All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
The Dissident Right has been abuzz for weeks about the “Groypers” and their jabs at Charlie Kirk of TPUSA. Mr. Roach has a good summary of the situation and a pretty even handed take on the facts. Seems like some progress has been made in the last decade or so resisting the astro-turfing of the Establishment Right. A good article to read if you’re interested in what’s going on in the culture war.
This episode is notable in that it introduces the character Harcourt Fenton (Harry) Mudd who returns in the much more enjoyable later episode “I, Mudd.”
The Enterprise detects a transport ship that is travelling without its identity beacon. Pursuing it into an asteroid belt The Enterprise is forced to overload its own engines while protecting the transport ship from destruction. Harry Mudd and his cargo of three women destined to be sold as wives to rich lonely miners are transported onto the enterprise just before the smaller ship is destroyed by an asteroid.
The women are repeatedly described as incredibly beautiful (meh) and have an hypnotic effect on the male crew. Interestingly, other than Uhura we don’t see any of the female crew members during the episode. The Enterprise is crippled by the destruction of its lithium crystals (apparently the term di-lithium crystals was coined later in the series) during the asteroid belt maneuver and the ship must head to a planet where lithium crystals are mined to replace them. Mudd finds out about this and communicates with the miners and they cook up a scheme whereby the miners will refuse to provide Kirk with the crystals unless he allows Mudd and his women to go to the planet’s surface for a meet and greet with the miners.
Things move forward on the plan but one of the women, Eve, is disgusted with the whole plan because of their guilty secret. The women are only artificially beautiful. They take a drug that makes them attractive. If they stop taking it, they become homely. Anyway, the miners find out about the secret and become angry but then we see that Eve becomes beautiful again due to the placebo effect of thinking she took the drug. Now she’s beautiful because she’s self-confident. And the miners are happy again because she has a heart of gold.
Mudd is taken back on the Enterprise where he will be put on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors against the Federation and the Enterprise is back to just having Yeoman Rand to maintain their hormonal balance.
Other than the slightly amusing acting of Mudd and the revealing costumes of the three women the only scene that I found engaging is when Eve and her miner are shown in bickering domesticity. She makes him breakfast and they spar about the value of female versus male housekeeping. I detected a spark of honesty in the portrayal which is highly unusual in anything Star Trekian.
But that’s it. Watching Bones, Scotty and Kirk salivate and gape at the women wears thin very quickly and cannot manage to fill out the hour while Mudd enacts his brilliant scheme. Kirk doesn’t do any shoulder roles or pontificate about life. It’s not very good. This episode is sub-par on both a conventional dramatic scale and with respect to Shatnerific bad acting.
When Bronze Age Mindset (BAM) came out last year I heard a little bit about it at various sites. When Michael Anton reviewed the book back in August I became interested and decided to read it. When the author (Bronze Age Pervert or BAP for short) published a response to Anton in October I reminded myself to buy it. Now I’ve read it and I am trying to get my opinion into some kind of an orderly form. But unfortunately, BAM isn’t that kind of a work. It’s a mixture of philosophical treatise, civilizational diatribe, atavistic lament and fraternal advice. One thing is for sure. BAP wants this world to melt down hard enough so that he can securely raise the black flag and start slitting throats.
As has been noted previously by Anton, BAP is in at least part agreement with Nietzsche. BAP reviles our age for its complete lack of heroic opportunities. He believes that for at least a portion of modern men life in a modern democratic state is a death sentence. A large part of the first part of the book describes his comparison of modern life to the life of the warriors of Bronze Age Greece as embodied in the Homeric works and the military dictatorship in Sparta. Along the way he expends enormous vitriol decrying the modern world and its feminists, neutered males (bugmen), endless bureaucracy, politically correct institutions, slave-driving lifestyles and the generic ugliness of modern life. He despises democracy as a false equivalency. He believes in the superiority of the alpha male and his right to rule over the rest of society.
BAP writes this diatribe in a clipped version of English that uses internet abbreviations and leaves out definite and indefinite articles at random. This doesn’t make it too difficult to read along but to my ear it is affected. Toward the end of the book he lapses into grammatical English and is obviously very literate.
As for the pervert in his name (BAP), he does seem to espouse at least some kind of homoerotic sensibility but he seems to describe it as not a homosexual attraction but an appreciation of male physical perfection. Either way for me it’s off-putting. Also, he thinks that the seamiest parts of the underworld with its pornography and prostitution and other perversions is important and men like him are meant to delve into it and take possession of it for some redemptive purpose that involves destroying the bugmen order.
