6,560 words
Green Lantern
(2011); 114 min.
Director: Martin Campbell
Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern; Mark Strong as Sinestro; Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond
“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight,
Let those who worship evil’s might,
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.”
“I pledge allegiance to a lantern, given to me by a dying purple alien.” — Hal Jordan
Unlike the members of certain perpetually pissed-off racial or ethnic groups, I’ve never been one to whine for reparations on account of being born and raised in the industrial heartland of the USA. Just as iconic Western bad guy Lee Van Cleef observed that “being born with a beady-eyed sneer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” so I have felt that my upbringing in post-War Detroit has endowed me with innumerable — well, ok, lots of — advantages, at least as cultural critic.
This was not, of course, today’s Detroit, the world capital of Don’t Let This Happen to You, the national punch line and object of ironic hipster “ruin porn.”[1]
No, this Detroit was the 4th largest city in America, an industrial powerhouse long before the automobile, a city whose Art Deco beauty led to its designation — un-ironic! — as “The Paris of the Midwest”; and once Henry Ford had established the highest wages in the industrial world — 10 times the average! — it was simply the best place in the world for a working man like my father to live — and he didn’t even work for the auto companies!
Thanks to the unions, the working man didn’t need the government at all — which in America is quite a good thing. No, we had something better — cash money. We didn’t need Obamacare — the unions provided free healthcare, vision and dental included. For everything else there was cash — when my father retired to live the good life in the suburbs, he didn’t need the FHA to buy a house; he didn’t even need GM or Ford for an auto loan; he paid for everything in cash. Cash!
I had to laugh when, in Goodfellas, Henry Hill explains to his date that he has so much money and pull, despite being a construction worker, because he’s actually “a union delegate.” That was my father — as a union delegate, we routinely vacationed in Nassau, just like James Bond! Except in Detroit, working people didn’t need some dirty foreign criminal gang, we had real jobs![2]
Don’t believe me? Well, consider tribesman James Kunstler, in his 1993 Geography of Nowhere — the 20th anniversary edition of which is now available as a $3.99 kindle:
The amount of wealth generated by the car business was stupendous. It flowed to Detroit from all the corners of America. And it showed in the broad boulevards [Paris of the Midwest!] of big, impressive Tudor-style houses, or Mediterranean-style villas with three-car garages . . . Until the 1967 riot, suburbanites still ventured downtown to enjoy the city’s glittering attractions. They saw Broadway-bound musicals at the Fisher Theatre, dined at the London Chop House on Congress Street, danced at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, and at Christmas time they dutifully flocked to Hudson’s, a department store so colossal and posh it made Bloomingdale’s look like a five-and-dime [Loc 3117-20].[3]
The tribe’s own Bloomingdales, outshone! And the hotels of Detroit! In North by Northwest, Hitchcock establishes “George Kaplan” as pre-Bond spy of the highest standards by having James Mason drone away at a list of his accommodations:
On August 29, George Kaplan of Boston registered at the Whittier in Dee-troit. At present, you are registered in Room 796 at the Plaza Hotel in New York as Mr. George Kaplan of Dee-troit.
Today, it sounds like an itinerary for Walter White.
Or, consider the most recent season of Mad Men, in which we see the normally alpha males of New York come crawling to the palatial setting of GM’s world headquarters — lobby adorned with mint Corvettes — to plead for a chance at the ultimate client — a car company! Finally, the Big Time! (What have we been watching the last 6 years?) Draper and Chaugh put aside a decade-long feud to merge their companies — on the spot! In a hotel bar — the Book-Cadillac? — just to be big enough for GM to notice! And once the five-seasons-long-sought Grail is achieved, we chuckle as the Real Men of Detroit toy with the prissy Mad Men — one crashes his car when he gets in a game of chicken with Chevy execs and then gets shot in the face while deer hunting, another is humiliated by crashing a test car — New Yorkers can’t even drive![4]
The point is that Detroit was a world of its own; and you, dear Counter-Currents reader, should care because then and there the tsunami of auto-money enabled White, Working Class Americans to build, for the first — and last? — time, a world of their own. The Left talks about Temporary Autonomous Zones, the Right about Whitopias; well, here’s the biggest one in history.
In particular, White Youth had the leisure and money to do whatever the fuck[5] we wanted to do; dress the way we wanted, grow our hair down to our asses,[6] listen — or rather, make — whatever music we wanted to hear, etc. Like Mad Men’s Chevy execs, we didn’t need New York or Hollywood to give us a daily agenda of consumption.
Well, I may exaggerate a tad. Nevertheless, there are vast swathes of “American Culture” that I have no memory of, that apparently impinged on my youth not at all.
