The Reason Why Music Isn't Popular At the Movies (Anymore)

As to the subject of the last entry: why are movies about music so unpopular?

It is strange because at one time, movies and music were joined at the hip.  Musicals were very popular throughout the first decades of sound film.  It was common, too, for 

music-stars to become movie-stars.  Arguably, the last of the classic-Hollywood film musicals was the Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews from 1965.  Since then, music and movies have gone their own way, at least in the United States.  

Into the Valley of the Obsolete...

Hollywood movies almost always include music, of course, be it a specially-composed score, or (as more commonly in recent times), contemporary or old-time pop songs.  Many music-hits gain public attention, in turn, as theme-songs to box-office smashes.  But the modern involvement of music with movies, doesn’t extend very often to the production of choreographed spectacles of the classic type.  The few such musicals that were produced after the ‘60s, have been very popular — as with Grease in 1978, or the adaptation of Chicago, during the early century.  A recent production of Les Miserables was also successful, critically and commercially.  

It isn’t a lack of demand for musicals that prevents them from being made.  It is that the suppliers — the requisite movie and musical movers-and-shakers — lack the will or imagination to make them.  

There are two reasons for this, I believe.  

Firstly, the predominant style of popular music after the mid-1960s - rock - doesn't lend itself to extended choreography.  Rock music is used very often in movies to involve the audience in the action onscreen.  But when rock music itself is the subject of a film, it somehow seems rather boring and pedestrian.  This must be the reason why no biographical film has been made of the most popular entertainers of the twentieth century: namely, the Beatles. The latter, of course, had the one really successful rock movie.  But A Hard Day’s Night, from 1964, focussed mainly on the lads’ hijinks-ridden attempt to evade hordes of Beatle-maniacs while travelling to a TV studio.  

Recent Hollywood rock movies have been unsuccessful.  One complete bomb of a years ago was a rock musical set in the classic mould, Rock of Ages.  It was despised to the point of ridicule (though I actually liked it).  It seemed to make plain to most people, why rock and movies are so incompatible.  

I couldn't resist

It could be said that Grease was a “rock” movie.  But its music actually owed more to an older song-and-dance tradition, overlain with the doowop and r’n’b genres of the 1950s.  This dance-hall and minstrel style lends itself more readily to spectacular choreography, because movement is based mainly in the feet.  Tellingly, dancers of this era were often called “hoofers.”  But rock’s rhythmic backbeat comes from the blues.  It inspires movement in the hips, rather than the feet.  It is thus rhythmically of little interest to other than people dancing to it.  Attempts to choreograph rock movement for the obvious benefit of the audience, end up seeming mawkish and artificial (as undeniably, they do in Rock of Ages).  Dancing doesn’t seem so in the classic Hollywood musical, based in an inherently more spectacular rhythmic orientation.  

Still, rock long ago ceded to other musical forms, the industry dominance it had from the late 1960s to the early 80s.  Still, performers in most other genres of American pop music, have similarly not been able to break into Hollywood.  The obvious example is Madonna, a chart topper for three decades, but never consistently successful at the box office.  This is in spite of the fact that choreography has been an essential part of the music-videos produced by Madonna and other pop-music queens since the 1980s.  

Perhaps it was the very ubiquity of dance on music-television at the height of its popularity, which made people unwilling to also see it at the movies.  However, neither Madonna nor any other music star of the MTV era has been successful for their comedic or dramatic roles.  Apart from the undoubted incompatibility of rock music with the motion-picture form, there seems to be the sense that modern movies are of a different sensibility from contemporary song-and-dance.  

No matter how well a pop singer acquits her- or himself in a given film (and Madonna received good reviews for her 1984 film debut, Desperately Seeking Susan), movie-audiences will not continually accept a singer in roles very far apart from an onstage persona, or so it would seem.  At the other end, the overt use of singing and dancing during the course of a movie narrative, seems intrusive and artificial. 

This disengagement of the movie and music industries at the artistic level at least, has thus a second reason: specialization of talent, as occurs when any line of business becomes larger and more complex.  Under the studio-system, movie companies were heavily involved in music-recording.  They invested in promising and pretty novices, so as to expose them to audiences cross-platform (as it would later be called, on stage, screen, record and broadcast).  

But as the studio-system disappeared in its classic form, and the supply of talent came to vastly outnumber the demand for their labour by television, film and music industries, would-be entertainers have had to specialize in their craft in a way that precludes them being any good at any but one type of entertainment.  The studio-system actress could become a good singer and dancer (or vice-versa), because training in these fields was paid for by her employers.  Contemporary performers simply don’t have access to these subsidies.  They must attempt to “make it”, or even make a living, selling what they are “naturally” good at.  It might be said that the imaginative psyche of present-day entertainers, that which allows them to break out of the bound of “real life” to create a role, a melody or a movement, has become so preoccupied upon a particular type of artistic endeavour, that the other forms of expression, once so closely associated, undergo atrophy. 