The book is uneven and ranges from poetic to almost psychotic. Some of it is either humorous fantasy or the author believes in things that are obviously untrue. For instance, he claims that Laotian is the same language as the dialect of Spanish spoken in Chiapas Mexico.
Toward the end of the book he talks more realistically about what a non-bugman can do to exist in the nightmarish post-normal world we find ourselves in. Here he is addressing the non-pirate, non-superman part of the population that have jobs and families. Some of the advice is actually very sensible and useful.
All in all, I found the book interesting. He has some insights that even a normie such as myself finds resonant. Undoubtedly the book is uneven and at times bizarre but it has valid points to make and it speaks to a part of every normal man who finds himself marooned in the modern Hive and wonders how we got here and how we get out. It’s not for all tastes but if you’re interested in another take on the modern world this might be interesting to you.
Francey Hakes, a former assistant U.S. attorney weighs in on the seriousness and the likelihood that abuse of power was involved in the FISA warrants used against the Trump campaign figures. She has experience with the process having herself appeared before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during her career, presenting applications for counterterrorism and counterespionage warrants on a special detail to the Department of Justice Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
Take a look.
I thought sci-fi fans might get a kick out of a review of this film since its source was a graphic novel and its director is David Cronenberg, who I rank with Kubrick as among the most important directors working in the genre.
The movie has a quality cast, including Viggo Mortensen as the rural Indiana restaurateur, Tom Stall; Maria Bello as his wife Edie; Ed Harris as the gangster Carl Fogarty; Ashton Holmes as Jack Stall, Tom’s son; and William Hurt as Tom’s kingpin brother from Philly. There are also a host of additional small-role actors that do an excellent job. Harris is particularly effective as the one-dimensional killer as is Holmes as the nerdy millennial.
The movie opens by following two motel guests, one in a dark button-down shirt in the middle of the desert, i.e. a bad guy, packing up to “head east” and “avoid the big cities”. The younger partner complains of the boredom and yawns his way through the rest of the scene, including when he’s asked to go back to the front desk and fetch water from the cooler for the long drive. There he sleepily encounters the clerk and maid whose throats his partner has just slit and almost nods out as he notices that a small child is emerging from the back room and shoots her. Like I said, bad guys.
This lovely bit of business is immediately contrasted by Tom and his quiet nuclear family. In these introductory scenes of the Stalls they all speak so softly and behave so tenderly to one another that the opening scene becomes submerged by the normal impulse to separate this seemingly vulnerable family from the monsters. But we know they will come and the savagery of the two drifters is anticipated by the inevitable high school bully that humiliates Jack in gym for daring to catch a fly ball to right. Violence, large and small, is almost clumsily emphasized. Cronenberg was said to have commented in connection to the film, “I am a great believer in Darwinian evolution and that violence is baked into our genes”, presumably explaining his lack of subtly on the issue.
When I read his comment, I thought of Cronenberg’s other films, like “Dead Ringers”, the story of twin gynecologists that descended into a surgical horror. And other of his films, Naked Lunch, Crash, Fly, all disturbing, but not particularly violent in any conventional sense. Rather, at their core, his films stylize death and disfigurement in a kind of grotesque eroticism. His focus, until “History”, was more in line with Poe than Peckinpah. Afterwards, however, gangsters and violence become common in his movies. One suspects the shift may be understood at least in part as commercial, but also, he seems to be trying to work out more conventional themes in more mature ways. For instance, “History” includes Bello in a frontal nude scene that seemed all too blue-blooded for the director of Naked Lunch.
In any event, when a very fickle fate sends our drifters into Tom’s diner, we are shown all the good that violence can do. For just as blue shirt instructs his youthful partner drooling at the waitress to “start on her”, mild mannered Tom dispenses with the would-be butchers faster than you can flip a flapjack. His ruthless efficiency at smashing a hot coffee pot in the face of one assailant, retrieving his gun and then dispatching both make his adversaries seem like amateurs. Even professionals like Ed Harris’ Carl and his gang can’t measure up to Tom’s lethal skill set. Carl, hearing of Tom’s heroics on the news, emerges from Tom’s past as if vomited out of hell’s mouth. His face seems half melted, one eye is clouded, he claims his visage is a reflection of Tom’s true nature and he has come to return him to it.
I won’t belabor the obvious. I’m sure the reader knows there is only one way our genes and destiny can resolve such a history. It’s a pretty good film, especially given its source. “A History of Violence” made money and won acclaim but it was less influential than one might have guessed back in 2005. When I saw it back then, I thought that some of the film’s hokier elements like the straw man bullies and one-dimensional housewives would evolve along with the genre. I was wrong, in fact, the thinnest parts of graphic novel sources like Watchmen or Westworld, the robot/costume stuff, became the focus of their realization on the screen. We have devolved, but I’m sure that statement comes as no surprise.