Disney, for example. Supposedly, a key icon of “American” culture. Never heard of it. “Children dream of a trip to Disneyland!” What? Where? “Liberal obsession with gun control is caused by a whole generation traumatized by Bambi’s mother.” Never saw it. Remember those rifle-toting Chevy execs? Ever hear of Ted Nugent? He wasn’t the only Detroit musician to wield a firearm or two.
Rob Tyner, MC5. Photo by Leni Sinclair. Interesting hair and fashion choices too.
Speaking of music, Motown? Never heard it. That was strictly for Da Blecks. Remember, this was a Whitopia; we even had our own White Panther Party![7]
The Beatles? Hah! Maybe some girls liked them. The “epochal event” of Sgt. Pepper effectively never happened.[8] I first heard one of those “timeless classics” when George Burns sang “With a Little Help from My Friends” on the Ed Sullivan Show.
George Burns. Let that sink in. No wonder some bored Detroiter started the “Paul is dead” rumor. If we bothered to listen to British music at all, it was strictly the Rolling Stones, the Who (for years they were “only big in the Midwest” until Tommy) and, for some reason, Savoy Brown (who sounded remarkably like James Mason in dedicating an album-side-long blues jam to their fans “in Dee-troit”).
MacDonald’s? Another childhood-programming corporation I never heard of. Well, I suppose, like Motown, it must have been there, but we didn’t need their corporate crap;[9] then as now, Mickey D’s was for Da Blecks; it’s just that now, everyone’s Bleck.[10]
And so on.
The reason for this musing is not just nostalgia but to set up my statement that comic books fall into the same category. Actually, comic books weren’t that big a deal anywhere — despite Boomer and Hipster re-booting of pop culture as comic-centric. But during the few years I paid attention to them, comics were a DC joint, if only by default. I occasionally noticed a Marvel “mag” as they would say, but a quick glance revealed them to be not really the soul-feeding material I was looking for; in fact, they seemed — cover your eyes, fanboys with Stan Lee boy-crushes! — well, creepy and weird; for losers, like Disneyland or the Beatles.[11]
Today, of course, I recognize what the problem was — they were the second wave of Judaic culture, in which the mask slipped a bit and a little more of the reality was exposed, deliberately or not.[12]
Yes, of course, I know that comic books per se are a Judaic invention, but the initial, first wave — like Hollywood — was rather sedate, almost entirely Aryan in look and feel (I mean, whatever the “hidden meanings,” come on, Superman?), while Marvel gave off, quite deliberately I gather, an unmistakable whiff of the foetor judaicus.[13]
That would be all the elements the fanboys love; “conflicted” heroes, moral “ambiguity,” stopped-up kitchen sink “realism,” relentless concentration on “urban” and “only in New York, folks!” settings and “in your face” attitudes, etc. In short, what I’ve called the Cockroach Culture.[14]
At least I wasn’t scarred for life like this poor contemporary of your author:
Amazing Spider-Man #5; October 1963. My first Marvel comic ever, bought off the rack when I was six years old. This was the most totally shocking comic I had ever read! Why? As a DC Universe fan, I was shocked to see the heroes in this book constantly fighting with each other. It was so bad I wasn’t even sure who the HEROES were supposed to be.
“Heroes” constantly fighting each other? Divide and conquer bitchez!
The book’s star, Spidey, seemed to come off pretty badly almost all the time. He wasn’t famous and respected, like Superman. And the people and heroes in this book didn’t look anything like the people drawn by Curt Swan. They were all weird and . . . Spidery! I didn’t know why at the time, as a kid, but of course now we all know why: STEVE DITKO. Reading this book was like opening the door to another universe: the MARVEL Universe. I was hooked . . .
Hooked indeed! And “bought off the rack”. . . they weren’t Walt White enough to make the first one free.
With the triumph of this Judaic element in our culture, it’s no surprise that this fairly straightforward screen adaptation of the Silver Age Good Guy living in Coast City, CA, would be met with howls of execration.
For example, a blunt judgment from DVD Verdict Jury Room: “Green Lantern or Douchebag in Space“:
“Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) . . . is probably the worst superhero ever portrayed on screen.”
Or from Amazon:
[T]oday’s movie superhero fans expect a guy in a cloak that’s just like you and me without any of the world-spanning baggage. Green Lantern’s guilty of being true to Green Lantern, spandex, mask, ring and all. For those who find it implausible, maybe a superhero powered by a jade-colored light source isn’t for them.
Indeed. Just like us — a cockroach in a cloak.
Since no one saw the film, here you go, from our friends at DVD Verdict:
Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds, Buried) is a cocky test pilot with a troubled past and disdain for authority. His reckless ways in the air land him in trouble with his employers and his on-again-off-again love interest Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, The Town). That’s the least of his worries, though, after an alien spacecraft crash lands on Earth and its dying pilot, Abin Sur (Temura Morrison, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones) gives him a powerful ring and lantern, telling Hal that he is a Green Lantern.