Even the exceptions that “prove” (which is to say, test) this rule, end up confirming the larger point about the disparate sensibilities of modern movies and music.  The Brooklyn-born Barbra Streisand enjoyed a lengthy career as a successful actress and singer.  Popular during from the late 1960s to the early ‘80s,  she could be considered the last of this classic-Hollywood type.  Originally reaching prominence on Broadway, she then became a pop star, breaking into movies with the musical Funny Girl in 1968.  

Yet after that, Streisand appeared in very few musicals.  She was popular and lauded in both comic and dramatic roles.  But her status as a music-star ran parallel to her career as a film actress (and later, a producer and director).  Talented, hardworking or ambitious enough to be proficient or exceptional in several types of entertainment, Streisand somehow knew that they couldn’t be mixed together easily or at all, to any success.  

He's Going to Need a Bigger Bed

This is confirmed by the career of another Broadway type who succeeded in movies: the late Bob Fosse, who died too young in 1987.  Fosse’s early Hollywood films were musicals, such as Cabaret from 1972 (which he didn't stage originally).  But he didn’t thereafter direct a Hollywood musical, in spite of staging the successful Chicago in 1975.  He made the excellent All That Jazz in ‘79, about a Broadway choreographer much like himself, but it had only two musical sequences (one an arrangement of the Everly Brothers' Bye, Bye Love.  This and other Fosse pictures were, in complete contrast to the high-flying tone typical of the Broadway musical, downbeat stories of tragedy and heartbreak as resulting from success.  Again, as with Streisand, Fosse’s very twin oeuvre reflects the different sensibilities of popular song, the musical and the movies.  

Why is Music So Unpopular at the Movies?

I've almost finished watching the cable TV series Treme, which ran on HBO between 2010 and 2013.  Named after the New Orleans neighbourhood renowned as a centre of the city's musical scene, Treme (which is pronounced like "trem-ay") dealt with the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005.  But it was no hit, in spite of the critical praise it received.  I thought it was a standard cable program - which is to say, if it aired twenty years ago, it would have been considered revolutionary. I really thought Treme hit its stride by the second series, but nevertheless it had very few viewers. When I mentioned the show to a relative of mine (who watches cable shows to the exclusion even of movies), he'd never heard of Treme.

This had me pondering as to why movies and programs about music aren't  very popular.  The indifference of the viewing public to the lives of musicians isn't reserved for niche tastes like New Orleans jazz.  Forty-five years after his death, Jimi Hendrix remains popular among youth whose parents were then years away from being born.  A few months back, Rolling Stone had a short profile on an upcoming feature film about Hendrix's breakthrough period.  Starring Andre Benjamin, from the rap-group Outkast, and entitled All Is By My Side, I periodically wondered when it would appear in theatres.  However, it showed up instead on the "rapid-borrow" shelf of the library near the beginning of the year.  Evidently, no one would distribute it theatrically. Personally, I enjoyed it; but I'm a huge Jimi Hendrix fan. Benjamin (who is more than a decade older than Hendrix was at the time of his death) puts in a very credible performance as the ill-fated guitarist.  It could be presumed that there is a built-in audience for such a film: but theatre-chains guessed, probably correctly, that no one would go to see it (the movie does suffer from the apparent inability of the filmmakers to secure the copyright to Jimi's music, and the performances consist of songs written by others).

The coolest guy that ever lived.  Yes.

A similar, and more so undeserved obscurity has attended to Nowhere Boy, a 2009 film about John Lennon's youth.  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, then just nineteen, is outstanding as the future Beatle, holding his own alongside fellow novices and deft veterans, such as Kirsten Scott-Thomas (expert as John's aunt Mimi Smith).  It was well-directed and edited, too, and the fact that no Beatle music is heard, is excused by the fact that it portrays events years before Beatlemania.  I'd never heard of it, though, until I came across the DVD while browsing titles at the library.  It could be argued that Hendrix's popularity is of more limited reach, but there is no question about Lennon's widespread renown.  It seems, however, that almost none of his many fans have the slightest interest in seeing movies or watching TV shows depicting his life.  Earlier attempts at a cinematic Lennon have been similarly unsuccessful.  In the 1990s a film called Backbeat, about the band's early days in Hamburg, met cautious praise but did little business either.  In 1988, a documentary called Imagine was released to theatres.  Though it had a great deal of rare or previously-unseen footage of Lennon, it similarly played to sparse crowds (as I was surprised to find when I went to see it). 

Speaking of Oscar-worthy performances...

As I remember it now, I went to see Imagine as a second-choice.  We had intended to view instead Rattle and Hum, the documentary about U2's mega-successful U.S. tour in 1987.  Scanning the movies page, though, we found it had disappeared from theatres soon after release.  Lennon's global popularity aside, U2 were the hottest thing in music in the late 1980s.  Not even this could encourage their fans to come see a movie of the band performing, in spite of good reviews it received (one of the At the Movies duo even put Rattle and Hum on his top-ten-of-the-year list).

The lack of popularity for films and documentaries about world-famous musicians, could be explained by their subjects' very ubiquity in the mass media.  Which is to say, John and Jimi's voices and personae are so familiar that any attempt to portray them will seem inauthentic and artificial.  Meanwhile, Rattle and Hum's failure could have resulted from public fatigue from the hype about the "new Beatles" (the accompanying soundtrack album didn't sell as well as expected either).  Yet the simultaneous flop of the Imagine doc, which did indeed feature the real McLennon with an intimacy not seen before, points to a generic indifference for musical cinema. 

