant-hood isn’t merely a profession but the very meaning of life. Globalist elites don’t have servants; they have ‘personal attendants’.
Anyway, if the servant in REMAINS seems insufficient as a human being within the Western conceptual ideal of the soul, it may seem otherwise in the context of other cultures, especially Asian ones. The socio-spiritual ideal among Hindus in India, for example, demands that a person born into a certain caste not only remain within that caste but think, feel, and act wholly in accordance to the rules of that caste. So, a good Hindu should be the ‘perfect’ servant who carries out his caste duties and nothing more or less. Also, the Hindu concept of the soul lacks the idea of individuality so essential in the West. For both the Greeks/Romans and Jews/Christians, each person had his own unique soul. Each person was given a soul upon conception and took it to his grave on the path toward Hades, Heaven, or Hell. In Hinduism, souls go from body to body, from human to human, animal to animal, animal to human, and human to animal. So, each living creature, human or animal, is merely the latest vessel through which this nearly eternal soul passes. (Jews, Christians, and Muslims may believe in the soul that last forever, but all souls begin with birth. In contrast, Hindus and Buddhists believe that a soul can be eternal both backwards and forwards in time. ‘Your’ soul will not only be reincarnated virtually forever but already has undergone countless life cycles for many eons.) Buddhism offers a way out through Nirvana, whereupon the soul will finally enter the void of eternal extinction. If Western man fears eternal death, Hindu/Buddhist man fears eternal life, the never-ending cycles of birth, life, misery, disease, suffering, death, reincarnation, etc. A good Christian seeks eternal life with the Lord. A good Hindu or Buddhist wishes for eternal death, the liberation from all illusions.
Kazuo Ishiguro is neither Hindu or Indian, but he is of Japanese origin, and a similar kind of socio-spiritual mentality developed among the Japanese. Not only did Buddhism have a greater impact on Japan than on China, but the strict military order created a rigid social order in which the ideal was for each person to bow low and be a perfectionist in his or her allotted role in life. A samurai was supposed to be a total samurai. An artisan was supposed to be a total artisan. A monk was supposed to be a total monk. A wife was supposed to be a total wife. A lord was supposed to be a total lord, a gardener is supposed to be a total gardener, a cook was supposed to be a total cook, etc. And indeed, Japan has produced excellent craftsman--consider the samurai sword--, formidable warriors, artists of great concentration, and geishas for whom entertaining men is a kind of ‘art’. Even making and sipping tea became a ritualistic pain in the ass. If you’ve seen the TV mini-series SHOGUN, you know what happened to commonfolk if they disobeyed social norms: they got their heads chopped off on the spot by psychotic samurai. And indeed no less was expected from the samurai. If anything, samurai were supposed to be even more fanatical in their duties and matters of honor. As a loyal warrior-servant, he was supposed to be devoid anything like an individual conscience or sentiment. (In SHOGUN, Toranaga tests his
son’s loyalty by accusing him of treachery and ordering him to kill his own kids, and his son simply obeys and goes to do as told. Good thing it was just a test.) It wasn’t so much a case of might-is-right as told-by-lord. This may not strike us as very moral, and maybe the Japanese kinda felt the same way too. After all, the ideal samurai was supposed to act without thinking. This didn’t mean one should act like a drunken Negro or Irishman but act without ‘moral’ qualms clouds the mind and interferes with one’s duty. So, if a samurai is expected to go into a village and chop off everyone’s head, he must do so without trepidation. One might even call this a perversion of the concept of Zen, whose original intention was to cultivate a soul purified of attachment to the false illusion of ‘reality’; in contrast, the samurai concept of Zen came to mean detaching one’s emotions while detaching other people’s heads and limbs.
A similar mentality prevailed among the Nazi SS as they roamed across Eastern Europe, killing millions of Slavs and Jews without the distraction of sentiment. Their ‘spiritual’ duty was to serve Hitler and Himmler. Nothing else mattered.
This begs the question. If the servant in REMAINS were German and recruited to serve in the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front to coldly and efficiently kill untold number of civilians, would he have done so? I suspect such questions weren’t part of Ishiguro’s psycho-philosophical equation, and, of course, REMAINS doesn’t suggest that the servant(or people like him)was, in any way or form, culpable for what happened in WWII, especially the mass-killing of Jews. Though some may find parallels between the servant’s devotion to his master and all those ‘law-abiding’ and dutiful Germans who followed Hitler’s orders--and later excused their actions as ‘having followed orders’--, the differences are more important. There is an almost ascetic turtle-like quality about the servant that sets him apart from the Germans who, passionately or coldly, participated in the Nazi enterprise. In a way, it’s as if the servant wants to hide from the world by being the best at what he does. In contrast, Nazi Germans were very much trying to change the world, even if they were merely ‘taking orders’.
Anyway, though Kazuo Ishiguro is as thoroughly English as Francis Fukuyama is American, a certain Japanese mindset seems to inform his works(though to be sure, I haven’t read any of them and only know REMAINS and NLMG in movie form). This Japanese connection could be cultural and/or genetic. Even if Ishiguro grew up English, his East Asian genes may tilt his view of the world an Oriental tint. Surely, I’m not the only person who noticed an element of zen in the Hopkins character in REMAINS. I’ve seen all kinds of uptight servant types in British and Hollywood films but none as fanatical and purist as the character in REMAINS. He’s less an English servant than one filtered through an Eastern sensibility or temperament--just like David Carradine in KUNG FU is less a Chinese martial arts expert than one re-imagined by Western ideas of the Orient. (Speaking of KUNG FU, the style of NLMG reminded me of the scene where the blind monk challenges Grasshopper to walk on rice paper without tearing it. Romanek probably thinks he’s achieved something special because he tread cautiously and elegantly, when, upon closer inspection, the end-result is more about finesse than fineness, manners than matters.)
There is one striking similarity between the clonors in NLMG and the samurai of feudal Japan. Clonors are raised to believe that they must live and die for others, and they sacrifice themselves by ‘donating’ their organs accordingly. Though samurai didn’t donate organs, they were not only expected to sacrifice life and limb for their masters but to rip open and spill out their guts to prove their worth and honor before their lord and peers. This utter--some might call it mindless--devotion to duty and service seems more Japanese than English, raising questions as to the impact of Ishiguro’s cultural origins on his works.
Though the worlds of REMAINS and NLMG seems unjust, even ghastly, by our standards, something like a repressed nostalgia seems to be operating in both. In this sense, both films have something in common with CHARIOTS OF FIRE, which for all its criticism of Old British antisemitism and aristocratic prejudices, was a loving and longing tribute to a world that has faded away. Similarly, though Ishiguro seems to raise issues such as inequality and injustice in stories involving class hierarchy and caste differences, one can’t help but feel a certain nostalgia for a Britain that is no more. The new UK being a nation of crass materialism, punks roaming the streets, soccer hooligans, drunken bums puking all over the place, trashy TV shows and trashier pop music, problems of ‘diversity’, the non-stop vulgarity, preening narcissism and celebrity-mania, violent Negroes, hoggish welfare-ism, finance capitalist greed, and the prevailing mentality--on both the Left and Right--of ‘me, me, and me’, it is somewhat moving to observe an older world that was, no matter how imperfect and unjust, one of duty, manners, form, and the sense that there’s something larger-than-oneself.
The servant in REMAINS may be a fool, but there is a purity in his devotion to his ‘calling’. And there is something moving about the characters in NLMG who are resigned to death/sacrifice so that others may live. They may have been raised to think and feel like idiots, but where does one find such ‘purity’ these days? Though NLMG takes places from 1970s to the 1990s, its vision of an ‘alternate reality’ England, especially the cloistered world--emotional as well as social--of the clonors, is unmistakably ‘conservative’. Given the nearly all-white England of the movie--the only non-white we see is a single Negro in longshot--, this could even be an England in which WWII either didn’t happen or was won by the Nazis(with England perhaps having made peace with Hitler). It seems like a less free but also a more stable society. It also seems like a society where the ideal of service and sacrifice is still alive, even if it’s been institutionalized in a ghastly manner. As such, it is a world in which ‘sainthood’ is still possible--though, to be sure, true sainthood has to be voluntary; though the clonors finally resign themselves to their fate, they never had a choice to begin with. (Some might argue that there is no shortage of do-goody white liberals in England, but today’s ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives’ are really materialistic, narcissistic, and trashy egomaniacs whose main passions are Che Guevara t-shirts, drugs, and rap-n-roll and who live by the conceit that Africa with more Live Aid concerts. They may be willing to sacrifice OTHER whites to black rape/murder in South Africa, but their main agenda is to squeeze more freebies from the government so that they can be spoiled children forever.) Films like REMAINS and NLMG indulge in a kind of dystopian nostalgia or what might be called ‘dystalgia’. There is a hidden or suppressed longing for what is being critiqued or condemned. Watching REMAINS, we can flatter ourselves that we’ve come a long way(since the bad old days)but can’t help feeling we lost something in the bargain. After all, is the dysfunctional and anarchic world of Mike Leigh’s NAKED any better?
The conceit of NLMG’s alternate reality/history fails due to an earnest realism that seems reverently, even slavishly, faithful to the novel. I’m guessing the novel’s reality is subjective than objective, all the more unnerving and ironic given that clonors have been raised to think and feel ‘objectively’ for the common good than to possess unique egocentric identities; indeed, as clones they aren’t unique even at the genetic level.
So, there is a kind of dramatic irony for the reader who, at some point, realizes that the ‘reality’ presented in the story(perhaps by the first person clonor narrator) is a kind of artificially induced psycho-social autism. In other words, the clonor narrator or protagonist can know and feel only so much given they were raised--and perhaps even genetically tweaked--to know and feel only so much. In BRAVE NEW WORLD and ATTACK OF THE CLONES, certain clones are designed to be more submissive and obedient. Storm troopers are actually genetically modified clones of Bubba Fat’s father. The clonors in NLMG seem mostly a passive and vegan-like bunch. Even naughty Ruth and temperamental Tommy accept their fates in the end(rather like Joseph K at the end of THE TRIAL).
What works for a novel doesn’t necessarily work in a movie. Literature, expressed through words, convey, first and foremost, thoughts, impressions, and ideas. Visual media such as photography/cinematography situate us in real or material reality. Though all sorts of visual and auditory tricks can be employed--filters, dissolves, focus, slo-motion, music, sound effects, etc--to convey psychological or subjective reality, a photographic image first and foremost presents actuality. This isn’t a problem if the novel is heavy on realism, but an essentially psychological or subjective novel requires a cinematic talent with acutely sensitive vibes to do it justice.
A true film artist also infuses the original concept with his own perspective and interpretation. NLMG fails on both accounts. Not only is the movie lacking in spark and sheepishly faithful to the novel, it presents psychological reality as actual reality. The perverse innocence of the clonors pervades throughout the film, their ignorance and ‘stupidity’ gaining the weight of the world.
There is little to indicate what is really real and what is ‘real’ to the characters, and so the world depicted seems ridiculous as well as weird. Romanek should have either dug deeper into the minds of the characters or completely remained on the outside. His trying to have it both ways--a kind of psychological realism--muddles up things. A more subjective approach would have heightened the shock and tension, like in CLEAN SHAVEN or INSOMNIA. A more detached objective approach would have accentuated the insubstantiality of the lives before our eyes in a coldly utilitarian--or utotalitarian--world. Romanek lacks the skills and acumen to navigate between the two modes.
My guess is the ‘reality’ in Ishiguro’s novel is a comforting myth fed to the clonors who will never know the forces behind the system that creates and destroys them. So, even the explanation given by the former Hailsham headmistress should be taken with a grain of salt. Assuming the validity of my assumption, the clonors really learn nothing about reality and die with the myth they were born and fed with. And even the confession by the former headmistress may be yet another myth--one fed to her by higher authorities. But, the film seems to ignore or delete the muted irony and settle for a conventional story of lost souls seeking and eventually finding the truth. Without the ironic ambiguity between ‘truth’ and ‘myth’, the clonors’ acceptance of their fates lack the perverse tragedy it might have had. The film essentially says the kids just gave up, all their options having run dry. It’s like a cancer patient looking for miracle cures but finally accepting death. But if Romanek had handled it better, there would have been a suggestion of ‘truth’ as another ‘myth’ and, as such, not without therapeutic value.