What’s a Green Lantern? That’s what Hal learns as he’s whisked off into space, to the planet Oa, where he discovers he’s the newest member of an intergalactic peacekeeping force. There, he meets his trainers, Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech) and Kilowog (Michael Clark Duncan, Daredevil), along with the esteemed Sinestro (Mark Strong, Sherlock Holmes), who has some radical ideas about how the Green Lantern Corps is to be run.[15]
Back on Earth, quirky scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard, Orphan) becomes infected with a piece of Parallax, the alien who killed Abin Sur. Now, Hector is getting smarter, more grotesque, and more bloodthirsty. In conjunction with this, Parallax itself is headed straight for Earth. Is Hal Jordan’s will strong enough to conquer his fears, save the world, and prove himself worthy of the Green Lantern name?
I don’t have much memory of Green Lantern, and I gather the film is in fact rather unfaithful in several aspects of the Silver Age version; this Sinestro chap is actually supposed to be a super-villain, not a mentor, and GL actually becomes this Parallax guy, etc., but for the reasons already given, I never read a comic book after about age 12 and never will have the patience to work through the several decades of ret-cons and rebooting that DC has gone through in a fruitless attempt to “marvelize” itself as part of its surrender to the Cockroach Culture.[16] Let’s just take the movie as it is.
Of course, a lot of that might have been added or explained away if the movie hadn’t bombed and the producers, drunk on visions of another comic book franchise, had had the chance to produce the trilogy that seemed to be their ultimate goal. As it is, it looks like they stirred in plenty of Lord of the Rings stuff for luck. There’s the usual “humans are too dumb/primitive to help.” Oa looks like a Lovecraftian version of Rivendell, while Sinestro seemed to be doing a lot of Hugo Weaving-ing. On the other hand, he even forges another ring to supposedly fight the Bad Guy with his own Evil Power, as Gandalf advised against, though as far as I remember that subplot simply disappeared. If the Council of Elrond was the UN Security Council, the meet-up of all the alien Green Lanterns went one better in size and variety of species, sort of like the General Assembly.[17] Of course, like the UN, bigger does not mean better.[18]
But really the problem lies with the most basic decision that the producers made: imposing the same old “superhero movie” template on far more interesting material. A reviewer at Amazon is perceptive enough to deserve quoting at some length; after Hal arrives on the aforementioned Oa:
It’s at this point in the movie where I excitedly awaited for the film to really take off. Until now there had been some exciting action and nice character work. Hal had been firmly established as a screw up, adrift in life, hoping for something bigger, and now that fate has handed him the chance to join the Green Lantern Corps, he presumably has a chance to right his course in life. But in an incredibly contrived moment, he decides that he’s not up to snuff, quits the corps and returns to Earth (although, strangely enough, he is allowed to keep the ring). Instead of the epic space opera I was expecting, the filmmakers decides on something far more quotidian: a superhero movie. The rest of the film goes through the usual superhero motions . . .
Green Lantern is a decidedly schizophrenic movie. Where the first half of the film provides the perfect set up for the “hero’s journey,” a story about one character being plucked from the mundane world and lifted into an exciting realm of adventure, the second half of the film seems content on playing superhero connect the dots. . . .
Unlike Batman, Spider-Man, or even Superman, the Green Lantern Corps lends itself to interplanetary superheroics more in the vein of Star Wars and Flash Gordon than Iron Man. But this is also what makes the character exciting. Where we have seen the basic outline of a superhero movie time and again, Green Lantern offers the chance of more science fiction tropes, which could potentially differentiate him from the glut of other superhero movies. Instead of shying away from the imaginatively bizarre, the filmmakers should have embraced the alien aspects of the Green Lantern mythos. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Green Lantern is that it represents a missed opportunity. . . . Trying to make Green Lantern like Iron Man was a grievous error in judgment. I expected more from Martin Campbell.[19]
This, I think, is why the 2nd half is not only un-involving but wrong-headed. I’m no more interested in “space operatics” than “super-heroics,” but what this reviewer has tumbled on is that the basic Green Lantern story — both how an individual deals with his fate and the creation of an Order of such men — is much more than “the usual superhero motions”: an actual Traditionalist myth – or mythos, for you Lovecraftians.
While Superman just falls ass over teakettle into superpowers, and Batman struggles to become, really, just a vigilante in need of psychiatric help, the third-string player on DC’s roster is far more interesting: he is offered the chance to re-make himself, become his own creator. It is a hermetic if not heroic quest.[20]
As IronFanofSteelofThunder (sheesh!) recently noted:
The difference is this: Green Lantern is the one guy who not only had some really cool powers and adventures thrust upon him, he was required to be actively responsible as well. Superman could’ve just stayed a farmer. Batman could’ve been a normal person and gone through some therapy rather than becoming the world’s finest ninja. Billy Batson could’ve been Batman. Bilbo could’ve stayed in his hole! The difference between Green Lantern and those other guys is they didn’t really have a choice and because his power chose him in spite of him. . . . Green Lantern is kind of a loser, but can conquer his own fears. That’s what makes him a winner. Because he doesn’t really have a choice. I mean . . . he does. But does he?[21]
Well, it is hard to tell, when it’s a man and his fate. Does he choose it, or does it choose him?[22]
“The ring choses you.”[23]
He, like us, doesn’t really have a choice, if he wants to be a real man.