This is even more striking, given that musicals were an integral part  of movies during the first decades of sound-film.  The relatively few musicals that have been produced since the 1960s, have been more successful than not.  It is specifically movies about the lives of musicians or their fans, which are terminally unpopular. This is so even for fictional films specifically about popular rock music.  Almost Famous was about a rock band that was something like Led Zeppelin dressed up as Lynyrd Skynyrd.  Set in 1973, the story was based on director Cameron Crowe's earlier career as a teenage journalist.  Released in the year 2000, Almost Famous was a surprise flop; its director had just made the Academy-heralded Jerry McGuire, and Famous was expected to be a smash.  

In 2010, a film called the Runaways was released, based on the first all-female rock band, from the late 1970s.  Though it featured popular young actresses at the time, Kirsten Stewart (as Runaways' guitarist Joan Jett) and Dakota Fanning (as the lead singer, Cherie Currie), the Runaways did little business, earning back less than half of its ten-million dollar budget at the box office.

Can't beat those seventies...

The mass indifference toward rock-themed movies goes back long before Almost Famous or the Runaways.  Robert Zemeckis has been one of the most successful Hollywood  directors of the past few decades.  His first studio feature was I Wanna Hold Your Hand, from 1978.  It is about New Jersey teenagers attempting to get into the hotel where the Beatles stayed when coming to America in 1964.  It was also well-previewed and reviewed, but did so poorly that Zemeckis was unable to direct another film for several years.  The director's constant efforts to merge a fictional present with the factual past are no less expertly accomplished (so I recall, not having seen the movie in decades) than in later attempts by Zemeckis that were much more successful at the box office.  Thus, when the kids finally obtain entry to the theatre where the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan show, the shot cuts away to the actual Beatles performing through the monitors of old-style television cameras (which in turn obscure the faces of the actual actors pretending to be the Beatles).  By the 1990s, when Zemeckis made Forrest Gump, computer-graphics were advanced enough such that the title character, played by Tom Hanks, could be rendered in conversation with president Kennedy and other historical figures.  This jumbling of time-frames was indulged even to a tiresome degree in the Back to the Future trilogy, in which the years are traversed in a nuclear-powered sports-car, and characters observe themselves doing things already shown before (hence the ennui).  Nevertheless, Future and Gump were very popular films.  Audiences do not reject Zemeckis=s particular thematic approach, except when it is applied to music.

Not surprisingly, the Beatles have been the most successful at the cinema.  But even this has be$en relatively unspectacular.   Made at the height of Beatlemania, A Hard Day's Night was very popular.  But the followup, Help!, was not as well-received.  Not counting the Magical Mystery Tour fiasco, only Yellow Submarine was an unqualified success, and the actual Beatles appeared in it only briefly.  The documentary Let It Be, appearing just as the Beatles broke up, was little-seen either at the time of its release, or for years afterward (for the good reason that it was boring).  The documentary featuring the Woodstock festival in 1969, was a box-office success upon its release to theatres the following year.  It was broadly popular less so due to the performances contained therein, but because of the extensive footage of the concert-goers themselves, which takes up probably half or more of the film's original three-hour running time.  This lack of interest of movie-goers in rock-music movies, obtains only when musicians are, onstage or off, the subject of the movie itself.  Music is an essential part of nearly all Hollywood movies, with popular song having an increasingly large place on soundtracks.  Frequently, songs become hits as the title-tracks of popular movies - even old radio-hits have undergone revival because of their inclusion in films (such as Stuck in the Middle with You, by Stealer's Wheel from 1974, which saw airplay nearly twenty years later, after it was heard in an infamous scene in Reservoir Dogs).  Again, however, rock and other popular songs only became famous in movies, if they are backing-tracks to some different activity than watching musicians perform.

The question is, why is this so?  I will tackle that in the next entry . 

Art is Always Illusion

The National Gallery of Canada is hosting this year an exhibition of prints by the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972). 

It turns out that Escher's son emigrated to the Ottawa area years ago, and the prints are from the younger Escher's own collection. I've been fascinated with Escher's works for years. 

Famously, most of them portray "Impossible Realities", such as Ascending and Descending, which I had as a poster on my wall when I still lived at home with my parents. 

Dating from 1960, it is a lithograph depicting a building about thirty or forty feet high, with an unseen courtyard bordered by a staircase. Figures aligned in two rows move in opposite directions on the stairs, which are shown to simultaneously ascend and descend: 

These and other Escher works are optical illusions: but they bring forward the reality that the perspective techniques which made for "realism" in post-Renaissance painting, are themselves based on optical illusion. 

In Ascending and Descending and other works, Escher employed the geometrical principles which made for the illusion of ascending stairs, upon the same visual plane as those principles which provide for the illusion of descending steps. 