This is too bad since mythology is the key to psychology, which, in turn, is the music and color to our experience of reality, which is never fully material or rational. NLMG evokes the thematic explorations of memory in several films, especially VERTIGO, LA JETEE, BLADE RUNNER, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THE VANISHING, and A.I. In VERTIGO, the generally rational and skeptical Scotty(James Stewart)falls in love with woman he’s hired to spy on. Why the mad love? It’s only partly because she’s good-looking, as one can find babes anywhere. He’s drawn into a romantic vertigo because of Madeline’s mythic aura. She seems haunted by the ghost of a beautiful woman who died tragically. Even though Scotty doesn’t actually believe in the hocus-pocus, it adds a layer of mystique, a poignant allure to her beauty. It is the interplay of light and shadows: the Madeline of light skin, silvery-golden hair, and white coat and the Madeline of dark moods, despair, and night. Even as he tries to convince Madeline that she’s just imagining things, it is this mytho-tragic aspect of Madeline that pulls and traps him in love’s spiral. And though he wants to save her, a part of him secretly wishes to share in her tragic-romantic destiny; she must die and haunt his dreams. Only through death can Madeline become the mythic goddess Scottie wishes to worship. Even as he wants to hold her near, he wants to love her from afar. We learn that the whole thing was a farce cooked up by the real Madeline’s husband(former college mate of Scotty). Though or precisely because he’s a cold son of a bitch, he knows a thing or two about the mythology of sexual attraction--therefore, how to manipulate it. Though he murdered his wife and exploited Scotty, in a strange way he granted his friend the greatest gift: to behold the most sublime kind of love.
Greek mythology is rife with tragedy, natural enough since nothing motivates the creation of myths as much as tragedy and loss. A parent who loses a child clings to memory, which becomes a kind of spiritual presence. And nostalgia is mythology of the past, especially of youth.
It’s because Scotty loses Madeline that he mythically recreates Madeline, a kind of imaginative cloning, perverse as well as predictable, mad as well as methodical--weirder yet when we consider that the Madeline Scotty knew was a mythic fiction created by the husband. (Interestingly, METROPOLIS, the mythic-fascist science fiction by Fritz Lang also involves a female double created for nefarious purposes. Yet, like all myths, the double takes on a life of its own. METROPOLIS was one of Hitler’s favorite movies, ironic given the half-Jewish identity of Lang. Hitler’s conservative backers probably thought they could help create, manipulate, and control the Hitler myth but, like the robot femme fatale in Lang’s movie, it went off on its own destructive tangent.) Without the element of tragedy, myths would be little more than fairytales, where dreams come true and everyone lives happily ever after. In most Greek myths, heroic triumphs are often stalked by tragic reminders, as when Theseus displays the wrong sail and instigates his father’s suicide or when Perseus accidentally kills his father with the discus.
Glorious feats shadowed by gloomy fates--even for the greatest heroes--kept the Greeks hoping and dreaming. Understanding and having accepted the futility of all things, Greeks came to value the process as well as the product. Thus, Greeks knew that Sisyphus would never succeed in pushing the boulder to the top of the hill; the nobility and beauty is in the effort itself. Similarly, we know that life isn’t forever and our dreams don’t come true. But we keep living and dreaming.
Why is there a mythic tinge to the love in WICKER PARK? Because Matthew lost Lisa and never stopped wondering why she left him(and if he might find her again).
It’s the tragic loss of Madeline that fevers Scotty’s romantic myth. He would have done anything to save her--except conquer his fear of height in the mission tower--, but she becomes even bigger in life; she becomes his religion. In his near-catatonic and self-induced hypnotic state, Scotty sees, hears, and senses nothing but the mythic Madeline. Now, that’s what I call love.
But ironies abound. The Madeline that he loved was not the real Madeline. In fact, he never saw or met the real Madeline murdered by her husband. And the whole mystery about Madeline being haunted by a ghost was pure fabrication. Yet, it is this ‘Madeline’ that Scotty falls in crazy love with, so much so that when he spots a woman who resembles Madeline, he goes about transforming her into ‘Madeline’--except that this woman turns out to be the woman who playacted at being ‘Madeline’.
The madness of love goes both ways. This woman, who was hired to play ‘Madeline’ by the evil husband and who is later (re)made into “Madeline” by crazy Scotty, also falls into a kind of mythic love. Though she took the role just for money, Scotty’s love for her--or her incarnation as ‘Madeline’--turned her on too. She falls in love with Scotty who falls in her love with ‘Madeline’, a classy highborn lady she expertly plays but isn’t one in real life where she’s just a cheap tramp. She cherishes Scotty’s love, but she knows it’s for ‘Madeline’ than her real self, a nobody from a small town. (There are echoes of VERTIGO in MULHOLLAND DR., but the difference is Diane Selwyn creates her own mythic double and manipulates her own self-deception.)
Mythic sexuality is more about luster than lust, transforming the experience of emotions into a kind of art or spirituality. Scotty is in love with the myth of ‘Madeline’, and even as he mourns her passing, we know he wouldn’t have it any other way. His pain, however morbid and unbearable, becomes the most beautiful and precious feelings he’s ever felt. Though fallen into a dissipated semi-insane state, he’d never felt so alive--paradoxically in relation to someone’s death. It’s not that the death of ‘Madeline’ made him realize something as trite as the value of life. Rather, he senses the meaninglessness of life without ‘true love’. That his life has become meaningless without ‘Madeline’ means that his life, for the short duration when he knew her, had true meaning: those moments, however brief, comprised the most precious time of his life. And though his life may be meaningless without ‘Madeline’, his dream of ‘Madeline’, though hopeless and mad, retains significance or creates new meaning. His attempt to (re)create “Madeline” is semi-successful because the ‘Madeline’ that he longs for is as much a state of mind as a person; ‘Madeline’ is what he projects onto the woman serving as a mirror for his fantasies. The recreated “Madeline” is or isn’t ‘Madeline’ depending on Scotty’s mental switch. She can just be a friend during daytime but then morph into ‘Madeline’ the mythic goddess in the evening when the mood is right. Though Scotty is reasonably content with his recreated “Madeline”, one could argue that he loses her again at the point of his triumph because the mythic ‘Madeline’ was inseparable from tragedy and doom. After all, the key element of her appeal was the inaccessibility--even as Scotty and Madeline had grown closer, a barrier remained between them, forbidding the consummation of their love. A “Madeline” that Scotty can fully own cannot really be ‘Madeline’. Also, even though the recreated “Madeline” looks the part, there is none of the aura of ‘Madeline’. But maybe there is an advantage in the recreated “Madeline” not being and knowing of the mythic ‘Madeline’. This way, Scotty can have both the mythic ‘Madeline’ and the recreated “Madeline”. The mythic ‘Madeline’ could remain a private fantasy, the one true love of his life, while the recreated “Madeline” could serve as a reflecting pool of his dreams. As far as Scotty is concerned, there is no reason for the recreated “Madeline” to know about the real ‘Madeline’, who is to remain his dark beautiful secret. But of course, the recreated “Madeline” is the same woman who had carried the image and fragrance of the mythic ‘Madeline’, so she knows the secret in the lockbox of Scotty’s heart. Scotty keeps the secret from the recreated “Madeline” who was the very person who, in her role as the mythic ‘Madeline’, had planted the seeds of passion in his heart in the first place. Strangely enough, it is when Scotty pieces the puzzle together--with the key piece being Carlotta’s necklace--that he is able to reconnect with the mythic ‘Madeline’. If darkness and mystery are integral to the mythic beauty of ‘Madeline’, it is through the final confrontation that Scotty is able to regain ‘Madeline’, ironically through the full exposure of her as a fraud. The process of de-mythification becomes yet another round of mythification. Though Scotty finally learns the truth and feels liberated--even of his dizzying fear of heights--, he is turned on by the epic perversity of it all. In one way, he has lost or is liberated from the ghostly presence of ‘Madeline’ forever, but in another way, he has yet gained a newer mythic ‘Madeline’ revolving around themes of confession, forgiveness, and redemption.
Despite the truth, Scotty confesses how sincerely he loved ‘Madeline’ and realizes that ‘Madeline’--or at least the real person behind the mask--desperately and madly loved him too. Though hesitant at first, he embraces the newer “‘Madeline’”. The tragic myth of ‘Madeline’ may be gone but only to be replaced by the new myth of two lost souls having found one another despite/through webs of deceit. Despite all the lies and subterfuge, there had been and still is a mad sincerity in their mythic love. It is still a myth because the attraction is not between Scotty and Judy(the woman hired by the evil husband to play ‘Madeline’) per se but between a disillusioned dreamer and fallen goddess, both of whom are desperately seeking to rekindle and reunite their love. So, even when the truth comes out, neither can abandon the central myth of their lives. (There’s a song by Bob Dylan, “4th Time Around” in the album BLONDE ON BLONDE, that works along similar lines. The woman tears the man down, the man tears the woman down, but in the end, they understand and accept each other with new eyes and feelings.)
Though Mamet, at least in his filmmaking, is something of a student of Hitchcock, the latter is defined by a romanticism lacking in the former. Hitchcock’s movies are rife with backstabbing and betrayal, but there remains an element, perhaps even sentimental, of redemption by faith(in one’s emotions if not in some higher authority, be in spiritual or political). In a way, Scotty loses everything--sanity, woman he loves, the beautiful illusion, etc--, but there remains the meaningful fact that Judy, in her role as ‘Madeline’, had loved him as much as he loved her(‘Madeline’). Though the ‘Madeline’ that he loved was a fake, Judy, as ‘Madeline’ and as Judy, did love Scotty both as Scotty and as the mad lover head-over-heels over ‘Madeline’(a creature she expertly played but never could be); therefore, her having to let him go was as tragic as Scotty’s loss of ‘Madeline’. (Strangely enough, the feverish final scene between Scotty and Judy/Madeline is reminiscent of the scene between George Bailey and ‘Mary’ in the alternate reality episode in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. ‘Mary’ of the alternate reality is both Mary and not Mary, and she is as freaked out in George’s clutching arms as is Judy while being dragged up the stairs by Scotty. The difference is that Judy knew what Scotty didn’t know in VERTIGO whereas George knows what ‘Mary’ doesn’t know in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. If the husband is like a dark angel hovering over Judy and Scotty, Clarence is a good angel. But all angels mess with our minds. Angels have more angles.) In contrast, there’s almost nothing but the con in the world of David Mamet; one is a fool to invest his or her emotions in anything or anyone(except perhaps one’s own family; in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, the only genuine signs of emotional attachment are Lemmon’s concern for his ill daughter and Kevin Spacey’s desire to go home to wife and kids after a hectic day at work.) The nihilistic paranoia in the works of Mamet makes him unsuited for either conservatism or liberalism; he either trusts no one(as they’re out to con and dupe other people, that is if they’re smart enough) or respects no one(as they put their trust in other people, that is if they’re dumb enough). In Mamet’s world, there are smart people and dumb people. Among smart people, there are those who use their superior intellect for power and money, and those who use their smarts ‘to do good’. Mamet, though critical of crooks, admires will-to-power smarties over do-goody smarties. In HOUSE OF GAMES, the do-goody smartie(the woman)is attracted to the will-to-power(the con artist). It’s as if Mamet is saying, “if you have the means to outwit others and win but don’t play to your advantage, you’re either a naive sap or don’t have balls.” Being crooked is bad, but being smart yet refusing to use one’s smarts to outwit others in the game of ‘will to power’ is pitiful. And even breaking-the-rules is a kind of rule; really smart people don’t obey rules made by others but manipulate them or make their own rules. It’s like a truly great lawyer don’t subscribe to ‘rule of law’ but to ‘rule of lawyers’. This is a sort of Ayn-Randian philosophy of con-artism.
The Mamet universe is filled with great liars like Ricky Roma, bad liars like Moss, and pathetic dupes like the Jonathan Pryce character in GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS. And in OLEANNA, the professor, though or precisely because he’s a smart guy, is a fool for thinking he can rationally and fairly discuss matters with his dumb fanatical student, who has fallen for the horseshit of radical feminism(as a kind of crutch since she cannot think for herself). (A cult is social phenomenon where an entire group of people collectively con themselves into worshiping some fanatical theory.) Gifted and insightful as he is, Mamet--he is a brilliant Jew, after all--comes across as an emotional accountant who seems incapable or unwilling to accept anything as a matter of faith or on trust, especially things outside his Tribe, though even the Tribe may be suspect(as in HOMICIDE; even so, Jews understand other Jews better--not so much because of clan loyalty but they share similar IQs and attributes; they understand the nature of the game; it’s like chess masters hang around together and con-artists have their own communities. They all play against one another, but there’s a sense of camaraderie in knowing unwritten rules that the outside community has no clues about). Hitchcock, for his fascination with human vices and cool intellect, was a deeply romantic artist, who, like Scotty, couldn’t let go of the myth even when exposed as a false dream. (By the way, I wonder what Scotty will tell the authorities after the recreated/revealed “‘Madeline’”--Judy--also falls to her death. He was lucky enough to be cleared in the death of the real Madeline, but how is he going to explain why Judy, dressed up as ‘Madeline’, fell to her death exactly in the manner of the real Madeline. And with her dead, how is he to prove that she was hired by the evil husband to play Madeline’s double? And how is he going to explain why he made her up as “Madeline”? Scotty, though having regained his sanity and gained the truth, is sure to be judged as mad by society--and, though it was an accident, guilty of the death of Judy--and in retrospect, of the real Madeline as well.)
