Apollodorus Films

Riding Back Out of the Sunset
The Resurgence of Western Films in the Contemporary Cinema

By Joseph R. Astalfa

When Ed Harris’ brazenly traditional film Appaloosa hit American theaters in 2008, noted film critic Roger Moore began his enthusiastic review of the picture with the following thoughts: “Appaloosa is the sort of solid, simple Western that Hollywood used to crank out 20 times a year…And if it’s not particularly surprising, ask yourself how often John Wayne, Alan Ladd or Jimmy Stewart surprised us. It’s not the novelty that sells this. It’s the familiarity” (Moore). Such an idea, that audiences might attend a deliberately old-fashioned movie because they wanted the familiarity of the classical western, would have been nigh unthinkable a few short years earlier. Indeed, though the western had made up a quarter of all Hollywood films made from 1910 until the end of the 1950s, and still maintained 12% of the American cinema in 1972, the seventies saw them plummet in popularity, with a low point of a mere three western films reaching screens between 1979 and 1984 (Hoberman 91). “As J. Fred MacDonald put it…no form of mass entertainment has been so dominant, and then so insignificant” (Hoberman 91).

Throughout the 1990s, the occasional western managed to escape from a major studio, prompting murmurs of a potential genre renaissance. Unfortunately, for every critical and commercial success like Unforgiven (1992) or Tombstone (1993), there were bilious releases like Young Guns II (1990) and Wild,Wild,West (1999) to keep enthusiasm for the genre in check. The 2000s began in much the same manner, with the first wide-release being the atrocious American Outlaws in 2001, which was critically panned and a box office disaster. This was countered by the release of Kevin Costner’s Open Range in 2003, which was well reviewed and a modest commercial success (Western Films of the 1990s and 2000s).

Something was about to change, however. Seemingly ignited by the release of James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma in 2007, a wave of critically acclaimed western films began to appear steadily in American cinemas at a rate unheard of since the early 1970s. The surprising enthusiasm for movies like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men (both 2007), and Appaloosa (2008) seemed to suggest that people were once more hungry for westerns, a perception that was spectacularly confirmed when the Cohen Brothers released their True Grit remake in 2010, when it became the second highest-grossing western of all time, behind only the Academy-Award winning Dances With Wolves (Western: 1979-Present).

What had changed? Why had this genre, after spending two-decades in obscurity despite the best efforts of many talented directors, suddenly recaptured a long-lost audience? What was it that drew the public back to the classic western, or were they being drawn to the classics at all? Did these new films actually abide by the themes and characteristics of their traditional predecessors? Or did they subvert and mock them, in the manner of revisionist works like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film J. Hoberman described as a “striking inversion of values” that exemplified the peoples’ distrust of traditional mores back in the 1960s (Hoberman 88)? To decide that, we must first decide on what characteristics and values define the traditional western, and that isn’t quite as simple as one might think.

It seems like a relatively straightforward question: What qualifies a film to wear the label of “western”? Unlike the way in which a musical film is defined by the tropes of musical theater, or science-fiction by the presence of fanciful scientific concepts and technology, the genetic code of the western is more difficult to sequence. Can it be as simple as a geographic or historical setting? Not really. The “wild west” is commonly accepted as a historical environment that existed along the American frontier, roughly between 1850 and 1910 (Durgnat 69). However, stories set in locales as diverse as Australia (Simon Wincer’s Quigley Down Under) and Japan (Seijun Suzuki’s Man with a Shotgun), and from the mid 1700s (John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk) to the far-flung future (Peter Hyams’ Outland), have all been lumped into the genre at one time or another. Obviously, independent of history or aesthetics, the western is primarily defined by the themes and attitudes of its narrative. In the article “A Western is a Western is a Western”, Stuart Kobak neatly explains the problems inherent in defining the genre:

“There are elements that must be found in a film to label it a Western. It is fair to insist that a Western have a reasonable amount of action and at minimum a modicum of shoot-em-up. Conflict resides in the guts of all Westerns. We need good guys and bad guys, although the differences can sometimes be blurred. Capturing a sense of the great outdoors is a fundamental precept of the greater number of Westerns. Often a chase is the driving force behind a Western’s plot. A changing way of life is frequently the focus of genre treatment and pioneers are found as unsung heroes. There is really no firm description that can lasso the genre. No Western will have each and every element in evidence. Not all Westerns are created equal and all are not equally Westerns. When enough of the essential nature of the genre is present in a film, it isn’t too great a stretch to call it a Western.”

To Kobak’s list we may add the nature of the hero his conflicts as defining factors in the disposition of the genre. The ideal western hero is sometimes jovial, but when he faces important matters, he always takes them seriously. He does not possess great wealth, nor does he need it, since he has everything he needs in his self-reliance, and ability to ride and shoot as well or better than anyone who comes along to hassle him (Warshow 37). As proficient a gunman as he may be, “the cowboy never goes after a fight, but he’d damn well best be ready when the desperado shouts his name in the street” (Durgnat 81). When the westerner walks down to face that desperado, he will never draw first, but that does not mean he will be reluctant to fire when the time comes. He is a champion on the virtuous side of any fight, and he cannot fulfil his purpose without shooting his enemies down (Warshow 38).

So what, at last, does the western hero fight for? If Kobak is correct, and “Conflict resides in the guts of all westerns”, what type of conflict motivates the westerner? Robert Warshow admits that the true cowboy hero is driven by such “cliched” causes as virtue, justice and courage, but he defends these things only because he values them and, in fact, his conflicts are always based upon the defense of his own sensibilities. “What he defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image– in fact, his honor” (Warshow 38). Remember now, in the traditional western, the communities which call on the cowboy for help are frontier towns. These are infant settlements, ones whose future character is precariously balanced across law and lawlessness. When the cowboy hero upholds the elements of society which reflect his own values, he is acting as a father figure or mentor to that society, becoming the moral guide trying keep the town on the higher path.

So, having established the basic ideals for which the traditional western stands, we can begin to consider whether or not the “western resurgence” of the 2000s builds upon the same foundation, or merely cloaks itself in pilfered iconography.
Let’s consider James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma. Despite the success of Open Range four years earlier, the western resurgence had yet to take hold when the Mangold began shopping his pet project around to studios. No one wanted to make it, and it was an uphill battle to get an earthy, R-rated western drama into a cinema landscape dominated by CGI blockbusters and cheaply made, yet consistently successful, formula comedies (Murray). However, after years of work, 3:10 to Yuma was released to great critical praise.

The film may look resolutely modern at first, with plenty of flashy bloodletting, CGI-assisted explosions, and a post-Tarantino vibe to the clever, alternately understated and over-the-top dialog. Beneath all of it, however is a story that could have been taken from a Budd Boetticher project: For a reward he desperately needs in order to save his ranch, Dan Evans agrees to help escort notorious criminal Ben Wade to the train headed for Yuma prison. Along the way, the two men find mutual respect, even affection, but without ever compromising their own essential natures. It is revealed that Evans, who is missing a foot, was wounded while running from battle in the Civil War, and imaging the reaction to this if his son knew the truth is part of his motivation for seeing his new job through. He has been given a second chance to live up to his personal ideals, even though he failed once before. Eventually, even as the rest of the posse gives up in the face of overwhelming odds, Evans negotiates more money for his wife and family, and completes his mission alone, even though this leads to his death.

Ignore the fact that the film is a remake. Even as the overall setup is the same as it’s 1957 predecessor, the details of the narrative (especially the resolution, Dan’s war wound, and the sidelining of Evan’s wife in favor of his son) are substantially different. That does not, however, mean that the tale is modernized. For all the slick, modern production values, the ideas underlying Mangold’s film sit firmly within the framework we’ve established for the traditional western. In accordance with Stuart Kobak’s definitions, Yuma is the story of good men and criminals (their moral ambiguity does nothing to compromise their stance as one either dedicated to civilized law, or to frontier anarchy), and it is partially a chase film (with Wade’s men nipping at Evans’ heels). Much of it involves danger in the wilderness between towns, exemplifying how tenuous civilization’s hold on the territory remains. Evan with the danger, though, a changing way of life is clearly on the horizon, symbolized in the threat of Evans losing his ranch to eastern-style capitalists, which motivates his entry into the adventure. Last, there is more than a “modicum of shoot ‘em up”, and the picture is as exciting as many of John Wayne’s cowboy action films.

As for the protagonist, Dan Evans, we can see the white-hat persona of many a Saturday matinee oater stars in his quiet determination. While he becomes a deputy partly due to the promise of a reward, he is not seeking “wealth”, but only the bare necessities to help his family get by. His ultimate motivation is the heroic westerner’s sense of honor. Yes, Evans is a compromised hero, haunted by his retreat from battle in wartime, but the simple fact that he is haunted by this tells us that he must hold bravery and duty in high regard. This is a virtuous man, and now that he is older (we can assume around 15 – 25 years have passed since the end of the Civil War) he is ready to stand up for his values in a way that he was unable to before. Like Robert Vaughn’s nerve-shattered gunfighter in The Magnificent Seven, who is haunted by fear but eventually overcomes it and dies honorably in battle, Dan Evans overcomes former cowardice and reclaims his honor through a similar sacrifice. This is another common theme in the classic western: A man may make a mistake, or even be a career coward, but in a tough and wild land, there are opportunities for redemption around every corner.

While 3:10 to Yuma jazzed up its faithful adherence to western tropes with very 21st century action choreography, Ed Harris’ Appaloosa, released almost exactly one year later, pulls the reigns hard in the opposite direction, creating a film whose style lies is its lack of such stylization. It also practically announces that it is a Western with a capital ‘W’, and that there will be no revisionism or parody going on in these parts.

The plot is either stereotype or archetype, depending on one’s outlook. Cruel, wealthy rancher Randall Bragg thinks his money can buy the soul of a town, and thus he thinks nothing of killing a Marshall and his men when they have the audacity to attempt to arrest some of his employees. The town, having enough of this tyranny, hires mercenary-lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hicks to put a stop to it. Of course, nothing goes as planned, Bragg is put on trial, promptly escapes with the help of his own hired guns, and Cole and Hitch must pursue them through the wilderness. There is the obligatory gunfight, with the two heroes gunning down Bragg’s men, though Bragg himself escapes and is pardoned for his crimes by the president, proving that even the highest-ranking bureaucrat in the land is still nothing more than a snake in the grass. Bragg returns to the town of Appaloosa, basically to flaunt his freedom and begin reclaiming his power. One of our heroes, Everett Hitch, knowing that it is just a matter of time before Bragg ruins his friend Cole’s life (he is trying to settle down), and that the system will never deal with Bragg appropriately, abandons his position as deputy, challenges Bragg to a private fight, and kills him. It doesn’t matter if the president, or anyone else, wants to protect Bragg, Hitch is dedicated to a greater power, his own ideas of honor and justice.

Of course, there is a great deal more to the film than this. Some remarkable characterizations and fresh subplots certainly contribute a great deal to overall quality of the narrative. However, from just this basic synopsis, it becomes clear that Appaloosa is playing by a very old set of rules. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but compare Harris’ 2008 oater with Michael Winner’s 1970 revisionist western Lawman, in which a very similar plot plays out. In that tale, Burt Lancaster is a straight-laced, honest Marshall named Maddox, but the film depicts this formerly lauded character-type as a disconnected zealot, while showing its criminal rancher as a levelheaded, tired old man, truly an example of the leftist counterculture returning to the Hollywood scene. Appaloosa, on the other hand, has nothing but respect for the unflappable lawman, and from the very first scene makes Bragg out to be a heartless crime lord. It does not, however, side with the government, essentially casting the United States president as an accomplice after-the-fact to Bragg’s murderous and corrupt ways. If Appaloosa is the antithesis to Lawman, it is the direct descendent of High Noon, where the court lets a killer go free on a technicality, and Gary Cooper’s Marshall Kane must ignore the will of the people and seek out justice based only on his inner morality. Similarly, the only justice Appaloosa respects is the common-law, common-sense ideals that exist somewhere between the Ten Commandments and the golden rule. This is justice that the western hero respects as well, the kind that meshes with his personal code of honor.

Both 3:10 to Yuma and Appaloosa were fine films. “I give thanks for westerns. Every time they seem to be about to gasp their last, dusty breath, one comes along to give them a bit of renewed life…Last year it was the excellent remake 3:10 to Yuma. This year it’s the worthy Appaloosa,” said critic Tony Macklin in his review of the latter. However, while both of these movies were artistic triumphs, and managed to turn reasonable profits between their theatrical box office and home video releases (TheNumbers.com), their success was minor in comparison to a film that would finally set the western genre aflame in the winter of 2010.

The plot of Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel True Grit is well known to most movie buffs, having previously served as the basis for one of John Wayne’s most beloved starring vehicles (and the one which led to his Academy Award victory). In short, a young girl hires violent, drunken Marshall Rooster Cogburn to track down the man who killed her father, and from that point on the story is one long pursuit over the harshest possible terrain, until it culminates in one of the most iconic shootouts in film history (“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”). There is a rugged simplicity to the narrative, and to the morality, of the picture. A cruel man commits a heinous crime, and virtuous people (and Rooster is eminently virtuous, despite his surly attitude, drunkenness, and willingness to shoot first and ask questions later) band together to hunt him down.

Of all the pictures that constitute the post-2000 western resurgence, True Grit is the most traditional. Unlike the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, this film sticks close to both its source novel, and Henry Hathaway’s 1969 adaptation. There are modern filmmaking techniques represented, and some obvious CGI blood on hand, but the screenplay fulfils our criteria for being a traditional western as closely as one could ever hope. From Stuart Kobak’s list, it possess exciting shootouts, clear cut good guys and bad guys, a “sense of the great outdoors”, and a chase as the “driving force” behind the plot. From our profile of the quintessential “western hero”, we see in Rooster Cogburn a jovial man who becomes serious when duty demands it, who does not possess or seek wealth, who does not wish to be anything but what he is, who adheres unflinchingly to a personal code of justice while giving little respect to the court, and who can certainly shoot better than anyone he comes up against (at least when he is sober).

If all this makes True Grit seems like a “by-the-numbers” kind of film, that’s because it is one. However, following genre conventions did nothing to turn the audience or the press off. Out of 232 professional reviews available online, a mere 10 did not give True Grit a passing grade, equating to a 96% positive response (Rotten Tomatoes). The box office was even more astounding. Worldwide, True Grit took in $249,250,624 against a $38 million dollar budget. Even 3:10 to Yuma, considered an unusually well-performing western, made $70,016,220 against a $50 million dollar budget, and True Grit stampeded over this figure like a spooked stallion (Box Office Mojo). The good press certainly boosted audience interest, but history tells us that reviews do not have the impact on moviegoers that many critics wish they did. What True Grit’s success tells us is that it was released at a time when the audience was hungry for something that a traditional western could offer.

This is the real reason for the western resurgence: people want to see the westerns that are being released. The question then becomes, what is it about the western that seems to be striking a cord with people now, after the genre has spent so much time lingering in the cinematic background? “When things get complicated, as they are now, people tend to gravitate toward stories in which the moral landscape is clear, there’s a white hat and a black hat,” offered Scott Rudin, producer of True Grit (Della Cava).

