Ghost of a flea: Survival or death with honour

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September 12, 2006

Survival or death with honour

About the only thing USC professor, Leo Braudy gets right in this Los Angeles piece is that Jack Bauer is no James Bond. I do not have the patience for fisking much of anything but a few quick points for Pr. Braudy: the "barely hidden religious subtext" of The Lord of the Rings is not an argument against The Lord of the Rings; using a book written sixty years ago as an example of either/or morality tales then using the same book as an exemplar of non-either/or narratives would earn you a C- in any course I have ever taught; doing the same for 1960s character Spiderman would underline the point, and; don't get me started on any argument that cites Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" approvingly.

Fallible heroes and superheroes, like Spider-Man, are the vogue in the pop cultural world today, and they less often stand alone than step out hesitantly from the crowd or vanish into it. In Steven Spielberg's remake of "The War of the Worlds," Ray Ferrier, the Tom Cruise character, has two children, and he can hardly protect them. In the 1953 version, Gene Barry's Clayton Forrester only had a girlfriend to deal with. In the post9/11 world, survival or death with honor seem to be our main choices, and the strongest memory we carry away from Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is how nothing in the vast U.S. arsenal, and no one in political or military authority, can stop the dreaded aliens. In part, this was the message of the 1953 film and H.G. Wells' original story. But Spielberg's version, in the context of hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, concludes that survival is a matter of dumb luck.

Certainly Spielberg and his fellow-travellers believe "survival or death with honour" are our only choices and in this, if little else, Braudy has accomplished himself by succinctly putting an entire worldview. The trouble, of course, is twofold. First, many of us reject the simplisme of his either/or logic and take a third way.* Second, and arguably worse, is coming to understand that even if Braudy has his way in ceding victory to the Death Eaters it is shockingly clear the choice he and his fellow cowards would make for the rest of us.

A new Casino Royale trailer has emerged. Part gritty, part glam, all Bond; or so I gather. What I saw of it looks excellent but with with a spoiler about ten seconds into a two-minute plus production that is as much as I decided to see until the picture is released. I will never understand, let alone forgive, the trend toward showing an entire film in advance to people who would could not otherwise make up their minds to go see it. Once again, the rest of us are asked to lower our expectations to the exact limit of the stupidest. A bit like democracy come to think of it.

Such is as it was before the fall of Rome. One thing I will say for the coming Dark Ages: Even the Foundation's attempted thousand-year spoiler was foiled by the Mule.

*Summed up in a simple maxim attributed to George Patton: "Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

Posted by Ghost of a flea at September 12, 2006 06:47 AM

Comments

Preempted once again!

:shakes fist in quasi-angry manner:

Posted by: agent bedhead at September 12, 2006 11:09 AM