Aesthetic pleasure of the other's destruction, the Crucifixion and The Devils

[Sean]

The image of the crucifix at the centre of Christianity has spiritual reference because of the aesthetic interest in the horrific torturing to death of another person.

Christianity speaks of compassion for others but is concerned with trying to deal with the aesthetic interest in their suffering, repressing torture/ death as it represses its parallel in the passions of sex/ orgasm; the idea of Christ's sacrifice is really that a person must, excitedly for the onlookers, give themselves in death, and sex- the individual self dissolves in those experiencing either ineluctable Dionysian suffering and pleasure. In both cases you really get at the other person.

The crucifix refers to the primary life-death duality, and is hence divine; it's often seen on outside of a church, the victim hoisted in the air to be mocked, surrounded by the dead in the graveyard, all very exciting.

Here's the end of The Devils, one of the most important films ever made-

The momentary shots around 3.56 & 4.46 stay with me most; the scene is still cut I believe from its original 1971 form, such is the scale of its challenge to the anaesthetized Apollonian West.

http://kr.youtube.com/watch?v=zQdua-vJVnY

I have loads of stuff on this.

[The new erato]

How about a thread on music Sean? And why not find a board on religion (or whatever) for your confused ramblings?

[Sean]

erato, I'd like to read some thoughtful responses, but I understand I'm being too optimistic as usual.

Remind me, what composers or period are you most into?

[ezodisy]

How about a thread on music Sean? And why not find a board on religion (or whatever) for your confused ramblings?

I notice you've been going around the diner lately, complaining about certain ramblings and certain topics, happily exclaiming that you never pay attention, yet here you are posting the same tired disruptive stuff. Why don't you just keep quiet if you have nothing to say?

Remember what you said a few days ago? Put it into practice please.

Thank you guys for reminding me why I never read these kind of threads. Now I can go back to reading the music threads again for a few months before forgetting once again.

[Sean]

Hey this isn't entirely the clique I thought...

[karlhenning]

Hey this isn't entirely the clique I thought...

Reflect a bit more, and you will find yet other respects in which you have been mistaken, Sean 

[Sean]

Along with The Wicker Man, also from the early 70s, English, superb music, and with the protagonist burnt to death at the end, The Devils is the most important film ever made.

You lot just don't seem to know...

[ezodisy]

Along with The Wicker Man

I've got that film up next. Is The Devils a film based on the Dostoevsky book?

[Sean]

The Huxley book!

The Devils of Loudon

[Sean]

Also get the right edition of The Wicker man, the one with the opening scene on the mainland.

[Catison]

Sean, please do yourself a favor and read some theological books by Christians.  It ain't all a conspiracy.

[karlhenning]

Brett, I applaud the optimism with which you seek to talk sense to Sean.  Like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, he is too cunning to be understood.

[Guido]

I found watching the Wicker Man an oddly underwhelming experience (aside from the ludicrously attractive Britt Ekland of course)... maybe there was too much hype surrounding it. I was surprised at how low key and uneventful it was. Enjoyable at least.

[Sean]

Hi Guido, yes that's how the film looks. But it's actually extremely clever and well put-together; Christopher Lee for instance says it's the best part he ever had and the best film he was ever in. Here's a version of some notes I posted once before; I have at least 5000 more words of rough notes in fact and hopefully will get round to tidying everything up eventually... The power of the film is that, as with The Devils (in a different way), there's an underlying and aesthetic necessity to burn the fool Howie to death- something transcending all Western/ Christian morality.