Like VERTIGO, the emotional power behind LA JETEE, BLADE RUNNER, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THE VANISHING, and A.I. relies heavily on psychology, where the protagonist’s meaningful personal myth is challenged by actuality. The world of LA JETEE is a post-apocalyptic Paris of underground survivors; it’s hard to tell if the survivors are more like Nazis in their bunkers in the final phase of WWII or like French Resistance during the Occupation; the only ideology left is ruthless will to live. A man is chosen for a time-traveling experiment in the hope that he may contact mankind of the past and/or future who may lend aid to the survivors in the present. Though the experiment has a specific objective, the man explores and perhaps creates his own personal psychology. One certainty, all said and done, is that no matter how far he moves into the past or future, no matter how deeply he hides within his own mythological space, there is no escaping from the tyranny of time itself. In the end, he falls victim as a guinea pig to the scientists(who’d been spying on him all along); his being was just another sediment in the erosion of time. But two things stand out in the story: that he chooses to return to the airport just prior to the nuclear holocaust and whether the experiment really involved time travel. He requests the god-like future beings--who offer him membership in their world--to send him to that moment of danger(at the Orly airport) when the world is on the cusp of destruction, because the woman he loves happens to be there, i.e. his personal mythology choose death with the woman he loves than eternal life among strangers. The airport was also the place he happened to be as a child when the world was destroyed. Though we think that we’d like to live forever, human psychology is emotionally and perhaps even philosophically meant to live a single lifetime; and that lifetime is defined by few key moments that take on mythological significance. And human life has meaning through attachments to places, people, things, memories, losses. What becomes of memory, love, and attachment if one were to live for thousands of years? Things that lent meaning to life will fade, and new experiences will just seem like deja vu repetitions of old experiences; all of life will become like THE GROUNDHOG DAY. The key to life, then, isn’t just about living properly but dying properly, and perhaps the latter is more difficult, especially if the world happens to be out of sync with one’s mythic psychology. It’s one thing to live a long life and ‘die with dignity’, but what happens when the object of one’s mythic psychology or personal longing/attachment dies prematurely. This is no doubt the question raised by LOVE STORY, and its great success(despite its mediocrity as a movie)suggests the universal appeal of its romantic anxiety. In the story, Oliver, the son of a rich wasp, falls in love and marries Jenny, the daughter of an ‘ordinary’ Italian-American baker. They overcome social obstacles, and it looks like their story will be ‘happily ever after’, but then Jenny is diagnosed with leukemia. The sequel OLIVER’S STORY(the novel)ends with the line: “Sometimes I ask myself what I would be if Jenny were alive. And then I answer: I would also be alive.” Though Jenny is the one who dies, in some ways they’ve traded places: she’s alive in him as memory and he’s dead without her in life. In ROMEO AND JULIET, the star-crossed lovers at least died together. Oliver, in constrast, must live on in a world without Jenny, a world without meaning. A similar psychological dynamic unfolds in MOTHMAN PROPHECIES where a man loses his wife and then his equilibrium. It’s as if the longing for his beloved triggers a psychic contact with premonitory forces of death, whereupon his personal sense of loss becomes projected onto the larger world. Having been helpless to stop the death of his wife, he tries to alter fate as a means of redeeming the world, thus himself. MOTHMAN PROPHECIES could just as well be called ‘Mythman Psychologies’. The obsession with the supernatural becomes a disturbing yet also promising and soothing possibility of contacting and reclaiming the soul of his wife. Like Opheus seeking Eurydice, he seeks the journey into the realms of the dead--past and future--to maintain a flicker of hope of reunification.
The other question in LA JETEE is whether the business about time travel was a reality--genuine scientific possibility--or a ruse employed by scientists to manipulate and gain the confidence/acquiescence of the hero. Did he really travel in time and see ‘other worlds’ or was it all a mind-game induced by scientists who were really studying the psychology of time than time travel itself? But even supposing that the hero’s time travel was all a fantasy, it stimulates the creation of a beautiful personal myth, one worth living and dying for. In a way, myths have their own logic, their own ‘reality’, which perhaps explains why revolutions often devoured their creators. What may have begun as a bold experiment in the possibilities of social change becomes the ONLY reality for those raised on its myths. To a communist who grew up in a non-communist world, communism is a possibility. For those who grew up under communist orthodoxy and nothing else, the radical myth becomes a radical reality. If the founders of a communist state act on the basis of what-should-be, those raised under communism think in terms of this-is-it; there cannot be any alternatives; the founders of a new system can be fanatical and ruthless but because they know there are other competing alternatives; inheritors of a system only know their system and regard alternatives as worse than heresies--they are unrealities. Trapped in their ideological fantasy as the only reality, they cannot accept real reality if it doesn’t conform to their narrow political correctness. (One doesn’t need a totalitarian system to have totalitarian mentalities. Western liberals, though living in democracies, have totalitarian fantastical ideas on race. Though far removed from reality, their myths have turned into comforting iron truths, so much so that anyone who dares speak the real truth is cast aside not only as wrong but mentally delusional. It’s like the lunatics have taken over the asylum, but not quite. The supersmart Jews who control the West know the real truths about races and racial differences, but they manipulate and unleash mad patients dosed on political correctness against sane patients who dare speak the truth and thus challenge Jewish power.)
This isn’t a problem of only radical revolutions but radical reactions. To an extent, the Japanese elite’s uses of ultra-nationalism and emperor worship were an opportunistic, even cynical, ploy to manipulate the hearts and minds of the unwashed masses who had to be dragged into modernity while, at the same time, kept loyal to the powers-that-be. The problem was the Japanese elites succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, for the peasants-turned-soldiers-or-lower-ranking-officers were even more fanatically committed to Japan’s great ‘destiny’ than the Westernized elites were. The elites modernized the nation under the banner of blind loyalty to the emperor, who came to embody Japanese might and greatness in the world; and this mindset came to boomerang and haunt them, as lower-ranking officers and soldiers were willing to kill and die in the name of serving the emperor(in a pure way). Paradoxically, ultra-loyalty turned into a form of rebellion because absolute loyalty means pure devotion to a cause, ideal, principle, or figurehead. If the emperor didn’t give his stamp of approval to ultra-nationalist agenda, it could only mean he was being misled by corrupt and venal advisors, who must be assassinated in the hope that the emperor, under new advisors and inspired by the pure self-sacrifice of the assassins(who willingly accepted punishment by execution), would be moved to make the right decision. Rulers often create myths to control their subjects, but once the subjects are radicalized by those myths, rulers have no choice but to live up to them even if they never believed in their veracity in the first place. (Looks like Gaddafi forgot his lesson. He built himself as god-king to his people but then made himself look corrupt and weak by dillydallying, like a silly playboy, with Western bigshots.) In THE WILD BUNCH, Pike Bishop spins the myth of ‘sticking together’, an ideal that he never really lives by, which is one reason that he decides in the end to ‘play his strings right out to the end’. And in a way, Mussolini too was dragged into WWII because the myths he toyed with took on a life of their own and came to own him.
BLADE RUNNER is another fascinating movie about mythic psychology, where the existential conundrum is metaphorically fetish-ized through the marvels of bio-technology. It turns out the myths of Rachel and Deckard aren’t merely haunts of individual minds but programmed data implanted into their android sub/consciousness. Though the evil husband of VERTIGO planted in Scotty’s mind deceptive seeds of mythic romance that sprouted into a false garden, Scotty does own a mind to call his own. But Rachel and possibly Deckard(if he’s a replicant)are frauds at the core since there never was a ‘they’ outside what had been programmed into them by the Tyrell corporation. Even the most basic elements of their memories are myths, planted into their ‘souls’ by creative engineers. This makes Rachel and Deckard more perverse as sentient creatures than other replicants or real humans. At least, Roy Batty and his friends know what they are: replicants with life-span of 4 yrs. And real humans, at the very least, own their individualities. In contrast, how strange that Rachel and Deckard, though replicants, live with the myth of being human. How stranger yet that even when Rachel discovers the fake ‘myth’ of her humanness, she doesn’t lose her humanity; and how strange that Deckard, even when knowing Rachel isn’t human, loves her more than he could love any real human. If myths are often created out of the past--historical or biographical--, they can also be created out of the present, which is what happens in BLADE RUNNER. Though Rachel realizes that her memories are fake and don’t really belong to her, there remains the fact that her moments with Deckard are truly hers and don’t belong to anyone else, not even Tyrell. So, even though she is a fake creature with false memories, a high-class robot, she can spin the beautiful myth of being in true love with Deckard. And even though Deckard knows she’s a replicant, or a fake human, he accepts the myth that Rachel, from the moment of realization of her true nature, is reborn, emotionally and spiritually, as a human. Her tears upon hearing the truth of her ‘childhood’ is, perversely enough, both mechanical and personal; personal feeling have been programmed into her, but when they crystallize into lonely tears, it is ‘more human than human’--which adds another layer of irony to Tyrell whose own inhumanity seems to grow in inverse proportion to his creation of ever ‘more human humans.’ To the extent that all living beings are essentially organic machines programmed by their genetic and social codes, we are all replicants. (Another fascinatingly perverse aspect of BLADE RUNNER is the concept of creating and owning gods, or at least pagan gods. Greek gods could be said to be ‘more human than human’. More beautiful, more intelligent, more powerful, more everything. Throughout history, gods were masters over man. But in BLADE RUNNER, Tyrell creates a god-race as a slave-race. It’s like he has the power to create gods and make them serve him. He fuses science with mythology. But then, weren’t all gods created by man in the first place?)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is another great movie about mythic psychology, one centered around the character of ‘Noodles’(Robert DeNiro)whose two prolonged spans in life--prison in youth and exile in adulthood--are haunted by unresolvable memories that ferment into personal myths. Though we aren’t shown his life in prison or in exile, everything about him is defined by personal myths he wove in isolation. In prison, he lived with the promise of freedom and love for Debra, though upon release, he immediately finds himself back in the criminal world and faced with the knowledge of Debra’s own plans, of which he’s not a part. Even after he loses Debra(especially after a brutal rape-attempt), she lives on as a mythic reminder of what he could have been but failed to be: someone deserving of winning and keeping her love. She becomes the symbol of his degradation, humiliation, and fall in the real world, to be redeemed through fantasies in his dreamworld. Besides, though a street punk he may be, his personal mythology makes him a tragic punk than just a run-of-the-mill punk. Via self-pity and/or self-mythologizing, there is a consolation prize to be had through the conceit of the ‘tragic fall’. If Adam had simply eaten a rotten fruit and gotten a stomach ache, he would have been just a fool. It’s the mythology of God and the Tree of Knowledge that him special: not just the first man but the first TRAGIC man. And it is his loss of the Garden of Eden that haunts the rest of his days and nights with dreams of what-might-have-been.
If Noodles in prison was fixated on Debra, Noodles in exile is fixated on Max, whom he believes to have inadvertently killed by trying to ‘do the right thing’. Though it must be quite a bummer to be burdened with guilt involving both Debra(whom he raped out of desperate love) and Max(whom he killed out of desperate friendship), it also imbues Noodles with the stuff of tragic beauty with which to weave his myths. And this is why the ending of the movie is so jarring, what with Noodles learning the truth about Debra and Max, both of whom betrayed Noodles in their own ruthless ambitious drive to power and glory.
As with Scotty in VERTIGO, there’s a sense that Noodles, even with the truth in his grasp, can’t help but to weave yet new patterns from the same myths. There’s something about human psychology that cannot accept ‘truth and nothing but the truth’--which is why death may be the only escape from lies, a realization that crosses the mind of the main character in SHUTTER ISLAND. Sometimes, it could be because the truth is too horrible or too humdrum or because the alternate ‘reality’ is too enticing and irresistible. We learn that the guy in SHUTTER ISLAND, even after being led to the truth, almost inevitably and invariably finds himself spiraling back into his own myths, which is why he chooses lobotomy or death when his mind is momentarily lucid. When personal myths become more real than reality, modern psychology calls it schizophrenia, but the more spiritually inclined might call it possession by demonic forces, which is the subject of THE EXORCIST. Both SHUTTER ISLAND and THE EXORCIST present the possibility of redemptive self-sacrifice and atonement at the moment of mental and spiritual clarity, when a troubled figure is, if only fleetingly, freed of sickness or doubt. The guy in SHUTTER ISLAND wants to pay the price for having killed his wife when his mind is clear, before he slips into yet another bout of delusions. And the priest in THE EXORCIST, burdened with the guilt over his mother’s death throughout the movie, battles demonic spirits by dragging them out of Regan’s body into his own, and then at the instance of clarity(momentary triumph over evil spirits), kills himself along with the evil spirts trapped in his body.