Though Escher wasn't the first to parody the optical illusions inherent to perspective painting, his oeuvre uniquely in the twentieth century made the vanishing-point form part of the content of the work. 

Through the maintenance of realism in terms of architectural detail, Escher nevertheless made it impossible to accept the conceit that his images were simply looking through a window. 

In a book called The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, by Bruno Ernst, published originally in 1978, the author writes of a trompe l'oeil that he encountered years earlier: "These mural paintings, carried out in many combinations of varying shades of gray, achieved so plastic an impression that one could not escape the conviction that they were marble reliefs a deception, an illusion that never ceased to astonish." (p. 5) 

Ernst goes on: "This playful exercise has its roots in the representational methods of the Renaissance. The three dimensional world had to be reproduced as faithfully as possible on the flat surface, and in such a way that image and reality might be indistinguishable to the eye. The idea was that the painting should conjure up warm, voluminous reality. In the case of the trompe l'oeil paintings, ceiling paintings, and those portraits which keep on staring at one from whichever point one looks at them, it is a question of playing the game for the game's sake. It is no longer a matter of representational verisimilitude in the things that are being portrayed, but of downright optical illusion, of superdeception in the service of deceit. The painter takes a delight in this deceit, and the viewer is determined to be deceived willy nilly, deriving therefrom the same sort of sensation as when he is being taken in by a magician. The spatial suggestion is so strong. so exaggerated, that nothing short of actual touch can reveal to us that we are dealing with pictures on a flat surface. A great deal of Escher's work is related to this supersuggestion of the spatial to which we have just referred. However, the suggestion itself is not what he is primarily aiming at. His prints are much rather the reflection of that peculiar tension inherent in any flat representation of a spatial situation. In many of his prints he causes the spatial to emerge from the flat surface. In others he makes a conscious attempt to nip in the bud any spatial suggestion that he may have brought about." (pp. 5-6) 

Escher was also evidently fascinated with the figure-ground relationship. This is seen in the "periodic space-filling" works, such as the pen-and-ink Angels and Devils, from 1941, where each angelic figure's outline is shared with the satanic one beside it.

More substantive works, such as Up and Down (from 1947), carry forward the figure-ground relation in terms of illusional representation. The lithograph features a young man sitting on steps leading up to what appears to be a tropical villa, looking up at a woman leaning on its balcony. 

This is shown from two perspectives simultaneously, from above the villa, and from below. In the latter scene, the structure's ceiling becomes the floor for the perspective from above: In point of fact, all art, or at least all art that claims to be representational, is an optical illusion. Curved and straight lines are placed down on paper (or painted on canvas or whatever), and if accomplished with enough finesse, establish a gestalt: a face, or a building, or the sky, or what you have you.

The Academy Awards were held last evening. 

As usual, I didn't watch; even if I had cable (or even digital-broadcast) TV, I probably wouldn't have bothered. The program itself is too boring to watch, I find.

Still, the Oscars are of inherent cultural fascination. Before I get into that, I wanted to discuss hunting. In books on human prehistory, authors usually describe agriculture as “succeeding” the hunter-gathering economy. But hunting remained a feature of the rural environment in every society right up to modern times, and until recent centuries, life in cities, or even large towns, was relatively uncommon.

It wasn’t only hunting for “game”, important as this was to rural people throughout civilized times. In less arable lands, or in the very common circumstances of crop failure, hunting made the difference for many populations between life and starvation. Predation thereby, was by no means rendered obsolete by the mere invention of farming.

 The hunt only ceased to be commonplace, at least in Britain, when during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, agricultural techniques were transformed through crop-rotation and the enclosure of land. This farming revolution not only increased harvest yields to such an extent as to make crop-failure and starvation a thing of the past. Land enclosure, and the complementary clearing of wasteland and wilderness for agricultural purposes, drastically reduced the amount of wildlife available to be hunted. The inequities of the cash-crop system introduced by agricultural improvements, were highlighted by the drastic curtailment of traditional rights of hunting.  Hunting upon enclosed lands was redefined legally as “poaching”, subject to severe penalty, up to and including death. Meanwhile, the feudal right of lords to hunt anywhere they wished to, was maintained.

The centrality of the hunt among feudal lords, and indeed, of hunting for sport generally, attests to the importance of hunting behaviour, indifferent to subsistence needs. The “goal” of game-hunting is the trophy — the head of the animal hung upon a wall, the remnants of the great feast held to conclude, and to celebrate, a successful hunt.Sports involve most or all the physical faculties required of hunting. The quarry is now a ball, instead of a beast, and the playing field replaces the happy hunting-ground. But the aim of the sport-contest is the same — a trophy, representing not the head of the opponent, but in contemporary times at least, an icon representing the player of the sport, or some kind of vessel. Sport-trophies are also handed out at a feast — the banquet.

Naturally, the champion gets the biggest trophy of all which, like the head of a slain beast, is usually hung on a wall, or placed on a mantel. As usual, what is apparently fun and frivolous, has deep roots in the human psychology. So primordial, in fact, that trophies are handed out for lots of activities that have nothing to do with athletics. Returning to the Academy Awards telecast, then. Observing the glee which with celebrated movie stars reacted when they were announced as the winner of the best-actor or actress awards, it struck me that this event, and others like it, is a kind of pagan-technological feast.