Jef Costello recently made use of a couple of D. H. Lawrence quotes he picked up from Derek Hawthorne, and I’ll use them here too:
“It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful” (Fantasia of the Unconscious, p. 18).
And:
“Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers” (Ibid. p. 109).
Whereas, of course, the superhero is the far more conventional figure, saving the innocent and winning the girl, living happily ever after.[24]
This dichotomy, as Lawrence postulates it, is in harmony with the division Baron Evola makes between society, the realm of women and family values, and the State, the realm of war and men.[25]
In that light, here’s IronFanofSteelofThunder‘s summary of what we’ve been calling the Green Lantern Mythos:
Fearless adrenaline junkie, Hal Jordan, suddenly has the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, the Green Lantern’s ring, forced upon him. He goes to the home planet of the Green Lantern Corps, Oa, and finds out that he is a member of an exclusive force of super space cops.
Now, that’s a movie![26]
I think in general we can say that tempting as it is to see the “superhero” genre, either as comic book or movie, as one of the last locations for manly heroism, represents a corruption — a rendering ineffective — of the Aryan Hermetic Quest; the Hero is constantly expected to put his self-actualizing on hold while saving Untermenschen and pining away for some female. Back to the campfire, in short.
OK, for now, let’s get back to Green Lantern. The basic idea, here, is that Hal Jordan is chosen by the Ring because he is without fear; actually, because his will is powerful enough to overcome his fear. The Ring then will enable him to fully exteriorize what he wills; this is his only “superpower.”[27]
The ring that gives Hal his powers, or rather, allows him to wield them, is obviously once again the Hermetic Stone. Apart from its green color, its Luciferian origin in even more obvious than in Psychomania — as the Grail was made from, or held, a green stone that had been mounted on Lucifer’s crown, or his forehead — Shiva’s Third Eye — so this ring falls from the hand of Abin Sur who literally falls from the sky — in his escape pod[28] — after being mortally wounded by Parallax. His vaguely Arabic name jibes with the Arabic origin of this tale,[29] and his Luciferian nature — bearing the Light of the Green Lantern — is rubbed in by his red color. The latter is not exactly a pigment but rather results — an odd fact we learn from the alien autopsy — from his transparent skin, which reveals his musculature. A rather odd evolutionary detour, but it reminds us of how the Realized Man literally reconstructs his body from the inside out, of new, immortal materials, through his realized Will. Not that it helps ol’ Abin Sur . . .
So man — or at least a man, Hal — receives from Lucifer — the Light Bearer — the tool with which to develop himself and, ultimately, defeat the malign Abrahamic God. That tool, symbolized by the Ring which is charged by the light from the Lamp — is simply this instruction: so strengthen your will so as to be able to create what it wills — become as God.[30]
As I noted in my review of Psychomania, this notion, though arcane and hermetic, has more than a little in common with our very familiar American school of “New Thought” or “Mind Science.”
For example, here’s Wallace D. Wattles giving away The Secret in his classic The Science of Getting Rich (an American title if ever there was one):
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought, in this Substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.[31]
The American proponents of New Thought, such as Wattles –who bore a disconcerting likeness to Percy Kilbride of “Pa Kettle” fame — took their ideas from Emerson, but Emerson was quite clear about taking HIS ideas from Hegel, Plotinus, and ultimately from both Plato and Hinduism.[32] Thus, “New Thought” was “new” only in the American, or Christianized Aryan context; it is, however banalized by New Thought[33] or Green Lantern, the transcendent and primordial Tradition.[34] As such, of course, it is also present in the Abrahamic and Christianized Aryan religion in the occluded form of “original sin” and “Luciferian pride.”[35]
What’s really missing from the film is the Green Lantern Corps; even the fanboys complained about how totally wasted the whole idea of the Corps is. It is, of course, a Männerbund or rather, its more modern equivalent — a Lodge or Order devoted to preserving Order in the universe.[36]
The Guardians of the Universe are the immortal founders and leaders of the Green Lantern Corps. Resident on Oa, they resemble a mash-up of those Star Trek aliens with the big foreheads with the creepy pulsating vein and the invaders of Mars Attacks!, although they seem to be true to the comic book original. They are ensconced atop several gigantically tall but narrow pillars, and seem pretty immobile — the heads seem to move now and then, though that could be a CGI mistake — hence the need of the Corps (though if they are masters of will . . .)[37] They are altogether reminiscent of the stones that the motorcycle gang become at the end of Psychomania, although since this is a positive version of the myth it is presumably the immobility of those who have achieved the Center rather than a punishment.