We live in a world where the United States is at war with its most nebulous enemy, the very concept of “terrorism”. Not only do people disagree on who the specific enemies are, they cannot agree on what to do with them when they are within our reach. If Rooster Cogburn managed to track down a Taliban leader, there would be no debate about whether he could be kept in Guantanamo Bay without trial, because he would have brought in hanging limp across a pack mule.

Aside from the threats of war, people are also facing constant economic uncertainty. They are unsure whether or not they can trust their banks or stockbrokers, and feel constantly exploited and undervalued by money-mad employers. These finance-bandits are clearly cut from the same cloth as the unscrupulous railroad magnates and corrupt cattle barons whose dishonorable dealings have stirred the wrath of cowboy heroes from Tom Mix to Ed Harris, and people take comfort in the kind of story where ill-gotten money isn’t enough to stop the advance of one good man’s justice. The appeal of the classic western seems perfectly logical, even expected, in times such as these. “Well-made westerns — precisely because they are such a ritualized and conventionalized form — have an ability to isolate moral conflicts in spare, essentially unrealistic, contexts and thus focus our undistracted attention on those issues” (Schickel).

The 1980s through the late 1990s were a period of general cold-war patriotic unity, and a long economic boom that many thought would proceed well into the 21st century (Leyden). People felt secure in the direction of their country, and of their way of life, and didn’t need any old-fashioned, squared-jawed types to preach virtue and perseverance in their movies. However, when the dream started coming apart (the rise of 21st century terrorism and the global recession), the public felt like rug had been pulled from beneath their feet. They didn’t know what they had done wrong, nor what they needed to do to get their misguided nation (and, taken a step farther, misguided world) back on track. Hardship and uncertainty were no longer things of the past. “In hard times, Americans have often turned to the Western to reset their moral compasses. In very hard times, it takes a very good Western”, said film critic Roger Ebert, in his review of 3:10 to Yuma, and I am inclined to agree with him.

The western has experienced a resurgence, because we as a people need to have faith in the ideas the genre stands for once again. We must believe in justice, right and wrong, fair and unfair, and the power of our personal ethics to guide us through a sea of opportunism and extremism without succumbing to their clutches. It is in times of desperation that people need strength of character. They need heroes who do not look for trouble, or accost the innocent, but sure as hell won’t allow desperados and bureaucrats to walk all over them. If there is a single line of dialog that sums up what a western teaches us, it is this one delivered by John Wayne in The Shootist (1976): “I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”

If ever we needed a return to such a simple philosophy of life, it is now. Thank God the western has just ridden back into town, and it’s ready to give this ornery culture some desperately needed schooling.

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Works Cited
Della Cava, Marco R. “The Western genre gets back in the saddle.” USAToday.com, Gannett, Inc. 2 Feb 2011. Web. 24 July, 2011.

Durgnat, Raymond and Scott Simmon. “Six Creeds that Won the Western.” The Western Reader.
Eds. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. 69-84. Print.

Ebert, Roger. “3:10 to Yuma review.” SunTimes.com, Chicago Sun-Times. 7 Sept 2007. Web. 24 July 2011.

Hoberman, J. “How the West Was Lost.” The Western Reader. Eds. Jim Kitses and Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. 85-92. Print.

Kobak, Stuart J. “A Western is a Western is a Western.” filmsondisc.com. n.d. Web. 12 July 2011.

Leyden, Peter and Peter Schwartz. “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980 – 2020.” Wired.com, Conde Nast Digital. July 1997. Web. 24 July 2011.

“List of Western films of the 1990s.” wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 July 2011.

“List of Western films of the 2000s.” wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 July 2011.

Macklin, Tony. “Appaloosa.” tonymacklin.net. Orig pub Fayetteville Free Weekly, 27 Nov 2008. Web. 23 July, 2011.

Moore, Roger. “Movie review: Appaloosa.” orlandosentinel.com. A Tribune Newspaper Website. 1 October 2008. Web. 20 July 2011.

Murray, Rebecca. “Director James Mangold Talks 3:10 to Yuma.” Hollywood Movies. about.com. n.d. Web. 20 July 2011.

“TheNumbers.com.” Nash Information Services, LLC. Web. 23 July 2011.

Schickel, Richard. “The Perfect Time for 3:10 to Yuma.” Time.com. Time, Inc. 7 Sept 2007. Web. 24 July 2011.

“True Grit (2010).” RottenTomatoes.com. Flixster, Inc. n.d. Web. 23 July 2011.

Warshow, Robert. “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner.” The Western Reader. Eds. Jim Kitses and
Gregg Rickman. New York: Limelight Editions, 1998. 35-48. Print.

“Western: 1979-Present.” boxofficemojo.com. An IMDB Inc Company, 12 July 2011. Web. 12 July 2011.

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The Great Train Robbery of 1903 is a cinema milestone, a film of firsts, and one that set the stage for the narrative motion picture as we know it. We can all discuss the importance of Director Edwin S. Porter’s twelve-minute crime drama in the context of history, but how many movie buffs and film-school refugees still give it credit as a work of art in of itself? The fact is, whatever import this little movie holds in the history books, it also represents a major accomplishment in set utilization, physical camera work, editing, and, above all else, a sheer efficiency of storytelling. It deserves its reputation as “the American cinema’s first defining masterpiece” (Page). The picture contains a mere fourteen shots, no written dialog, no narrative inter-titles to bridge scene gaps, and yet it manages to relate an intelligible, and action-packed, tale.

Scene one begins with a mid-distance full-shot that encompasses a large portion of an office, complete with a small window to the left, and a large window with a fine view of a forested area on the right. Given the title of the film, viewers can immediately assume the location to be a part of the railroading infrastructure. This shot, like all most of those that will follow, allows the audience to take in the whole of the set’s geography at once. It also introduces our first character, a man seated at a desk just to the right of center-frame. I am tempted to call this an establishing shot, but if we accept that an establishing shot is one “that begin(s) a scene or sequence as a way of locating a scene clearly in a certain place before dividing that sequence into more detailed shots” (Corrigan 70), then Porter’s camera set-ups cannot truly be such a thing, as his sequences typically contain only a single, long take. It is just as difficult to categorize any shot in The Great Train Robbery by formal labels, simply because the visual vocabulary of film had not yet evolved at the time of production. There are no cuts within a scene, and so the initial camera angle must be all things at all times. Director Porter uses the edges of the frame in the manner a dramatist of his time would be most familiar with, as a direct counterpart to the proscenium arch in a stage play. In every indoor scene of the film, Porter needed to think like a stage director, ensuring that every actor’s motion, every prop, and every crucial piece of visual information he intended his shot to contain or convey, was composed and played out in a fixed and rigid cube of space.

Look again at the first scene. When the bandits break into this office, we can quickly ascertain several key facts: The man at the desk must be a signal operator, as he is clearly clutching the cord to such a device. The bandits force him at gunpoint to release this cord and to write a new set of orders to lead the locomotive into ambush. Even as this occurs in the foreground, out the office window we catch our first glimpse of the eponymous train.

About this window, the attentive viewer would have already noticed that the slight shuddering of the window-image is clearly out-of-step with the jostling of the camera frame as a whole. The exterior must have been a separate piece of footage that was either composited into the shot through editing, or accomplished in-camera by way of rear-projection. While Porter does no intercutting in The Great Train Robbery, the effect he accomplishes with this illusionary view is something quite similar. He has composed a shot that shows two seperate pieces of footage, one featuring the activities of the bandits and the railroad employee in the interior set, and the second communicating to the audience the approach and stop of the train outside.

When an oblivious man comes to receive his falsified orders from the employee and depart, we realize innately that he has come from the motionless train and will return to it, with no explanations or demonstrations required. In a modern film, we more than likely would have seen a handful of shots to show the same sequence, but Porter’s economical sensibility neatly sidesteps the need for such things. So, with the train rolling away from the window, and with their nefarious meddling finished, the bandits knock-out and bind the railroad employee and exit the set.

Now the film reaches it’s first scene transition, and it is accomplished with a basic cut. In the new exterior long-shot, we see armed men take cover behind a water tower. There has been no fade, no dissolve, no stylistic transition of any kind between the two locations, which is notable for films of the period. Porter’s use of simple crosscutting is still considered a major milestone in the history of film editing (Capp 92). As John Belton explains, “The fade, like the lowering or raising of the lights between scenes or acts in a theater, marks a change in time or place…The iris functions like the opening or closing of a theater curtain to designate major transitions…the dissolve and the wipe…provide a more fluid, less discreet marking of temporal or spatial change” (Belton 58). That the changeover from the station sequence to the water tower sequence bears none of these techniques articulates just the inverse, that we have not seen a major transition. The end of one sequence and the beginning of the next happen simultaneously and in close physical proximity, so the excitement is maintained as we continue rolling along with the action. That is Edwin S. Porter’s great achievement as a director, mastering the ability to say “meanwhile, just over here…” in purely visual terms. In addition to keeping the level of excitement up, this makes the audience feel like a whole world exists within the film, and that many things are occurring elsewhere, but simultaneously, while we watch the scenes playing out in front of us.

The film continues. The train workers stop to take on water at the tower, and we see just why the bandits forged such an instruction, since this is their opportunity to board the train. A moment later, the locomotive pulls away. We cut again, this time to the interior of a baggage car, where a worker mills around beside a pile of sacks, a stack of trunks, and one conspicuous metal strongbox on the floor by an open door. The moving scenery visible through the open door of the railroad car represents another composited element, a film reel of trees zipping by the car at high speeds. Of course, this door would never have been left open like this in reality, and we can tell that it was not actually moving do to the lack of wind produced (all the papers in the shot are motionless), but Porter included the effect for its narrative qualities. It reminds the audience that this new set is indeed within the train, and it adds thrills (look how fast we’re going, folks!).

Soon, the bandits begin smashing their way into the baggage car, and the worker inside gestures wildly toward the strongbox on the floor, slams the lid shut, locks it, and hurls the key outside. In just a few seconds, the driving force of the film, the bandit’s target, is made clear. Gunfire is exchanged as the bandits enter, the worker is killed, and our villains are left to blow the strongbox with a explosives, which is realized with less than realistic, but suitably spectacular, pyrotechnics. The two men snag their loot, hustle back out the door, and we cut to a spectacular sequence atop a moving train.

This was not a trick effect like the moving background in the baggage car, but was accomplished by actually mounting a camera to the tender of a moving locomotive. We are soon treated to a fist-fight atop the rumbling train as the pair of bandits seize control from the engineer and fireman. As one bandit wrestles his opponent to the ground, Porter makes uses of a very simple optical trick, stopping the camera, switching out the actor playing the railroad man with a dummy, then restarting the film, allowing the bandit to seemingly hurl the man to his death. The mechanics of this substitution trick were already well-known by 1903, having been invented some seven years earlier by Georges Méliès (Robinson). Even so, Méliès had focused on using his special effects in fantastic fare like 1902’s A Trip to the Moon. Porter took what had been a kind of magic trick and used it, not to defy reality, but to allow him to capture a realistic situation that could not have been safely realized without the trick editing effect.

When the bandit heaves the stunt-dummy off the train, it is easy to miss the next directorial flourish of the scene. Just before the bandit disposes of the stuffed corpse, the camera pans slightly to the right, preparing viewers for the motion. Again, in the midst of an uninterrupted take, Porter finds a way to direct his audience’s focus, indeed, to change the focus of the shot, through only the slightest of changes. In a time when most films could barely tell a story confined to a single setting, Edwin Porter was fastening his motion picture camera to the roof of a moving train, while moving the camera independently to shift the composition of the frame. That is innovation.

Next, the bandits take the surviving engineer off the train, and we cut on the motion of the men climbing down a set of steps to a long shot of them fininshing ther descent, and the engineer going to uncouple the engine. By placing his cross-cut after the men begin climbing off the locomotive and before they reach the ground, Porter maintains the flow of action in what may be one of the first truly seamless edits in cinema.

As the locomotive pulls away, Porter cuts to another long-shot of a bandit herding people off the train’s passenger cars and lining them up for a systematic robbery. In another dramatic moment, a passenger panics and makes a mad dash toward the camera. It is very well-composed image, with the fleeing passenger growing larger as he approaches us, while behind him, in a good use of deep focus and perspective, the bandit holding the passengers at gunpoint pivots at the hip, shoots the man in the back, and swings his weapon back to cover the others before his thrashing victim can tumble over. This sequence displays a surprisingly effective piece of acting from the bandit, who exudes a cool, methodical, menace with his efficient motions (especially as they contrast with the theatrical flailing of his victim). It is not easy to for an actor to exude anything in a long-shot, but this fellow does, and ought to be acknowledged.

Now, loot firmly in hand, the bandits run off into the next shot, and join their cohorts aboard the locomotive to make their escape. The succeeding shot places us some distance up the track, where the bandits clamber off the train and run down the grade beside the tracks. Here Porter makes use of his most dramatic camera movement of the picture, as the frame pans left, and then tilts downward, following the four fleeing bandits. This camera move lasts a full six seconds, and the moving frame seems to suggest the adrenaline that must be surging through the criminals as they make their escape from a (seemingly) successful heist. In the next shot, Porter cuts to the bandits still running down the hill, and into the forest. We are left to wonder where they might be going, and why they abandoned the train so soon. About eleven seconds after the cut, there is another camera movement, a slight pan to the left which follows the bandits as they pass through the frame, and surprises us by revealing a group of saddled horses tethered and waiting in the middle of the woods. Besides the obvious appeal of adding action to the shot, the pan also makes it possible for the reveal of the horses (the final component of the bandits’ carefully laid-out plan), to have a much more dramatic impact that it would have if the animals were simply standing at center frame when Porter cut to this scene. It is interesting, though, that Porter confines his use of camera movement to the robbery and escape sequence, and does not revisit it for the remainder of the film.

Shot ten begins a new sequence, with Porter switching the focus from the criminal plot, to the efforts of the law-abiding. We see the bound worker from scene one still trussed up on the floor of the railroad office. He struggles to his feet, and uses his face to manipulate something on the desk, which is difficult to see, though one can assume that it is a telegraph key (what else is there in a 19th century signal station?). Unfortunately, he is too weak, and promptly collapses, leaving the audience to wonder if the bandits may actually get away with their crime. Soon, a small girl enters the office. Who is she? Why is she there? Again we see Porter’s visual storytelling efficiency at work. In the girl’s hand is a metal lunch pail, so she is bringing the worker food. Knowing this, the audience can logically infer that she is his daughter bringing lunch from home. This small bit of characterization is integral to creating the emotion of the scene, as the child rushes for her father, cuts his bonds, and tries desperately to wake him (going so far as to clasp her hands in prayer). If this had been a random passerby, the scene would have played blandly. By identifying the man’s benefactor as his daughter, the tone of the scene is much different. Thankfully, the girl succeeds, and her father can send for help.

The scene cuts to the interior a saloon or social hall, and there is an incredibly brief use of an iris-type effect, perhaps used to indicate that this location is somewhat distant from the signal office, but it is really only of interest because this film was apparently among the first to use such an effect (Dirks 1). The location it reveals, however, is notable only as the most patently artificial-looking set in The Great Train Robbery, being nothing more that a large, unremarkable room that has been given a bit of character by painting architectural details on the walls. While most of the details come off well enough, it was probably a mistake to paint a false pot-belly stove on the wall directly at the center of the frame. It’s position makes it an obvious place to rest our eyes, and it is only too obvious that it does not actually extend out from the wall. A minor enough quibble, but one that could have been easily eliminated.

