The Existentialist Cowboy: satire

Showing posts with label satire. Show all posts

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Brave New World

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The origin of the title of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is found in Shakespeare's "The Tempest", specifically Miranda's speech, Act V, Scene I:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206

Shakespeare's Miranda (The Tempest) had grown up on an isolated island. She had known only her father, servants, spirits and an "enslaved savage". There was one notable exception: Ariel, "...a spirit of the air", who had refused to serve the witch, Sycorax. As a result, Ariel was imprisoned in a tree until rescued by Prospero.

Early on, Ariel reveals a plot to murder Prospero. Ariel's obedience is an important symbol of Prospero's humanity, ameliorating Prospero and humanizing actions taken by Prospero against his enemies.

Upon seeing other people at last, Miranda is understandably overcome. She utters the famous line: "O brave new world, That has such people in't." It is irony if not sarcasm. What she has witnessed is not civil behavior but that of drunken louts. Huxley employs the same device when the "savage" John witnesses a a "brave new world". Huxley's work --Brave New World --dates to 1931 when he was living in Italy. Already established as a writer and social satirist, Huxley was by this time a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue. "Brave New World" was Huxley's fifth novel and his first "dystopian work". Huxley was always eager to credit utopian works by various authors to include H.G. Wells, notably his A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods of 1923. It was Wells' "hopeful vision of the future" that inspired Huxley to write a parody.

This "parody" became Brave New World. Huxley's vision of the future, however, was quite unlike his original inspirations. Huxley served up what some critics have called a "frightening vision of the future". Huxley himself called it a "negative utopia", a "dystopia". He was clearly inspired by by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes -ahead of its time with respect to corporate imposed tyranny and "behavioral conditioning".

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[1] In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer listed Brave New World number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time",[2] and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.[3]

Brave New World

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Romney Shirked

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It was a dark and stormy night. Having strapped the dog atop the car, the Romney family embarked upon the long road to oblivion and mormons. The trip itself was uneventful, disturbed only by the flapping of dog ears in the lonely wind! It was, of course, fate. Fate! Fate to which Mitt would never submit or acknowledge. Mitt had to make this trip by car. As a matter of principle, he would never allow his dog or family aboard a craft that did not have roll down windows!

Ms Mitt sat by the window, her head thrown back defiantly in defeat. One of her two legs stretched across floorboard. If she expected Mitt to be aroused, she was sorely disappointed.

The window frame trembled with the speed of motion despite the fact that the speed limit was posted --20 MPH. The window pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while, not often, and even then not worth mentioning. She was disappointed to learn that they were only fireflies.

Mitt --for just about one second and a half --considered surrender, completely, utterly! That did not last long. Even as he tried to forget everything, he suddenly remembered it all. 'Darn it', he said aloud! 'Frap! Why can't I just permit myself to feel? Let go—drop the controls—this is it.'

Then --as if awakening from hypnosis --he remembered the dog! The dog! But just as suddenly, he forgot the dog. He remembered the suffocating airplane trip, nearly choking, banging on the un-openable, the window, the CLOSED window, the window he could never open.

Then he remembered being humiliated in public debates. He remembered being laughed at when his pants fell down. In his nightmares, he fled the scene in 'official' Mormon Doodiepants and photographed by vermin: photographers and reporters! Reporters! Reporters! Then he broke out in a sweat! He was never certain that the empty chair did not talk back to Clint.

Somewhere on the edge of his mind, under the sounds of Lawrence Welch and his All Mormon Orchestra, he heard the sound of train wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, like a good mormon orchestra --boring! Bored --he could relax now. He heard the wheels and was, therefore, reasonably sure that the car was still moving forward. But 'why?', he wondered. Why? Surely, he thought, the warranty had run out on the tires.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

'They Live' Directed by John Carpenter

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

The release date of John Carpenter's film "They Live" is 1988 but seems more recent, more like a commentary on today's news than it is a commentary of 1980s paranoia. To be sure, there were many who warned of the dehumanizing effects of mass culture, political propaganda, political agendas --right or left!

The temptation to see allegory is not merely justified; it is, surely, the filmmakers intent. Like the much earlier "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" this message is political, a cautionary tale. While 'The Day the Earth Stood Still" deals with potential invasion, it is the alien's intent to warn us of ourselves. Klaato comes to earth with a warning, a warning about how we may destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. But, he might just as well have had in mind our enslavement from without and, most ominously, from within. It the latter case, 'we' would have no one but ourselves to blame. Or as Shakespeare put it in 'Julius Caesar':

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
--Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

'The Invasion of the Body Snatchers' seems obvious in retrospect: the 'seed pods' were the American right wing, Republicans, narrow-minded bigots, authoritarians. They would enslave us from within. John Carpenter's 'They Live' is both allegory and warning. Carpenter has created 'aliens' who have disguised their origins and their 'evil' intentions. They cannot be detected without the use of special eye glasses. The viewer accepts this as a convenient plot device. Wisely, Carpenter does not slow down the action for lectures about how this kind of thing may be feasible. Nor does he reveal an agenda but through a well-crafted story --not lectures or soliloquies. It's a device which successfully moves both plot and action to a riveting and inevitable conclusion/climax.

'They Live' is not merely Sci-Fi. It's a horror film in which a dreadful future is the monster. And, like Frankenstein, the 'monster' is one of our own creation, in this case, the complicity of 'earthlings' with evil aliens. Unlike many Sci-Fi movies and literature, the aliens of 'They Live' do not appear to have anything profound or awe-inspiring in mind. Like many earthlings the ugly aliens, resembling death heads when seen with special shades, have, it seems, only the U.S. right/GOP agenda in mind, that is, rigging Wall Street, acquiring great wealth and power, usurping the media for purpose of mass mind control. So far --they differ little from the Republican party.
Here's another review which, likewise, spotted the political implications:

John Carpenter wrote and directed this science fiction thriller about a group of aliens who try to take over the world by disguising themselves as Young Republicans. Wrestler Roddy Piper stars as John Nada, a drifted who makes his way into an immense encampment for the homeless. There he stumbles upon a conspiracy concerning aliens who have hypnotized the populace through subliminal messages transmitted through television, magazines, posters, and movies. When Nada looks through special Ray-Bans developed by the resistance leaders, the aliens lose their clean-cut "Dan Quayle" looks and resemble crusty-looking reptiles. Nada joins the underground, teaming up with rebel-leader Frank (Keith David) to eradicate the lizard-like aliens from the body politic. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

--They Live, Rotten Tomatoes

John Carpenter directed but, interestingly, wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym: Frank Armitage, the name of one of the characters in the movie. I have no idea why Carpenter chose to do this. In any case, the film (full movie below) is scary, challenging, and, if action is your cuppa tea, there is a memorable fight scene to end all fight scenes. Having failed to kill one another, the two characters are destined to be friends but we don't know that at the time. There is the possibility that one will kill the other. The audience is sure to find in each character traits with which he or she can identify.

Called part sci-fi, part horror, part dark comedy, it is, in fact, a cautionary tale. That it works on every level accounts for its enduring popularity.