The Wicker Man (by A.Shaffer dir R.Hardy music P.Giovanni prod C.Lee, 1972)
The arts provide a realm of meaning that isn't understood rationally: aesthetics is the oldest branch of philosophy and its inquiry into why certain words, paintings and sounds have the effect on us they do is unanswerable in principle. Art's concerned with these strange peremptory potentials and autonomous guiding forces lying beyond Apollonian rationale and has an unearthly inevitability not directly deriving from or reducible to its materials; indeed artists often say they feel to be writing under the influence of dynamics originating somewhere other than their conscious minds.
   But aesthetics or these guiding forces aren't really strange, they guide all thought and action: we just do things because they need doing, not because we reason our way to action. Once we think about things too much we encounter the phenomenon of self-consciousness, and in fact it's then that mistakes are made. And this is what happens with Sgt. Howie in The Wicker man, locating him entirely on the wrong side of an aesthetic line. Acting naturally is only 'explained' in rational terms after it's been carried out- rationality can at most parallel the initial intuition; our natural state of mind for dealing with the world was always aesthetic, hidden forever just beneath intellectual processes, and indeed it's nothing complicated. In fact the failure to act unselfconsciously is seen to be laughable, and foolish, because this is to fail to be the person one already is; rational means 'of ratios', or relating one thing only to another, yet life is based instead on direct experience and action.
   The film winds up to the unexpected yet inevitable conclusion of burning Howie. The necessity for this isn't based merely on a religion relating only to itself on a distant island but these primary aesthetic impulses, as distinct from superficial discursive deliberation above them. But it's this deliberation that defines Howie's thinking- his naively foregrounded ideas and generation of fixed controlling moral principles from these of the organised religion he represents, contrast with the islanders' always unstated aesthetic ideas. The islanders still just sing and smile with complete assurance as the fire takes hold, the music (as Nietzsche argues) controlling their Dionysian excess through intuitive rather than principled means; in scene after scene, music cuts off and obliterates any meaning in Howie's thinking and superficial reactions, reflecting intuition over reason.
   Howie should be burnt because he's failed to see past himself, and his ludicrous rational mental processes by which he relates to the world, to the simple intuitive/ aesthetic logic of being connected to it naturally. Epistemology itself, the 300 year philosophical quest to ground knowledge intellectually, was discredited in the 20th century as impossible in principle: reasoned thought could never lead to knowledge, only interminable theory and castles in the sky. This is Howie's situation, which the islanders understand throughout; the opening words spoken to him on arrival are 'Have you lost your bearings?'. Then there's the scene when he goes into a classroom and the teacher's winding him up, as is everyone, by teaching witchcraft and sexual iconography on the board- he goes over to one girl who has a beetle in her desk attached to a thread, making it 'go round and round all day', which is exactly what he's doing in his ridiculous search for a missing girl: his thinking's stuck in circular fashion in rational thought.
   He senses he's making mistakes- another memorable moment is when he pinches his fingers in the lid of a coffin he's trying to find the girl in, expressive of the immaturity of not finding his way down, in vertical aesthetic descent, to common sense: his thinking's all horizontal, contrasting with the villagers' animal heads that reflect being close to nature and the locked-on quality of animals. Further instances of his thought are telling people he's a policeman and wearing his hat when everyone already knows who he is, and using a megaphone to speak to the boatman who drops him at his plane, reasoning that he's too far away to hear when he's obviously just ignoring him- because of his foolishness, which Howie constantly deletes from his awareness. And the letter sent to him in the first place asking for his help is crazy- it begs many questions before he should march off investigating on his high horse, perfectionist way: even his work colleagues tease him for his sexual repression and know his outlook's totally wrong.
   Although the situation never warrants it, Howie looks for the girl's death certificate and says to a secretary 'Do you know her?'- it's a tiny community so all the islanders do, a ridiculous question that only someone already lost would ask. 'Yes of course I know her.' 'How did she die?' 'I don't know, I don't know anything about her'- and he accepts this, a total reversal within two phrases, and he goes off again. This is all as a woman testing a man in seduction: if he asks her daft questions he already knows the answers to, she'll immediately give him a daft answer, and scare him off in his self-created confusion- she can never help him. Sex is a central factor in the film and it concerns all the lyrics of Giovanni's superb music: seduction is the ultimate test of unselfconscious action, proceeding on underlying potentials not a woman's denials, negated if the man continues when he should. His inability to perceive generates a process that opens up a gap that the islanders rightly and simply proceed in.