The actual trophy given out for winning an Academy Award is fascinating in its banality. Featureless, almost out-of-focus seeming, the statuette is nicknamed “Oscar” in spite of its androgyny. The design is a relic, a fragment of the Art Deco style, which often incorporated statuary shorn of distinctive individuality in its architecture and decor. The Oscar is, in other words, significant of absolutely nothing at all. But one gets the impression that winners of the year’s Oscar in what-you-have category, have to do everything in their power to remain dignified when rising to accept the award. Some don’t even bother. My idea as to the underlying nature of the Academy Awards, perhaps came to light as I watched Jack Nicholson, the now-venerable actor, rise to the stage and do a little dance across the floor to the podium, collecting the Oscar for the lead performance in As Good As It Gets.

Nicholson had already won the Oscar for best actor as a relatively young man (for Chinatown, in 1974). It should have been no big deal for him; instead Nicholson as much as levitated across the stage to get his trophy. I think this was when I decided that the attraction of the Oscars, was not merely hype.

There is a whole lot of hype involved with the Academy Awards. It is the most watched programme on the planet, seen throughout every country in the world. The manifest elation of Oscar winners, and the corresponding disappointment of the also-ran, would seem to indicate that the whole world actually voted for them. In reality, Oscars are awarded by an organization called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — hence the official name of the awards ceremony.

There are prominent members of the Academy, but its membership as a whole remains confidential, as do the methods for polling as to which movies and performances are to be judged the best of the year. In spite of its name, the Academy exists virtually to give out awards. The shadowy character of is inner workings, actually seems to lend prestige to the “race.” It’s almost as though the Hollywood community, and by extension, millions of people throughout the world, treat the decisions of the Academy as sacred, the word of some kind of priesthood of wise elders of the industry.

This is so, even when (as often occurs) the selection of this film, or that performer, as the best of the year, is met with general disapproval. In spite of it, the next year Hollywood players avidly campaign to be included on the nominee list.

 The Academy Awards are just one of many annual, industry-specific awards’ banquets, almost all of which are of interest only to those directly involved. Aside from the attention given the Oscars, the latter differs from the others in that no feasting is to be had at all during the ceremony. Originally, the awarding of the Academy “Merit” trophies (as per their formal title) followed a formal dinner, but this was judged too cumbersome for live telecasts.

Less prestigious shows, such as the Golden Globes (these awarded by even more shadowy entity known as the Hollywood Foreign Critics Association or some such) are staged with the nominees sat at tables. In any case, the “real show”, as the saying goes, comes not during the awards show, but with the after-parties, when the Hollywood elite carouses well into daylight.

In pagan lore, charms and idols are associated with luck — both good and bad. If, as I believe, the Oscar trophy is a subliminal fetish, it is perhaps inevitable that the Academy Awards have bred their own superstition. There is talk of an Oscar “curse,” the career bust that supposedly dogs winners of the best-acting categories. Empirically, the case for such a phenomenon cannot be made by mere observation of the number instances when this did, in fact, occur. A more careful approach would be to compare the success of Oscar-winning performers with those who were nominated and did not win, and those who were not nominated at all. The latter’s diminishing prospects couldn’t be blamed on an Oscar-trophy “curse”.

My quick analysis on exactly this question, done several years ago, led me to believe that for most movie-stars, Oscar winners or not, box-office “cred” is relatively fleeting. A very minuscule number of film stars are successful over many decades; most have less than a decade as bankable actors, and many have five years or less. This is regardless of Oscar-approval or not. What is clear, is that success at the Oscars is essentially irrelevant to an actor or actress’s commercial potential. Even otherwise highly-praised film stars have remained active for long periods without winning the trophy, while the vast majority of performers who have not won an Oscar, are also not stars for very long. In spite of all the Oscar hype, the Academy Awards are a commercial irrelevance, at least in the long-term. They are, at base, as irrational as the worship of any icon can be — more so than with sports even, as the criteria for “victory” at the Oscars is so mysterious and arbitrary.

Hitler's melting pot

During his early years in public life, Hitler made no secret of his ultimate intentions should the Nazi party come to power: in Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925, he explained that the Germans must colonize the east in order to gain Lebensraum, or living-space for the country’s burgeoning population.


Somehow, though, most everyone refused to take Hitler seriously, even after he began carrying out the plans he had set in print years before: not only the conquest of eastern Europe, but also the “elimination” of the Jews from his Nazi empire. In the War of the World, Niall Ferguson remarks as to how the ultra-paranoid Stalin trusted no man but one — Hitler, who was in turn the only man who ever had the power to betray “the man of steel.” But the invasion of the USSR in June, 1941 was a surprise to very few but Stalin himself. Mere weeks before the invasion commenced, one of his spies in Germany wrote an urgent message to Soviet intelligence, warning Stalin of what was imminent. Stalin’s response was to condemn the spy as one “who should be sent to his fucking mother.”