Porter makes up for the limitations of the set by giving us a gaggle of men and women laughing, dancing, and generally reveling throughout the room. At first, it is easy to assume that these are the bandits enjoying their spoils, especially when they draw their guns and blast away at a man’s feet to make him dance until he flees the room in terror, amidst the assembled cowboys’ cheers. However, our old friend the railroad worker soon bursts into the room gesturing wildly, and the dancing cowboys grab their weapons and follow him out the door en masse. Now the audience knows that these reckless and raucous fellows are the film’s heroes, heading off to confront the bandits, though the wild behavior they’ve displayed for the past minute suggests that there may not be much of a distinction between good guys and bad guys in Porter’s vision of the wild west.

Now the film reaches the first of two uncharacteristically awkward scene transitions. We have seen the posse of townspeople run out to go after the bandits at the behest of the railroad worker, but then Porter immediately cuts to a shot of the posse already engaged in a horse-back gun battle with the bandits as they pursue them through the forest. How did they track them down so precisely, knowing only where they stopped the locomotive, but not where the bandits would travel from there? Even more inexplicable is how they were able to catch up with them so quickly. Every scene in The Great Train Robbery seems to follow directly from the one preceding it, so the only logical way to interpret the release of the railroad worker in the greater chronology of the story is by assuming his daughter finds and frees him following the escape of the bandits by horseback. An acquaintance of mine has suggested that the cut back to the signal station might have been intended as a step backward in time, showing something that happens concurrently with scenes of the bandits’ crime, but I see no evidence to support this idea within the film itself. If this was Porter’s intention, I don’t think he was successful. If the more obvious interpretation is correct, and the scenes are laid out in a consistent temporal order, then the posse simply should not be able to catch up with the bandits, especially considering their head-start, and the fact that their horses were freshly rested while the posse must have ridden all the way from town. I feel almost as though there ought to be another scene in the narrative, with the posse tracking the bandits, or heading them off somewhere, anything to bridge the narrative gap from the saloon to the horse chase.

Despite this hiccup in the plot, the story still makes sense, we simply have to infer what happened to allow the posse to intercept the bandits. I doubt that the audience watching this at the time of release cared much about such a detail, especially as they teetered on the edge of their seats watching one of the first great action sequences. Porter makes good use of perspective again, as dozens of horses begin as distant blurs on the forest path, only to thunder directly past the camera, blasting away with their revolvers and leaving great clouds of smoke as one of the bandits is shot off his horse, struggles to stand, only to be gunned down by the posse as they ride by.

The second oddly awkward cut of the pictures happens next. In the last shot, the posse was mere seconds behind the bandits, following hot on their heels as they charged out of frame, but Porter cuts from this to the three bandits alone in the forest, their horses secured, as they hurriedly begin dividing the loot from the robbery. How did they get such a lead on the posse, and why do they think there is enough time to divide the money now? Does Porter want the audience to think the bandits gave the posse the slip some time ago? It is not made clear, but as in the last scene, our questions are quickly pushed to the background by a spectacular action scene.

While the bandits fret over their ill-gotten gains, we see the posse creeping through the trees in the background. Here we again see Porter’s efficient use of one master shot to film an entire scene, even when he needs the audience to notice multiple points of activity. Porter uses the foreground and background in the way a later director would have used intercutting. The wide long-shot gives the audience a deep enough space to follow the approach of the posse and the activities of the bandits, almost dividing the frame into two separate picture planes, upper and lower, to accomplish this. The sheer expanse of the shot gives it a kind of epic quality, using the natural setting to give the picture a climax that could never have been equaled by a shootout restricted to a stage. The men of the posse march toward the bandits, and toward the viewer, and it serves to make us identify with the criminals. There is a tension in the scene, suspense, as we are almost tempted to yell at the bandits to run away. This effect derives in part from two things: We have spent the whole picture with the bandits, we have been there with them for every step of the crime, and so we identify with them, the audience having become sort-of an accomplice-by-observation. The other reason we may feel more concerned with the bandits is because of the impression of power given off by the marching posse. They are a huge group, moving in-step, a single entity like a military unit. The bandits, in comparison, are the underdogs, reduced to three panicked men just trying to grab a little bit of the take to make their plan worthwhile. These feelings are a testament to the effectiveness of Porter’s direction as a whole, but our sympathy can’t save the bandits. They put up a token resistance, but as the posse opens fire, rifles belching waves of smoke, and we can just imagine the hail of lead that must be slamming into those bandits, blasting them to pieces as they crumple to the ground.

Finally, as the posse reclaims the stolen goods, the screen cuts to the most famous gunshot in the history of film, as a cowboy levels his pistol directly at the audience and fires. At the time of the film’s release, “theater managers were free to either begin or end the picture with this scene — a promotional gimmick – selecting it as either a prologue or epilogue” (Dirks 2). Despite this, I find that it takes on an interesting connotation when used as the finale. We have just watched the bandits being gunned down and, as I stated above, the majority of the film placed the audience with these bandits, thrilling as they fought, hijacked, robbed and killed their way across the screen. As viewers, we identified with them, were excited by them and, in the fantasy of the theater, we became members of the gang. Now they are all dead, and when actor Justus Barnes points his revolver at the audience, it is almost as though he is saying “You think you can just enjoy the ride with the bad guys, and get away scot-free? Not a chance, folks.” And then the audience is shot, ending their part in the story just like all the other characters who thrilled to violence and mayhem. A fitting end, whether the director intended us to interpret it that way or not.

At the end of The Great Train Robbery, we feel like we have seen something big. Edwin S. Porter’s western is more than just the first true narrative film, it is the first realistic screen adventure. We see here the seeds that would later grow into films like The Wild Bunch, Heat, and countless other western, crime, and action classics. Without a single word, Porter created an epic, and the only tools he used were actors, locations, a few simple camera pans, and some very precise editing. The film he created deserves to be remembered as a piece of history, but it should always be remembered first as a work of art.

Works Cited

Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.

Capp, Rose. “Editing.” Metro Magazine 141 (2004): 92. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 June 2011.

Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. 7th ed. New York: Longman-Pearson, 2010. Print.

Dirks, Tim. “The Great Train Robbery (1903).” Filmsite.org. AMC, n.d. Web. 8 June 2011.

Page, Tim. “DANCING IN THE DARK.” Smithsonian 36.12 March 2006: 102-109. EBSCOhost.com. Web. 6 June 2009.

Robinson, David. “Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès George:French magician, filmmaker.” Victorian-Cinema.met, n.d. 8 June 2011.

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This post has nothing to do with entertainment. Just Humor me, folks.

I recently read the following story, and you people out there had damn well better read it, too:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989037,00.html

Here’s the basics from the TIME article:

“He was just an innocent bystander, he says. A bystander who peered over the top of a toilet stall and discovered–in the women’s rest room of a casino on the California-Nevada border–his best friend Jeremy Strohmeyer, 18, struggling with a seven-year-old girl. He tapped his friend’s head, he says, knocking off his hat, but couldn’t get him to stop. So David Cash Jr. decided to take a walk.

The scene in front of him could not have been any clearer: a nearly 6-ft.-tall teenager and a little girl who didn’t yet weigh 50 lbs. locked in the stall of the Primadonna Resort casino at 3:47 in the morning. And yet Cash goes for a walk. He says nothing to the security guards. Less than half an hour later, Strohmeyer emerges and tells Cash he has molested and murdered the child.”

As the article says, there are few states in the union where David Cash could have been charged with a crime, one of the few, though, is Vermont.

“Vermont “Bad Samaritan Law”
ß 519. Emergency medical care
(a) A person who knows that another is exposed to grave physical harm shall, to the extent that the same can be rendered without danger or peril to himself or without interference with important duties owed to others, give reasonable assistance to the exposed person unless that assistance or care is being provided by others.
(b) A person who provides reasonable assistance in compliance with subsection (a) of this section shall not be liable in civil damages unless his acts constitute gross negligence or unless he will receive or expects to receive remuneration. Nothing contained in this subsection shall alter existing law with respect to tort liability of a practitioner of the healing arts for acts committed in the ordinary course of his practice.
(c) A person who willfully violates subsection (a) of this section shall be fined not more than $100.00.”

(Taken from www.cengage.com/criminaljustice/samaha)

Unless he suffered from an abnormally low IQ, we should not question that David Cash had seen more than enough evidence that Sherrice Iverson was “exposed to grave physical harm”. Based upon section (a) of the Vermont law, Cash’s actions would obviously be a violation, as reporting that he had witnessed Jeremy Strohmeyer brutalizing Sherrice Iverson would have involved no danger to himself, and did not involve “interference with important duties owed to others”, except perhaps Cash’s laughable assertion that he had some duty to protect his friend, the murderer/rapist Strohmeyer. The idea that someone would protect a friend against the law is not humorous and it can be, depending on the crime, a noble decision wherein the value of a single human being trumps dedication to state control in another person’s mind. Here, this impulse is perverted to such a degree, Cash’s statements cannot be taken seriously. One simply cannot invest any weight in an argument that appeals to the concept of compassion (for a friend or anyone else) when it is invoked by a person who would allow a seven-year-old girl to be raped and murdered despite his obvious ability to stop it.

Vermont’s law is ethical in concept, but isn’t it just another form of government interference in our lives? One may say that a bystander has no legal duty to intervene or report a situation that will more than likely result in harm to another person, unless they have one of the “special relationships” listed in various criminal law textbooks, like “parent-child, doctor-patient, employer-employee, carrier-passenger, husband-wife” (Samaha 92). However, such specific conditions are undermined by, among other things, the court’s opinion in State of Connecticut v. Miranda.

Please take a look:

http://www.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/cases/st%20v%20miranda.htm

Here a person who is neither a child’s parent or legal guardian is held to be subject to a legal duty as it applies to those people. The court’s reasoning is sound, but it instantly invalidates any rigid framework for defining who is responsible for whom. Just when does a boyfriend who is affectionate toward his girlfriend’s children become legally responsible for them? After one date? After a month? Does he have to live in the house? What if he is there most of the time? Does it change if he spends 12 versus 13 hours per day there? Maybe he has to take one of the kids to a doctor’s appointment, thus implying he has taken responsibility for their health?

None of this matters, it is the same as the old quandary, “how many grains of sand are required to make a heap?” We all agree that a dump truck full of sand is a heap, then we begin to take one grain of sand away at a time. We know that one grain of sand is not a heap, and it sure seems like two, or ten aren’t really a heap, but at what point in our one-grain-at-a-time reduction does the classification “heap” become invalid? All people will disagree, and unless they are strictly held to a definition imposed by higher authority, the whole concept is a logical fallacy.

In State of Connecticut v. Miranda, the court didn’t base its decision on the written law, but upon their own intuition as to where “grains became heap” or, if you please, where a man stopped being just another citizen, and where he became a “father”, when “father” was undefined. If this is to be the way such things are decided, it is time that the state says “we are responsible to no-one but ourselves, unless we wish to be” or that “we are responsible for our fellow citizens when serious harm is threatened”. This is the equitable way. Which of these propositions is chosen as law depends on what the desired goal is. The case of Sherrice Iverson, and of course the infamous case of Kitty Genovese:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

…and the case of the heroic Alfredo Tale-Yax, who stepped in to challenge a bastard threatening a woman with a knife…

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/kitty-genovese-2010-people-walk-by-dying-man/19454372

…and many others prove that we simply cannot depend on humanity possessing any ideal of morality, save perhaps for moral nihilism. In the above cases, witnesses behaved animalistically, doing nothing because the crime did not directly affect them. Actually, “animalistic” is not even the correct word, because even cats have been known to run into burning buildings to save helpless kittens, and surely to call Cash or the Genovese witnesses “animals” is an unforgivable affront to felines (see http://www.moggies.co.uk/html/scarlett.html).

Though I am a devout, nigh religiously dedicated, libertarian, on this issue I follow personal hero Flavius Claudius Julianus in embracing the title of apostate. We need Vermont’s law if we wish to rise above our base nature and act as civilized as we would like to pretend we are. Sure, there are heroes that rise above of their own accord, but obviously there are not enough. I would hate to live under the auspices of the Leviathan, but the simple fact that the debate over whether “Good Samaritan Laws” are ethical is occurring lends a frightening amount of credence to Thomas Hobbes’ beliefs on human nature.

Vermont’s law is a good start, but a $100 dollar fine is an insult. If we are going to appeal to greed in order to force people to value their fellow man, let’s make a statement that a person’s life is worth more money that a traffic violation, shall we?

Joseph R. Astalfa , Signing off.

17 September, 2010

Work Cited: Samaha, Joel. Criminal Law, 10th ed., Belmont, CA. Wadsworth, Cengage 2011, 2008

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This is not about the arts, per se, and it is not an article in the manner of those I have previously published on the Apollodorus Films website. However, the topic I am about to address is critically important to the entire art world, and as this website represents the interests of a motion picture company, I have elected to present my thoughts here. If you are easily offended, steel your nerves, because I am about to discuss the right to free expression, and it is going to be a rough ride.

ONE NATION, UNDER GOD, WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME, AND JUSTICE FOR FEW

I received word from a credible source that a disturbing incident recently transpired at a nearby public school. This school may or may not be located in ***ILION, NEW YORK***. It is definitely located somewhere within a half-hour drive of Utica, NY.

Well, it seems that a teacher employed at this school decided to single out for persecution a student who wore a set of rosary beads to class. (At this point, let me say that I will not be disclosing the names of any parties involved in this story here, only relating the facts in the hopes that the School District in question will perform some serious soul searching on the behavior they allow from their teachers). The teacher was so offended by this display of little beads on a string, that they demanded the student remove the article immediately. The student, apparently aware of their right to free expression, admirably refused to comply. The teacher would not let the issue drop, and the student was eventually asked to leave the class.

Holy shit.

It doesn’t matter why the student wore the rosary to class, whether out of veneration or disrespect, nor does it matter if the teacher wanted the student to remove it because they felt it was a disrespectful display, or because they hated Christians. Whatever the reason, it was unequivocally wrong for that teacher to demand the rosary’s removal. The students of a school, especially of a public school run by the state, can never be denied the rights entitled to them as American citizens. The fact that a teacher would spit on the 1st Amendment is so abhorrent, I can scarcely find the words to describe it. Luckily, I am an American as well, and free speech allows me to use whatever words I wish to describe the situation. So, here comes my best attempt: :

What the hell is this bullshit!? Does this teacher believe we are living in Stalin’s Russia? Does this teacher spend their private time practicing the goosestep and pleasuring themselves to a life-size photo of Adolf Hitler? Maybe, maybe not. I only have enough information to say that a person who directly opposes the 1st Amendment has no gods-damn business educating our children in the American way of life!

A teacher, my friends, is an authority figure. As an employee of a PUBLIC SCHOOL, they have a responsibility to conduct themselves in a way that HONORS and DEFENDS the constitutional rights that make our nation greater than those ruled by mind-twisting, socialist or fascist tyranny!

