Part Four of the highly debated movie Zeitgeist is out, and thinking about the great financial crisis the world is facing right now it should definitely be an eye-opener. The movies try to communicate those very important social understandings which most people are generally not aware of; for indeed, this is a sick society.
The first film, Zeitgeist, focuses on suppressed historical and modern information about currently dominant social institutions, while also exploring what could be in store for humanity if the power structures at large continue their patterns of self-interest, corruption, and power consolidation.
The second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, attempts to locate the root causes of this pervasive social corruption, while offering a solution. This solution is not based on politics, morality, laws, or any other “establishment” notions of human affairs, but rather on a modern, non-superstitious based understanding of what we are and how we align with nature, to which we are a part.
Yeah, you know, that old graphic novel (i.e. comic book) by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator) which is now being adapted to the screen. I love that comic. It’s kind of Ny Moral in a nutshell.
Because to me Watchmen is about the delusion and condemnation of humanity. It’s about what happens when we abuse power and responsibility, when ”soft-spoken” fascism dictates the rules of everyday life. When people who think they know what’s best for you tell you what to do. It’s about what needs to be done to save humanity. And it asks two questions: Who watches the watchmen? Does the end justify the means? The solution to humanity is rather dystopic and misanthropic, I’d say.
When Alan Moore unleashed Watchmen in 1986/87 he created a whole new way of looking at comics. All of a sudden comics where of literary value. When TIME Magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present, Watchmen was right up there alongside The Catcher in The Rye (J.D. Salinger), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), 1984 (George Orwell), Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy), Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller), A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), Lord of The Flies (William Golding), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – to name my personal favourites – and other novels by William Burroughs, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway, Salman Rushdie, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison… The list goes on. Watchmen is also the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award. All this elite stuff is almost hard to believe, but when reading Watchmen you’ll understand. Or else, in a fascist kind of way, they will make you understand, with the help of the written word, commercials, money, capitalism, corruption, chaos – a maximum overload of information. That’s how it works. But constantly being told what to do raises scepticism amongst individuals, and anti-authority works both ways; some like it, some don’t.
Watchmen thrives on the complexities of life, of being human, and adds to that the odd twist of what it would be like if superheroes – or rather masked ” heroes”, devoid of supernatural powers (Dr. Manhattan excluded), acting as vigilantes – really existed in our modern world. What if God all of a sudden walked the Earth? ”Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”, quoted from Genesis chapter 18, verse 25. Obviously, it’s not that easy. What Moore does is that he gives coherence to these complexities. In his own words: ”it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects”.
Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature. I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.
You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.
Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society — and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That’s my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality.
On another note: As for the nobel prize in literature I’d suggest we give it to Cormac McCarthy. Or Iain Sinclair. Or why not Alan Moore? But maybe it would do them and the fans more bad than good, so let’s not make it complicated.
PS. If you’re really interested in Watchmen, you should check out The Annotated Watchmen! And here’s a Watchmen Wiki… And this blog post pretty much concludes that Rorschach is a Jew… As you can see, we’re dealing with information overload here as well.
And as for the movies, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta and Watchmen, here’s Alan Moore talking about his disgust for Hollywood, stating clearly that the comics ”were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema”. He obviously hates them all.
1. Mathematics is the language of nature 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers 3. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. So what about the stock market… My hypothesis, within the stock market there is a pattern, right in front of me… Max Cohen, Pi
“Rather than focusing on the physical anomalies at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, this film follows the intelligence ties of Osama Bin Laden, the alleged hijackers, and those who were actually detained on 9/11…
The movie delves deeply into the roles of seperate Nations that were involved in supporting the 9/11 attacks. From Israel to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and even the United States itself, no one is spared in this scathing expose that pulls no punches. Sit back and get ready to learn how members of the FBI had their investigations into Bin Laden obstructed and shut down, how the hijackers were trained at US bases, that military drills crippled our defense and facilitated the attacks, how the Shadow Government was actually activated that day, and much much more…
Join Alex Jones Productions and Jason Bermas, one of the creators of Loose Change, in his directorial debut on September 1st , as he loads new ammo for the Infowar…”
>I stumbled upon a guy this afternoon who had not seen Zeitgeist (go here for sources, subtitles and additional info). You may download it here (yes, it’s legal!). It’s a must see for everyone. Below is the remastered final edition, two hours of the most interesting conspiracy theories ever put on tape. Watch, digest and explore.
“It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.”
In my opinion this movie is about making a choice: Do you want to live your life through the eyes of someone else, or do you want to think for yourself? Question everything (Zeitgeist included, of course).
You probably know this one already: Tom Cruise, famous Scientologist, is quite scary in this clip – and he’s not acting… It pretty much shows how indoctrination rules in religion. Nothing new, but it seems like a lot of us need to be reminded about this blemish on humanity every once in a while. I’m not saying all religions are crap, they might be of good use to a lot of people, but when religion and faith becomes business and tools for power we’ve failed once again.
A pretty good documentary on the subject of religion and faith is The Root of All Evil? where biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the very readable book The God Delusion, takes on religion and its influence on society.
This one looks very promising! One of the most prominent critics of Israel, Norman G. Finkelstein, son of Holocaust survivors (his mother was a Majdanek survivor and his father a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp), will appear in this documentary about his life and work. Can’t wait! Along with Chomsky this dude is the shit. Finkelstein was recently denied entrance to Israel and is now banned from entering the country for 10 years. Why? Because he’s a true threat to the racist zionist pro-apartheid assholes that rule with iron hand. The madness goes on…
Below is a very interesting debate between Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz, whose book The Case For Israel was commented by Finkelstein as “a collection of fraud, falsification, plagiarism and nonsense”. Thus begun the Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair. Not much love in that one… You may skip the first ten minutes of part 1, but from then on it’s full throttle. Which one is using facts and which one is using propaganda? It’s quite obvious.