The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 (which touched off World War II) and of the Soviet Union two years later, did not come without ironies, though. One of these was that, after the Nazis had indeed conquered a great deal of living-space into which the German population could expand, very few Germans were actually interested in moving east. Those few who did were not the simple, sturdy peasant-farmers of Nazi ideals, but opportunists seeking to make easy money off the slave-labour of conquered Jews, Poles and Russians (men such as Oskar Schindler, the famed eventual saviour of several thousand Jews). The Nazi overlords of Poland eventually had to resettle ethnic Germans that had been living for centuries in Russian territory, in occupied Poland; instead of Germans moving east, it was Germans moving west, in closer proximity to the original Fatherland (thus giving the lie to the Nazis’ obsession with Lebensraum).


But, as Ferguson points out, the eastern Germans were often unsuitably Slavonic in culture, language, even in their appearance; but many of the “inferior” Poles were had blonde haired and blue eye. The conclusion drawn from this, was that “Aryans” outside the Reich, had been breeding with the inferior races, and it was up to the Nazis to “rescue” these bloodlines from total corruption. Accordingly, functionaries were organized and sent to the Polish “protectorate” in order to determine the racial fitness of the Slavic population according to a fourfold system of classification: those placed in the “A” category were deemed acceptably Aryan genetic endowment, and thus made eligible for “re-education” as Germans, or if children, deportation back to Germany, where they would be raised among Aryan families; the unfortunate people designated as “D”, were to be immediately shipped off for slave labour or extermination at one of the many camps established by the Nazis throughout their empire.


According to conventional understanding, “fascist” is a synonym for “ultra-nationalist”. This is true, to a great extent, for the original Italian Fascists. But, in spite of their name, the National Socialists were no more nationalists than they were socialists. They were collectivists, but their collective focus was on race, not nation. For this reason, the Nazis found it easy to collaborate with, and find collaborators among, the populations of the countries they conquered, or otherwise became “allied” with. Ferguson writes, “...the more the Germans relied on foreign allies and collaborators the more multiethnic their empire necessarily became. The first symptom of this unintended transformation was the changing complexion of Hitler's armed forces. The army that invaded the Soviet Union included 600,000 Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks and Spaniards. In addition to fighting alongside troops from allied countries, German soldiers also increasingly saw foreigners wearing German uniforms. Franco had declined to join Hitler's war in the West, but he permitted the formation of a Spanish 'Blue Division' (named after the blue shirts of its Falangist volunteers) to fight against the Soviet Union; it served with distinction ... French volunteers also fought, in the Legion des Volontaires Francais contre le Bolchevisme, as part of a Wehrmacht infantry division. Other foreigners generally wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, a reflection of Himmler's enthusiasm for broadening the available pool of 'Nordic' blood, as well as the Wehrmacht's reluctance to surrender large numbers of Germans of military age to the SS.” (Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Allen Unwin, page 457-458).


Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader and chief racial theorist of the Nazi regime, explained why, near to the end of the Second World War, his organization included more non-Germans than Germans in its ranks: “Every SS officer, regardless of nationality. . . must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations [Himmler specified the German, Dutch, Flemish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Baltic nations]. To combine all these nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality... [Later] this family... has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture can be saved from the danger of the yellow race. At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organization is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units ... fighting in close togetherness.” (Quoted in Ferguson, page 459).


Years ago, I proposed that the National Socialist party had to focus on race, as instrument of cohesion, just because “Germans” had a very weak sense of national belonging. In fact, as Ferguson points out, many key Nazis were not of German birth at all: the Austrian Hitler, of course, but also Alfred Rosenberg, the party “philosopher”, and several others.


And, in an entry earlier this year, I wrote as to how modern European empires, uniquely in world history, sought to make separation of races a key part of the ruling strategy. The Nazis were the most thorough about this, but were hardly unique: it was a policy pursued previously by the British, Dutch, Belgian and French empires, as well. What I didn’t mention was that the European empires pursued this policy, just because they understood that race mixing was an inevitable part of imperial conquest.


But, in fact, even the Nazis were unsuccessful in their policies of total racial separatism. Ferguson writes that, “even as Nazi racial experts engaged in the laborious racial classification of Poles and Czechs, the very tendency they wished to eradicate — miscegenation — was continuing. Indeed, the chaos caused by war and forced resettlement positively increased the sexual contact between Germans and non-Germans. On March 8, 1940, new police regulations had to be issued for Polish workers in Germany, the seventh of which specified bluntly that `anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner’ would be liable to the death penalty (later specified as death by hanging).” (Ferguson, page 461)


Ferguson also sheds light as to why so many ordinary German soldiers chose duty in helping to slaughtering Jews during the Holocaust. Aside from ethnic hatred, and the inability to ignore direct orders, there was the motive of self-preservation. By the time the extermination of the Jews got going in earnest, by 1942, the Russo-German war had commenced. At the Eastern front, for the first time, Wehrmacht troops were encountering high rates of mortality in combat. It was considered a privilege to be assigned to the duties of executioner to men, women and children, all of them civilians who didn’t have the means to fight back; this became all the more true, as the war continued on, and the German army became bogged down in the hellish snow and wind of three Russian winters. Aside from the inconvenience of having to murder, direct participation in the Holocaust was very profitable, with much opportunity to steal the belongings of those who were being killed.