Am I being a bit hyperbolic, here? Of course I am. And do you want to know something, Teacher? Do you want to know something, you ignorant, elitist, closed-minded, prejudiced piece of shit?
I can be as hyperbolic as I wish! I can say what I fucking feel like, and I can write whatever I damn well please. Why? I can do so because I am an American, and because I live in the United States, and because here our right to free expression is SACRED.

You don’t like that, Teacher?

THEN GET THE FUCK OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!

I’m sure you would be much happier in one of those nations where they stone women to death for wearing their head coverings improperly. Hey, you know something? I would wager a guess that the authorities in those nations probably don’t like seeing girls wear rosaries around their necks, either! You could all have a big stoning party, passing around baskets of rocks and pummeling to death anyone who does something that offends your morality, or your religion, or your fashion sense, or anything else.

You would probably be very happy there, Teacher.

At least until someone decides to turn those rocks on you. Bigoted mobs have a tendency to do that, you see. They eat their own, once they run out of weaker prey.

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THE END IS NIGH!
The Culture of Apocalyptic Hysteria

Copyright 2010, J.R. Astalfa

Apocalypses. Given the nature of the term “apocalypse”, it ought to give us no small pause when we muse on the fact that there exists a standard spelling for the pluralized form. In Greek, apocalypse merely means that which is uncovered or revealed, and thus it was originally used as the title of John’s Book of Revelations in the Christian bible, wherein God allegedly revealed to his prophet the sequence of events leading to the end of mankind’s history (“Apocalypse”). From this use the word has entered the English language as the generic label for whatever future event will culminate in the termination of human history, the end of our world. If ever an event could only happen once, this is that one. If ever a word should need no plural, apocalypse is it. It should practically be capitalized.

So why is this not the case? Simple, it seems that apocalypses come along every century, sometimes several of them at once, sometimes each patiently waits for the last one to end before they take their turn laying waste to the pitiful animal that is man. At least, that is what one would assume if they believed the endless stream of prophets and doomsayers that scream on corners, preach on pulpits and late-night television, and churn out “nonfiction” books, films, and documentaries all warning us that THE END IS NIGH!

It is impossible to count, let alone analyze, every frenzied panic or period of quiet terror over a predicted humanity-ending cataclysm since the beginning of history, but we needn’t even try to do so in order to understand the phenomenon. Only the culture of modern western society is of interest to me at present, though since western (specifically American) media has permeated most of the world’s countries, the ideas transmitted thereby are increasingly becoming world culture. This western mindset, and it’s susceptibility to declarations that the sky is about to fall, formed out of many traits and beliefs. Most integrally for us are those relating to the drive for innovation and advancement, and its counterpart in the fear of change and nostalgia for the past; and of that most powerful of forces, the enveloping shroud of Judeo-Christian ideas that has infiltrated and influenced all aspects of western history for two millennia.

First, let us look at the mother of all doomsday predictions, the biblical Book of Revelations, fittingly the final book of traditional Christian bibles. The simple summary of this text proceeds roughly in the following fashion: God possesses a closed book (or scroll, depending upon the translation) secured with seven seals. When the time comes that the earth has descended to the worst levels of immorality and heresy, and the Christian faithful once more find themselves the target of systematic persecution, the seals on the book will be opened one by one. As each seal is broken, some divine horror descends upon the earth to slaughter the masses, sparing only those chosen by God because of their faith in Christ. Once this massacre of those who lacked in faith has concluded, Christ returns to seal Satan away for a thousand years, and rules over a golden kingdom on earth, after which Satan meets his final defeat and the universe achieves it ultimate, perpetual state (“Revelation”). This ending is all very pleasant, but it does not quite wipe the reader’s mind of the phantasmagoric atrocities that populated the rest of the story. Between surreal grotesqueries like locusts with scorpion tails swarming over the land, and multitudes of people being shoveled into a giant wine press and squeezed into a river of blood miles wide and deep, it is no wonder why this text, taken as an authentic prophecy of God’s wrath by millions of people, tended to terrify and fascinate them. Nor is it any wonder that the good Christian folk taught to believe in biblical inerrancy would have a powerful interest in knowing just when this cosmically psychotic purge of the planet would occur.

Religious-based apocalyptic movements cropped up frequently from the middle ages through the modern age, taking on many forms. While some Christian sects simply saw the end of the world as a somber and even frightening time of God’s final judgement, when the contest of souls would end and the sinful and pious would take up their final positions in the cosmic hierarchy, others had a decidedly more appealing view. Known as “millenialsts”, these Christians looked at the Book of Revelations and saw the promise of the first thousand year reign of Christ as a period in which only the most just of souls would be resurrected to live beside him, in a millennium-long “wedding feast of material pleasures in Jerusalem” (Daley 224 continuum). Only after this reward of hedonist revelry would the rest of history’s departed souls be judged.

In the 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD, it was extremely common among members of the young Christian faith to see the apocalypse as a great joy waiting for them just over the horizon. This was because they were living in a period of infrequent, but occasionally vicious, persecution by Roman authorities. The spirit of these times is summed up best by the words of Terullian of Carthage, a man known for his harsh and pointed criticism of nearly all of his contemporary religious movements (Daley 227). He predicted that the rise of the antichrist and the time of the apocalypse was nearly at hand, and that he would soon delight in seeing “the public reversal of the present order of power: Rome’s deified emperors being thrust into the lowest darkness, pagan poets and philosophers being surprised by the reality of judgement and retribution” (Daley 227).

So here we can see the darkest of psychological themes that fuel religious apocalypticsm: The sadistic joy of truly believing that, one day, all of the people of all the world’s religions besides yours will be shown their errors and your superiority by being subjected to grotesquely violent punishment. This is akin to the situation of a man who hates a president, and because of this hate he sits in his basement fantasizing about the president being assassinated, or of his nation falling into chaos and destruction, just so he may point his finger at those people who supported the despised candidate and say “I told you so, you should have voted for the man I did, and this wouldn’t have happened”. Now I must admit that, while I say this is a destructive and dishonorable impulse, I do not deny that it is very appealing at times. I believe everyone has or will experience a moment when they wish extreme misfortune on another for the sake of proving their own ideas or beliefs unequivocally superior to the other party’s. This is just a fact of human nature, and one we would do well to suppress, but the idea of religious apocalypse that slaughters the “heretics” and rewards the “chosen” institutionalizes these urges and lends them an uncomfortable veneer of respectability. It is very important to note here that, despite the fact that the Book of Revelations is by far the most influential of religious apocalyptic writings, this attitude of final “comeuppance” against the heretics and infidels is still present in Judaism, and to a very intense degree in Islam. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second highest ranking member of Al Qaeda, has for decades pronounced his only goal to be seeing the day when Islamic Law would displace the “empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government” (Fenn 38). As author Richard K. Fenn writes in chapter 2, “Radical Preachers and Mullahs”, of his book “Dreams of Glory”:
“Like the apocalyptic visionaries of the Christian right in the United States, who look forward to Israel’s control of all the promised land and to a final Armageddon, Zawahiri similarly looks forward to the destruction of Israel and the world dominance of Islam. Like the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition in the United States, Zawahiri fears a new world order, despises secular government, and trusts that Israel…(representative of any other religious tradition as well)…will fail.”

So in understanding the power of religious apocalypticsm, we must remember the driving forces behind the appeal of such beliefs: The first is the desire to prove the rightness of one’s own religious cult over others. This first concept then dovetails into the sadistic desire for extreme punishment of those who denied your God, as well as encompassing the belief that the world will inevitably fall into decay when people’s observance of your cult’s traditional morals, ideals and traditions begins to fall by the wayside, or they rebel against them outright. The second important force to remember is the appeal of an approaching “golden age” during periods of individual hardship or actual or perceived persecution of a group. These exact ideas were the driving force behind one of the first truly large-scale apocalyptic fervors of the modern age, the rise of the Millerite movement in New York State.

New York in the late 18th and early 19th century was, some would say contradictorily, both the most forward-looking and advanced state in the young American nation as far as economic systems and social ideas were concerned, and also the site of the most fervent evangelism and religious revivalism in the nation. The central New York region along the Mohawk River and Erie Canal had been trod so completely and repeatedly by preachers spreading the biblical message and reaping converts that the entire area was known as the “Burned-Over District” (Klein 338). We must note that, by the mid-1800s, New York state was fast becoming a microcosm of modern America. The traditional, agrarian farm family was fast being passed-by by the economy which, aided by the ease of shipping along the Erie canal and the presence of New York harbor, was quickly turning the state into an industrial, commercial, fully capitalist political region (Klein 307-322). At the same time, the state’s citizens were consuming the highest levels of alcohol in the nation’s history as the modern economy made it cheap and plentiful, slavery was still in operation until 1827, and many merchants were operating seven days a week in blatant disregard for the Christian Sabbath. Even worse in the minds of many traditional Christians, the diminishing importance of self-contained family farm living had freed up the time of many women, and these women had found the audacity to demand full equality with men, committing a deliberate heresy against biblical tradition, which clearly held a woman’s position as being the property first of her father, and then husband (Klein 323-345).

From this turmoil rose the Millerite movement of the 1840s. William Miller was a farmer from Washington County who spent years studying the bible, and came to believe that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent (Klein 338). Miller was already traveling as an evangelist and preaching his “imminent end” conclusion by 1831, and his biographer Sylvester Bliss names over 230 communities in which Miller lectured between this date and 1845 (Barkun 36). By the early 1840s, Miller’s end-times prediction was growing more specific. Utilizing a number of biblical sources such as the aforementioned Book of Revelations as well as the equally apocalyptic (though not so ghoulish) old testament Book of Daniel, Miller worked out the date of the Second Coming to be October 22, 1843. As this date neared, thousands of the faithful sold off all of their worldly possessions, and when the 22nd of October dawned, they gathered en masse on a Massachusetts hilltop to await their glorious reward. It was a scene of anticipation, but also of great fear. An interesting aside notes that, while this legion stood waiting, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Theodore Parker passed them on a morning walk. They inquired as to what was afoot on the hill, and one of the faithful asked them “Don’t you know the world is going to end today?” Parker replied: “That doesn’t affect me, I live in Boston” (Wilson 181).

As the Millerites soon saw, this particular Apocalypse affected neither Parker nor anyone else on the planet, as October 22 passed without incident. In the midst of disappointment and despair as the folly of the followers settled in, and the Millerites may have separated themselves from the power of the cult, the Millerite leadership quickly sprang into action. An announcement was made that William Miller had made a simple, easily understandable error in his calculations, by basing them on the Christian year, rather than using the Jewish calendar of biblical times. A second prediction was made, and Judgement Day was now scheduled for one year later, though it is important to note that Miller himself was reluctant to endorse a new date, and was pressured to do so by his movement’s lieutenants (Barkun 39 ). October 22, 1844 also passed without incident, and Miller admitted the error of what he had tried to do, and died five years later, leaving behind a legion of confused, financially broke, and emotionally despondent Millerites (Wilson 281).

Not seeming to learn anything from the mistakes of his mentor, Hiram Edson, a close friend of Miller’s, announced that he had had a vision whilst walking through a cornfield.
Edson claimed that Miller’s calculation had, in fact, been right, but that he had only been predicting the start of the period of final judgement, which was even then taking place in heaven (Wilson 182). Though Miller had time before he died to call Edson’s claim complete rubbish, the many cultists who had nowhere to go or to fall back on when the Millerite community collapsed latched onto Edson’s word’s like a life preserver. Certainly, they must have said, we weren’t stupid to sell off our belongings and abandon our lives in expectation of an Apocalypse that never happened, we simply took the first steps toward a more Christ-like life. Edson became the new leader of what remained of the Millerites, preaching that his followers were indeed living in the time of final judgement, and at the end of this time, when Christ had finished sorting out all the souls of history, he would return to earth. Edson made his followers revert to following Old Testament dietary laws and honor the Sabbath on Saturday, the seventh day on the week. He did take one important lesson from William Miller, however, and never again tried to predict the date of the end times. These Millerites-cum-Edson cultists survived far beyond their original beliefs, and remain active today as the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (Wilson 182). Though the Adventist Church is of a more respectable size today, in 1850 there were barely 200 members. Given the huge rank of cultists that had formed around Miller before his sect collapsed, the more interesting phenomenon than this replacement of one form of radical Christianity for another is the number of former Millerites who simply reintegrated themselves into American Protestantism (Barkun 44). This absorption of an enormous group of people heavily influenced by apocalypticsm continues to colour the attitude of American protestants today.

While the precise number will never be known, most estimates place the number of devoted Millerites at the height of the movement’s influence at around 50,000, a staggering number for a William Miller to have gathered in a handful of years (Barkun 33, Wilson 181). Educated estimates suggest that it as possible that one million more people, while not considering themselves Millerites and remaining somewhat skeptical, still looked at Miller’s proclaimed apocalypse date with hesitant expectation and some quiet fear (Barkun 33).

So who were the Millerites and why did they flock hopefully toward a vision of Apocalypse? Demographically, many of them came from rural areas locked into antiquated lifestyles. These were the people whose style of livelihood had been rendered nearly obsolete by the market revolution, and who resisted this reform at the same time it clung desperately to the preservation of the traditional, patriarchal family (Klein 338). One again we see a people who are experiencing hardship, economical in this case, looking forward to a soon-to-come golden age, which would free them of worry forever. One must also note the threat to customary lifestyles referenced above. Many of these revivalists strongly believed that society was turning against them and trying to undermine their traditions, and so they gleefully latched onto the comforting thought that greater society was very close to being destroyed for these very reasons.

While the ideas above are very human and understandable, the Millerite movement also harbored the same cruelty and religious bigotry that seems destined to infect all religions based upon the idea of being the only correct one. Millerite newspapers like Boston’s “Signs of the Times” and New York’s “Midnight Cry” printed in the years before their impotent 1843/1844 apocalypses show a disturbing vein of protestant nativism lending strength to the movement. In the 1820s, there had been a surge of immigration into America from Europe. The vast majority of these immigrants, characterized perfectly by the wave from Ireland, were Roman Catholic. An article from a Millerite newspaper reprinted by author Michael Barkun in his book “Crucible of the Millennium” states as follows:
“Give the Catholics the power and the occasion, which is never long wanted, and submission or death would be the only alternatives!
The Roman Catholics already number in their millions in the United States, and nearly 100,000 more are added to the number yearly by emigration. They already vaunt loudly, ask favors of states governments, and are getting them allowed. Papacy is almost wholly allied with one of the corrupt political parties in our land -presumably the Democrats-, which bids fair to control the nation” (Barkun 54).

So here also the comeuppance factor. American Protestants saw Catholics as tools of the antichrist, misled by their church and too stubborn to join the enlightened ranks of the protestants. So of course, there is the nasty desire to see the waves of Catholics coming into the country condemned to hell for following the pope while the good, protestant Millerites are brought into heaven, but there is one more element in play here as well: jobs for foreigners. Most Millerites were American Protestant Nativists, who believed in a place of special privilege for descendents of the original religious European settlers of North America. They feared that Catholic immigrants would take jobs and potential income from native-born Americans that deserved it (Barkun 54). This poisonous idea would be played out again, but against freed African-Americans during the New York City emancipation riots of 1863, and the same rhetoric informs huge numbers of anti-immigrant groups today.