One of the most harrowing of mythic psychological films is THE VANISHING--the original, not the awful remake--where a man searches for a woman who disappeared yrs ago under apparently the most ordinary circumstances. He is beset with guilt because just prior to losing her, he’d left her stranded in the car--out of gas--in the middle of a long tunnel. Though he returned with a tankful of gas, and they emerged out of the tunnel, the fact that he’d ‘abandoned’ her--when she felt most vulnerable--and then lost her soon thereafter gnaws at his conscience. Though initially his was a search to find the woman, it dawns on him that she’s most probably dead; the search then becomes a search for truth and atonement. (Similarly, the objective of the rescue in THE SEARCHERS changes from saving Debbie in body and soul to killing her body--defiled by Red savages--to save her white ‘soul’.) He needs to know how she died, and he needs to suffer the same fate as a kind of psycho-cosmic justice. This atonement becomes even more important avenging her death--even though he ample opportunity to do so. At one point, he beats the killer to a pulp, but then the killer says the truth will never be known if he dies. The only way toward the truth is the killer’s way, which, ghastly as it is, is the only thing that can fulfill the searcher’s mythic psychology of love and loss.
There seems to be a similar dynamic in NEVER LET ME GO. In one way, it could be said the clonors choose not to escape because there is really no way out. For all we know, the UK of the film could be a mildly totalitarian society where everyone can be tracked soon enough. Besides, the clonors have been raised in a way that makes them stick out in the crowd. Though they speak English, they are like foreigners in another country in their social awkwardness.
Another explanation for their acceptance of fate could be due to conditioning. Like people raised in totalitarian communist or fundamentalist religious nations(or overly conservative or ultra-politically-correct societies), they tend to lack a strong sense of individuality. Without individuality, they are prone to groupthink, and they’ve been raised to feel and believe that their duty in life is to ‘donate’ their organs.
But there seems to be something else going on, something more insidious. In a way, the world of NLMG does allow a degree of individuality and the sense of ‘free will’. It allows just enough freedom for the clonors to live in a limbo between a controlled environment and free environment. And rumors about the possibility of freedom and liberation from their duty/destiny seem to abound. There is a kind of psychological sticks and carrots going on here. Ultimately, the clonors are made to feel as if they freely and individually chose to donate their organs--not because they were forced or conditioned to do so but because they came to the conclusion that it’s the only right thing. And there seems to be several ways this is realized. Ruth, for example, goes looking for her ‘possible’, the original person from whom she was cloned. (It’s like an adopted kid looking for his real parents.) When the ‘possible’ turns out to be the wrong person, Ruth says they--she and her friends--are looking in the wrong place(respectable parts of society) because people like her are cloned from social ‘trash’. But we wonder if it’s a fact or a rumor that clonors are cloned from ‘social trash’. And if a rumor, was it disseminated by officialdom to make clonors feel unworthy, thereby making them feel that their only hope of redemption is through sacrificing themselves for better/worthier members of society? In Akira Kurosawa’s film KAGEMUSHA, the lowly bandit finds meaning by serving a great clan, and at the end, he’d rather die for the clan than live on as lowly social trash. He chooses to die when he could have lived. The clan had used him but disposed of him like an orange peel when he was no longer useful; a bandit in actuality, he’s not even thought worthy to die for the clan. The samurai, on the other hand, believe it’s not just their duty but privilege/honor to die for the noble clan.
This suggests the ideal of blind sacrifice can just as well apply to the privileged as to the enslaved. It’s kinda like the character in LORD JIM--I only saw the movie--who develops a death wish stemming from the shame of having fled from a sinking ship(that alas didn’t sink). In a culture where’s it’s honorable for the ‘captain to go down with the ship’, Lord Jim became chickenshit Jim, a fact that haunts him until he dies.
The world of NLMG seems to be totalitarian-conservative, deeply hierarchical, and repressive. What it deems as ‘trash’ are the usual social outcast types. But feelings of unworthiness and trashiness can be disseminated in any number of ways. Political correctness and Jewish media power have made entire groups of white people feel unworthy, trashy, self-loathing, and shitty; as such, they lack pride and confidence and feel that they must forever atone for their evil, tainted blood, and etc. ‘Blonde and blue eyes’ has become synonymous with Nazism and ‘racism’. ‘White power’ is tantamount to crime against humanity. Even the wish of white people to preserve and maintain their racial and cultural character in their ancestral homelands is deemed sinister and wicked. There is, of course, a vile and vengeful Jewish Hand behind much of this, but it sure is effective. White people have been made to feel historically, politically, and culturally responsible for all the evils in the world; and as such, the only acceptable mode of white psychology is atonement, redemption, and ass-kissing toward Jews, Negroes, gays, etc. Never mind donating mere organs. Whites are supposed to donate all their lands, wealth, women, and power to Jews, Negroes, and other weasels, apes, and louts.
So, the world turns a blind eye to South African blacks robbing, raping, and murdering white folks left and right. And there’s hardly a peep in the Jew-controlled American media about the horrors of black crime against white folks. (Jews especially don’t care since they are rich and can afford to live in safe fancy neighborhoods with little or no crime. And being vicious and vile scum that they are, Jews of course delight in the fact that white males are being castrated and white women are either being raped or running off with the Negroes.) Europe is filled with propaganda urging white women to have sex and babies with Negroes. Over 80% of Europeans worship Obama as bigger-than-Jesus, not least because he’s the product of an African Negro boffing a white woman. Such has become the ideal for most progressive and even conservative Western people: that white women should mate with Negroes while white boys pull their puds to the spectacle of their own sexual demise in the worship of interracism. Or take a movie like BLIND SIDE, where a white conservative family is praised for adopting a 300 lb Negro boy. In other words, whites are decent if and only if they live for non-whites, not for their own white interests. (How a great people can fall so pathetically and pitifully in such a short duration is indeed beyond belief. It is a kind of virtocide, a form of genocide where people don’t see the danger because they are so wrapped up in the virtue of embracing ‘diversity’, ‘equality’, and ‘justice’.)
So, even though Ishiguro is a liberal pansy, the implications of his novel are quite varied, not entirely predictable. Given the easy manner in which Jews have manipulated and used white goyim, the world of NLMG isn’t as improbable as it may seem. Consider figures like John McCain and Sarah Palin. On some level, they must know that they’re little more than prostitutes of AIPAC and American Jewish power, which, by the way, is mostly liberal, anti-white, anti-America, etc. Even many so-called Jewish conservatives are really Hyman-Rothers who are exploiting the American conservative community to garner extra-support for Israel and Jewish power. ‘Jewish conservatives’ may also worry that if 100% of Jews were liberal/leftist, it would be easier for white goyim to see Jews for what they are and unite to counter/combat Jewish power. So, the eloquent presence of some ‘conservative’ Jews is useful to Jewish power because it lends false hope to the white conservative community that the ‘conversion of the Jews’--political, if not spiritual--is possible. This is why even liberal Jews actually have an appreciation for ‘rightwing’ Jews like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Michael Medved, Mona Charen, Norman Podherotz, David Brooks, William Kristol, and others. Such Jews fool dumb white goyim into believing that many Jews are on their side, and golly gee whiz, given enough time, most Jews may come to see the light at the end of the tunnel and turn conservative.
White goyim don’t understand that Jews see them as stupid, dumb, moronic, childish, retarded, inane, and insipid. For most Jews, white goyim are only useful as consumers of Jewish Hollywood trash, as pornified whores servicing/satisfying the vile lust of Jewish men and Negroes, and as witless game pieces in the divide-and-rule strategy of Jerry-Springer-like Jewish power. White conservative goyim have about as much chance as clonors in NLMG of being recognized as moral, cultural, or intellectual equals of Jews. Jews will never see whites as equals. Jews will always see white goyim as dummies to manipulate and mind-control; Jews will regard white goyim as body parts for the enjoyment and empowerment of the Jewish brains and penises. Of course, there is one area where Jews do feel inferior to goyim--in the looks department--, which is why some Jews have a vicious agenda to take revenge against white beauty by muddying it up with mixtures of Negro blood. The God of the Jews is a ‘jealous God’ and will not tolerate the beautiful and handsome gods of other peoples; they must all be destroyed as ‘false idols’. If one part of Jewish mentality seeks to destroy all that is non-Jewish-and-beautiful--as with ugly Jewish hag feminists bitching and whining about the ‘beauty myth’ as the false idol that must be smashed to satisfy the Big Sister in the sky, or ugly Jewish male geeks taking pleasure in seeing white men reduced into pussyass white boys by stronger Negroes who then muddy up with white blood by humping white women--, another part of Jewish mentality seeks to enslave, own, market, peddle, and rake in loads of cash by controlling the business of white beauty and Negro muscle. Jews control Hollywood, the music industry, mass media, and sports franchises. They market white female beauty as a commodity and sex toy; Jewish-controlled Disney now encourage even prepubescent white girls to dress up like hip-hop ho’s. Jews also market Negro male muscle as the highest symbol and ideal of raw macho-hood. Musically, many of the top acts promoted by Jews are a mulatto female artists who were likely produced by black males humping white females. And indeed, porn, an industry totally dominated by filthy dirty Jews, started out mostly as Jewish men porking white women and then morphed into Negro men porking white women(in videos produced by hideous Jews).
But one thing needs to be understood. Jews don’t value white beauty or black muscle as something sacred but as commodities to cheapen, sensationalize, market, degrade, and profit from. Nazis were scum, and their notion of art was laughable, but they did have a reverence for Western European heritage and beauty as something ‘sacred’ and worthy of preservation. (It’s too bad Hitler and his fellow degenerates didn’t feel that way about all Europeans.) White goyim need to realize that their hope of recognition as equals from Jews makes as much sense as Jews during WWII hoping Nazi Germany would recognize them as equals. Jewish Supremacism is the new Nazism, and in some ways, it’s more insidious and dangerous. As evil as Nazism was, its madness and agenda were obvious and plain to see. Jewzism is, in some ways, more sinister because devious and cunning Jewzis promote their own self-interest and supremacism by accusing OTHER groups of ‘racist’ and ‘supremacist’ thinking. It should be obvious to everyone with eyes and brains(and some metaphorical balls) that Jews are in fact extreme elitists who pretend at egalitarianism to hoodwink and control the masses. Does anyone really think Jews wanna be equal with masses of ‘white trash’, Negroes, and illegal Mexicans? Does anyone really think that Jews believe that non-Jews can ever be the intellectual or cultural equal of Jews? That would be like Negroes of West African descent sincerely believing that the top 10 finalists for the 100 m sprint could be Hindus or Mexicans. Jews know they are smarter, Jews know they are more ruthless, Jews know that their cultural hallmark is contempt for goyim. Jews are not so much moral as morally arrogant and narcissistic. Jews don’t practice morality to be good people; they exploit morality to elevate themselves above others. How can anyone become a better person without self-criticism and self-examination? Look all around, and Jews, like lowlife scum Negroes, are always criticizing and condemning OTHER people but almost never themselves; even when Jews go for self-criticism, it’s more an apology or rationalization of their power than honest-to-goodness examination of their failings and shortcomings. It must be said that traditional Jews, though never apologetic to non-Jews, did recognize their God as great and bowed down before Him and atoned for their sins. But once modern Jews found no more use for God, they made themselves into god, and they’ve been acting arrogant, pushy, disgusting, insufferable, hideous, and nausea-and-migraine-inducing ever since. (Are Jews the most corrupt people in America? It all depends on how one defined ‘corruption’. Most Jews don’t have super-power and make a living as professionals and small businessmen. Most Jewish accountants are probably no more corrupt than non-Jewish accountants. It could also be that many Jews in many professions are not only superior in skills but also more trustworthy. After all, if most Jews are such crooks, why do so many people seek the advice and services of Jewish professionals? No, many Jews are wonderful workers and deliver the goods. In my personal dealings, I found Jews to be generally more conscientious than most people, especially more than ‘white trash’ who drive me nuts. Help out a ‘white trash’ friend by lending him or her money, and five times out of ten, you won’t ever see the money again; of course, Negroes are much worse. So, it would be wrong to say most Jewish individuals are corrupt at what they do. But in terms of collective Jewish power and Jewish elitist power, Jews are indeed very corrupt. All power, especially great power, must come under criticism and inspection. It is not only foolish but dangerously arrogant for anyone or any group to say its power should remain beyond scrutiny and should be taken on trust. We know that simply isn’t viable. Take the Catholic Church. Its culture of secrecy hid so many cases of child abuse--despite the Church’s devotion to doing good work all around the world. I would rather trust a system where Hitler or Stalin is president but whose power is checked and balanced by other forces than a system where Mother Teresa has totalitarian power over everyone. Stalin was an evil man whereas Mother Teresa devoted her life to doing good, but what I fear most of all is concentration of power in one person or one group. The problem of Jewish power is it cannot be criticized; worse, it cannot even be acknowledged. When a power as great as the one held by Jews cannot be scrutinized--let alone said to even exist--, then it is a dangerously corrupt cancerous tumor in American society; and its toxins are spreading all over the body politic/economic. So, though Jews may not be the most corrupt People in America, their Power is the most corrupt and malignant force in America.)
