Be Careful What You Wish For... (Part 2)

Aesthetic Ideation Brings About Its Own Demonstration

[Continued from Part 1.]

Americans were imagining the worst. The arts became a devotion to destruction, partaken in by its creators with a devilish revelry that seeped into the consciousness of the unsuspecting audience.

FILMIC EXEMPLARS OF DESTRUCTIVE IDEATION

In film, breaking with two decades of harmless sci-fi and fantasy, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) established a trend in the public consumption of private imaginings with its grave foreboding of total disaster. Alien parasites from a dying planet insidiously take the mimicked form of loved ones, neighbors, friends and colleagues, replacing them with vegetable matter in their image. These “pod people” are empty of empathy and even individual personality; but they labor collectively to push out competition for resources, to suck the lifeblood out of ordinary Americans so that they may have a host off of which to feed. The pod people are unstoppable and the film halts just where it should have found its conclusion: in the utter ruination of invaders. But it does not. I’ve watched this film perhaps a dozen times in my life. Each time my initial reaction is confirmed: It is a film that is very well made, with memorable images, a subtle weaving of plot and action, acted persuasively, and thus utterly terrifying. It is akin to the planting in a backyard garden of deadly nightshade. It would be hard for any American to reject a premise so well crafted and delivered; but it must be rejected in consciousness if it’s effect is to be parried.

Two generations later, what Invasion of the Body Snatchers portrayed in its figurative expression has come to pass in many ways. An obvious example is the omnipresence of regulatory bureaucracies. These monster herds have worked collectively, relentlessly and -- while professing their own supposed virtue -- in a manner entirely absent of care or concern for the host who are compelled under penalty of prosecution to feed them, destroyed the American livelihoods we used to know when we proudly made our own products with our own hands. But even outside of government, a much larger percentage of Americans than ever before, especially those whose livelihoods are often supported entirely by the taxpayers they hate, despise America, our liberty, our livelihoods and the sanctity of human life; but most of all themselves who are empty, incapable of empathy, narcissistic and soulless.

In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Soviet and Chinese malefactors brainwash an American soldier, replete with false memories of his own supposed heroism, thus making him an unwitting sleeper agent. He is programmed to snipe the Presidential nominee at the Convention, thus ensuring the Vice-President, a fellow traveler, ascends to the highest executive office and ushers in an unAmerican autocratic regime. The plot differs somewhat, but in the present day, we have our own version of a Manchurian president.

So pleased was Hollywood with this scenario — had they something in mind other than box office? — that Denzel Washington was hired in 2004 to reprise the movie.

The Omega Man (1971) imagines a last man, ironically a US army doctor, who survives US-China biological warfare by injecting himself with an experimental vaccine. A sophisticated, intelligent, cultured and brave American man who lives in a secured penthouse with his books, chess set, sculpture and music of a lost world, he ventures out during the day to scavenge canned goods. The barbaric red-eyed pale plague victims, who, like vampires, must avoid sunlight, threaten to return each day to kill him. COVID-19...

A generation after “Towering Inferno” (1974), in which the world's tallest building and the pride of its city catches fire and collapses, the World Trade towers came down, incinerating thousands. I recall the trailers, dreamed up or at least overseen by the master of grotesque spectacle Irwin Allen, to titillate viewers into venturing out to the cinema to pay $3.50 to watch helpless people struggle to avoid their own incineration. ‘Course it couldn’t happen, they all thought.

How the debonair sophisticate and song-and-dance-man Fred Astaire ever managed to get himself wrapped up in this flick, even as a highly-paid guest-star, is beyond me. I feel the need to break up the misery with levity. Here’s a much more enjoyable (and typical) video of Mr. Astaire, perhaps the supreme representative of a far more wholesome and nutritious era of public entertainment.

The same could be said for Kurt Russell, whom I first admired in Follow Me, Boys! (1966) when Disney still made wholesome family films. Escape from New York (1981), in which Mr. Russell starred, was yet another of an interminable series of disaster films pushed upon the American public. But, by now, heady with ticket sale successes, the corporate New York/Hollywood axis began to wear its rot on its sleeve. (In an interview on The Mike Douglas Show around 1970. Betty Hutton said pictures started to get bad when Gulf & Western, whose executives had never made a picture in their lives, bought up entertainment companies in the late 60s.)

In this flick, still beloved by bottom feeders who delight in perverse expressions of human barbarity, the US government has turned Manhattan into a maximum security prison, where criminal gangs run wild, unfettered by law or morality – only violence enabled the brute power needed to command resources for survival. 50 years later, Fifth Avenue storefronts are empty, the subways are filled with predatory packs of roaming animals in human form and financial behemoths abandon Wall Street.

This clip makes me think of the UFC, now enjoying an astonishing popularity.

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GET BETTER IDEAS

There were thousands of these miserable filmic imaginings, produced roughly a generation before they spawned themselves in front of our unbelieving eyes; and yet Americans seemed to be surprised by their happening. Americans imagined them into being and Americans watched them and loved them, in droves, paying their producers and actors tremendous sums to bring about dreams of destruction before their eyes. In adopting them as their own ideas, audiences helped to bring them about.

Cause is often traceable to effect, but not always; then it may be inferred from effect. When the conclusion boggles the mind, as does mine, of the generative power of the imagination, it is often difficult to accept. When I was many decades younger, I would have explained this phenomenon as merely accurate prediction, if only because a good many thoughts seem never demonstrate themselves. Utopian fantasies never seem to root: Coleridge and Southey's pantisocracy, for example. After five millenia, Jews still await the Mashiach. But after a near total massacre, Jews now inhabit their own homeland and thrive. So they may be on to something...

It is a fact, or rather a principle of human existence, that the imagination demonstrates itself for those who credit those ideas seriously enough to adopt them and make them their own. The wisdom of “seek and ye shall find” is predictive.

Through the vessels of the American Generation of '68 the nihilist leadership of the West have achieved what they imagined – destruction, hopelessness and meaninglessness – and now everyone who adopted it must live it every day. I repudiate it all and encourage you to repudiate as well. Imagine the worst and that is what you shall get.

Get better ideas! It behooves us, for our own good, and for those of us in the arts for the good of our audiences, to take the reins of our imagination firmly in hand and imagine only the best, the truthful and the beautiful.