After reviving ourselves again with refreshments we estimated that we had time for one last course before exhaustion would set in. Almost at random we selected Mudd’s Women. It was a mistake. What we thought we were going to watch was the episode called I, Mudd. This one is about Mudd selling women that he artificially beautifies with a drug. It’s boring and meaningless. At the end the women are seen to be beautiful without the drug because they’re self-confident. Yeah sure, and I’m Brad Pitt.
Anyway, this poor episode angered the delegates and disrupted the complacency that the massive junk food binge had produced. We set to work repairing the situation with mass quantities of supplies. Once we had re-established our equilibrium, we decided to quickly bring the ShatnerKhan to a rapid close. But we did ramble on about what we had learned and vowed less poisonous food at ShatnerKhan 2.
So, what did we learn?
But all agreed that ShatnerKhan 1 was a roaring success both academically and gastronomically.
All hail William Shatner, long may you endure as a shining beacon of terrible acting.
Ford v Ferrari is the true story of the effort by Ford Motor Company, led by Carol Shelby, to build and race the first American car to win the Le Mans Gran Prix, the most prestigious road race in the world. The film was directed by James Mangold, starring Matt Damon as Carol Shelby and Christian Bale as Ken Miles, the lead driver for the Ford team. The movie is something of a small miracle; a mostly live action Hollywood film shot on real locations. Also, there is no political agenda. All the actors are who they actually were, white men, and they fight, lie and cheat, which is to say they compete, for the purity of winning. How did this happen in 2019 America?
It is a wonderful spectacle to behold. Matt Damon as the Texan Shelby battling the soulless suits, led by Josh Lucas, who has made something of a specialty out of playing dastardly weasels. The movie is unconcerned with cultural appropriation, casting the Jewish Jon Bernthal as the Italian-American auto industry icon, Lee Iacocca. He does a fine job. Even Henry Ford II has a substantial role played by Tracy Letts. And to top it off, the film is centered on Miles’ intact heterosexual family of three, a supportive, if somewhat feisty wife and his heartbreaking 10-year-old son, who will witness his fiery death.
Now the movie aims for iconic myth-making but I’m happy to report it is at least soundly competent. I have been wondering the last few years if the industry was still capable of making a real movie. Apparently in some corners, it is. The racing scenes are fun, much of it CGI, but still enjoyable. Grown men past sixty, as were many in the audience, will have a different experience from everyone else. If you were around in the 1960’s but still too young or too working class to be in college, cars was the most important thing in life. They are the material and cultural medium that ties the suits to the cowboys and the Brits to the Italians. They hate each other in all the deplorable ways we make believe is unnatural. It is the very nature of men and it is their crafts and creations, mechanics, racing, auto making that channels their animal spirits to a higher plane. They compete, they innovate and even when they lose they tip their hats to the winner, as Enzo Ferrari does to Miles.
Bale and Damon go a little over the top now and then as does the film itself when the Ford scion is reduced to a sort of weeping orgasm at his first experience of real racing at the hands of Shelby. But these flaws are welcome and authentically quixotic in their ambition. If the film ultimately misses the mark myth-making, it doesn’t matter. It succeeds at something more important, reminding us what real movies and real men once looked like.
The NFL is desperate to show that they aren’t denying Colin Kaepernick the opportunity to be the superstar he knows he is. But unfortunately, Kaepernick doesn’t intend to interrupt his crusade by having a football career.
Could it be that he really is a mediocre athlete and after three years of inactivity wouldn’t be able to compete at all at the NFL level? He instead had his own work out for eight teams at a high school field where he could control the camera crew and the footage that would be released. My guess is that even he knows he’s not good enough for an actual workout.
I read that Dallas Cowboy fans have deluged management of the team with declarations vowing to drop their support of the team if they sign Kaepernick.
I’m guessing that Colin wants a team to sign him to a contract where he will get paid not to play but to perform a kneeling act before each game, sort of like the high priest of wokeness for the NFL. Hey it’s their money. Since I don’t have to watch the NFL anymore I hope they do sign him. It’ll make the game suck that much more.
As I delve deeper and deeper into Season One, I find myself amazed at just how much awful acting there is. Whereas in most Star Trek episodes just one Jim Kirk is enough to satisfy anyone’s appetite for bad acting but in “The Enemy Within” we get two! A malfunction of the transporter causes anything sent through to be divided into polar opposites. A dog with a horn on his head and a really fake looking fur coat is split into a calm docile version and a rabid psycho version. And when Kirk goes through the machine, he becomes polar opposite twins too.
