Saturday, December 01, 2007
The Right Hand of Beowulf
As a counter-point to "The Left Hand of Beowulf," I offer Raymond Ibrahim's "Anti-Christian Crusade" from National Review Online. I would suggest that the anti-Christian themes in Beowulf are muddled, and not nearly so clear as Ibrahim is arguing, but since Ibrahim can be used as ammunition against Jeffery Hodges, I will instead take the position that the article is unassailably brilliant.
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I've never seen John Boorman's 1981 film, Excalibur, cited by Ibrahim as another exmaple of Hollywood bashing Christianity -- can anyone explain his comment that Merlin was "chrome-doomed"?
ReplyDeleteMerlin wears an odd, close-fitting shiny helmet in the film. You can see it here.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
ReplyDeleteHow does it doom him?
That metal beanie was essentially a high end tin foil hat. Tin foil hats are supposed to protect a person from the orbital mind control lasers, but actually make it easier for the OMCL's instructions to get through. Thus Merlin was doomed because the OMCLs had an easier time of planting instructions in his mind than they would have otherwise.
ReplyDeleteRaymond Ibrahim, who is usually right about things, is wrong this time, and I know this without even deigning to read his apparent screed, for he dares to argue against my unassailable position, thus proving himself not only, per definition, wrong but also excessively foolhardy! I refuse to read what he has so foolishly posted for all the world to see in its utter emptiness. Why should I expose my flesh to his amunition, blank though it be? For even blanks have been known to kill. If I recall, Bruce Lee's son perished that way. Possibly, I don't recall well. Ah, it matters not. What matters is that I am right and all who oppose my position are wrong, egregiously wrong. And if they do not repent, I shall come and smite their land with a curse...
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
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The Ibrahim strikes me as a pretty silly ("subliminal messages"?) and ignorant article, at best. He speaks of "the same subtle depictions and motifs present in movies from decades past were once again present," and then cites only a handful of movies from the past few years. In calling Kingdom of Heaven anti-Christian, he muddles the distinction between institutional and individual Christianity, surely a difference that matters in our post-Lollard, pietistic, humanistic, and, yes, American attention to the sincerity of the individual soul. He writes "That the pagan peoples habitually engaged in barbarous practices, such as human sacrifices, cannibalism, and slavery is ignored," which is, uh, silly (on human sacrifice, is he thinking of the Bog People? As for Christianity abolishing human sacrifice....uh. Really? Can I hear from René Girard? Can I hear from, well, the Eucharist, which is symbolic human sacrifice and cannibalism? Hell, on Cannibalism is he...making it up? (see William Arens). And we might as well call the Crusades themselves, as well as the pogroms that followed Host Desecration libels, a kind of human sacrifice. On slavery and Christianity, uh, see Agobard of Lyons. Or St. Paul). As for Christianity as an "effete faith," and its purportedly instrinsic appeal.... No, Ibrahim needed to point out that Hollywood, so far as I know, tends never to go after faith itself. Once one gets over one's attachment to the particular rituals of one's own faith, that's the important point, as least so far as this atheist is concerned. There's always some kind of respect for belief in the divine, even if it's "pagan." There's always an admiration and fear, especially, for nuns (think of the Sound of Music, the Lilies of the Field, the Blues Brothers, and probably even those Whoopi Goldberg nun movies). Apart from a subtler instrument for understanding faiths, apart from simply needing to know more about movies, he needed to point out, at least, in short, how much Hollywood loves superstition, or faith itself, whatever you want to call it.
ReplyDeleteKarl,
ReplyDeleteYou lost me the moment you praised *Kingdom of Heaven*. By the way, in terms of "a kind of human sacrifice," you might consider the history of the New World, where literal humans were literally sacrificed on literal altars. Yes, the evils Pedro de Alvarado could be considered "a kind of human sacrifice," but there's no need to place the phrase "a kind of" in front of Maya religious practices.
As long as we're talking about "a kind of human sacrifice," I submit to you the film *Kingdom of Heaven*. I myself was sacrificed upon that altar far more than two hours. At least in church, sermons tend to last only about 20 minutes.
N.E. Brigand:
ReplyDeleteHow does it doom him?
He's not doomed, only domed. It's a typo.
Clearly Beowulf like many complex texts (like oh, I dunno, the Bible?) can mean anything as long as you're quite careful to choose selectively.