   He's a virgin into his 30s and well benighted in his repressed Christian ideals; he's also chosen a career as a policeman, giving a uniform, sense of authority and set of laws to insist on, all conferred from without. The tension builds, but then just continues to build until 'the game's over' and they really do burn him- there's no desisting, just as none is allowed in seduction: any self-consciousness in the man and the woman stops him. Also before the end of the film the events can almost been seen as humorous, just as Howie throughout misses the underlying seriousness of the situation, and just as a man taking a relationship to be more superficial or relative than it always potentially is.
   Among numerous aesthetic connections between death and sex would be the sudden outward change in behaviour, the period of ineluctable sensation and uncertainty of where it's leading, wanting but not wanting it to reach its conclusion, the shocking end after a build up, being unable to avoid giving oneself, and the loss of critical perspective. The sunset in the background is another important parallel (see Sunsets).
   When Howie interrupts Lord Summerisle and the school mistress singing the erotic song (again music as Dionysian underlying, prelinguistic right action) he shows some decisiveness in throwing the hare he's disinterred, but Summerisle knows overall his thinking is groundless and says purposefully 'I thought it was you carrying out the investigation': Howie backs off again, accepting the farcical notion that he shouldn't be bothering others. But of course indeed he shouldn't, because it's all nonsense and is really only his investigation, into nothing: with Howie flattened and sent further down the line to destruction, Summerisle returns to the piano and the song; there's total confidence in his lost state and that he won't find the light.
   Even a young girl who falls out of a cupboard, that he's looking for the missing girl in, smirks in her understanding that he's ridiculously on the wrong level, and likewise the knowing expression on the face of the (phallical) hobby-horse man who never speaks but leads him on, shows the absolute justification in what he's doing as long as Howie fails to see through it. Howie's face by contrast before meeting Summerisle looks confused and callow despite his resolution, a finger squashed across his lips, as he stares at the naked dancing girls- he's transfixed yet lacks the maturity to reconcile or be 'refreshed' by the sight. As Summerisle disturbs him he just falls back into funnelling of everything through a silly intellectualised scheme of the world, regardless of the contradictions within him.
   Finally he comes 'to the appointed place', necessarily of his 'own free will' and has put on a fool's costume himself, for the fool he is: his inability to perceive generates a process that opens up a gap that the islanders rightly and simply proceed in. As the tension cranks, Summerisle even says to him in the procession 'That's not much of a dance, McGregor (the man Howie thinks he's replaced)- play the fool, that's what you're here for!', but his thinking is just too rational to see that everyone knows it's him in disguise, because his attention's in the narrow, groundless moment rather than the whole, that the islanders have designed long before, and all proceed further down the aesthetic line.
   He's in a monkey trap with the monkey's paw inside a bottle of seed that it wants, but when it makes a fist it can't pull out its hand: all it has to do is let go, but its poor mentality allows the seed to grip it. And this is why he can be eliminated: there's no sympathy for not being oneself and instead lost in the world, because you are yourself already, and no help is due or possible to such a person- they may be given a social environment to improve in, but nothing direct. Silent intuition's nature is self-referential, lying beneath discursive thought's world-referentiality, so one can only find it oneself. The island culture provides a very inclusive society- pub songs to join in and a beautiful girl to sleep with, but he stupidly fights against himself and rejects all; the light is inside him, but not finding it justifies his sacrifice.
   He's burnt locked inside the image of a man, all as his inner self is lost inside himself; the image also has no facial features, echoing alignment with nature rather than the Apollonian delusion of individuality or free will based on ideas. At every point in his investigations he's been faced with situations that demand that he pauses, steps back and considers inwardly, focusing his brow, but he doesn't, common sense always eluding him. Through meeting his horrific end he finally comes into contact with the focussed reality that always existed and which his thinking must eventually refer to: he's in an inevitable aesthetic process, giving the film its strange compulsion, where circling relative thought moves to the absolute realm of the Gods. It's an offering to them since it's only in death that his idiotic state of mind could find its real self; there's no empathy with him at all, only the necessity for the action.
   As he's being carried to the Wicker man he says 'Think, think what you're doing!': of course the problem is thinking- when separated from intuition or that level of existence bringing us in touch with the divine. His thinking's securely lost in discursive processes, this also being the meaning behind the Post Office woman saying 'You'll never understand the nature of sacrifice'- intuitive thought, the absolute, God and our direct contact with reality isn't understandable in the relative mind. Moreover this film's a warning against the emphasis on rational over intuitive norms in Western thought and its increasing loss of art and God, its sexual repression, and the digital and binary dualistic forms of communication with their simulation of reality, separating us from unity.