And this pair of Kirks is very special indeed. One of them is Castrated Kirk. The transporter has neutered him. He is indecisive, confused and unmanned. He is constantly reminded by Spock that his Evil side is responsible for his ability to command the ship and therefore Good Kirk while intelligent and principled is unfit to run the ship, a capon and a big loser. Spock really rubs it in. It seems like he’s angling for the job.
The other Kirk is Satyr Kirk. He attempts to rape Yeoman Rand. I suspect given time he might have humped the entire female crew. He berates Bones and orders him to hand over the Saurian Brandy which he wanders around swigging from the bottle. And he beats up various members of the crew whenever the chance offers itself. Later on, when he takes the Helm, he orders the crew to abandon Sulu and the landing party to their frozen deaths. This did actually endear him to me. I think they should have given him a chance. I liked his instincts.
Watching Shatner portray the complementary fragments of Kirk is a thing of grotesque beauty. The feral lascivious leer of Evil Kirk is wonderfully overdone. The fretful womanish whining of Good Kirk is annoying and pathetic.
As a secondary pleasure in the episode, due to the malfunctioning transporter, the landing party is trapped on the planet as the temperature heads down into negative triple digits so we get to watch Sulu slowly freezing to death. Very satisfying.
The climactic scene for each of our demi-heroes comes when Good and Evil Kirk have their showdown on the Bridge. When Evil Kirk submits to Good Kirk’s leadership he cries out in a panicked voice, “I want to liiiive, I want to liiive!” Pure schmaltz, marvelous. Then as both Kirks are standing on the transporter plate waiting to see if the transporter can meld them back into a composite of bad acting, Good Kirk is supporting unconscious Evil Kirk and just before the mechanism is activated Good Kirk hugs his Evil half in a loving embrace. It’s quite nauseating. Truly wonderful.
Obviously, this is a Star Trek must-see episode. Seeing the two polar opposite Kirks you realize that up until this episode, Shatner has been restraining his acting style. We get to see Shatner unbound and it’s not pretty. But it’s important for us to know his true range. It’s good to know that there is more Shatner in there if it’s needed. Well done Bill, well done.
It is interesting to me to consider the new movie as part of two bookends to James Cameron’s strange career, while providing some comment on the evolving image that Linda Hamilton has presented in media and the almost unchanging one of Arnold.
When he made The Terminator, James Cameron had not done any of the films that built the industry position he holds today. He was a special effects guy that wrote a typical sci-fi screenplay about a murderous robot. But “The Terminator” somehow had a strangely enduring effect on American culture. The screenplay had all the stock components, with a few slight twists that would become Cameron trademarks like transforming female characters into alternate heroes. Otherwise it included the typical murderous, apocalyptic future so common, perhaps even central, to all science fiction, the obligatory arrested love interest, and a commendable combination of live action and classic stop motion animation right out of Jason and the Argonauts.
But this movie resonated with all kinds of segments, many without much taste for either conventional action or science fiction. And Cameron made both Schwarzenegger and Hamilton actual cultural icons. It’s easy to argue that neither of them surpassed their roles in the film, with Arnold literally milking it for billions in ticket sales and a governorship and Hamilton clearly chewed up by hers. How do we account for this? Can we see something in the two stars’ comparative destinies and did Dark Fate provide any clues?
The character of Sarah and the actress Linda Hamilton were perfectly matched to project the most innocuous presence, never rising above cute, until the cyborg is blasting a shotgun at her. We meet Linda working an adolescent fast food job and then going to a movie. In parallel a housewife mistaken for her is executed in her home and her roommate and boyfriend, beaten to death in her apartment. This balancing of extremes continues as her protector, Reese, and the cyborg finally meet shooting at each other in a bar over Linda’ head. The scene in a new wave disco called New Noir is one of the few that warrants the otherwise overused slow motion. While the “new wave” music plays and the young yuppies sway, the cyberpunk uncoils again from behind the bar, laser and machine guns in hand. Thus, begins the carnage. We see Sarah innocently look blandly at the camera with a red laser site on her head, about to be terminated when Reese uncorks his own assault, ending the scene by blasting the cyborg through a plate glass window.
When he rises, Michael Myers-like, Reese and Sarah alternately flee and shoot at the bot in every possible venue until Sarah/Linda is told that she is the mother of the future resistance, a legendary warrior whose son will defeat the future. She cries out for us all, “What”? The chase scene ends when the terminator drives straight into a brick wall with the cops chasing both of them. Suddenly, Linda finally becoming partially aware of her surroundings and knows to grab Reese as he reaches for his shotgun to confront the cops. She yells, “No Reese, No, they’ll kill you”, in a voice we don’t hear again until she is does some terminating of her own.