If Ruth ‘freely’ chooses to resign herself to fate out of despairing conviction that she was cloned from unwanted dregs of society--though she’s attractive, it’s true that many good-looking celebrities, entertainers, and porn actresses ‘arose’ from the lower depths--, Tommy and Kathy find their own ‘individual’ rationales for accepting their fates. Tommy, a rather eccentric and introverted figure, invested his core energies into creativity(paintings). His individuality is inseparably fused with his art, and so when his art is ‘rejected’ as application for life, his life itself seems without meaning. However, though he isn’t accepted as a normal individual, he has been given the ‘freedom’ to fail individually(from which to form his own personal myth of failure; it’s the system that fails and dooms him, but he’s made to feel it’s his own failing; in a way, it doesn’t matter in the end whether Tommy has real talent or not. Just as Roy Batty in BLADE RUNNER has a 4 yr life-span no matter how smart and powerful he may be, Tommy too can only live so long. Batty’s doom is technologically-engineered inside; Tommy’s doom is socially-engineered outside, but the system is clever enough to manipulate Tommy into accepting society’s design as his own. The system understands the psychology of hope and happiness, how to raise expectations and then crush them to evince an ‘understanding’ among clonors that their lives and deaths are as they must be; the system also understands that when certain mental switches are turned off, people lose the will to live and are more willing to call it quits; also, the fact that clonors are not killed off at once but ‘allowed’ to die gradually, piecemeal by piecemeal,
may add emotional meaning to their ‘sacrifice’; it’s less like they’re being killed than living-by-dying for others; it makes them feel like tragic spiritual figures carrying the cross; the system also understands the uses of compassion and sympathy. In a way, the advantage of dying before your peers is knowing that there are others who will mourn your passing. Clonors, having no family, become lonelier the longer they live while their disappear from this world; though death is something each person experiences alone, a dying person wants his/her passing acknowledged by others. In the Iranian film TASTE OF CHERRY, some suicidal guy searches for a man to preside over his death. One of the problems of suicide prevention programs is they may paradoxically make people more suicidal. By sending the message that ‘someone out there cares’, suicidal people may believe that others will really feel sorry for them if they die. If you really wanna save a suicidal person, just laugh and mock him or her as a pathetic loser, haha. Anger and hate make people wanna live, if only to get even. One reason why Negroes are less suicidal is because Negroes don’t give a shit about one another. So, a Negro thinks, ‘Sheeet, if I done kills myself, all da punkass homeys in da hood gonna laugh at my dead ass.”). As such, he doesn’t die as one of the nameless sheep but as a struggling artist who gave his best but failed. The fates of the clonors may be preordained, but each clonor is given, if he or she subconsciously wishes, his or her personal path toward destruction. They’re provided with just enough leeway to make believe that they ‘freely’ chose their fate. Similarly, the fates of the main characters at the end of BRAVE NEW WORLD, though inevitable or grim as variations of punishment or exile, makes each believe he has partial control over his own destiny. So it is with Tommy.
It’s not really clear if the two old women who explain ‘the truth’ to Tommy and Kathy are really telling the truth or proffering another layer of deception to clonors for whom the official explanations and rationales are not enough. (Am I the only one who noted a
hint of the devious general in PATHS OF GLORY who professes sympathies one way while, in effect, pulling the rug underneath his hapless victims? Is ‘Hailsham’ a kind of play on ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Ms. Havisham’ of GREAT EXPECTATIONS? As I recall, Ms. Havisham acted kindly towards Pip--at least in David Lean’s movie, as I haven’t read the book--but only used him to turn the girl into a misterogynistic psycho.) Indeed, the two women are effective precisely because they seem so sympathetic. They make Tommy and Kathy believe that their tragedies will not be in vain because there are people like the two women who accept them as beings with souls and really feel sorry for them. Fear takes on an element of pathos, and death no longer becomes meaningless. In TASTE OF CHERRY by Abbas Kiarostami, why does the man seek out someone to stand over his death?
To be sure, Tommy’s ‘individual’ acceptance of death was made easier by the manner of his social--and perhaps genetic--engineering. Some cultures and/or genetic traits tend to produce people who are generally less rebellious--and even if rebelliousness, more introverted than extroverted. This is certainly true of the Japanese, and I suspect that Ishiguro uses ‘repressive/repressed’ British characters and situations as shadowy surrogates to explore his own insecurities as a ‘quiet passive Asian’. As admired as he is as a writer, he’s not a world-shaker but essentially the literary equivalent of Yo-Yo Ma, another fine artist who’s very good at what he does but no maverick original. So, in a way, Ishiguro’s characters could well be Western clones of Ishiguro’s restrained Eastern zen soul, which may be why, despite elements of social satire in REMAINS and NLMG, there is the ‘spiritual’ aspect of grace via passivity.
In terms of social satire, NLMG does score some points. We need only to look at the war machine of the West. Though called ‘national defense’, most soldiers--goy and often from the lower depths of society--are ideological clone-mercenaries in the service of the elitist-Zionist cabal. Though they join an outfit that requires them to lose life and limb in the service of alien-Jewish interests, why do so many quietly comply? Why are they so eager to kill and die in Wars for Israel? For one thing, like the clonors in NLMG, they’ve been raised with the myth that Jewish lives are more precious than all the other lives, even their own. Holocaustianity tells us so. Indeed, there is no greater love, act, and deed than having saved Jews from Nazis; every European nation has its version of ‘we saved Jews’ in books and movies, and every European nation has its version ‘we aided and abetted in the killing of Jews’ in books and movies, which calls for atonement. Indeed, what is the primary measure by which we judge peoples and nations? By the ridiculous rule of ‘how good were they to Jews?’ If a nation/people were good for Jews, they were a good people. If they were bad for Jews, they are a bad people. So, ‘good people’ must keep on being ‘good’ by sucking up to Jews, and ‘bad people’ must redeem themselves by showing their unconditional love for Jews. Jews are never judged by what they do; they are judged for what they are. They ARE simply better than goyim. Perversely enough, Jewish Supremacism operates much like Nazism. Nazis didn’t judge Jews by what they did but what they were. So, even Jews who were loyal to Germany and anti-communist were marked as enemies and slated for mass-killing. Now, we have a situation where Jews can do whatever they want--no matter how wretched--, but we are supposed to admire, respect, revere, love, and even worship them cuz being Jewish is the holiest and noblest thing in the world. But don’t ever think this devotion to Jews will guarantee Jews loving you back. Like Yahweh with Job, it’s a mostly one-sided affair. Remember Job was a very loyal and pious man of God, but God kicked his ass just the same. And when Job asked him why, God said He worked in mysterious ways and it’s the duty of man to just worship Him on faith. Similarly, you can love, support, and worship the Jew, but the Jew may send Negroes to gang-rape your daughter, psychologically castrate your balls, sensually manipulate you to become sextoys of Negro studs in porn stables owned by Jews, and flood your homeland with tons of Negroes, Muslims, and Illegal Mexicans who may one day outnumber your white kind. South Africa was politically very close to Israel, but did that save South African whites from international pressure(dominated by the American Jewish cabal)? The White Right need to learn this lesson, and learn it good. Jews deviously play it both ways. Israeli Jews--especially those fattened on the diamond trade--gave assurance to white Afrikaners that if the South Africa toadied up to the Jewish state, it will do wonders for their international image since how could Afrikaners be ‘racist’ and evil if they are so closely aligned with the Holy People, the Jews? But, all the while, other Jews were doing every dirty trick to subvert and undermine white power in South Africa to create this hallowed image of Jews-as-sacred-victims-of-the-Holocaust allied with Negroes-as-tragic-victims-of-white-slavers. Ultimately, not least because Jewish power is mostly concentrated in white goy majority nations, it was in the interest of Jews to undermine and weaken white unity, confidence, resolve, pride, and power. White guilt is the golden goose that keeps on giving to the Jews. And since Jews control the brain centers of the Western world--as well as its eyes and ears via the mass media--, they created whole new generations of whites who are intellectually, spiritually, morally, and sexually owned by Jews(and their pet monkey allies, the Negroes). How else can we explain the utter stupidity of people like Sarah Palin, whose idiot son signed up for the military to go fight Wars for Israel. Notice that very few Jews serve in combat forces in the military while Jews dominate the upper echelons of US government. Jews set the foreign policy agenda and have non-Jewish ‘white trash’, ‘black trash’, and ‘Hispanic trash’ die for Zionist causes. And all these dumb goyim, raised on videogames-rock music-dumb Hollywood movies-etc, thinks it’s ‘so cool’ to be ‘the few, the proud, the Marines’, when in fact, they are ‘the duped, the pathetic, the Morons’. (I’m not suggesting that ‘white trash’ should not serve in the military. If anything, all whites should serve in the military to learn how to use guns and to rebel against the US or JewAss government when the Moment of Truth arrives.) Some might accuse me of ‘blood libel’ since I’m accusing Jews of sacrificing gentile blood to further their own agenda, and my reply is DAMN RIGHT!!! I do accuse Jews of blood libel for brainwashing and making white American gentiles to go kill and die for filthy vile Jewish interests. What’s really scandalous is that so few people are willing to speak truth to Jewish power and say it like it is: that Jews are using us like dogs and dirt. Isn’t it amusing how these Jews, who practice a rabid and virulent form of their own ethno-supremacism, accuse white people of being ‘racist’ and ‘crypto-Nazi’ and etc.? Jews have made too many gentiles, especially whites, feel like racial and moral trash, who, as such, can only hope to redeem their unworthy lives by loving and dying for Jews. Jews know that real power derives as much from spiritual and psychological sources as from the economic, physical(military), and political. Indeed, those who control the souls and psyches also control much of everything else. After all, Christmas is the biggest day of the year for Christians--and Jewish retailers--because of the Christian faith in Jesus as the Messiah. It’s Christmas’s magical effect on the public psyche that make countless people dole out their cash in ‘celebration’. Since goyim came to own Jesus as their own God--and as a hostile force against Jews--, modern Jews felt a need to develop a new spirituality which they can control in order to own the souls of goyim. It is through Holocaustianity that white goyim now worship Jewsus more than Jesus. And it is through Jewish control of intellectualism and mass culture that white goyim have been sold on ridiculous notions and values such as ‘gay marriage’. Jews have rigged the game so that white goyim can gain moral credits only by undermining and weakening their own power, pride, values, and validity as a people and culture; white goyim can win morally only by losing politically, economically, and biologically. It’s a new formulation of ‘meek shall inherit the Earth’; Jewish message to white goyim is they must be meek losers filled with sinful guilt to be redeemed ‘spiritually’. Of course, the meek shall never inherit the earth. Indeed, white goyim are losing the very earth under their feet while Jews--and Negroes in alliance with Jews--are gaining everything. Holocaustianity, like Christianity, is being used as an opiate of the masses.