How Star Wars got Lost

Last evening was the second-last episode of the Lost series, which began in the autumn of 2004.


A few thoughts: the programme is one of the most violent ever presented, or at least, that I have seen recently. Last night’s show, for example, featured a woman dying after having her throat cut, right before a second character is shot to death. Last week’s segment revealed more about the mysterious Jacob, and his unnamed twin brother, who were born from a shipwreck survivor who washed up on the island, was rescued by a woman already living there, who in turn murders the new mother by bashing her head in with a rock. This woman then raises the twins as her own.


I was reminded of the Norse pagan creation story, of the chief goddess giving birth to the Nordic race by having twins, one of whom is fair-haired, the other swarthy. In Lost, Jacob is shown to be fair in appearance, while his twin, if not swarthy, is much darker complected. It seems that the unnamed twin was rendered into the “smoke monster” that has harassed and murdered the plane-wrecked survivors, and many others, throughout the course of the series, when Jacob pushed him into the cave from which emanated a bright light of unknown origin. After which, the light was extinguished and the smoke monster came flying out of the cave.


The significance of this, I’m not certain. However, the producers and cast of Lost recently held a party to mark the end of the series. They were sent a revealing note by George Lucas, creator and director of the Star Wars “saga”.


It read as follows: “Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show. Don't tell anyone ... but when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories — let's call them homages — and you've got a series.” This is what many people, including me, suspected all along about Star Wars.


The Star Wars “saga” ultimately failed, becasue there was, in fact, no story to tell. The Star Wars universe was not a place, but a device, which allowed George Lucas to meld together several genres — the western, the war movie, the medieval romance, the pirate flick, and the samurai film — to create an exciting adventure with the first installment in 1977. Though set in the distant past, the far-away galaxy possessed super-futuristic hardware, inspired in turn by Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1940s. This allowed the characters to seamlessly hop between genres. Thus, Luke Skywalker and company could engage in a gun (“laser”) battle in keeping with the old western; later, Skywalker could take on Darth Vader with a sword made out of light, as befits a medieval epic; afterward, our heroes could engage the forces of the evil galactic empire in World War II-style space dogfights. Courtesy faster-than-light travel, the characters could speed to any planet as befitting the genre: either a “desert” planet, or a “forest” planet, or an artificial planetoid to stand in for the villain’s castle. It was this melding of genres which made the original Star Wars so exciting, even if, as one critic put it at the time, it was really “bubble-gum for the mind.”


Be that as it may, it was certainly good-tasting bubble-gum — and relatively long-lasting, too. The premise had enough promise for two separate movies, but that’s it. The first sequel, the Empire Strikes Back, Lucas wisely handed over filmmaking duties to hired guns. Even here, however, the saga necessarily fell back onto melodrama — “I’m your father, Luke.” The third film in the original series had all the action, without the spirit. The three prequels, released around the turn of the century, and detailing the transformation of Luke Skywalker’s father into Darth Vader, the chief villain of the series, were at times just mediocre, and often, abysmal. Even a children’s programme joked about how the Phantom Menace was “half-baked.” One reviewer called it “the Phantom movie,” which is precisely what it was. Perhaps a more skilled screenwriter could have penned something more exciting and interesting. It is more so that Lucas attempted to stretch a device — sci-fi hardware subsuming multiple themes and genres — into a saga, and it didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, work.

Hatfields vs McCoys / Private vs Public

In barbarian society, the public is not a space for largely anonymous contact and communication between myriad private actors. Barbarians usually exist in settled communities, but have not developed civilization, society based in towns and cities. Public space there is enfeebled not only by the basic lack of infrastructure. The endurance of clannish social patterns, serves to reinforce the basic of lack of public space, which in turn serves as an arena where social conflicts are played out. Author Malcolm Gladwell quotes an ethnographer who declares that, “Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary...” (J.K. Campbell, “Honour and the Devil,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, J.G. Peristiany, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, no page number cited in Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success , New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2008, p. 167.)


The lack of public or political authority in barbarian society, means that individuals must depend for their security upon their own kin and clan. Each moiety, in turn, must be wiling to take to violence if, even symbolically, another group transgresses upon itself. This is, of course, wrapped up in the concept of “honour”, through which social behaviour is regulated by adherence to group norms, and where disputes are settled by violence, when these norms are offended.


It is a mistake to consider barbarism as a “phase” between savagery (nomadic hunting and gathering) and civilization (urban-based society). Barbarian society reaches stasis, precisely because the level of public violence precludes the development of infrastructure and authority which makes civilization possible.