At the climax of the Oa scenes the Corp sends their ring lights skyward in unison, and the effect is reminiscent of the “Cathedral of Light” at that Nuremberg rally . . . say, wasn’t that movie called Triumph of the Will? And who else had cool rings, too?
But, as we’ve seen, just when you think it’s going to be a cool movie about Green Nazis imposing their irresistible Wills upon the universe, Hal gets homesick or something and returns to Earth, and the whole thing become just another superhero soap opera.
From IMDB:
Superman’s first appearance on Earth in the Donner version had you cheering, as Superman saves our feisty, likable damsel in distress Lois Lane, from a nasty helicopter crash, in front of a diverse social cross section of the good people of Metropolis.
Green Lantern’s first appearance on Earth leaves you cold, as he saves an already established grease ball politician, from a nasty helicopter crash, in front of a gathering of over-achievers and posh-knobs who frankly you couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about.
The script had no character development. What seemed to be a story about fear and will power turns out to be about fighting a giant tumor and a giant fart.
The villains were an insult to both the general public and comic book fans intelligence. When will writers learn that smoke doesn’t work as a villain? First they did this to Galactus in the equally bad Fantastic Four sequel and now to Parallax.
Did Peter Sarsgaard really think his character could be taken seriously? Not enough with giving one of the most dull performances of all time in the first half of the movie, after he becomes a giant tumor he decides to reach levels of overacting that made him unwatchable.
Peter Sarsgaard plays Hal’s nerdy failed romantic rival Hector Hammond (Harry Haller? Hermann Hesse? Heinrich Himmler?) as an unlikeable geek and then as essentially a giant, insane tumor.[38]
Infected by a little bit of Parallax, his color is, like Parallax, yellow; not the true yellow of the Sun, Lion, and indeed, Fearlessness, but its earthly or demonic counterfeit, the yellow of gold, money, filthy lucre. He is, in short — short! — Alberich, especially in his misshapen mutated form. It’s as if we moved from Valhalla to Nibelungland, but never find our way back.
True to form, just as Alberich “rationalizes” and regiments the Nibelung workers, so Hector devises some kind of serum which, when injected, will produce the same mutation. We see here the typical non-Aryan who thinks that elite status can be achieved by some artificial, mechanical method, without either character development or the proper racial background. “Dress British, think Yiddish” as they used to say on Wall Street.
Hector’s true status is revealed by his basic goal of stealing Hal’s gal. Although we might think of today’s peddlers of “The Secret” as Reaganite yuppies, the original New Thinkers were resolutely opposed to the Social Darwinist, Robber Barons, and Trusts of their day; several had emerged from the Social Gospel or Christian Socialist movements, though they also abjured equally crude methods such as state control or revolution.
Instead, they exhorted their readers to “rise from the competitive to the creative plane.”[39] The idea was to have the faith that one could will more, not use the will to take a limited supply from another. To think otherwise was to accept the idea — what we or the Gnostics would recognize as essentially Judaic — that “God has finished his work.”[40] Wallace’s phrase irresistibly brings to mind the Biblical creation story, in which Creation is finished and Man is tasked to sweep up occasionally. But then something green appears . . .
Hal is thus able to trick the unfit Hector at the climax by offering him the ring (sound familiar?) — Hector thinks he can just take it and redouble his power, but as we know, “The ring chooses you,” Hector’s powers rebound against him and destroy him — just as happens to someone who attempts initiation without the proper qualifications and predisposition.
Speaking of race — although the movie starts on the right, White note by making Hal a test pilot (a notably White occupation), the later Earth scenes work in all the usual anti-White tropes, from the evil blond Senator/father to the black female scientist; in the climax, Hal needs to rescue both her and a generic sassy black female character; in a more Traditional film, their predicaments would have been played for laughs.[41]
Apart from the racial undertones of the climactic battle between Hal and Hector, there is one interesting scene when the evil Senator[42] mocks his son, pre-mutant Hector, as a mere thinker and praises Hal as someone who gets out there and does things. Hal, displaying Aryan modesty and loyalty to his friend, points out that what really matters is the ability to do both.
Plot-wise he’s taking his hopeless and ultimately treacherous friend’s side against his mean father; but actually, if you listen closely and think a bit, he’s enunciating a more nuanced view than either; what our culture must develop are not pale, abstract “thinkers” and rootless, cosmopolitan “critics,” nor dusky savages of mere “action” (most likely under the more or less surreptitious control of the former, of course) but men who can think and then act; the man who can realize his Will.