Jews well understand the human psychology of supremacism and narcissism. Humans are by nature elitist or wanna-be-elitist: holier than thou, prettier than thou, stronger than thou, smarter than thou, etc. Since racial, cultural, and moral supremacism on the part of white goyim can pose a threat to Jews, Jews have created a whole new set of idols, images, and ‘values’ whereby whites can feel supremacist pride in their own self-destruction. White liberals readily adopt positions like the pro-gay-agenda, pro-‘diversity’-agenda, and anti-‘racist’-agenda because they have this human need to feel superior to other people. Since they are forbidden to feel any racial or cultural pride as whites or westerners, their supremacist or superiorist impulses are given a ‘progressive moral’ outlet. Thus, white liberals can feel orgasms of superiority over ‘racists’, ‘homophobes’, and other ‘paranoid’, ‘pathological’, ‘rabid’, ‘virulent’, ‘bilious’, ‘odious’, ‘intolerant’, ‘divisive’,and blah blah kinds of people. But notice that this sort of ‘progressive moral’ supremacism serves only to further Jewish power and interests while leading to the wholesale castration and lobotomization of white folks. Jews are a deviously clever and sly bunch of assholes. They psycho-politically employ, manipulate, and exploit the very emotions that they officially denounce. Jews tell us that ‘paranoia’, ‘supremacism’, and ‘hate’ are negative and evil emotions, yet who are more paranoid than the hideous Jews? And what can be more supremacist than Jewish Supremacism and politically correct ‘progressive values’ which is predicated on the conceit that those who embrace ‘gay marriage’ are morally, culturally, and socially superior to sane people who are appalled by it? (And just consider the sheer ludicrousness of the notion: the idea that ‘two gayboy buttfuc*ers are worthy of marriage’ is now believed by many to be morally superior to the position that real marriage should harmonize the moral with the biological in the sexual dynamics between men and women.) And though Jews tell us that the ‘us vs. them’ mentality, or ‘hate’, is evil(or the source of much evil in the world), who incites as much hatred among various groups as much as the Jews do? Jews pit Muslims against Christians, pit Negroes against whites, white women against white men, gays against straights, Mexicans against Americans, etc. Jews beat up and humiliate Palestinians on a daily basis. While Jews demand that Europeans support the Jewish state against Muslim terrorists, Jews are doing everything in their power to flood Europe with MORE Muslims and Africans. And white goy liberals brainwashed by the Jewish MSM are filled with rabid and virulent hatred for their own kind. Indeed, much of Jewish politics is about hatred; it’s about spreading the germ of self-hatred in the hearts of white people. Since self-hatred isn’t very pleasant, the means by which a white self-loather can attain redemption is by embracing ‘progressive’ values. By becoming a ‘progressive’, ‘leftist’, or ‘radical’, a white person no longer needs to hate himself or herself; he or she can hate white rightists and ‘racists’ who want to preserve and defend white/western race, heritage, and culture. Take a film like GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO, a slimeball bucket of puss from faggoty-maggoty Sweden, a land of politically correct Nords. It offers a chance for white people to be ‘good’: they must wage social, cultural, economic, and political war on their own kind. Modern liberalism is both paranoid enough to believe that closet-Nazis are still running amok all over Europe and hateful enough to take sadistic pleasure in combating such ‘rampant evil’ from the face of this Earth. Since every white person with even the slightest hint of ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, and ‘sexism’ is a ‘crypto-Nazi’, it pretty much means the white race and culture must be wiped out as a viable force in the world. It is both amazing and amusing that Jews, who decry films like JEW SUSS by Veit Harlan, love movies like GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO that are even more deranged, paranoid, and hateful than any Nazi feature film.
Sick Jews have mastered the art of taking power via psychological manipulation because they are highly intelligent(and creative) and because they are a small minority in most goy nations. Since Jewish power in terms of population can only go so far, Jews rely more on shaping the minds of large numbers of goyim by setting the terms and rules of dissemination, discussion, and debate in the mass media. Jews decide which topics and issues are to be discussed, what terminology is to be used, what rules shall apply to the discourse, and whom shall be ostracized and destroyed for saying the ‘wrong’ thing. If Freud’s main objective was to explore, understand, and ‘heal’ the human mind, other Jews took up the field of social psychology to gain maximum power; they were less interested in understanding the human mind per se than in using that understanding to gain power over the goyim.
Marx also partly discussed capitalist society and economics in terms of psychology: how modern industries have ‘alienated’ the worker from the goods he creates. But, it was the modern right which gained an advantage in the instrument/weapon of psychology as a means to power. Nietzsche may have laid the groundwork for movements along this line, but it was Mussolini and the Fascists and then Hitler and the National Socialists who understood the power of the ‘irrational’ in shaping and guiding mass behavior, something Max Weber had portended and warned about. Mussolini and especially Hitler exploited psychology in some of the most sinister ways, robbing people of their individuality and turning them into mental clones chanting the same mindless slogans at mass rallies designed to immerse the masses in a pool of intoxicated euphoria. (To be sure, Bolsheviks had developed this style even earlier, and it should be duly noted that Mussolini started out on the Left and Hitler had a great admiration for leftist uses of political demagoguery. Even so, it was Mussolini and especially Hitler who mastered the art of psycho-political manipulation, which today is practiced mostly by Hollywood and pop music industry with their brand of sleazy-narcissistic-politically-correct-pop-fascism. How ironic that Jews, who loathe Hitler and fascism, used mostly fascist iconography to elevate Obama into near-god-like cult figure. Jews are a vile, wicked, devious, and hideous bunch.)
Power-via-psychological-and-spiritual-control is essential to the preservation of Jewish power over goyim. Jews certainly learned the lessons of history. By the late 19th century and early 20th century, Jews had amassed great economic and political power in many parts of Europe, but it didn’t prove to be sufficient to prevent the rise of antisemitism. Economic and cultural power alone made Jews the objects of envy and resentment on the part of goyim. After all, the tiny Chinese minority owns much of the economy of Indonesia(and rest of Southeast Asia), but that doesn’t guarantee protection from periodic outbreaks of vicious anti-Chinese violence among the Indonesia masses. Political power too isn’t a sure thing since politicians generally are not respected nor trusted, and political fortunes change all the time. If Jews back one bunch of politicians, they can still lose elections; and if Jews support too many politicians, the goyim will say, ‘Jews control the government’. Many French were openly and lividly anti-Jewish when Leon Blum the Jew ran France in the 1930s. Therefore, in order for Jews to have REAL power, they must own the hearts, minds, and souls of goyim. Prior to WWII, the main spirituality for most white goyim was Christianity, which had a long history of ‘antisemitism’ originating from the notion of Jews-as-Christ-killer and Jews-as-money-lender. And in the first half of the 20th century, Jews hadn’t yet had the opportunity to employ their instrument of psychological warfare on the goy masses to the fullest--though Hollywood and Jewish-controlled media in America were already laying down the groundwork. It was after WWII that Jews gained great power and influence to replace Christianity with Holocaustianity(as the main faith for goyim, with SCHINDLER’S LIST as the new religious movie) and to use education, entertainment, and media to mold the goy mind into little more than putty in the dirty and devious hand of the Jew. Of course, Jews were blessed with this golden opportunity because the German masses had been dumb enough to offer their souls and destiny to a gang of psychopaths led by Hitler, but it must be said that Jews squeezed their newfound opportunity for all it was worth and then some. Though only a retard would deny the tragic horror of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust(or the great evil of Nazism), it’s equally true than only an idiot would deny that Jews have exploited the Holocaust in the most shameless and wicked ways to maximize their own power and to wreak genocidal--or at least genecidal(genetic muddying)--vengeance on ALL the white race.
Anyway, what is Kathy’s ‘individual’ path toward her destruction? She can apply for the position of ‘carer’, something like a nursing home assistant. If accepted, she can put on hold the process of donating her organs. Thus, the system lends itself a certain flexibility and ‘human face’. It’s like limited privileges were allowed under communism to create the illusion of personal choice and freedom. And under slavery, not all slaves were the same. Some enjoyed relative freedom and could, for a time, even lead what seemed like normal lives. Even an evil or unjust order has its human sides.
Of course, one could argue that humaneness in a fundamental inhuman system makes the system even more insidious for creating the false impression that “it’s not so bad.” That was precisely the point of Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, which unlike Orwell’s 1984, didn’t seem so bad at all. Most people seemed young, healthy, well-adjusted, and happy. But was anyone in that system truly a free individual? Could the concept of individual freedom even exist in such a system? Wasn’t everyone, high and low, essentially a laboratory rat, albeit a well-fed and content one, in a rigged maze that provides only an illusion of choice?
Consider a liberal Jew like Cass Sunstein, who’s very much like the elite social engineers of BRAVE NEW WORLD. Dumb conservatives think rich Jews are undermining their own interests by supporting ‘big government’ which supposedly taxes the rich and successful(Jews) to provide freebies to the dumb and lazy, but conservatives are missing the larger picture. While it’s true that big government does disproportionately tax the rich--and the majority of Jews are rich--, it’s also true that big government can be rigged by globalist crony-capitalist Jews to favor them over all else. If one needs any proof, just consider how Wall Street Jews fleeced the entire country via ‘bailouts’ under the ‘socialist’ Obama. Also, even if Jews were to pay higher taxes, the fact remains that the globalist system fills their coffers with more wealth than earlier generations could have imagined. And Jews believe that paying higher taxes is worth the price of gaining greater political power and using the government--in tandem with the mass media--to socially engineer the goy masses into dumb lab rats following the Jewish Pied Piper. (That said, of course it’s more than true that people can be very stupid, ignorant, and retarded without Jewish influence. Nazism was a Germany goy sickness. The idiot Japanese who invaded China proper and attacked Pearl Harbor were idiots of their own making. And the Muslim world is one stupid place filled with morons and retards. And it wasn’t Jews who filled the Christian Right with the idiot notion of Pro-Life-ism and Creationism. And the cult of Holocaust Denial and Neo-Nazism among certain elements of the White Right prove that sheer idiocy is all too common among some white people. )
Anyway, Kathy may be duped into believing that the system isn’t really unjust because, instead of ‘forcing’ her, it allows her to ‘take her time’ and offers her ‘choices’--limited and unsure though they may be--before accepting her fate. She may even feel a degree of gratitude for her furlough from certain death. Besides, in the role of ‘carer’, she would have spent time with sick people in need of organ transplants; as a result, she might feel a greater sense of duty, perhaps missionary in nature, toward the larger community of ‘normal people’. (This is where selflessness can also be an evil.)
Whatever Ishiguro’s political views, NLMG could serve as a critique of the modern welfare state as well as well a fantasy satire on medical ‘fascism’. In some ways, the world of NLMG might be described as a kind of ‘liberal fascism’, a statist hell with a human face and conceit of personal freedom. In a way, one could say the clonors are, to borrow a concept from Cass Sunstein, ‘nudged’(than outright coerced) to their social ‘duty’.
NLMG is partly a critique of selflessness, not necessarily in the sense that selflessness is wrong per se, but that it can be manipulated and exploited by a selfish system to its own ends. There was some of this in Frank Capra’s MEET JOHN DOE, which is much darker than most people give it credit. The movie suggests that the dark side of populism--goodwill, unity, faith, trust, and innocence--lies in the way it can be appropriated and controlled by the powers-that-be or by powers-that-wanna-be. This is as true of secular orders as with religious orders. By nature, people are both skeptical and faithful. It’s natural for us not to trust strangers, but it’s also natural for us to want to trust. Distrust may save our butts from charlatans and frauds, but it also fills us with anxiety, responsibility, and alienation; and indeed, a society that is excessively distrustful can end up dysfunctional, like Southern Italy or Greece. A culture of trust allows for greater unity, cooperation, mutual aid, and goodwill. But blind trust can be exploited by the likes of Jim Jones, Lenin or Stalin, Mussolini or Hitler, Neocons, or Liberal Zionists(the puppetmasters behind Obama). The sickening sight of all those conservative dummies willfully fooling themselves that Sarah Palin is an ‘intelligent’ woman or all those liberal dummies fainting all over the place in the presence of Obamessiah should warn us of the dangers of trust when it turns into a cult of blind faith.
The clonor kids in NLMG were raised in the spirit of trust and selfless service to society. With those two principles as the core premise of their being, their individualities cannot blossom even when they are placed in an environment of relative freedom. Trust and service are their spiritual core, and so they are afraid to demand what is ‘rightfully theirs’. Their very essence has been defined and determined in relation to rest of society. But what makes it even more perverse is the sense that, even though(or especially because) they are living/dying for others, they are better than others because of their selflessness in living/dying for others. They can claim a kind of moral pride through their social shame. Having been physically cloned from ‘dregs of society’, they can spiritually rise(at least in their own minds)above others by making the ultimate sacrifice. It is a form of secular spiritualism institutionalized and imprinted into the hearts and minds of the clonors. So, what they believe to be their ‘redemption’ isn’t really theirs at all.
Gaining a slice of superiority through perfection of inferiority is very Japanese. Even a low samurai, by giving his life for some principle or code, enters the samurai heaven of ultimate honor, something unavailable to a powerful highborn samurai who lives a long healthy wealthy life. (In Kurosawa’s BAD SLEEP WELL, rich executives cynically manipulate their underlings to take the blame for graft and commit honorable sacrifice--suicide by jumping off buildings--to save the face of the company. Little do the underlings understand that the rich guys are utterly cynical in their psychological manipulations and appeal to honor and sacrifice.)
