No Country for Old Men: Meaninglessness and the Reality of Self-Mythology

by Christopher Barr

“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.  It’s not that I’m afraid of it.  I always knew you had to be willin’ to die to even do this job.  But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin’ I don’t understand.  A man would have to put his soul at hazard.  He’d have to say: ‘O.K., I’ll be part of this world.’ "

 - Sheriff Ed Tom Bell

“Once you quit hearing ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, the rest is soon to follow.”

No Country for Old Men was about a man that got his hands on two million dollars of drug money from a cartel deal, in rural West Texas, gone wrong.  Instead of reporting the money or the site that he discovered where several men have been shot and killed, Llewelyn Moss decides to keep the money for himself.  As a result he ends up getting a psychopathic killer named Anton Chigurh on his trail, a man that is an evil force of nature that will stop at nothing to retrieve the money and kill Llewelyn.  As Chigurh closes in on Llewelyn the blood trail they leave behind begins to flow like a river.  While the pursuit unfolds, a laconic sheriff, Ed Tom Bell blithely investigates the carnage path left behind as he struggles with the enormity of the crimes themselves and their seemingly meaningless nature.

The film was beautifully shot by the always clever masterminds that are the Cohen Brothers.  The story was based on a Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.  The story at its core is about right and wrong, good versus evil, man versus himself and each other.  It’s a reflection of the direction civilization is heading if we are to remain on our current path of progress, a path where greed and power outweigh the health and safety of the less fortunate and worse, the future of the next generation.

No Country for Old Men is best when it is understood as an allegory.  Not quite to the level of the Cohen Brothers’ Homeric comedy O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)  but certainly echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy with a specific focus on the first of three parts of the epic poem, The Inferno.  I would argue that the film’s characters rather than its mixed structure are Shakespearian in nature.  Unlike Dante’s realized characters of his comedy, Shakespeare’s are all tragic in such a way, as they are usually the reason for their own fall but are oblivious to that fact.  Sometimes, even when it’s too late they can’t see it or certainly don’t want to see it, like in the case of Richard III.

This tragedy is most noticeable though in Hamlet as oppose to the more obvious downfall of Macbeth.  Hamlet represents the death of the fantasy; we ruin our own lives, not the drama that surrounds it.  We do this by the choices we make and by the action we take.  Shakespeare’s psychological message here and most paradoxically is; we ruin our lives but it was going to happen anyway.  One is left with feeling somewhat responsible for their overwhelmingly lack of free will.  Shakespeare’s characters set their own stage and travelled down a path that they couldn’t see their uncontrolled desire for unattainable freedom.

If in Dante’s Comedy the angelic figure of Beatrice is to be taken symbolically and not literally, as she should be, then we are left with the conclusion that Beatrice is who Dante wants us to be.  He sees the secular Vigil as a man that understands the path of real men in our real world but Beatrice is the beacon of light that hangs miles ahead of us.  Therein lies Dante’s conflict within his poem because, unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dante witnesses a form of infinite horror.  Had Hamlet come before Dante, which is oddly like saying had you come before your father, he would have had a place in Dante’s Inferno.  He almost would have made it into the less treacherous Purgatory but Hamlet’s psychological motives did finally become realized in his actions, even if it took him most of the play to get there.  

No Country for Old Men approaches the Divine Comedy from a more tragic trajectory - backwards.  Tommy Lee Jones’s character Ed Tom, is the beacon of hope here where the Josh Brolin’s character Llewelyn is in purgatory and Javier Bardem’s character Chigurh is the manifestation of the inferno.  These main characters have their various interactions, some more bloody than others, but in the end they don’t knock each other off their respective paths.  Ed Tom doesn’t catch up to Llewelyn and help him off his downward spiral.  Chigurh doesn’t catch and kill Llewelyn and Ed Tom never faces off against Chigurh.  These characters’ paths were already made by them, this can easily be seen as them slipping into a form of preordained fate - but it isn’t that at all.  They as characters made their choices much in the same way as Hamlet did but as symbols, Ed Tom retired the old ways of ‘yes sir’ ‘yes ma’am’ politeness, Llewelyn died as a result of ego and greed and Chigurh, whose the personification of the unruly, unforgiving world and thus can’t die.

I think Llewelyn had to die, symbolically, so we are able to see that there is no future for mankind, if we try to get ahead on our own and not as a unified species.  Like Hamlet, Llewelyn tried to make his quest a solitary one, this is fine when one is seeking enlightenment but when one seeks prosperity to its own selfish end, one must realize that the future of mankind depends on all hands on deck, not by one’s hands in the treasure chest and damn everyone else.  

As Nietzsche pointed out, it’s not human suffering that bothers people, its pointless suffering.  This is where the film explores its nihilistic angle, if people don’t believe there is any point to their death, if they see meaninglessness and irrationality at work, then what is the point to life?  I think that’s why Llewelyn dies in an anti-climatic way, the chaos and ruthlessness that fuels the man chasing him, stripped Llewelyn of what little meaning he had in his life.  This was also the point where the insignificant plot about money and drug cartels disappears and the focus is put on the actual protagonist of the film, Ed Tom and his quest for meaning in a meaningless universe.