Now that would make a great movie! No wonder They didn’t want it made. Who has the Will to make it real?
“His actions are a reminder of why the ring chose each of us — to overcome fear, and destroy evil wherever it may hide. As Lanterns we must fight with all our will. Our wills have not always been united. It’s time they were.” — Sinestro
Notes
1. All this has been documented so well by Paul Kersey, both on his invaluable website Stuff Black People Don’t Like and in his topical collection Escape from Detroit: The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis.
2. As Senator Gearey notes in the contemporaneous with Detroit’s prime Godfather Part Two: “I don’t like your kind of people. I don’t like to see you come out to this clean country with your oily hair, dressed up in those silk suits, passing yourselves off as decent Americans. I’ll do business with you, but the fact is that I despise your masquerade, the dishonest way you pose yourself. Yourself and your whole fucking family.” Speaking of “doing business,” there was of course a certain, ah, symbiosis between the unions and the mob; see Danny DeVito’s criminally under-rated and overlooked film Hoffa, set in the Detroit of the 1930s and featuring Jack Nicholson awesome portrayal of the titular figure. Conversely, only self-justifying pity explains Nicholson’s character remarking in The Departed: “Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a job, we had the White House.”
3. See, most recently, his July 22 “Requiem for Detroit” here and his KunstlerCast #65: Virtual Tour of Detroit.
4. In 1959, retired General Motors President Harlow “Red” Curtice shot and killed retired GM Vice President, Harry Anderson, in a duck-hunting accident, according to AutoNews: “Mad Men’s Auto Characters are fiction but loosely based on reality” here.
5. “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” — Motor City 5.
6. I address these issue of hair and dress in the context of the history of Aryan youth in “Wild Boys and Hard Men” and “Fashion Tips for the Far From Fashionable Right” in my book The Homo and the Negro.
7. See Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with The MC5 and the White Panther Party by John Sinclair and Michael Simmons (2007). The faux-revolutionaries of The Big Chill give themselves away as poseurs by their cringing idolizing of Motown hits; see my review “Of Costner, Corpses and Conception” in The Homo and the Negro.
8. “To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sorbonne History and Musicology Professor Olivier Julien and MPG Books assembled a team of 11 university professors from around the world to “examin(e) the album by addressing issues that will contribute to explain its absolutely unique position in the history of recorded popular music.” The scholars were to analyze and discuss “the various aspects that make Sgt. Peppers a groundbreaking album — formal unity, cover design, lyrics, connections with psychedelia and, more generally, with the sociocultural context of the 1960s, influence of non-European music and art music, critical reception, songwriting, production (and) sound engineering.” — Amazon review of Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles (2013) which carries a kindle price-tag of $79.95!
9. “These guys are gonna BURY you with their corporate CRAAAAP” — MST3K, Episode 821, Time Chasers.
10. “McDonald’s. Black people. What a combination! Even Daniel Tosh, the popular comedian and host of one of cable’s most popular shows – Tosh.0 – pointed out the hilarity of McDonald’s 365Black campaign in his recent episode celebrating “Black History Month.” — Paul Kersey, The Return of McDonald’s 365Black! Filet-O-Fish Order Gets Violent” here.
11. And not the good kind, like Iggy Pop.
12. At the same time, a similar process, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, was unfolding amongst the American Negro, who, no longer expected to “act White” and in fact encouraged to “express himself” was embarking on the slow devolution from Cab Calloway to Fitty; and what you lookin’ at? Correspondingly, the Judaics have become yet more pushy and vulgar, a Third Wave in which schlubby George Costanza is replaced by the in-your-face Sandra Bernhard or Sarah Silverman.
13. See Jay Geller’s “(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other” in People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, who notes that Schopenhauer was “perhaps the most celebrated modern disseminator” of the notion.
14. The more anodyne way of expressing the DC/Marvel difference, is that DC is “plot driven” while Marvel is “character driven.” This is fine as far as it goes, but every Marvel “hero” is a pathetic loser; every origin story could be summarized this way: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from unruly dreams, he found himself transformed in his own bed into a monstrous cockroach.”
15. And who, in addition to playing the chrome-domed villain in every single movie — Kick Ass, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, Green Lantern, John Carter — shares the cutest little snaggle-toothed smile with your humble author.
16. Or, to some, a “rich mythology that has developed around the Emerald Knight over the course of more than seven decades.”
17. Reviewing Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008) here on Counter-Currents Ted Sallis notes “The same thing was going on at DC comics. Kaplan writes: ‘And the fact that Broome and Kane were “members of the Tribe” meant that occasional Jewish signifiers filtered into the stories . . . The intergalactic diversity of the Green Lantern Corps is a metaphor for the ethnic diversity Broome wished for all peoples.’ All peoples? Including Israel?”