As noted by social scholars, altruism is also a kind of self-serving reward. If the clonors can be made to feel ‘special’ in their altruistic act, they may not only feel socially redeemed--from their ‘trashy’ origins--but even ‘spiritually’ superior. After all, why did some missionaries choose almost certain-death in the jungles of Africa or xenophobic China of the late 19th century? Because of the conceit of spiritual superiority by serving humanity in the name of God.
Human psychology is such that even a repressed or banned idea or emotion has a way of being remolded and resurfaced as something else. Liberals and leftists claim to oppose and combat hatred, but hate is a natural emotion that cannot be eradicated. Liberals and leftists have simply remolded the terminology and discourse to sanitize their hate into ‘progressive’ passion when in fact, they’ve erected a new ‘us vs them’ dichotomy to justify their emotional need to hate and vilify others. To an extent, the zealousness of liberal sympathy with the gay agenda has to do with the leftist need to fight new battles in order to feel better than everyone else. Since the era of Civil Rights is long past--and black problems seem to be stuck in a rut--, the new great hope of liberal sanctimony, supremacism, and hatred is supporting the gay agenda. Why else would something as idiotic and nonsensical as ‘gay marriage’ have become so central to our national debate? It’s largely because liberals, having run out of causes, need to cling to something fresh and new to feel better than everyone else. (And if ‘gay marriage’ one day becomes law and even idiot conservatives climb onboard, liberals will find some other idiocy as the ‘great struggle between good and evil in our age’.)
Even without the elaborate psychological dynamics, there is simply the power of behavioral conditioning that is crudely effective and generally reliable. Consider the movie VIVA ZAPATA where Mexican peasants humbly request help from an official. They’ve been raised to be meek and passive, and when the official says he’ll look into the matter, the peasants are grateful simply for the fact that their voices were heard by someone of authority. It’s Marlon Brando as Zapata, the rare maverick Mexican, who stands his ground and says peasants need food, not promises.
Though NLMG is unsuccessful and unsatisfying as satire(or as tragedy), it does expose certain deceptive truths about our world, and this is something we need to recognize to understand and counter the power of the Jews. Jews learned from the communist experiment that outright oppression and coercion, ruthlessly effective they may be in the short run, generally don’t have a long-lasting impact, at least not in the modern world of hedonistic consumerism addicted to ever newer stuff. In the end, Orwell’s nightmare vision was not realized. Naked oppression and injustice--even in the name of Justice or Brotherhood of Man--simply cannot be hidden from view, and it’s only a matter of time before people see it for what it is--and even grow bored and tired(with the same old same old; though much of our pop culture is recycled trash, it is branded as something new and fresh, and suckers fall for it all the time--especially young people since our society/culture is so amnesiac and has no memory of the past). Even though there was little in the way of open rebellion in most communist nations, most people came to see the system for what it was. For oppression and injustice to have a long shelf-life, they have to be subtly and psycho-socially embedded in the fabric of daily life that outwardly seems free, normal, and plentiful. If the state had tried to cram ‘gay marriage’ down our throats and up our asses 20 yrs ago, we would have seen it for what it was. Instead, the gay agenda was disseminated--via Cultural Hegemony strategy--through entertainment, educational subjects, ‘tolerance’, ‘sensitivity’, ‘equality’, etc. In time, it became ‘cool’, ‘hip’, ‘progressive’, ‘decent’, and ‘empathetic’ to be for the gay agenda. Instead of trying to impose ‘gay marriage’ from the top, the devious Jews and ridiculous liberals who control the media and a host of cultural institutions disseminated the gay agenda through movies, music, tv shows, books, fashion, etc. As a result, it created the illusion that the government is moving toward ‘gay marriage’ as a result of natural and inevitable social/popular demands when, in fact, many people(especially the gullible young)were made to think and feel that way by the cultural images and ‘intellectual’ ideas all over the media and schools(and even in churches and other ‘spiritual’ networks).
The human-face-ification of evil makes evil far more insidious. Though THE EXORCIST is the better movie, OMEN II is the more interesting work. Evil in THE EXORCIST is obvious: it turns a young girl into a monster that talks like 50 cents and vomits oatmeal. It looks, sounds, and smells like Ewwww-vil. If evil always showed itself in this form, we’d spot it through sight, smell, and/or hearing from a mile away.
The more insidious form of evil sneaks up on us almost unnoticeably--indeed even to the one who happens to be evil; notice that Damien in OMEN II only gradually discovers his true destiny. Since Damien seems like a nice bright kid from a respectable family, people are easily blind to the evil lurking in his heart. Of course, to an extent, OMEN II is a Jewish warning about the evil at the core of the Wasp/Christian elite, the basic conceit being that the Satan has, in effect, infiltrated the core of the Christian Order--the Church of Christ is really the den of Satan. And it’s amusing that Damien looks like the young Hitler. OMEN II warns us not to judge a book by its cover--Wasp power may look decent, proper, and respectable, but it’s really been taken over by demonic forces.
But, this notion can apply just as easily to Jewish power. Though Jews make themselves out to be Holocaust-surviving saints and noble heroes of ‘social justice’, many Jews are really a bunch of devious, arrogant, power-hungry, and murderous bloodsuckers who feel contempt for goyim. Israel, the nation Christian Fundies love so much, is one of the global centers of white slavery whereby Eastern European women are forced to work as prostitutes under brutal Jewish pimps who sell their fleshly commodities to cretinous Jewish, Arab, Asian, and Negro men. To be sure, the human-face-ification of evil is a universal problem. Indeed, we often forget or ignore a problem if it has been humane-ized. For example, consider the number of dogs and cats that are killed because their owners abandoned them. Because ‘anti-cruelty’ societies ‘humanely’ employ euthanasia to destroy those poor creatures, we look the other way. This is not a condemnation of anti-cruelty societies which are indeed run by decent people and which do in fact provide an invaluable service to society; and it is indeed relatively humane to kill stray animals painlessly than have them die in the streets. But ‘humane’ destruction of animals makes us sleep better and forget about the problem. Indeed, how often have we heard the argument that slaughtering and eating animals is okay as long as they’ve been treated ‘humanely’. As a meat-eater myself, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with the argument but pointing out that it also serves as a moral copout on our part. Since we can rest assured that a cow is being ‘humanely’ smashed in the skull before being turned into hamburger meat, we think it’s all okay.
Suppose Asian nations that eat dogs and cats devise and enforce ‘humane’ ways of raising and killing those animals. Would that be okay? In a way, it would be better than torturing those animals. But it could also be worse by pretending to ‘humane-ize’ what is evil in and of itself--the killing of dogs and cats for food--and lend the false impression of progress.
The clonors in NLMG can be said to be treated humanely. Their housing, food, personal freedom, and other amenities are more than adequate. They are given time to think and even express themselves. They are not brazenly exploited like the psychics in MINORITY REPORT. But it could be this very ‘humaneness’ that blinds society-as-a-whole to the fundamental injustice of what’s happening. (If the Nazis had any brains, they would have devised a more ‘humane’ way to deal with the Jewish Problem, like separating Jewish men from Jewish women and treating both groups rather well... until they died without producing offsprings. In this regard, American whites were more clever with Chinese-Americans, most of whom were male in the early part of the 20th century. Since white Americans feared the demographic rise of ‘chinks’, they made it nearly impossible for Chinese males in America to bring Chinese females for marriage. Though some Chinese males married white women--really ugly kind who couldn’t find white hubbies--, most of them found no wives and couldn’t have any kids. Though there was no attempt to physically exterminate the Chinese-American population, the end result would have been the same. So, you see, the humane-izaiton of ‘evil’ or ‘injustice’ is far more insidiously effective.)
Why are we blind to the ugly fact that the ‘trash’ elements recruited into the US military are essentially used as disposable cannon fodder for the globalist Jewish cabal? It’s because today’s soldiers are provided with all sorts of benefits, gourmet food, and even free plastic surgery(and because we pretend that they are heroes honorably serving and defending this country--when they generally fight wars overseas to further the Zionist agenda)? The mushy myth about ‘dying for my country’ and the material math of generous benefits make us forget that they are toy soldiers for the Jewish-controlled government. Indeed, we sleep sounder because we feel that ‘our men and women’ are being amply rewarded for their ‘noble sacrifice’.
This isn’t to imply that the concept of service to one’s nation is of bogus value nor that soldiers shouldn’t be compensated for their service to their country. In a perfect world, honor and service are indeed virtues. But the America of today is a Jewish-Cabal-controlled state whose vile modus operandi forces honest people to invoke Blood Libel. We are donating our hearts, mind, bodies, and souls to the vile, vicious, hideous, and heinous Jews--or at least 90% of them, it would be mindlessly antisemitic to accuse ALL Jews of wickedness. Not all Jews are vile and vicious like Frank Rich and Tim Wise; only most of them. .
If the Jewish-controlled US government brazenly recruited goyim to fight Wars for Israel, the truth would be out in the open, as light as day. It is because Jewish power is so insidiously cunning and psychologically manipulative that most Americans still believe in the myth of free and independent-minded goyim volunteering to ‘defend their country’ from Islamic Terrorists who are supposedly hatching evil plots to wipe out all Jews, every single one of whom is an innocent saint. Jews gay-ize the US military, but then make US soldiers sacrifice their life and limb to die for Jewish interests. Jews must be cracking up at dumb goyim.
Both NLMG and Jewish-controlled America would not be possible without their roots in Christian theology, concepts, and values. In a way, one could argue that the world of NLMG and present America is one where sinister elites have reprogrammed Christian mentality to serve non-Christian purposes(though, to be sure, the whole history of Christianity was a case of elites manipulating the symbols of Christianity to their own ends; if the modern secular world has no use for blatant Christian symbolism, it still heavily relies on and tinkers with the mentality of Christianity.) Jews have essentially displaced God with Michael King(aka Martin Luther King) and Morgan Freeman; Jews have displaced Jesus with Che Guevara and Barack Obama. Jews may feel hostile toward Christianity, the great nemesis of Judaism through the millennia, but Jews also know that the Christian mindset--with its emphasis on selflessness, service to humanity, tolerance, shame, and guilt, guilt, guilt, etc--can be tweaked to their own ends. It’s like in TERMINATOR 2, the killer robot is reprogrammed to serve humans against the machines. Jews psychologically studied and learned to reconfigure the goy Christian mindset. If traditional Christian mentality felt proud and confident in having the Son of God--and thus God--on its side, the new Christian mentality--reprogrammed by Jews--is heavy on guilt, guilt, and more guilt in regards to what the European-Christian order did to poor saintly Jews, Negroes, Indians, Muslims, gays, etc. Like the Scanners in the David Cronenberg’s eponymous movie, Jews now have a kind of psychic power to make Christian whites do harm to themselves.
Jews have even reprogrammed Aryanism, what with the new THOR movie having some Negro Norse god. And Arnold Schwarzenegger came to play a bunch of ‘good Aryan’ roles where his characters took orders from geeks, as in TERMINATOR 2 and 3. The stupid idiot even accepted a role of a pregnant man. He was pussified by Jewish Hollywood. (Imagine John Wayne or Lee Marvin doing that! How times have changed.)
The world of NLMG may be post-Christian, but it is steeped in a kind of neo-Christian-ism all the same. After all, Jesus was an organ donor of sorts too, except He donated His ENTIRE body to the idea of saving humanity. And in Catholicism, there’s the ritual of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. If traditional Christianity(especially Catholicism) is the materialization of spirituality, the neo-Christian-ism of the world in NLMG is a spiritualization of materiality. If Christianity is a spiritual narrative/concept that has been made manifest in our world through books, churches, songs, rituals, symbols--crucifixes, necklaces, dresses, etc,--then the medical scientism of NLMG spiritualizes the physical removal of organs from clonors’ bodies. Indeed, it is made bearable for the clonors--and acceptable for the rest of society--because the sense of redemption, sacrifice, and do-goodery at the core of the practice. Instead of ‘bloody murder’, it’s been turned into something that might be called ‘affirmative donation’. (Incidentally, there was a scandal not long ago about Jewish rabbis working in cahoots with Israeli medical-industrial thugs to harvest the organs of goyim to save the lives of Jews. For most Jews, a single Jewish life is infinitely more valuable than the lives of millions of goyim. For some Jews, even Jewish Ideas are more valuable than goy lives. How often have we heard Jews make apologies or excuses for communism on the basis that it was supposed to have been good for mankind? When Jews mourn the history of communism, they feel sorry for the failure/death of the grand idea than for the deaths of tens of millions of non-Jews.)
Nazis, though sharing the hostility toward Christianity, found it useful as did the Jews--albeit for different reasons and agendas--and sought to exploit elements of Christian mentality to promote a form of radical neo-paganism. If Jews learned to bait-and-switch the object of the Christian guilt-complex, the Nazis valued the culture of blind faith, discipline, and hierarchy in the Catholic tradition.