Now there is one last element to the Millerite panic that we must address, and it is one that bridges the gap between purely religious apocalypticsm and secular end-of-the-world anxieties later on: Finding significance in natural phenomenon. While the idea of natural phenomenon like comets being portents of doom or just something that foretold the future to those with the ability to interpret them was common throughout human history, it is astonishing to note to what degree this believe persisted into the 19th century, long after the basic concepts of astronomy and the other natural sciences were known. This fear of natural forces as supernatural signs was not just an act of ignorance by the people thus affected, but rather an unconscious rebellion against all scientific progress since the renaissance.

The Millerites spent a great deal of time combing records of celestial phenomenon for “signs from God”. They announced everything from the darkening of the sky in the northeast 1780, explained at the time it happened as the effect of smoke from a huge forest fire, to the Lisbon earthquake of 88 years earlier as God’s signs that the second coming was near (Barkun 55-56). They also claimed that increased rates of storms, shipwrecks and earthquakes corresponded to biblical prophesy regarding the lead-up to the end-of-days, but the increase they spoke of was something conjured only from their imaginations, it simply was not occurring. The prevarications of the Millerites hit the apex of stupidity when many of the newspapers listed as divine signs in the heavens claims that “Fixed stars were disappearing” and that records proved “the Northern Lights had only become visible in the 1700s” (Barkun 55). Any rational human being should have been able to dismiss this foolishness, but in this era most people did not have the time or inclination to access the few available libraries to learn for themselves, nor did they seek the educated opinion of the scientists or learned men that knew the truth of such things. This was a matter of faith, and more than a little hysteria, and both of these things are natural foes of rationality. At the time, superstitions about natural portents and the refutation of scientific knowledge was not terribly out of character for religious cultists. As we will look at in a moment, however, this willful mental handicap would only reach the height of its power in the late 20th and early 21st century, as secular apocalypticsm took its place alongside the time-honored wrath of God in humanity’s collective subconscious.

Because of the significance of thousand-year periods in biblical prophecy, as well as people’s natural fascination with big, round numbers in our base-ten counting system, the turnover of one millennium to the next has been a time of excitement and apprehension ever since reasonably consistent calendars became widespread. In the late 20th century however, millennial terror became the poster child for the secularization of formerly Christian paranoia, as the import of the “thousand year reign of Christ” and similar numeric prophecy was pushed into the background, and a new boogeyman gave even some atheists reason to fear triple-zero years.

The Y2K panic is notable both for its effect, and for the simple fact that the majority of individuals born circa 1990 or earlier generally remember it. In short, the panic arose from the fact that certain computer systems that used double-digit representation of years (1900 is 00, 1999 is just 99) could face internal confusion when the year rolled over to 2000, either by locking up entirely, returning to the year 00, or causing program errors by attempting to number the year 19100 (Year 2000 Problem). While many people, to their credit, did not lose their heads over this idea, much of the general public admitted to a great deal of apprehension. I myself knew several individuals who freely proclaimed their certainty that society as we knew it was about to fall.

And why not? By the year 1999, much of the world was run by computer. To lend credence to the impending crisis, the United States Government created the “Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act” to hopefully negate the coming crisis. With the cooperation of 120 countries, the World Bank assembled the “International Y2K Cooperation Center” headquartered in Washington, D.C., to “promote increased strategic cooperation and action among governments, peoples, and the private sector to minimize adverse Y2K effects on the global society and economy” (Year 2000 Problem).

Who can forget the people who told us that we should take out huge cash advances on credit cards because bank records would be wiped clean on 01-01-00? Or the militia groups that advised Americans to stockpile arms, ammunition and supplies to protect ourselves from the mobs who would roam the countryside in the imminent chaos? Even friends of mine, and the proprietor of a certain military surplus store I once frequented, counseled people to build up their supply of non-refrigerated foodstuffs. I simply leaned back, and waited for the first apocalypse of my lifetime.

So, what happened? Very little, as it turns out. No chaos, no societal collapse, not even any wiped out credit card bills. Minor computer problems were reported around the would, most being things like web pages displaying the date as 19100, bus validation machines in Australia not functioning, and one company’s older model cellular telephones accidentally deleting new messages rather than old ones when the memory reached capacity (Year 2000 Problem). While some people credited the effectiveness of government preparations and programing repairs headed by the groups mentioned above with the scarcity of problems, which would be a comforting conclusion given the $300 Billion dollars spent on Y2K preparation (Year 2000 Problem). Unfortunately, this justification is quickly shot down by the fact that countries such as Italy, which was widely criticized for doing almost nothing to prepare for this coming disaster, reported approximately the same rates of minor errors as those reported in the United States and the 120 “International Y2K Cooperation Center” countries (Year 2000 Problem). The simple fact is, the significance of the Y2K problem was wildly exaggerated in many circles, and much of the private sector was swept away in the hysteria. While simple mob mentality explains a lot of this panic, the money-making potential of fear had a hand in it as well :
“The Y2K issue was a major topic of discussion in the late 1990s and, predictably, showed up in most popular media. A number of “Y2K disaster” books were published such as Deadline Y2K by Mark Joseph. Movies such as Y2K: Year to Kill capitalized on the currency of Y2K, as did numerous TV shows, comic strips, and computer games” (Year 2000 Problem).

While the genesis of this scare is just as easily identifiable as that of the Millerite hysteria, prophecy by authority figures on topics the public at large did not understand (scriptural prophecy and computer science remain mysterious to most of us and likely always will), we must remember one of our significant psychological themes: The fear of changing our traditional way of life. While the Millerites feared social advancement because it flew in the face of biblical precedent which was understood to be eternally valid, the Y2K panic tapped into humanity’s fear of change just as surely. In the half century after World War II, human technology advanced more than it had in the previous thousand years. Computers that would have occupied entire rooms fifty years ago were now powering high-school scientific calculators. Computers were being allowed the responsibility of running more and more of society’s infrastructure. As early as the publication of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” and especially the release of Stanley Kubrik’s popular film adaptation, with it’s immortal HAL 9000 character, the mad computer broken free of its human control, we could see the powerful, near-atavistic terror of losing our power to a being of our own creation. And, like the religious “chosen people” who would laugh and shout “I told you so” at the people they could not convert as the God of the Book of Revelations boiled them alive, the Y2K crisis may have appealed to the same impulse in closet technophobes. These were the people who had always felt quiet but ever-increasing paranoia as the more and more of the world moved into cyberspace. Had Y2K actually led to Apocalyptic collapse of the modern western world, or even to the survivable but significant breakdown of the computerized wing of the infrastructure, these technophobes would have become what all traditionally devout monotheists desire to be, the chosen people who had spread the word amongst the masses, and had then been proven to be true prophets after all.

In the year 2009, the Y2K crisis has become an historic curiosity. We can now laugh at our alarmism as a society, secure in the knowledge that there was both sound logic, and a solid truth in the initial claims of computer experts that systems could be confused by the millennial date change. Of course, the problems caused were minor and easily correctable, and many in the public simply let themselves be carried away by the fear. But what would we feel like if there was no logical foundation for any of the Y2K claims or the reaction to it? What if Y2K was, like the apocalypse date of William Miller, nothing more than a colossal farce? I should hope we would look back with more than a shrug and good humor. Unfortunately, we face just such a farce before us now. Where the last expected apocalypse of the 20th century was built on a grain of truth blown out of proportion, and was at least based within the modern framework of scientific thought, the first apocalypse of the 21st century seems to be going in the opposite direction. The 2012 Panic is upon us, and it is a frightening return to a vision of apocalypse rooted solely in the primitive psychology of superstition.

What is the 2012 crisis? What disaster, exactly, do millions of 21st century humans believe is going to descend upon up in three years time and lay waste to all that their species has accomplished? It is difficult to say. There is little reputable scientific literature on the “2012 event”, but much information that is basically computer-age folklore and campfire stories. A look at the Wikipedia Internet article on the subject gives a fine overview of the ideas, and Wikipedia’s status as a user-community edited encyclopaedia makes it a perfect source of information regarding phenomenon that seem to exists primarily in the mass imagination. As far as I can gather, on December 21, 2012, the following things will occur:

An apocalyptic event will destroy our current universe on the day that the Mayan long-count calendar (which was more likely created by the Olmecs and then assimilated) reaches the end of the time period they calculated based on astronomical observations. A fragmentary Mayan inscription discovered in Tabasco, Mexico that was translated bur nearly impossible to interpret with what is known about Mayan gods may refer to this 2012 apocalypse, or it may refer to just about anything else (2012 Phenomenon). NASA scientist David Morrison succinctly expresses the feelings of the scientific community regarding the Mayan calendar doomsday: “…calendars, whether contemporary or ancient, cannot predict the future of our planet or warn of things to happen on a specific date such as 2012. I note that my desk calendar ends sooner, on December 31, 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction of Armageddon” (Morrison 50).
New Age religions posit another event. From the Wikipedia article:
“Many New Age thinkers believe that the ending of this cycle will correspond to a global “consciousness shift”. Established themes found in 2012 literature include “suspicion towards mainstream Western culture”, the idea of spiritual evolution, and the possibility of leading the world into the New Age, by individual example or by a group’s joined consciousness. The general intent of this literature is not to warn of impending doom but “to foster counter-cultural sympathies and eventually socio-political and ’spiritual’ activism” (2012 Phenomenon).
While I cannot vouch for the existence of a joined consciousness, or for New Age thought being preferable to “mainstream Western culture”, I feel that I should not have to worry about whether this new world order will be an improvement over the current one, as I assume it will not last long, with the Mayan apocalypse destroying the universe shortly after the new age begins.

Also in 2012, a solar alignment will occur, with the Sun and planets sharing the same axis. While this has no effect on the Earth as far as I am aware, a consistent wobble in the Earth’s axis will also change which constellation is visible early in the morning of the spring equinox around this time. The next change will take us from the Age of Pieces to the Age of Aquarius. New Age thinkers suggest that the end of the Mayan long-count calendar was determined due to predictions of events made by the Maya based upon reading the heavens just as astrologers do, and the 2012 alignment was significant to the Maya for the same reasons (2012 Phenomenon). Given that astrology is a superstition that is useless as a tool of prediction, I will choose not to worry about this one element of 2012’s countless horrors.

On the theory of the long count calendar’s basis in astronomy, Mayan researcher John Major Jenkins suggests that the Mayans based it on the movements of the “Great Rift”, known as the “Black Road” to the Mayans, a band of dark dust clouds which stretches through the Milky Way Galaxy. His theory posits that the end of the calendar’s corresponds with the sun/planet alignment axis intersecting with this Great Rift and also with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Jenkins also suggests that any importance Mayan shamans placed on this galactic alignment was due to the consumption of psychoactive toads and mushrooms (2012 Phenomenon). It is worth noting that the alignment in question lasts for 36 years, and in fact has already begun, so why the Milky Way is waiting until 2012 to spring it’s fiendish plots upon the earth is unknown to me at this time.

I’m not even sure why it’s so damn pissed at us.

One idea about Jenkin’s galactic alignment theory that both supports the idea of an apocalyptic event on that date, and also claims a basis in science, is the black hole alignment theory. This idea states that when the sun aligns with the supermassive black hole sitting at the center of the Milky Way, some form of gravitational amplification will occur and wreak havoc on earth. Science assures us, however, that not only did the aforementioned galactic alignment begin in 1998, but also that the galactic black hole would need to be 6,000,000 times closer to cause any interference with our solar system’s gravitational fields (2012 Phenomenon). Again, I turn to scientist David Morrison to give us the rational person’s thoughts about all these galactic phenomena as they relate to 2012. “Apparently the scaremongers have decided to use meaningless phrases about “alignments” and the “Dark Rift”…precisely because they are not understood by the general public” (Morrison 51).

A concept I had not heard of until reading the Wikipedia 2012 article is that of “Timewave Zero”. This is a computer program based on numerology and the I-Ching that “purports to calculate the ebb and flow of “novelty”, defined as increase in the universe’s interconnectedness, or organized complexity” (2012 Phenomenon). As a tool for prophesy, the I-Ching is, like astrology, a useless device based in fantasy (Sullivan 40-42). Given that fact, any predictions based upon it will be low on my list of concerns come doomsday.

Also in 2012, a massive solar flare will cause the Earth’s geomagnetic poles to shift. Many people predict widespread destruction based on this fact. This element of the apocalypse is very intriguing to me, because geomagnetic pole reversals are known by scientists to be nonviolent affairs, affairs which take 5,000 years to complete not in one specific year, and one which cannot possibly be triggered by solar flares (2012 Phenomenon).

After, I assume, all these other catastrophes have befallen planet earth, another planet called Nibiru, whose orbit was predicted by the ancient Sumerians the story goes, is going to slam into the earth and destroy it. Or it is just going to pass close by Earth and cause more gravitational chaos, but after the black holes, and magnetic shifts, and solar flares each take their turn ravaging our little blue sphere, I wonder if Nibiru might just save itself the trip and find a more convenient planet to vaporize.

If Nibiru insists on attacking after all, I would like to mention the following points brought up by our friend from NASA, David Morrison. Morrison reminds us the origin of the Nibiru story was in the 1970s, in the work of an author named Zecharia Sitchin, who wrote fictional tales about ancient Mesopotamia. It was then popularized by a woman named Nancy Lieder, a self-proclaimed alien contactee that claimed to have received psychic warnings from aliens living near the star Zeta Reticuli that Nibiru was on its way (Morrison 48). The impact was supposed to occur in May of 2003, but a new date was chosen when it did not occur. If this reminds the reader of the Millerite apocalypse, it should. Since so many apocalypses are due to occur in December of 2012, I suppose the aliens contacting Lieder told her to reschedule the impact to that month just so we can conveniently get through all of our backlogged doomsdays at once. Perhaps the greatest refutation of the Nibiru hypothesis is the simple fact that, if the planet were going to hit the earth in 2012, it should already be visible in the night sky, and tracked by thousands of professional and amateur astronomers (Morrison 53).

If the paragraphs above rang somewhat sarcastic to your tender ears, well, they were a bit sarcastic. The reason is simple: I was being sarcastic because I have no other way to respond to generalized insanity. The truth is however, that many people believe one or more of the events I mentioned will take place in 2012. Not a day goes by that a television show about the phenomenon doesn’t beam across the airwaves, hundreds of books on the subject litter Barnes & Noble bookshelves and Amazon.com’s internet stores, and Columbia pictures has just released their feature film titled “2012″ onto DVD and Blu-Ray. The fact that television stations which purport to air “educational” programing are feeding this hoax is appalling, and the “viral marketing” campaign for the “2012″ film that guides viewers to both a movie-sponsored hoax web site and other crackpot psuedoscience web pages in order to channel the fear of the ignorant masses into box-office success is actually sickening in its perversity. David Morrison reports that he has received over 1000 inquiries from people misled into thinking the movie web site was genuine, and says: “I’ve even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don’t want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the Internet and scare children in order to make a buck, that is ethically wrong” (2012 Phenomenon).