18. And it could have been worse; as the aforementioned Geeks of Doom report, the original idea was a comedy starring Jack Black. “It’s indicative of Hollywood’s simmering contempt for comic book properties and sadistic desire to milk every last cent they can out of them that they were willing to transform an iconic superhero like the Green Lantern into a one-note comic buffoon in the desperate hope their devious effort would make them a profit.” For a review of the similar attempt to re-boot the Green Hornet as Seth Rosen, see my Counter-Currents review “The Green Cockroach” here.
19. Who directed the rather successful Bond re-boot, Casino Royale, which indeed is more of a “hero’s quest” showing how Bond becomes Bond rather than super-agent heroics.
20. See my “Evola on Wheels: Psychomania as Hermetic Initiation,” here.
21. “What Makes Green Lantern Great: A comparison with Lord of the Rings, Batman, CAPTAIN MARVEL, and Superman” by IronFanofSteelofThunder; September 10, 2013.
22. Evola discusses the various theories of pre-natal choice, and their implications, in the discussion of suicide in Ride the Tiger.
23. Despite several repetitions in appropriately awed tones, I never shook off the feeling that his was from a Yaakov Smirnoff routine: “In America, you choose ring; in Soviet Union, ring chooses you!”
24. Of course, Christopher Nolan’s Batman series has succeeded, by choice or not, in highlighting hermetic and Traditionalist elements, even questioning the validity of the whole “saving Gotham” motive.
25. See his Men Among the Ruins.
26. Paris: “Wealthy, good-looking hedonistic heir to billion dollar multi-national media conglomerate moves to London and spends nights pining away for his college girlfriend — who’s watching that movie?” The Gilmore Girls, “The Long Morrow.”
27. We see a similar set-up in the equally White movie Dune, where Paul Atreides shows his chosen-ness by conquering fear, although this is only a prelude to his actually transformation through the spice. There’s even a little oath, just like Hal’s:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
28. The Gnostics, some of whom did venerate Lucifer, called their Redeemer “The Alien God.” Alien, that is, from the world created by the false, deluded and deluding god, YHVH, whom they, like Blake, liked to call Nobodaddy or The Exterminator; appropriate names for Parallax. If Sur is Lucifer, then his enemy Parallax is the Abrahamic God, or rather, the false, deluded and deluding YHVH. An amorphous, cloudlike being, like Cthulhu, but animated by a malign intelligence. The Church of the Sub-genius returned the favor by designating its nemesis as “the orbital alien space-god, JHVH-1.
29. Thus, the desert world of Dune is obviously crypto-Arabic; we note also the Ra’s al Ghul — “Demon’s Head” — in Nolan’s Batman Begins. Since the Templars — who reportedly worshiped a head, Bathomet — presumably Lucifer’s — The Arab has functioned as a symbolic proxy for the Aryan Tradition, perhaps due to it seeming a more manly, thus more Aryan, version of the Abrahamic religion (as Evola thought; see Revolt Against the Modern World); or perhaps “the enemy of my enemy”?
30. “If one does as God does enough times, one will become as God is.” — Hannibal Lecter, Manhunter.
31. Tarcher/Penguin 2007; first published 1910; pp. 22–23.
32. See Anderson and Whitehouse: New Thought: A Practical American Spirituality (2012).
33. At the beginning of the MST3k version of Devil Doll, the possessed dummy, seated in the back of a London taxi, gloats “I’m driving . . . with my mind!”
34. See Maya D’Oust and Adam Parfrey, The Secret Source (Feral House, 2009).
35. See Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, Chapter One.
36. It’s hard to tell if any of the countless aliens are female, though Tomar-Re seemed androgynous enough to recall one of Michael Manning; see my “The Hermetic Environment and Hermetic Incest: The True Androgyne and the ‘Ambiguous Wisdom of the Female’” here.
37. And why don’t they recognize Parallax’s name in the first place, and . . . It’s just a movie, I should really just relax.
38. At times I thought I had fallen asleep and woken up to a repeat of Spawn, “in which a vengeful mutant roams the Earth accompanied by an insane farting clown from hell. — “Review: Fascist ‘Starship’ troops lacking in irony” by Paul Tatara November 11, 1997.
39. Wallace, p. 38.
40. Wallace, p. 43.
41. “Feets don’t fail me now” etc. The post-9/11 behavior of the crowds is decidedly odd; when Parallax hovers above the city, blotting out the sky, they just wander about, “Hey, looky there” and all; only when the building start to fall do they reach the level of panic any Tokyo crowd would have exhibited in a classic Godzilla movie right from the start. Poor direction or a comment on our narcotized masses?
42. Played by an unrecognizable Tim Roth, who seems to be channeling Greg Kinnear’s super-douchebag from Mystery Men, an earlier Judaic belittling of the Hero myth.