One of the most interesting ideas in NLMG is the uses of ‘displacement’ as a social control mechanism. Clonors--at least those at Hailsham--are made to feel ‘special’, but this also makes them feel as outsiders, outcasts, aliens, or foreigners in their own nation. But they are not true outcasts or foreigners like gypsies or Jews since they were created by mainstream society for a specific purpose. Their outcastness is synthetic and manufactured than organic and historical. Feeling as outcasts and aliens, they have a desire(even desperation) to fit in and belong. Since they are clonor ‘trash’, there really is no place for them in society. Ultimately, they can only fit in by serving society in the manner that they were designed to.
There may be an element of immigration narrative here, for immigrants in a new country feel displaced and desperately desire to fit in and be accepted--sometimes at any cost. THE GODFATHER begins with a distraught father telling a story of how he wanted his daughter to grow up as an American girl, even if that entailed hanging around waspy American boys who didn’t turn out to be very honorable.
The restaurant scene in NLMG is reminiscent of how foreigners feel in another nation where they don’t know the language, rules, menu, etc. Though clonors speak the same language as rest of society, they’ve been raised to be ‘culturally’ different. They feel uneasy and out-of-place even in an ordinary run-of-the-mill restaurant. One doesn’t need to be a foreigner or an alien to feel this way. A hayseed in a big city will feel much the same way. Or a member of a cloistered community--like that of the Amish--may also feel displaced and disoriented in an urban setting. In their timidity, the clonors seem almost like the stereotype of timid awkward Asians of whom Ishiguro may know a thing or two since he too is of Asian origin. (Japanese seem to be especially awkward outside--and even in--Japan, with their constant bowing and anal-retentive attention to form and detail. One female Japanese tourist-customer when I was working retail at Macy’s gave me a wrong credit card during the transaction, which was no big deal, but she reacted as if it was the crime of the century requiring absolute apologetic debasement on her part. She must have apologized about ten times.) In Europe, immigrant-workers have been allowed since the 1950s to do the ‘dirty work’ that white natives didn’t want to do--because they could find better jobs or live on welfare as native-born citizens. Many of these foreigners, after centuries of Western imperialist domination in their own lands, came to be employed--in some cases, even exploited--as the servant class in new Europe. From this angle, NLMG might have had greater satirical currency as a film of the 50s or 60s. Today, it’s the native Europeans who face the threat of becoming the slave population of the New World Order dominated by Jewish elites and over-populated with Negroes, Muslims, Illegals, and immigrant hordes from non-white countries.
The strange thing about the clonors’ upbringing is the way they’re made to feel behind-the-times and out-of-tune with the latest trends and fashions. In any school, a kid who comes dressed in out-of-fashion clothes is often mocked or belittled. For kids who’ve been raised to fit in, it’s painful to realize that they don’t fit in. Clonor kids are raised to conform very much to their school environment. Belonging to an order is what gives them meaning. But the order in which they are raised is artificially different than the world around them. Though the story begins in 1978, Hailsham academy(or whatever it’s called)could be a boarding school in early part of the 20th century. And the kids have been raised to speak proper English and have fine proper manners. The irony is that these cultural hallmarks of good upbringing--the sort of thing that leads to great expectations from life--are really a preparation to turn the kids into a subcaste of organ donors. The kids are cultivated and civilized into a kind of slavery; their archaic cultivation is out of tune with what seems like a modern society where cultural trends change all the time.
(In the film AN EDUCATION, a Jewish playboy makes a well-mannered English girl, who studies hard to be accepted into Oxford, feel out of place in the new happening world of Jazz clubs, fancy wine, and hip foreign films. She’s so desperate to belong to this cool world that she ruins her chances of attending Oxford. Incidentally, the actress is the one who played Kathy in NLMG. Some say she’s good-looking, but she strikes me as Fatty Arbuckle after a sex change operation and a crash diet.) In one way, this could be a criticism leveled at the entire history of civilization. After all, the samurai caste was educated, elevated, and cultivated to serve as obedient slave-warriors of their lords. And it’s true enough that we train dogs--teach them to be brighter, more skilled, and astute--only to make them more easy to control. Cultivate to control. And notice that Obama, as a Harvard boy, is ever more useful to Jews than some loud brash wildass Negro. Paradoxically, Obama, by becoming the ‘most powerful man in the world’, also became the biggest ‘house nigger’ puppet of the global Jew elites.
Though the modern ideal is cultivation-to-create-free-thinking-and-independent-individuals, the traditional ideal(especially in the non-West) was cultivation-to-create-more-correct-tame-and-obedient-individuals. Great Britain has been a strange civilization for it was both the great innovator of personal liberty/individuality and the great bastion of class, privilege, hierarchy. Since the 60s, not least due to the influence of American pop music, Brits have made an intense effort to be more demotic and egalitarian, but old mentalities die hard. The New Order has its own politically correct orthodoxies, do’s and don’ts, taboos, the high-and-mighty and low-and-dirty.
Anyway, if one knew nothing of the story of NLMG, one might assume, based on the opening scene, that Hailsham is an idyllic setting for lucky children. But gradually, we learn that this privileged environment is a second-hand environment. It’s not only behind-the-times, but its students are provided with donated cast-out toys, trinkets, and even junk from mainstream society. Moreover, this cultural junk has obviously been filtered of any subversive material, like rock music or etc. If the world of FAHRENHEIT 451 bans anything of higher cultural value, the world of Hailsham bans things of vulgar nature. Even the toys are old-fashioned, and the few pop musical items tapes of old-fashioned songs like ‘Never Let Me Go’. So, the kids at Hailsham are living in a second-hand time. Despite or precisely because of their proper diction, range of interests, manners, and mentality, they are hopelessly behind-the-times and second-hand/second-rate. This phenomenon can be found with the British Royalty itself. Though I haven’t seen THE QUEEN, I got the sense--from a few clips and the reviews--that Queen Elizabeth comes to realize how behind-the-times and out-of-touch she is in relation to rest of England. The superstar royalty of New England is Princess Diana--despite the divorce, exile, trashy behavior, and ridiculous death. She is the great heroine of the people, the great darling of the elites. The queen herself is seen as old-fashioned and second-rate. The message of the movie seems to be the queen must sacrifice her sense of pride for the good of new and improved England. In a world of celebrity than royalty, the queen is no longer the whale of the sea but a fish out of water. Similarly, the psychological manipulation of clonors is made easier by the fact that they’re raised in a cloistered world. A blend of social elevation and slavery may be more effective than slavery itself, just like ‘house niggers’ were easier to control than ‘field niggers’. And the Ottoman Turks enslaved Christian boys and elevated them into ‘special’ Janissaries. The aspect of selective elevation justified, compensated for, and/or made one overlook the fact of slavery. And under the old British Imperialist system, certain members of the indigenous elites were elevated(and even educated in Britain)to turn them into more useful puppets of imperial domination. And in a way, it could be said that the Allies made it bearable for Japanese and Germans to lose their political freedom/independence--they are still political whores of America--by sweetening their political slavery with economic success.
Though I wasn’t quite sold on the concept of Hailsham, it was still welcome as a kind of anti-Harry-Potter, surely the most shameless, trashy, mindless, and offensive cultural phenomenon in recent yrs.
In one sense, the clonors may accept their purpose/duty in life because they never would have existed without it. After all, clonors were created by the medical-industrial state for a specific purpose. Without that purpose--ghastly though it may be--, they never would have been given life in the first place. If we didn’t eat beef, millions of cows would never have come into existence. We breed them--give them life--because we want to eat them. Vegetarians may object to the practice of killing and eating cows, but if we followed their creed, most cows wouldn’t even exist in the first place. Meat-eaters may be immoral, but it’s precisely their taste for beef that makes possible the millions of cows alive in America.
Similarly, clonors were given life for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Without that purpose, they never would have existed in the first place. We exist because our parents wanted to have kids. Clonors, on the other hand, are not the product of parental wishes or designs. There’s only one reason they exist, which is for them to grow up and ‘donate’ their organs. So, however immoral the system may be, it does give life to a caste of people who otherwise would never have existed. If society were to terminate the clonor program as immoral and cruel, then it would also be exterminating the entire caste of clonors; it would be a kind of clonocide.
In Christian lore, Jesus is agonized by the fact that His purpose in this world to die for the salvation of humanity. His Father created Him for that purpose, and indeed, it could be argued that Jesus was a kind of clone of God(since Joseph was not His real father and since God only borrowed Virgin Mary’s womb to begat the Child). The Christian myth has God in effect cloning Himself so that the copy(aka ‘His Son’) could be sacrificed for the good of humanity(and also to redeem His own name, given He hasn’t been very perfect on the basis of the evidence found in the Old Testament). This aspect of Christianity could account for NLMG’s having the ascetic quality of films by European auteurs steeped in spiritual matters--Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Carl Dreyer, and Eric Rohmer especially; and also, Ingmar Bergman and Antonioni who, though personally non-religious, grappled with the death of God in the modern world.
But, like the bogus ‘art films’ of Woody Allen of the late 70s to the early 90s, NLMG is a pastiche of copped styles, tropes, and mannerisms than a vision owned by Romanek.
NLMG also seems to borrow some elements from John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS but fails for same reason: an all-too earnest realism that, half the time, buries the irony but, in the other half, blares it out. There’s also something bordering on what might be called ‘ironoia’--paranoia of irony--, for which Ishiguro may deserve more blame than Romanek. We get an inkling that Ishiguro is so keen to find irony in every nook and cranny in the world he created that everything is calibrated to reveal yet another hidden secret, social or psychological. It’s too bad that neither Ishiguro nor Romanek have the sense of imaginative boldness and perversity of Kafka, Orwell, Cronenberg, Kubrick, Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess, Kaufman(BEING JOHN MALKOVICH), or Mamet to pull it off and really affect us. The best films of Cronenberg probe and penetrate, psychically and physically. Ishiguro, perhaps owing to his Japanese origins, treads more delicately. Perhaps, his novel works as a kind of shadow play of the soul, but the film, what with the dead weight of its earnest realism, is mostly dull and boring. There has long been a school of Japanese aesthetics, perhaps originating in the Heian period(which produced THE TALE OF GENJI, where lovers exchange signals and fragrances behind closed screens), reliant on silences, nuance, suggestion, and refinement than forthright expression; and Ishiguro’s literature could be an heir to this tradition crossbred with the English novel of manners. On the other hands, it’s hazardous to stereotype cultures and artists in this manner since, for example, the creative partnership of Kobo Abe and Hiroshi Teshigahara--especially with WOMAN IN THE DUNES and FACE OF ANOTHER--produced some of most strikingly strange works in film history.
Though NLMG is not exactly a film for the masses, it may have some appeal to the SWPL community. In our ‘progressive’ age of ‘victimhood’, we all want to feel as victims(whether we are actual victims or not). Jews, for example, are the richest and most powerful people in the world, but even snot-nosed and spoiled Jewish kids who grew up in America with all the wealth and privilege put on the oh-look-at-me-I-am-a-poor-helpless-Jew act. And though Negroes are running around robbing, raping, murdering, and having all kinds of fun by driving white folks crazy, they still be acting like they be ‘victims’ and shit. But European Christians enjoyed this shtick for millennia too. Though the Christian West became powerful and dominant throughout the world, white Christians embraced and regurgitated the victim-myth about all those poor hapless Christians fed to lions by Romans or eaten by savages in some Polynesian island.
Given that the current political correctness is all about ‘who, whom’, certain groups get more mileage out of victimology while some groups--especially straight-gentile-white-males(SGWM)--get all the blame. Then, NLMG may provide the same kind of appeal as M. Night Shymalan’s THE VILLAGE. Since all the tragic victims are white, SWPL crowd can identify and emote with the clonors. They can make believe that they too are victims of some ‘evil fascist’ system. In some ways, NLMG is PASSION OF THE CHRIST for white liberals.
But the more I think about it, NLMG’s basic narrative and premise can be found in a TOM & JERRY cartoon where a newly hatched duckling mistakes Tom for its ‘mama’. Tom tries to cook the silly little thing which thinks Tom is being loving and affectionate. (Of course, Jerry does his best to save the duckling.) At the end, the duckling discovers that Tom is a cat who’s been treating it nice only to prepare it for lunch. But the duckling got emotionally so attached to Tom(as ‘mommy’) that it chooses to die and serve as Tom’s meal. It being a kiddie cartoon, Tom is deeply moved and spares the duckling, but no such luck for the clonors in NLMG. Personally, my request is Never Let Me See Another Film by Romanek.
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