What I wanted to do when I began writing this piece on Apocalypticsm was to come to some understanding regarding people’s fascination with the end of days. As far as religious Apocalypticsm goes, I feel I have given strong and rational observations and conclusions. I even managed to link the very different Y2K panic with the same psychological tradition, but the 2012 phenomenon gives me some trouble. There is religion in the mix by way of Mayan (or at least pseudo-Mayan) mythology, but as it is not linked with the monotheistic tradition of persecuting those who worship differently from you, the idea of “Chosen People” and the “Glorious Apocalypse” doesn’t apply. I do however acknowledge the possibility that, while it is not represented in most of the literature on the topic, that apocalyptic Judeo-christian-muslim groups may embrace the 2012 theories by attempting to link them with scriptural tales of God’s wrath.

As far as those who truly believe the pure forms of the 2012 stories, adaptating to other traditions is impossible, not to mention the many non-religious people that have, for whatever reason, latched onto this secularized apocalypse. Unlike the morality breakdown seen by the Millerites, or the technology paranoia of Y2Kers, it certainly cannot fear or dislike of humanity or its actions that lead them to believe the 2012 hoaxers. This doomsday prophecy is somewhat unique in the way that it utterly removes humans from the “cause” part of apocalyptic “cause-and-effect”. 2012 is something that we can have no part in except waiting for it to happen to us.

Is this the key to understanding 2012, then? Maybe knowledge of Earth’s, and our own, utter insignificance in the cosmos has unconsciously led to this profound fear of being wiped out by unexplained knowledge of the ancient Maya, or by a rube-Goldberg-like catastrophe on a galactic scale. Or perhaps we have all decided that we do not want to be responsible for anything anymore. One need not interact with many young people before they become aware of the profound lack of any sense of personal obligations to morals, to people, or to society that infects a great deal of them. That could be why the apocalypse of the younger generation has completely removed itself from the realm of religious or secular duties and obligations, they don’t understand such concepts. The 2012 phenomenon is the “stoner apocalypse”, one where people don’t believe they can do anything about it no matter how hard they work, and they can all say “it wasn’t my fault, just the flow of the cosmos” when it hits. In the end, however, neither the cause of this or any other ospecific panic is the main issue. The great question is, why the human tendency toward apocalyptic fear of any kind? What psychological need does it fill in some minds?

Perhaps apocalypticism is only our way of reminding ourselves that not just our lives, but human life as a whole may be transitory. This can either remind humanity to make the most of the time it has, or it can squelch creativity and ambition beneath the weight of futility. If such was the case, we reduce the topic to a “is the glass half empty or half full” discussion.

Another possibility is that the end of the world does not weigh down on our hopes and dreams for the future, nor does it serve only as a species-wide, cultural memento mori, but it may in fact appeal to our sense of drama. Storytelling has been a part of the human psyche since the moment we gained the ability to reason and imagine. Every culture has their tales of gods and heroes, larger than life visions of ourselves who can do almost anything an author, poet or priest can imagine. But from the most primitive cave-bound campfire tale, to the death of Christ, to the demise of the deities of the Norsemen in the epic battles culminating in the gotterdamerung, when even their mightiest heroes like Thor the thunder god meet their end, these stories seem to inevitably conclude with the death of their heroes. While Christ’s crucifixion may have forced his own followers to explain its significance, one would think that a Hercules or a Thor need never die in the minds of their people, but simply go on and on, each new generation adding to the tapestry of their imagined lives. So why the mortality? I am reminded of something the great author Alan Moore once said when explaining why Frank Miller’s Batman novel, The Dark Knight Returns was so powerful. Moore said that, the reason many comic book heroes will never reach their potential to replace the role of gods within our modern mythological landscape is that their stories go on indefinitely, that there is no end waiting for them. He suggested that only by writing these heroes an ending, as Mr. Miller had done, can their stories become truly fulfilling. I wonder if that is also the draw of the apocalypse, nothing more than people looking back over the epic journey that man has taken, from our first ancestors roaming the jungles of Africa, to the NASA Apollo program carrying us to the moon, and they feel the artistic need to give humanity an epic last stand to finish the dramatic arc. Without an ending, the story is never fully satisfying, so perhaps rather than creating an end to fear, we should make certain that what we, as all humanity, creates a life that is satisfying enough that, should the end come soon, we will not feel as though we never saw our true potential realized. As a great man once said, “A life well ordered is long enough.”

I would like to wrap up this paper with one last idea from David Morrison, who says: “As far as the safety of the Earth is concerned, the important threats are from global warming and loss of biological diversity, and perhaps someday from collision with an asteroid or comet, not the pseudoscientific claims about 2012.”

This statement can clearly be expanded to cover any other point of terror which people allow to overwhelm them. I personally feel that if everyone who is currently tearing out their hair and rending their garments in terror over 2012, or any of the other types of apocalyptic scenarios I’ve written on, would take what Morrison said to heart, and redirect their energy toward solving the problems he mentioned, maybe we wouldn’t feel the need to dwell on the death of the planet so much, because we would be helping to keep it alive.

*

This Joe A.,
Signing off.

*

Works Cited

“2012 Phenomenon.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. November 2009. 13 November 2009.

“Apocalypse.” Webster’s New Colligiate Dictionary. 13th ed. 1961.
Barkun, Michael. Crucible of the Millenium. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press: 1986.

Daley, Brian E. “Apocalypticism in Early Christian Theology.” The Continuum History of Apocalyptism.

McGinn, Bernard and John J. Collins and

Stephen J. Stein. London: Continuum, 2003. 221-253.

Fenn, Richard K. Dreams of Glory. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006.

Klein, Milton M. The Empire State: A History of New York. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Morrison, David. “2012 and Counting.” Skeptic Vol 15. Issue 2 (2009): 47-53.

“Revelation.” Holy Bible: King James Version. Thomas Nelson Bibles, 1970.

Sullivan, Charles. “What’s Wrong with the I Ching?” Skeptical Inquirer. July/August 2009: 40-42.

Wilson, Colin. Rogue Messiahs. Charlottesville, CA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2000.

“Year 2000 Problem.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 25 November 2009. 13 May 2009.

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I recently stumbled over an article in Game Informer magazine about the upcoming video game Max Payne 3. That particular series holds some significance for me, being heavily influence by the film noir movement, which holds a special place in my heart. In the article, Rockstar Games VP of development Jeronimo Barrera was quoted as saying:

“Some people say ‘Max is a noir game and it has to be black and white and in New York, but noir is not necessarily a place and a color scheme. Noir is not necessarily saxophones and big dark shadows. It’s looking at the world in a bleak way. That’s what we’re doing. It’s more contemporary.”

Well, that’s not quite right. No, noir is not necessarily any single one of the elements he mentions, but it is certainly not just “looking at the world in a bleak way” and to suggest that that is the single key to defining film noir is shallow, and even a bit insulting. So, after reading this passage, I got to thinking about the essential question it raises: Can we concisely define film noir? Read my latest blog, and find out.

A World of Darkness
How Two World Wars, Expressionism, and Hard-Boiled Literature Combined to birth Film Noir

By: Joseph Astalfa

What is film noir? The question is not a simple one and, in fact, there may be no one true answer. It is not a genre in of itself in the way the science fiction, comedy, or romance films are. What defines noir is something less tangible than the presence of spacecraft or slapstick antics; it is an essence of darkness. Darkness of plot, darkness in the soul of its characters, and darkness in the visual compositions used to tell movies’ stories. The stories themselves are sinister and downbeat, presenting a dense atmosphere of oppression. At their heart is a philosophy of nihilism, or even fatalism. Noir heroes are destroyed by forces beyond their control, drawn inexorably to unwelcome fates. Films noir are movies of hopelessness, where all good intentions will be rendered futile, because the modern world is a terrifying and unfriendly place destined to tear down even the strongest of men.

Most people are familiar with at least a few examples of the noir style. A knowledge of the film medium can barely be claimed without having seen The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, or The Maltese Falcon. However, individual movies cannot answer our question. Forget the noir buzzwords that TV Guide spouts whenever Sin City shows up on HBO, folks. Instead, bear with me while I explain the roots of the Film Noir style, considering both its visual and thematic characteristics, and follow its genesis out of movements in painting, cinema, and literature from the aftermath of World War I through its maturation in the midst of World War II.

First, though, we must take a step backward, and consider the earliest seeds of the style. In its most embryonic state, we can see the uneasiness of the noir mindset begin to emerge in the static visual art of the early twentieth century, most importantly in the German expressionist movement. Die Brücke, a group composed of German painters that wished to use their art as a link between traditional values and art styles, and the revolutionary ideas and modern art of their own time, would bring to prominence two major figures integral to the future style.

Emile Nolde’s bold, often nightmarish images utilized contrasting colors and jagged, inelegant compositional arrangements in order to evoke powerful and immediate reactions from viewers. In his Still Life with Masks (Adams 839), we see what appears to be native masks hanging on display. Even though a mask cannot harm us, Nolde imbues the scene with tension and malevolence. Even though it is a very colorful work, it is the artists skillful use of blacks to contrast with his bright hues that gives it its emotional resonance. The shadowed eyes, brows and cheekbones of the false faces certainly brings to mind the chiaroscuro lighting that would become a hallmark of dark films later in the century, first in horror, then later in film noir. Nolde’s later work, Prophet (MoMA.org) makes his influence on film even more apparent. The cinematic image of a gnarled visage emerging from inky darkness into a directional light could be a storyboard for any of the dark films that emerged in later years, not to mention it’s obvious kinship with the art of author Frank Miller’s wonderful, noir-inspired Sin City comic books of nearly a century later.

If Emile Nolde’s painting predicted the aesthetics of film noir, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s work expertly vocalized one of its primary themes: the inherent anxiety, anonymity, even horror, of modern city life. In his Five Women in the Street of 1907 (Adams 838) and Street Scene of 1913 (Bolton 238), he paints an image of urbanity as a state of perpetual unease. The people seen in his teeming scenes are dark, sharp-featured creatures that are either indifferent to the viewer, or leer predatorily at them. Kirchner gave voice to a truth film noir heroes would later become all too aware of: In a city of millions anyone can be dangerous, and the ones who are not are still typically indifferent to your plight.

The height of the Die Brücke movement was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, the single most destructive conflict the western world had ever seen. This war can be seen as the awful fulfillment of the “era of warfare” foretold in the philosophy of Nietzsche or, in a more significant sense, as the dark spectre that had been sensed by so many artists as fin de siecle angst. Certainly, the epic slaughter of that war would have been an impossibility without the 20th century’s technological advances.

Not surprisingly, the devastation of World War I, and the subsequent singling-out of Germany as the primary scapegoat by the world community, fostered a distinctively bleak, dark and threatening quality in post-war German art. While this was true across all mediums, it is in the cinema that we must concentrate our attention.

German Expressionist cinema inherited and adapted the look of the static art style exemplified by Nolde and Kirchner and put it into motion. “It‘s goal was to give expression to subjective human feelings and emotions through the use of … structure, color, texture … and stylization” (Barsam 108). Some films, such as Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) took this idea to the extreme, with set-design that bore extremely little resemblance to the objective view of the world that most human beings share. Wiene had decided that he didn’t care if his film looked natural, so long as the proper feeling was evoked in the audience. Seven years after the release of Caligari, Director Fritz Lange utilized the same expressionist philosophy to craft his science-fiction epic Metropolis. While this style is seemingly at odds with cinematic realism, when Lang set out to make a film set in a contemporary (in 1931) urban setting, he did not forget the lessons learned in the fantasy worlds of expressionism.

M, which tells the story of law enforcement and criminals alike attempting to stop the bloody career of a serial child murderer (played by future Noir-icon Peter Lorre), was neither fantastic, nor entirely naturalistic in its vision. Though the story is brutally down-to-earth, being based on an actual case (Crowther 39), and the setting is mundane, the lighting and camerawork is clearly linked with expressionism. Lang presents his city as Kirschner had, as an ominous and demonic place, and its occupants are frequently depicted as alarming in their own right. Furthermore, Peter Lorre’s murderer Hans is shown to be truly insane, very much a victim himself, and thus becomes sympathetic without diminishing the horror of his crimes. These choices in plot and setting serve to make M a common beginning which scholars point out as the moment that film noir took its first tentative steps into theatres.

In the United States, the period following the first world war was not a horrific time of depression and scarcity of resources as it was in Germany. In fact, the next decade was one of such prosperity that it was dubbed the “roaring twenties” in retrospect. America had overcome its long-standing policy of isolationism and mobilized its armed forces, sending them across the Atlantic to defend the ideals of freedom. This had proven sufficient to turn the tide of the conflict, and the soldiers that survived had returned to their home nation victorious. In addition, American industry boomed thanks to the demands of wartime production, the economy soared, and the stock market became something of a mystical treasure-map in the eyes of citizens that had never before paid it any mind. It may seem odd, then, that it is this optimistic environment that would produce the next ingredient in the bubbling stew that would become film noir.

Pulp magazines, named for the pulpwood paper used to print them, were a widely popular form of mass literature during the period between the two world wars. A format mostly unique to American newsstands, the pulps were first characterized by high-energy stories of adventure that could range across several genres in the space of a single issue. By the late 1920s, however, the most popular series had become almost exclusively devoted to detective stories. However, these were not the stuff of a Nero Wolfe or C. Auguste Dupin mystery, the pulp detective operated on a far different level than the high-born thinkers of Victorian-style crime literature. Violence, lawlessness and the loner mentality that once colored popular western novels and tales of Zorro-like swashbucklers crept out of period pieces and into the cities of modern American crime fiction. The new pulp detective yarns that embraced the “urban jungle” mentality came to usher in a genre that showed the modern world as every bit as anarchic and deadly as the frontier had been: A literary movement later labeled the Hard-Boiled genre.

Who were the readers that had so suddenly embraced tales of violence and horror set in the middle of golden-pavement America? Why, the veterans of World War I, of course. These young men returned to their homes victorious, but they had had their outlooks on life permanently scarred by war. While they still believed in justice and the ideals of freedom, they no longer identified with men that sat back in safety and comfort, fighting the good fight with naught but brainpower. Their experiences in war led them to seek a frighteningly dark and bloody feel in their entertainment.

It is in this combination of war-bred, fight-fire-with-fire philosophy and the gritty literature of the pulps that the immortal noir image of a lone private detective bypassing a corrupt justice system to hunt down and eliminate criminals was born. A generation of Americans turned into fighting men, men who had been asked to kill in the name of good, needed to have fictional heroes willing to do the same. Still, many of these veteran soldiers still believed that their sacrifices on the battlefields of Europe had effectively ended large-scale war forever, and their favorite stories reflected that fact. No matter how much evil they needed to battle, or how deep the blood they waded through, the hard-boiled hero would always triumph over the villains in the end.

It took the economic calamities of the 1929 stock market crash, and yet another near-apocalyptic war, to finally drag all of these disparate threads together to form true Film Noir. Whatever sense of faith in the inherent goodness of humankind had survived the first of the 20th century’s global conflicts, the sheer inhumanity of World War II destroyed the notion forever. With countless millions of people being massacred by the Nazi war machine, and millions of men once again called on to die for peace, the notion of evil ever being truly vanquished was seen as the ridiculous fiction of a naïve civilization.