8 Comments
What a wonderful article! Full of nice, playful associations, and very piercing at the same time. For the first time I really understand the difference between ‘Superman’ and the real Aryan heroes. I love how you write about them. It makes me yearn to be the same.
Thanks, Donar! Just remember, you need only WILL!
Maybe even better: Will AND Fantasy.
The Aryan Hero imagines a whole new world, that makes him enthusiastic, and he pursues it with divine vigour. The Gods will come and assist him. Maybe the greatest problem of conventional, jewified, dour, White Nationalism is its lack of fantasy.
It is important to recognize reality, especially the reality of race. But as long as someone is white (and not anti-white), I have a high tolerance for his flights of fantasy. It is the vision that makes us special.
In this sense, we might agree with Oscar Wilde when he says “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.”
There are dangers attached to fantasy, of course. Maybe white liberalism is in part a fantasy taken too far. And although I still respect Bradley Manning, I could never call him ‘Chelsea’ with a straight face.
Maybe Hegel can help us out. Maybe the solution lies in a dialectic between reality and fantasy, with an ever evolving synthesis.
This article washed me in sentimental nostalgia. I remember my grandmother (German immigrant) buying swathes of material in Hudsons basement, then we’d go to Coney Island eat a chili dog and use the bathroom where she’d wrap the cloth about her middle, this to avoid duty at the tunnel. Christmas was the best. Woodward avenue decked out, the crowds, Santas on every corner and Hudsons again, festive and magical in my little girl mind. I left at 18 but on return visits always visit Detroit which confirms my racialist views. Thanks
Ah yes, smuggling, another part of the anti-Government spirit of Detroit! I should clarify for readers that there was a thriving habit of smuggling btw Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, whose ersatz Euro-charms, as I described in my interview with Greg elsewhere on this site, were another source of “we don’t need government” spirit. Canadians would smuggle liquor — even Canadian Club was cheaper as an import in Detroit than in Canada — and Americans would smuggle everything else. My father would take us across the bridge or through the tunnel for a weekly expedition and we would return with the car stuffed with contraband, ranging from eggs to Scotch wool. On one trip we crossed back to find the city aflame!
Book bans meant nothing to us; the likes of Ulysses, Naked Lunch and Lady Chatterley were free for the smuggling in supposedly “puritanical” Canada, where Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis were available to discourse thereon.
“Coney Island” refers to a unique Detroit concoction, a grilled hot dog with onions and chilli, purveyed by two rival outlets next door to each other. Detroiters were defined by being partisans of Lafayette or American coney islands.
And yes, it was truly a White Christmas each year as Santa arrived at the end of the Hudson’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of I think 4 that the networks would broadcast. NY, Philadelphia, and …? There was no need for the Internet; when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published, I called up Hudson’s that day, gave them my father’s Hudson’s store card number, and a green van delivered it to my door that afternoon.
I had no idea you had this depth of feeling for Detroit – forgive me. As such, you are uniquely qualified to write an Epic, thee defining story of the Fall of the Colossus of the North. Bring in tropes like Edward Abbey’s “Glen Canyon was a Paradise until Man destroyed it; Tolkien’s “Shall Orcs and Swarthy Men feast in the White Tower?” and of course “The City did not fall – it was betrayed from within”. You could discuss that great but confused man Henry Ford and his use of Negroes as strike breakers. Also you could weave in your own experiences in the Detroit counter culture and of course your awakening to the nature of Jews and Blacks. Also perhaps your experiences, if any, as an Alter Boy and your views of the Christianity and the Church. Finish with a Jeremiad like “The Owl and Bittern are heard in the street” and “Which Way Western Man”?
Great article James! I remember back in the late 1950’s taking the old Baltimore & Ohio Cincinnatian from here in the Queen City up to Detroit. Even though train travel was in its final throes back then, it was still a great way to travel before the interstate highway system. I’m big fan of Art Deco and hope all of that architecture in the Motor City will be preserved in spite of the present predicament. By the way, I still remember when you paid cash for virtually everything including healthcare, a car and even train tickets!
Fantastic article. This line stood-out for me:
The Left talks about Temporary Autonomous Zones, the Right about Whitopias; well, here’s the biggest one in history.
Personal significance. I remember discovering Hakim Bey in creative writing in high school as I made my way through various “leftist” thinkers. Unlike many others, he had some kind of respect for Tradition & could figure out the various anarchic undercurrents that exist therein, especially in regards to the current system. Unfortunately, leftism usually isn’t conducive to anything other than temporary “Burning Man”-style escapes from reality, which are fine for what they are, but, as you point out, ya need a whitopia for any of that stuff to last. Your descriptions of Detroit are fantastic and heartbreaking — somewhat jarring given that I live in one of the post-whitopias on the Eastern seaboard, which only manages to cobble together self-“respect” through sports and ironic acknowledgments of how lousy the place is.