[drogulus]

     

   Howie should be burnt because he's failed to see past himself, and his ludicrous rational mental processes by which he relates to the world, to the simple intuitive/ aesthetic logic of being connected to it naturally. Epistemology itself, the 300 year philosophical quest to ground knowledge intellectually, was discredited in the 20th century as impossible in principle: reasoned thought could never lead to knowledge, only interminable theory and castles in the sky. This is Howie's situation, which the islanders understand throughout; the opening words spoken to him on arrival are 'Have you lost your bearings?'. Then there's the scene when he goes into a classroom and the teacher's winding him up, as is everyone, by teaching witchcraft and sexual iconography on the board- he goes over to one girl who has a beetle in her desk attached to a thread, making it 'go round and round all day', which is exactly what he's doing in his ridiculous search for a missing girl: his thinking's stuck in circular fashion in rational thought.
  

     When did knowledge become discredited as impossible? When the film came out? Somehow I think it will take more to demonstrate the failure of rational thought than a fiction about Druids outsmarting a policeman.

     Now, if they had outsmarted Einstein and burned him that would really be something, since relativity would be false and epistemology impossible in principle. All you have to do is sacrifice a scientist and prove at the aesthetic level that your gods are more powerful than Apollonian reason and the whole basis of civilization is destroyed.

[bhodges]

Along with The Wicker Man, also from the early 70s, English, superb music, and with the protagonist burnt to death at the end, The Devils is the most important film ever made.

You lot just don't seem to know...

Although I have seen both The Devils and The Wicker Man--and like them both, The Devils more so--I suspect you will be trudging up a very long incline trying to make a case for the former's being "the most important film ever made."

--Bruce

[Sean]

drogulus, the search for certainty in intellectual knowledge, on which to base an objective understanding the world was discredited in mid-20th century philosophy and the critique of foundationism. But I agree it's such an immense thing, undermining Western thought generally, that many thinkers just bracket it off best they can.

bhodges, being in a minority of one (as Gandhi said I think) has never troubled me in the slightest, in fact it's also a powerful position given the extent of uncertainty in people generally.

[drogulus]

drogulus, the search for certainty in intellectual knowledge, on which to base an objective understanding the world was discredited in mid-20th century philosophy and the critique of foundationism. But I agree it's such an immense thing, undermining Western thought generally, that many thinkers just bracket it off best they can.

     Yes, Sean, knowledge isn't absolute. It doesn't need to be, so the critique of reason using that approach is a wild goose chase. It's not that reason and empiricism are wrong, it's the absolutist understanding of them. No absolutist philosopher, having disproved reason to his satisfaction, uses something other than arithmetic to do sums.

     So Western thought isn't what you say it is. It isn't grounded in absolutes, and isn't vulnerable to such a critique, which is why no one notices that it isn't valid any more.

     Both of these are good films, by the way, even if they don't exactly shake the philosophical foundations of anything.

     

[Sean]

drog, that's a thoughtful post, but I'll leave it at that. I have some philosophical shaking to do in my spare time today (presently writing about the mobile phone's deleterious effects).

[M forever]

Let me guess: you have found proof that cell phones are really devices with which people can be remote-controlled and their brains be reprogrammed.