With conflict consuming their home countries, many of the great European expressionist filmmakers, among them legendary names such as Fritz Lange, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and numerous others, found themselves and their darker artistic visions unwelcome in Hitler’s empire. Lang‘s experience during the Nazi rise exemplifies that period’s artistic climate. He had completed a film entitled The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (a sequel to an earlier silent movie), only to have it censored by the Nazis for, as they claimed, being critical of the new government. Influential party member Joseph Goebbels tried to soothe Lang’s ire by offering him a leadership position in a new, government-sanctioned film production company. Lang helpfully reminded Goebbels that, beyond his political objections to the Nazi party, there was also the small matter of his Jewish ancestry to consider (Shaw). Like so many immigrants before, Fritz Lang and his cinematic peers found a new home across the Atlantic, and a new forum for their visions in the Hollywood film system. “The émigré directors made a unique contribution to the development of film noir by bringing their own visual and narrative concepts to bear on native American literary material” (Crowther 52).

It was 1941, the year that the United States would once more go to war with Germany and her allies, that most scholars agree initiated the classic film noir period. The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, is an extremely popular film for labeling the first true film noir. The hero, detective Sam Spade is played by Humphrey Bogart as a man with no real interest in justice, just an interest in having his fees paid. The main storyline involves various characters scrambling to take position of the priceless, eponymous artwork. After much strife and several brutal murders, it is revealed that the Maltese Falcon object is a fake, and all the suffering endured in seeking it was for nothing.

While this storyline (from a novel by veteran hard-boiled pulp writer Dashiell Hammet) has the requisite nihilistic tone of film noir, I hesitate to say it is a fully mature example of the style. The Maltese Falcon’s plot is new, but the visuals are fairly traditional (though expertly shot by Huston). I consider it more of a proto-noir alongside Fritz Lang’s M, which has the visuals nearly perfected, but is not quite film noir in storytelling.

I will not presume to guess which movie (if any) should be named the first American film noir. I will say that, by World War II’s end in 1945, the cycle was in full swing. The displaced European filmmakers that had fled the Nazis were working in America and, more importantly, the expressionistic cinematography they developed was being embraced by American-born directors as well. The final convergence of painting, foreign cinema, and American literature had occurred. Added into this stylistic concoction was the black spectre of World War II, which proved to many the futility of belief in any supreme morality, or even belief in human concepts such as justice and honor. The war would eventually claim well over 35,000,000 military and civilian lives, about 20,000,000 more than the first world war (Volume Library 1729).

The film noir had grown up as the child of nihilism, and an overtly pessimistic strain of existentialism called Fatalism. This way of thinking accepts the existentialist concept that every person is free to define their life’s meaning through an infinite number of choices, but emphasizes the many constraints on human thought that prevent the full realization of this idea. In effect, it suggests people have the illusion of freedom more than they have freedom itself. This feeling of oppressive darkness would soon infiltrate a variety of genres, though it would be the crime film that came to define the film noir image.

Detective films such as director Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Howard Hawks’ 1946 picture The Big Sleep (both from hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler’s novels) put to bed the highly moralistic cops-and-robbers feel of classic gangster films. In these films, the police are nothing more than impediments to progress, ignorant bureaucrats only sometimes competent and nearly always corrupt. In both films, the protagonist risks his life to solve mysteries that ultimately prove inconsequential to the overall scheme he finds himself embroiled in. More importantly, many people die with little need and no justification. In the end, justice is shown as an abstract concept that never really applies to the events of the story, which always ends as a straight forward attempt at survival. The embracing of the private detective (rather than the police) as a hero can be seen as the influence of a growing distrust of governmental authority in American society. Why should filmgoers trust the status quo mentality to solve a fictional crisis, when its most recent achievements had been the great depression, and the involvement in a brand-new war?

The other great type of crime films that dominate the film noir landscape are those of the manipulative femme fatale school. In this strain of film noir, the standard story involves an average (at least for the most part) man lead to commit a criminal act by a dominating woman.

From a French novel, Fritz Lang adapted his horror-tinged tale Scarlet Street. The French plot and German talent lent a distinctly European feel to the movie. In it, an innocent store clerk is led to embezzle money in order to (he believes) retain the love of a beautiful woman. Unfortunately, she is nothing but a con artist using him for personal gain, and he eventually murders her in the midst of his despair. The influence of expressionism is felt very distinctly here, as Lang physically darkens the film’s look as the hero descends further into depression and madness.

In 1944 Billy Wilder, again an artist from Germany, saw the release of his film Double Indemnity. One of the greatest examples of the noir cycle and recipient of seven Academy Award nominations, the story involves a housewife who convinces an insurance agent to assist her in murdering her husband. Darkness is not only lent to the story because the protagonist a willing participant in murder, but also because he is bleeding to death when the movie begins and recounts the narrative in flashback, letting the observer know it is pointless to hope for his redemption. This technique was duplicated in many subsequent films, and clearly illustrates the futility of all of man’s efforts. After all, what type of “happy ending” can the audience expect when it knows the protagonist’s quest will end in failure and death?

The term “Film Noir” was first used in print around this time, in articles by French writer Nino Frank, though he did not actually coin it. The origin of the phrase was in another term, “Serie Noir”, which French publishing houses had begun labeling imported American hard-boiled novels (Perspectives 5). While Americans did not realize they were witnessing a unique artistic movement in film noir cinema until at least a decade later, the French critical community had already identified one of the key links in the style’s genesis.

The end of World War II did not alleviate the pessimism of the American people, rather, it opened the door to a threat that made Hitler’s military might seem impotent by comparison. The deployment of two atom bombs over Japan in 1945 signaled the advent of the atomic age, and a few short years later, the Cold War had begun. The United States and the Soviet Union began preparing for the nuclear exchange they feared was coming, and the public could only wait in fear for the thermonuclear Sword of Damocles to drop. Were this type of war to begin, it wouldn’t matter if the aggressor was defeated, since both opposing nations (and the rest of the planet) would likely face mutual destruction.

Film noir reached it’s blackest, and “purest”, point in 1955, in the midst of the Cold War arms race. While there was always an element of using the noir protagonist to represent all of humanity, Robert Aldrich’s seminal film Kiss Me Deadly literally made the hero’s tragic fate species-wide. Again the story features a private-eye seeking a stolen object, but this time nuclear paranoia comes into play. The object is a mysterious, glowing item that seems to have been stolen from the government, with a character voicing vague links with “Trinity” and “Los Alamos”. It is transported in a small, latched box, clearly a metaphor linking atomic weapons to the myth of Pandora. The film even suggests that if the weapon were activated, it might mean the extinction of mankind. At the story‘s conclusion, despite the villains perishing, the box is indeed opened and a nuclear disaster begins. This is a microcosmic look at the inevitable end of a U.S.A/U.S.S.R. atomic war.

The “classic” film noir period ended in the late 1950s, perhaps unable to survive the advent of the peace-and-love mentality that rose in the 1960s. Still, the influence of the style never truly disappeared. The Clint Eastwood/Don Siegel classic Dirty Harry fits into the mold perfectly, with an uncaring public, incompetent police force, demonic villain and beautifully expressionist urban-jungle photography. All this, despite being shot in color and released in 1971. Michael Mann’s brilliant, groundbreaking television series Miami Vice (1984-1989) very consciously mimics much of the noir style, proving that pastel suits and tropical settings cannot overcome the darkness of noir. The use of episode-specific color schemes designed to evoke specific emotions again harkens back to expressionist art.

Perhaps the most interesting product to come out of the neo-noir mode is the 2005 film Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller (based on Miller’s comic books). While Miller has always stated that it was the hard-boiled school of literature and American film noir that led him to create his modern black & white epic, his use of lighting and character body-language is not entirely noir. In fact, his work edges closer to the German expressionist movement that started the noir bloodline a century ago. Sin City is actually a work of neo-expressionism viewed through a film noir lens, and brings this artistic saga full circle.

*Fin*

So there you have it. It takes a hell of a lot more than trench-coats and tragedy to churn out a noir film. For an example of a flick that didn’t quite get it, look at the recently released adaptation of Max Payne, a film that turned a video game with a pretty good noir story into a movie with a fairly awful story. On the other hand, to see how truly great film noir can be done in the 21st century, check out Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, David Fincher’s Zodiac, and Michael Mann’s masterpiece; Collateral.

Looking back to the quote from Mr. Barrera, we can now plainly see the deficiencies of his personal conception of noir. If we can say anything for certain, we can say this;
In addition to “looking at the world in a bleak way”, in order to truly fit the noir mold, a piece of art requires oppressive societal relationships, a sense of fatalism, and, most integrally, clear visual links to German Expressionism. Noir is most definitely a color scheme, though I will agree with Barrera that it need not be black and white. It is a color-scheme carefully controlled to evoke emotions from the audience in a way that clearly separates it from purely naturalistic styles of imagery. Barrera mentions “big shadows” as something noir does not require. If that is the case, I wonder why Fritz Lange, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger Edward Dmytryk, Robert Aldrich, and all the other men that, you know, created the damn style, were so consistent with the use of chiaroscuro lighting. I guess they must have been doing things wrong. Thank God Rockstar games is finally going to fix their mistakes.

*ahem*

Joe A.,
Signing off.

Works Cited

Barsam, Richard. Looking at Movies. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2007.

Crowther, Bruce. Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1989.

Frank, Nino. “The Crime Adventure Story: A New Kind of Detective Film”. L’Ecran Francais 61 (1946). Reprinted in Perspectives on Film Noir. Ed. R.B. Palmer. New York: G.K. Hall & Co, 1996. 21-24.

Kirchner, Ernst L. Street Scene. 1913. Private Collection. A Brief History of Painting. By Roy Bolton. London: Robinson, 2004. 239.

Kirchner, Ernst L. Five Women in the Street. 1913. Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Art Across Time. Book 2, 3rd ed. By Laurie Schneider Adams. New York: McGraw-Hill. 838.

Nolde, Emile. Still Life with Masks. 1911. Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. Art Across Time. Book 2, 3rd ed. By Laurie Schneider Adams. New York: McGraw-Hill. 839.

Nolde, Emile. Prophet. 1912. Museum of Modern Art.org. 25 April 2008.

The Volume Library. Vol. 2. Nashville, TN: The Southwestern Company, 2000.

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After considering a comment allegedly sent from Mr. Wright himself, I will clarify a few points.

1. My comments were based on the roughly 1/3 of his output with which I am familiar.

2. All comments were merely the opinion of a single poetry enthusiast, not the word of God (or the gods, if you prefer).

3. As for the author’s accusation that I am “poisoned with envy”…no dice. I am the first person to admit that I cannot, and likely will never, be able to composed any poem that does not reek of amateur shit. All I am concerned with is whether or not it is worth my time to read another man’s work.

4. My impression was not wholly negative. At the end of my rant (yes, that is exactly what I called it) I merely said that I was “straddling the line” on whether Mr. Wright was a good poet or a great poet. I still am, as a matter of fact.

5. I invited everyone who read my thoughts to make up their own mind on Mr. Wright’s work, I did not tell them to avoid it.

Let’s try to keep things civil, friends. Whenever someone puts their ideas out in the public square, criticism will follow. Opinion will never be fact, let’s remember not to fret over them as though they are.

Joe A., Signing off.

1 Comment »

I’ve been in a “poetry” kind of mood lately, and thinking about the nature of poetic greatness. You see, there are figures dotting the landscape of modern literature who have achieved levels of pseudo-sainthood in the eyes of colleagues and readers alike. These are the Walt Whitmans, Sylvia Plaths, and T.S. Eliots of the world. To speak ill of their work often leaves a critic disregarded as an eccentric, someone who just doesn’t understand poetry. Given enough time, it seems, a poet will either achieve this exalted status, or be forever relegated to the “honorable mention” column in textbooks. Every now and then, however, authors may find themselves hovering between these two categories. A legion of fans sing their praises, while an opposing force equals this support with venomous condemnation.

So, what do we do then? One popular criteria for establishing greatness is a tally of the awards a writer has under their belt. Frequently, the definitive line between “good” writers and “great” writers in the Pulitzer Prize. Often we see the mob mentality in action after a controversial poet nets one of these babies, and all of a sudden critics that hated their work develop a miraculous “new found respect” for their poems. Sometimes, though, a Pulitzer comes and goes without diffusing the controversy. I want to look at two good examples of this. One, Anne Sexton, is from the mists of the past. The other, Franz Wright, is our contemporary.

Ladies first though, so question #1 is:

Was Anne Sexton a Confessional Poet, or just a Public Confessor?

Born in 1928 as Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, her early years offered no sign of the literary talent that would one day make her (in-?)famous. Though she later claimed to have received “no visible education” (Poulin 652), she did spend some time at Rogers Hall boarding school beginning in 1945, after graduating from public school. At Rogers, Sexton showed her first interest in poetry, and saw her work displayed in the school yearbook (McClatchy xiii). She soon put Rogers Hall behind her, after becoming romantically involved with Alfred Muller Sexton and eventually traveling to North Carolina to elope. During the first decade of this union Anne Sexton birthed two daughters, Linda and Joyce, and spent a brief period modeling for the Hart Agency. Unfortunately, this period also marked the onset of multiple mental breakdowns. She was first hospitalized for an “emotional disturbance” in 1954 after the death of her beloved great-aunt Anna Dingley (McClatchy xiii). Two years later she made her first suicide attempt, an effort she would repeat in 1966, 1970, and successfully carryout in 1974. More than just being a moment of psychiatric crisis, this first tragic attempt would, ironically, inspire Sexton’s professional forays into the artistic world. Doctor Martin Orne, her new psychiatrist, seized on the idea when she admitted a brief interest in poetry, and suggested that she take up her pen as a therapeutic tool, a safety valve to release her pent-up anxieties. At the doctor’s prompting, Sexton enrolled in her first poetry workshop under instructor John Cllelon Holmes. Over the next several years Sexton published work in popular magazines, and released the poetry books Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), and Live or Die (1966). This body of work won Sexton several awards, and teaching positions at Harvard and Radcliff universities (“Anne”).

Despite her success, critics were divided. Some, like her own teacher Mr. Holmes, suggested that Sexton’s technique of translating intensely graphic and painfully bleak episodes of her mental anguish into verse was simply not appropriate material for poetry. Others found her interest in death as a recurring theme too morbid. Still more simply thought she was treading ground that had already been worn flat by the more famous confessional poets like Robert Lowell and Sexton’s friend, Sylvia Plath. She did have supporters, though, and they loved the way she seemed to dissect herself anew for them each time they opened her newest book. They said that Sexton’s critical detractors were unfair to judge the quality of her work based on personal bias against the confessional style. They also took issue with labeling Sexton as “death obsessed,” instead pointing out that her books did not point to death as a solution to her problems, merely as a shadow that unfortunately would not lift from a seriously disturbed mind. In an essay on this subject, writer Cheryl Vossekuil went so far as to insist Sexton’s early poems were unequivocally life-affirming. She says that Sexton always considered her poetry as an activity to uphold her will to live, and believed that only when she ceased to be a poet would she be ready to accept death (Vossekuil 120). In this sense, every time Sexton put pen to paper, she was forcing the ghost of death back for another moment.

The nature of Anne Sexton’s literary use of death and suicidal motifs is also a obvious point when her proponents seek to defuse accusations that she was just a pale imitator of death-poet Sylvia Plath. As critic Greg Johnson says, “Plath mythologizes death…and places herself at the center of a myth…” she “willingly embraces” a “brutally nihilistic” self image. Anne Sexton, conversely, seems to be always thinking about death, but is ever longing to be a part of the healthy world around her (Johnson). This is what makes her such an attractive figure to many readers; while she would suffer mentally until taking her own life, she never seemed to lose sight of all the world’s goodness. It was never hatred of life pushing her toward death, it was hatred of her own inability to live.