Arnold gets the opposite treatment. We meet him emerging in a spherical electric storm naked in a crouch and watch him straighten up into the Hulk. He then walks through the park to murder and kill some punk rockers for their clothes, thus, cyberpunk. He is a comic figure We see his ass; he reads visual algorithms to select pre-coded responses like, “Fuck You, Asshole” in what became America’s definition of a slightly fascistic cyber/Germanic voice. His hair gets cropped and he wears cool ray bands to hide the eyeball he plucks out. He looks like Brando on his bike. Best of all, because he is a robot, he is not morally responsible for any of this, so we can enjoy his antics. This is no trivial accomplishment; Cameron creates a character Arnold will play for the next three or four decades. Remorseless, brutally violent, but cool and funny.
So, by the movie’s end, when Sarah punches the steel press on his steel skull, and he takes a last look straight into the camera, as if winking, with his laser red eye shining as the press crushes it dark, Sarah has gone from cute to terminator, and Arnold, the reverse. Society, however, won’t let Linda be a terminator, but Arnold can be anything. He’s a protector, then he’s Danny DeVito’s genetically perfect twin, JL Curtis’ lucky husband, Sharon Stone’s even luckier boyfriend, a predator’s predator, a Kennedy, a Governor, even an expendable, and finally a terminator husband/father in Dark Fate. In the subsequent films, she will become a Rambet, permanently.
But a Rambet is denied even the righteous orgies of violence Stallone formulated for John Rambo. Sarah must become the separatist feminist, gaunt, cut, unsmiling, long suffering, ideologically pure. Most importantly, she is always angry. She invented the Hollywood version of the resting bitch face. She’s pissed about the apocalypse and having to bear the messiah and she’s going to do something about it. This may make for good doctrine, but it’s a bad career choice. It’s a classic Hollywood scam, make a “feminist” sci-fi cyberpunk movie that destroys the female lead’s career. Message, stick to cute.
That’s why The Terminator was so memorable and the rest, I don’t remember. Because at the end of the film with Linda Hamilton driving off into the stormy Mexican desert with her revolver, dog and headband, Sarah is still cute. There was still a Soviet Union. The apocalypse was coming, as it really is for all of us, but she came through the realization, as we all can. Later all this is revised as her ideology requires. We can’t be left with our faith, only her ideology. And therein lies the rub for Linda and even Arnold when it comes to the rest of their lives till Dark Fate.
I read that James Cameron, after years without contact, reached out to Linda Hamilton, his former wife, to ask her to make a new sequel. She claims that it took her years away from the industry living in Louisiana to finally build a stable life in a community away from Hollywood with real connections. But, for some reason, could it be money, she agreed to play Sarah again. The results are exactly as you would expect; it’s a disaster. Arnold’s body is gone, and his face looks like a parkinsonian mask. Linda’s voice sounds like she speaking through a tracheotomy. Now, with the right screenplay and if there had been no other sequels, these physical transformations could have made for interesting material. But given their respective ideological “careers” there was no way out. They went through the joyless, soulless motions until time, thankfully, ran out and Arnold was dead and burned next to the latest, multicultural terminator.
We had to suffer it all in Dark Fate. A tanned wrinkled, aging second wave feminist Sarah croaking out lines like “they want your womb”. A dumpy, younger, millennial feminist protector constantly signaling her sacrificial virtue. A Mexican virgin 2.0 screaming about her right to choose. Finally, a constantly transitioning multicultural killer cyborg. An identity maelstrom. I came to the conclusion that both Arnold and Linda got screwed by their roles, although Arnold a little more lucratively. They are left having lived out the superficial script written for them by Cameron. His hollow successes after The Terminator, with the exception of Aliens, have condemned him to the same lucrative irrelevance. It’s fitting that the Avengers franchise, sourced from dime store children’s comic books, is eclipsing his pretentious achievements, Titanic and Avatar. Stan Lee must be rolling in his grave.
So, looking at two films separated by 35 years, and two actors with seemingly opposite careers that ended in the same place, and the director responsible for the whole mess, what can we say about any of this. Only that the tenuous string that used to barely connect what passes as popular culture to at least a modicum of genuine craft has, over the course of one director’s career, entirely disappeared, leaving in its wake a trail of cultural victim/collaborators in various states of wealth and debasement. And nothing whatsoever for us.