Passing the Buck:
Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic Metaphysicians
James J. O’Meara
Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2021
248 pages
About Passing the Buck
Welcome to Metaphysical Science Theater 3000. This collection is the first comprehensive attempt to place Traditionalism within a major field of modern popular culture-cinema, good and bad – and to recognize how each can clarify and illuminate the other.
Although Hollywood classics are included here (from Sitting Pretty to Touch of Evil) along with popular hits like Groundhog Day, Manhunter, and Silence of the Lambs, the emphasis is on movies small and personal, forgotten, or just plain weird (Psychomania). There’s Manos, of course, but the real standout is an extended examination of autistic auteur Coleman Francis and his trilogy of boredom and postwar despair. All are minutely examined until they reveal evidence of cyclical time, karma, reincarnation, and ultimately the amoral attainment of enlightenment by what the author calls “passing the buck.”
Spencer Quinn says: “No movie is too obtuse, no performance too wooden, and absolutely no tidbit of modern cultural ephemera could possibly be too utterly worthless to escape this man’s surgical scrutiny. O’Meara finds Sisyphean meaning where most mortals find half a bag of crushed jalapeño-flavored Cheetos at the bottom of a rusty old dumpster. He trawls the Z-movie swamp with his beeping sci-fi metal detector searching for gold. And all the knowledge and insight that went into these essays cause them in many cases to surpass their subjects as cultural capital — at least within dissident circles.”
Counter-Currents review here.
Paperback: $19.95
Kindle: $7.95
Also by James J. O’Meara
-
2020 - 351 pages
James J. O’Meara
Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus
A new kind of spiritual teacher or “guru” has emerged in the 20th century, one more interested in methods, techniques and results than in dogmas, institutions, or – especially – followers. James O’Meara examines these “populist gurus” from a wide variety of perspectives, including substantial chapters on well-known figures such as William Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Neville Goddard, and Julius Evola, as well as such fringe phenomena as Chaos Magick and even the origins of the Internet’s ‘meme magic.’
-
2017 - 250 pages
James J. O’Meara
The Homo & The Negro
James O’Meara’s The Homo and the Negro brings a “queer eye” to the overwhelmingly “homophobic” Far Right. In his title essay, O’Meara argues that the Far Right cannot effectively defend Western civilization unless it checks its premises about homosexuality and non-sexual forms of male bonding, which are undermined not just by liberals and feminists, but also by Judeo-Christian “family values” advocates. O’Meara also uses his theory to explain the stigmatization of Western high culture as “gay” and the worship of uncultured oafs as masculine ideals.
-
2015 - 252 pages
James J. O’Meara
Green Nazis in Space!
World War II has been over for decades, but Nazis are everywhere! From girls boarding schools in Scotland to fashion shows in Peking, from utopian desert islands to New York nightclubs, from intellectually fashionable Paris cafés to campy flats in Chelsea Square. They’re even in the War Room, and—my God!—they’re already in outer space! James J. O’Meara, the New Right’s most provocative writer, uses his “paranoiac-critical” lens to reveal the method of Judaic culture-distortion—such as the youthful “girl-craziness” that conservatives think of as the “good old days” but was manufactured by Hollywood to undermine traditional forms of male friendship and social organizations (and start World War II)—while demonstrating that it just can’t prevent the eternal return of the “Fascist Other” throughout our popular culture.
-
2015 - 104 pages
James J. O’Meara
End of an Era: Mad Men & the Ordeal of Civility
AMC’s Mad Men (2007–2015) was an instant hit, winning fifteen Golden Globes and four Emmys and “redefining television.” Already a slew of books have appeared to examine its cultural impact. Now comes The End of an Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility, bringing to the discussion a unique perspective: race realist and Traditionalist. Drawing in equal measure from Kevin MacDonald and René Guénon, and able to marshal a stunning array of pop culture reference points, James J. O’Meara — himself a child of the ’60s and a product of America’s long-dead industrial heartland — examines the hidden agendas and social implications of the Mad Man phenomenon. At its center is a bravura, two-part essay analyzing the disintegration of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency as symbolic reenactment of the archetypal struggle of the Aryan and the Judaic for control of Western civilization. From the culture-creating powers of the three-button suit, to the dissolution of the Aryan Ego in the hot tubs of Esalen, The End of An Era delivers one stunning insight after another. You’ll never watch a rerun of Mad Men the same way you did the first time.
-
2014 - 244 pages
James J. O’Meara
The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture
“James J. O’Meara is my favorite literary and cultural critic. A virtuoso essayist who can reveal the most startling connections, O’Meara brings Traditionalist spirituality and a New Right sensibility to bear on both high and popular culture, showing that Tradition, like Cthulhu, still lives in the depths and can rise to the surface again, if you know what to look for . . . or if the stars are right.”