Live or Die eventually gained wide appreciation, and netted Sexton her most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize. This peaking of Sexton’s popularity may have been due, in part, to the great attention author Ralph Mills gave her in his book Contemporary American Poetry (Wagner-Martin 6). Whatever the reason, Sexton would never see this level of critical acceptance again. Her next collection, Love Poems (1969), would prove to be her most commercially successful work up to that time (“Anne”). The critics were not so impressed as the consumers, and reviews were tepid. Most didn’t like the idea of a married woman with children writing a book memorializing an extra-marital affair, and if the affair related was a fiction, they objected to a “confessional” poet working in untruths (Wagner-Martin 6). Sexton’s next volume, Transformations (1971), went even further afield, being made up of Grimm’s fairy tales, re-imagined by the poet as feminist myths. Sexton herself did not think the style was incompatible with her earlier work, saying: “I think they end up being as wholly personal as my most intimate poems, in a different language…but coming from…as deep a place.” (Leventen 137)

Anne Sexton would publish two more poetry books before her suicide by carbon monoxide in 1974, The Book of Folly (1972) and The Death Notebooks (1974), with her final volumes, The Awful Rowing Toward God and Words for Dr. Y, being released posthumously. Sexton’s declining mental state is obvious in these works, and the poems displayed within are sadly poor when compared with her initial output. Her longtime friend Maxine Kumin defends the work Sexton produced towards the end of her life, opining: “The later work takes more chances, crosses more boundaries between the rational and the surreal; and time after time it evokes in the reader that sought-after shiver of recognition.” (Complete xxxiv)

Whether one agrees with Kumin on that point, or even whether or not one enjoys any of Anne Sexton’s work, one must testify to her uniqueness of voice. Madness, fear, and despair are nothing new in poetry but, for a time, Sexton managed to counter these emotions with her words. I would like now to consider a poem taken from her very first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. It is a response to her workshop teacher John Clellon Holmes. He had requested that she give up relating her emotional trials and psychiatric care in favor of subjects more “appropriate” for poetry, fearing that she would someday be “ashamed and haunted” by the memoirs of the person she used to be.

For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further

Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped my own head;
it was glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone’s fear,
like an invisible veil between us all…
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.

The meaning of this poem is simple, easy to understand. Many authors seek to bathe their verse in layer upon layer of impenetrable metaphor and oppressively personal, subjective symbolism in an effort to seem profound. In its straightforward accessibility Sexton’s best work, like the poem above, stands in direct contrast to that philosophy .

She opens the poem by bluntly stating that the subjects she writes about are not beautiful. The third line references a sense of order there, and we are soon told that “there” is some type of asylum. Sexton could be referring to any number of psychiatric institutions in which she underwent treatment. The reference to order is reflected in the rhythms of the poem itself, which feels like a very formal rebuttal of “John’s”  comments, more like an official letter than a discourse between friends. Though a certain formality is common in much of her early writing, I think Sexton felt she needed to play up the sterile, rational feel of the piece in order to make her point convincing.

Sexton proceeds into an analogy of staring into a mirror to confront the idea of a “selfish death.” We know she was tempted toward suicide, and tried to give in several times. Here though, she acknowledges the egocentric nature of suicide, even when a person is in a place of ultimate despair. Who exactly would she be cheating if she died “selfishly”? Her family is the obvious answer, but there will be more to this later. Following this, the poet says that she could try to write the type of poetry that Holmes wanted her to, but she doesn’t see the worth in that. Sexton has decided that, through her poetry, her moments of darkest despair, the moments that are the “worst of anyone,” can be turned into a good. Her anguish becomes “an accident of hope.”

Lines 17 through 24 begin to explain Sexton’s ultimate thought in this poem, and ultimately the philosophy behind all her work. She will tap into her head, her pained memories, for inspiration. She does not, however, just want to “rage in her own bowl,” or keep her memories internalized and use them in a subtle way; no, she says this would be “small.” The stuff within her “bowl” or mind cannot remain private, it has grown to be “more than myself, it was you, or your house.” Sexton is saying that by setting her experiences and illness down on the paper unadulterated, her readers can begin to see their pains within her work. These are readers who may feel lost and alone like she did. They may even suffer from psychological disturbances themselves, but she wants her story to be a lesson to them, to be a beacon of hope, to show them they are not alone. When she earlier decided that dying would be “selfish,” it is these readers who might take solace in her work that she didn’t want to abandon. She hangs on to this belief that somebody, somewhere must feel as she does, and she declares: “There ought to be something special for someone in this kind of hope.”

Here is Sexton’s final point to Holmes, who wished she would write about more pleasant subjects. From line 38 to the end of the poem she explains that, if she didn’t put her suffering, with all its brusque and garish horrors, onto the page, if she wrote from someplace “lovelier,” then she wouldn’t have this hope to offer anyone. What then, would be her purpose to continue living? Sexton speaks of the veils that separate us as people, and I believe she is accusingly speaking to Holmes about the way we like to pretend that things are always fine in our lives. We dash around the issue when our acquaintances are ill or depressed, we don’t mention it because it is not “polite.” Well, Ms. Sexton refuses to play that game. If John’s world is all sunshine and happiness, he doesn’t need to confront the turmoil of a anguished mind. For those off us who occasionally feel the tug of anxiety or the weight of hopelessness and melancholy, we know that someone else has been there.

We know that she understands us.

Works Cited

“Anne Sexton: Biography.” Answers.com. 18 February 2008. <http://www.answers.com/Anne Sexton%3A Biography>

Johnson, Greg. “The Achievement of Ann Sexton.” Hollins Critic 21.3 (June 1984)

Leventen, Carol. “Transformation’s Silencings.” Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Ed. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1989. 136-149.

McClatchy, J.D., ed. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Poulin jr., A. and Michael Waters, eds. Contemporary American Poetry. 8th ed. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

Vossekuil, Cheryl. “Embracing Life: Anne Sexton’s Early Poems.” Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Ed. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1989. 120-    127.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1989.

That’s it for now, keep on the lookout for my thoughts on Franz Wright.

Until then this is Joe A., Signing off.

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Relevant DVD and Book links are listed at the end of the post.

Maids Never Have Homecomings
How Esslin Proved Genet’s “Maids” was not Theatre of the Absurd

By J.R. Astalfa

I assume that many of the cinema and stage fans that visit this page are familiar with the movement in play-writing known as Theatre of the Absurd. If you are not, the short explanation is: A term invented by the writer Martin Esslin to describe a group of non-traditional plays written in the decade following the second world war, and linked by vague criteria of his devising. The most (in)famous title slapped with the label is also something of the absurd archetype: Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, a work that emerged from the author’s pen with no proper story arc, dialog that quite possibly communicates nothing, a general sense of chaos, and a final meaning or moral that is so obscured as to be entirely theoretical. I happen to believe that Godot is not absurd in the dictionary sense of the word. However, I will accept that the play is absurd in the sense that it conforms to Martin Esslin’s criteria for “Theatre of the Absurd”, a category he has every right to define, being its creator.

Before I move on to the combative heart of this essay, I must will first make it clear that I agree with many of Esslin’s selections for inclusion into the Absurdist category. One name that, for me, represents the absurd to a far greater degree even than Beckett, is Harold Pinter. Anyone who has watched his play The Homecoming can clearly see how little it has in common with traditional, narrative drama. It also rings as more bizarre than Beckett’s work because where that author set outlandish characters in fantastic worlds, Pinter places absurd characters into a realistic setting we all can recognize. This is not to say I did not enjoy The Homecoming, but it quite simply does not function as a traditional narrative. Characters have little obvious motivation for the things they do and they don’t behave in ways that seem authentic within the realistic environment they inhabit.

In Martin Esslin’s essay “Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd”, he uses the absence of logical cause and effect plotting to separate the absurd from old-fashioned theatre. If that is the benchmark, then The Homecoming is a blue-ribbon example, as the audience would be hard pressed to find any causes for the bizarre incidents that characterize the final section of the work. Everything that occurs does so for reasons that are not readily obvious in the plot. For The Homecoming to be a satisfying viewing experience, we must try to figure out, to borrow a term from Esslin, “what is happening”. There are none of what Esslin calls the traditional plot-driving questions, “what will happen next”, because we could not possibly guess that when Pinter isn’t playing by the dramatic rules we are used to. Perhaps this is the best way to define Theatre of the Absurd, a group of plays where to only way to reveal the moral of the story is by intently contemplating all of the drama’s possible subtexts.

However, my intention for this essay is not really a critique of Pinter, nor is it an overview of the Absurdist movement as a whole. This essay is about to become a rant centered on another play labeled “absurd”: Jean Genet’s 1947 opus, The Maids.

In the brief summary, The Maids is the story of two sisters: Solange, the elder, more vocal, and dominant, and her younger sister Claire. As the play opens, we meet them acting out a strange, sado-masochistic play-within-a-play in which the maid Solange rises up in defiance of her employer, referred to only as Madame. After this scene, which crackles with incestuous eroticism, the women return to their duties as maids. In their conversations, during which Solange tends to break out into long-winded monologues, they bemoan their station in society and preach the author’s less than subtle Marxist ideology. This leads to the revelation that the maids are planning to kill Madame when the opportunity arises.

Eventually we meet Madame, who is almost cartoonishly patronizing, insensitive, self-righteous, and rude to her servants. We also learn that Madame is mourning the imprisonment of a man who, unbeknownst to her, the maids had had framed. When Madame notices a telephone in her bedroom is not on the cradle (moved during the maids’ ritual), she demands to know who had called. While Claire panics, Solange hurriedly says it was Madame’s imprisoned suitor, who (she lies) has been released from jail. Madame immediately readies herself to meet him, and the maids know they have been backed into a corner. If Madame discovers their lie, they will face severe discipline, and likely find future employment impossible to come by. Clair attempts to make Madame drink a cup of poisoned tea, but fails, and the woman sets of to see her man. Unable to cope with the knowledge of the coming punishment, Clair drinks the tea herself. Solange is left to deliver a final monologue on life, and their place in it, leaving her fate in doubt at story‘s close.

To put it bluntly, I find it almost impossibly stupid to place The Maids into the same category hosting Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, but people have persisted in doing just that for decades. To put an end to this misfiling, and disqualify The Maids from the Absurdist group, I will be utilizing Martin Esslin’s own words, taken from the aforementioned essay “Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd”.
To begin, in describing the trademarks of the movement Esslin named, he states that the Absurdists “violently reacted against the shallow, verbal, psychological ‘realistic’ drawing-room play of the Parisian boulevards and the London West End“. Well, shallow The Maids certainly is not, but not “verbal and psychological”?  Are the endless pages of Marxist propaganda monologues explaining peasant versus aristocrat rage not verbal? What of the rejection of psychology? In my opinion, the psycho-sexual mechanics of the sister’s incestuously sadistic interaction never cease to fascinate and entertain, often keeping the play afloat when the politics grow too heavy-handed. Given author Genet’s own unconventional sexuality, no one can convince me that he did not take his play’s psychological aspects seriously. Furthermore, is there anyone alive who would suggest that writing a “bedroom-play” was much of a “violent reaction” against the old-fashioned “drawing-room play“?

The Esslin quote above also uses the word “realistic”, which I consider to be of supreme importance in the discussion of what constitutes “absurd” theatre. He later remarks that “Theater of the absurd cannot be realistic theater“. I cannot over-emphasize this point, The Maids no more rejects realism than the ocean rejects water. Certainly the protagonists are rather verbose, and their sisterly relationship is far from typical, but nothing they do violates the internal authenticity of the fiction Genet has created. Their odd behaviors are simply character-specific traits meant to allow the audience inside their heads, to understand them.

As we move on through Martin Esslin’s essay, he brings up the aspects of traditional narrative. In his words, Absurdist theatre rejects plots with “rigid motivational chains of cause and effect” and uses as an example of conventional storytelling the case of a man who is cruel as an adult because he was beaten as a child. However, isn’t this example analogous to the situation of Solange and Claire? Their anger, jealousy, and murderous intent is clearly shown as an effect motivated by a lifetime of callous, disrespectful, and humiliating treatment by an aristocratic class that sees servants as comparable to farm animals.

Following this, Esslin says that in Theatre of the Absurd, “there can be no highly structured plot, no well-defined characters, no meaningful dialog”. I say that, while the story of The Maids may not be rife with twists and turns, it most assuredly has a structured plot. At its most basic level, stripped of all political and psychological themes, The Maids still works as a tense crime story. We have two protagonists who plan to murder a third. We have scenes to designed to show us justification for their anger. We watch a hasty plan put into motion when things begin slipping out of control, and we watch as said plan reaches ultimate failure. The play ends with one protagonist killing herself to avoid the consequences of their revealed subterfuge, and the second one attempting to make sense of what has occurred. This is as traditional a plot as one would find in dozens of pulp fiction magazines or a hundred RKO Studios crime films released at the same time that The Maids was on stage.

Esslin again shows us that Jean Genet’s play does not fit into the Absurdist mold by making a statement on what keeps an audience involved with a plot. If a play is of the old-style, traditional narrative form, he says, audience expectation is generated by viewers asking “What will happen next?” In contrast, Theatre of the Absurd will make the audience ask “What is happening?”

One could spend countless hours pondering the psychology of The Maids’ characters, or debating the merits of the socialist philosophy they preach in an effort to determine why “what is happening” is happening. However, to suggest the audience of the play will need to put forth a great effort to understand the plot is patently ridiculous. All of the play’s drama and narrative thrust derive from traditional “what will happen next?” moments. When Madame returns home, will she realize what the kitchen clock left in her bedroom, or the makeup Claire retains from the maid’s secret charade, signify? What will happen when she discovers that Solange lied about the telephone call? Will Claire’s last, desperate ploy with the poisoned tea succeed? And then the final, unanswered question of “What will happen next?” for Solange?

No, no. This is not Theatre of the Absurd. This is an old-fashioned crime thriller, just one with a lot of non-traditional left-wing preaching and some aberrant sexual implications to make Solange and Claire interesting personalities to spend the story following. Why should critics try to force The Maids into a box it was never designed to inhabit? Isn’t a mixture of Agatha Christie intrigue and incestuous desire interesting enough?

-Joe A., signing off.

Amazon.com DVD Recommendations:

The Maids (Christopher Miles, director)

The Homecoming (Peter Hall, directing)

Amazon.com Book Recommendations:

Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett, Author)

Endgame (Samuel Becket, author)

The Theatre of the Absurd (Martin Esslin, author)

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The Apollodorus Films website is not just an exercise in the ongoing capitalist treasure hunt, but also a forum to discuss all aspects of the art and entertainment world. This being the case, the Joe’s Blog section will frequently host my ramblings on any number of subjects which fall into these admittedly very broad categories. Some of my pronouncements will be relevant to current events and trends in the media, and others, like the one going online later, will seem like transcriptions of whatever random thoughts I had on a given day. They will give this impression because, essentially, they are exactly that.

So enjoy what you can, ignore what you can’t.

Joseph Astalfa, signing off.

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