Barbarism is usually overcome by two paradoxical routes: the conquest and literal housebreaking of barbarians by a neighbouring civilized society, or the barbarian conquest of an urban culture. This is what brought classical civilization to a protracted end, at least in western Europe, as the hordes of Germans, Goths and other barbarians overran the decayed Roman empire. However, within a few centuries, the descendants of these barbarians gathered around the remnants of the empire (notably, the Catholic church, the organization of which was patterned directly upon the administrative reforms of the anti-Christian imperator Diocletian), forming the civilization known as the Middle Ages. It was a process interrupted by the appearance in the eighth century of the Norse, or Vikings, the barbarians who laid waste to much of northern Europe and the British isles during the next several hundred years — but who also traded and explored far wide, from the eastern Mediterranean to Greenland, Newfoundland and perhaps the mainland of North America itself.


It wasn’t long, either, before the Norse were civilized as well, establishing the Danelaw and Danegeld in Britain, as well as various suzerainties in continental Europe. By the time William the Conqueror successfully invaded Britain in 1066, the duke of Normandy, a descendent of Vikings, had been part of long line of French-speaking cavaliers. Prior to their invasions, the Norse were a relatively unknown, and apparently not especially aggressive, farming and pastoral society, without much in the way of established authority or civic life, still living in tribal bands. Historian Gwyn Jones writes, “In early times Denmark was at best a loose and straining confederation; considerable tracts of inland Norway by reason of their inaccessibility were ore or less permanently divorced from the polices of the Trongelag, Rogaland, and the Vik; and large regions of Sweden, notably Vastergotland, Ostertogland, and Uppland, were held apart by dense forests. The trend to separatism was marked to the end of the Viking Age. Farmer communities, remote and inward-looking, and resistant to change, persisted throughout Harald Hardradi’s time in Norway and Onund Jacob’s in Sweden; and the old viking aristocracy, blest with estates, privileges, and ships, was slow to break up. No king in the north could survive except by force. In sounds less flattering to described Godfred the Dane, Olaf Tryggvason, Svein Forkbeard, and Eirik the Victorious as mere top-dogs in their separate domains, but it falls short of libel. Their almost-peers were a hard-jawed packed. Such was the nature of the northern realms.” (Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings. 2nd. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; paperback ed., 2001, pp. 66-67).


It appears that overpopulation of the European northlands forced the “surplus” — consisting mainly of young adult males — to sally forth and steal what they could not earn. It is significant that the Viking Age came to an end, in the eleventh century, coincident with the formation of three recognizable Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden and Norway.


The other kind of civilizing process, where a relatively developed, urban society, with established government, comes to dominate a barbarian population, occurred with the extension of royal authority in London, to the entire of the British isles during the early-modern period. At that time, Scotland especially was home to a very backward and factious population of clans of Irish derivation, the people known today as the Scots-Irish. The civilizing of the highland Scots clans occurred with the Clearances, the dispossession of thousands of peasants so to enclose land for cash farming. A significant number of the estranged emigrated, during the eighteenth century, to North America. The remainder were forced to migrate to the cities of Caledonia, where Scots Gaelic disappeared for good, along with most of the customs of the highland Irish, as these Irish were assimilated into the Scots English mainstream, which had long been situated in the country’s burghs. In Scotland, the civilizing process was quite successful, with the Scots becoming leading pioneers of the Enlightenment.


But the clannish and honour-based society of the Scots-Irish persisted amongst those who had emigrated to America, finding a home in the backhills of the southeast, the Appalachian and the Blue Ridge mountains in particular. These places were the home, of course, to the many blood feuds that erupted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably that among the Hatfields and McCoys. Famously, the disputes arose over no substantive injury. Instead, symbolic acts (such as the accusation of cheating at cards, in one lesser known feud) were nearly always behind the vigilante skirmishes that affected so many of the counties of Appalachia. The American southeast generally — the area known as Dixieland — was characterized until recently by the impoverishment of the public, and by the clannish “good ol’ boy” rule. It was a culture that came to encompass the African slaves and their descendants, identified in the twentieth century with the “ghetto” ethos of the American inner cities. In these places, the public has been turned into the “turfs” of various street gangs, the intramural warfare of which makes these areas as bloody as the highlands of early-modern Scotland.


How are factious barbarians, so committed to blood feud, able to achieve the unity necessary to invade and conquer civilized societies? It is frequently the advent of what Max Weber called charismatic leadership. Charisma, alike with tribal-kinship organization, is highly personal and informal. But as with “legitimate” government (based, that is, on formal laws and institutions), charisma inspires loyalty and action beyond immediate kin and patriarchal relations. Instead, the charismatic leader, who comes as often as not from the lower ranks, inspires others entirely on the basis of personal magnetism, sagacity and prowess. He may become the “father-figure” of his barbarian nation (with the rare female charismatic leaders, such as Jeanne D’Arc, becoming “mothers” of their people), but even so, his leadership serves to undermine the traditional loyalties of kin and village in favour of “something bigger.” It is this grandiosity, again based in a person, not institutions, which often paves the way for institutional or (in Weberian terms, “legitimate”) government.


But here is the truth in the saying, “men make history.” It is by no means inevitable that a charismatic leader should arise amongst the ranks of barbarians, to unite the latter in common purpose. And, even if this should occur, there is no certainty that the charismatic will take the necessary steps to institutionalize impersonal rule as a legacy. And yet, it does take the will of the charismatic to bring about civilized existence into being: civilization doesn’t just evolve “on its own.”