This nihilism is further explored in Chigurh’s coin flip.  The gas attendant was not killed by Chigurh at the beginning of the film because he guessed ‘correctly’, while toward the end of the film, Llewelyn’s wife, Carla Jean died because she didn’t.  Ed Tom didn’t confront Chigurh in the motel room after Llewelyn’s death, even though he seen his reflection in the door tube where Chigurh had blown the lock through, and Chigurh at the end getting into a car accident, all represented chance.  Not only do we live under the illusion of free will but we also live under the whims of chance in the universe.  Although Chigurh has remnants of a Greek god of chaos, an avatar of death, he uses ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ and follows many of the rules invented by men, but adds to the undefinable chaos that he unleashes on his unsuspecting victims, while attempting to psychologically disarm them to free up his own sick need to kill.  Like the Joker in The Dark Knight, Chigurh’s madness is unquantifiable by psychological standards; they are both ‘agents of chaos’ that only wish to ‘watch the world burn’.

“Momma, take this badge offa me, …I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.” 

– Bob Dylan

Good versus evil becomes no longer significant is this chaotic world which leaves our values in many ways, not applicable.  Good in this form of chaos cannot triumph in the ways we would like it to, like in the case of Llewelyn dying or in the case of Ed Tom retiring.  Chaos on the other hand can be shot and survive a serious car crash, only to walk down the street and into the future. 

The interesting thing about the car accident is the car that smashed into Chigurh’s failed to stop at the red light, failed to halt according to the rules of the road.  Chigurh was following the rules of the road and proceeded as one would through the green light.  One must then reflect on an earlier line of dialogue by Chigurh; “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”  This is likely a question about the ever expanding universe itself versus the security we all think we have built for ourselves.

This film seeks some comfort in Ed Tom’s telling of his dream in its last minutes, where his father makes a fire for him up ahead, as he travels on horseback in the mountains through the dark stormy bleak night.  This is where the film doesn’t let its audience off the hook and likely is why so many have disliked the ending.  Ed Tom was the shinning knight on horseback to save the day but he didn’t.  He quit and left the crazy world behind him.  He gave up because he finally realized that he can’t “stop what is coming”.

During a coffee break at a relative’s place at the end of the film, Ed Tom speaks to an old feller in a wheelchair about the chaos of the world and the absurdity of what he is chasing, stating; “I don’t know.  I feel overmatched.  …I always thought when I got older God would sort of come into my life in some way.  He didn’t.  I don’t blame him.  If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”  Life didn’t turn out the way he thought it would and Ed Tom is angry about that fact.  He’s angry that his father wouldn’t like the man that he’s become, a man in retreat.  Like in his above quote relating to God, Ed Tom has the same opinion about himself as he thinks his father would.

The great irony of No Country for Old Men, relating to Macbeth is; it is a tale told by idiots.  Its characters and narrative is a chaotic mess, with no order or structure in its message, this is demonstrated when the capricious Chigurh at the end, confronts Carla Jean, after her mother’s funeral no less, and gets her to choose a side of his coin flip.  Chigurh is attempting to push his chaos theory on everything but Carla Jean refuses and thus proves to be freer then he is.   We must go back to philosophy and apply reason and meaning to this whirlwind of chaos.  We need to structure our thoughts and organize our lives; we must never retreat to save ourselves because we think we are special and are worth saving above all others, while we face the evil in the world.  ........That would be vanity.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

It is time for man to fix his goal.  It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope.  

His soil is still rich enough for it.  But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow there.  

Alas!  There comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man - and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whiz!  

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.  I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas!  There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star.  Alas!  There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo!  I show you the Last Man.

"What is love?  What is creation?  What is longing?  What is a star?" - so asks the Last Man, and blinks.  - Friedrich Nietzsche

......And then I woke up.

Edge of Tomorrow and the Eternal Recurrence of Groundhog Day

by Christopher Barr

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence, even the spider and the moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.  The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Edge of Tomorrow is a fantastically intelligent and fresh science fiction mega movie, where the Earth is on the brink of destruction from an alien race of beings.  Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a United Defence Forces (UDF) spokesperson and a cowardice United States military officer that has never seen a battlefield.  After being reluctantly and quite forcibly dropped in on an alien-controlled frontline with the first wave of Operation Downfall, Cage begins to see the horrifying enormity of war as he lands on the beach, wearing an armed mechanical exo-suit called a Jacket.  After lucking out as bombs are dropped and soldiers around him die by the dozens, Cage is killed.

Reset.

Cage wakes up on a military base at Heathrow Airport in London and repeats the day, again and again and again.  He discovers that he must learn how to kill the aliens, a squirrelly hideous organism that the humans call “Mimics”.  During his first death, Cage detonates a claymore mine killing himself along with a creepy bluish alien later revealed as an Alpha, a rare unusually large alien that possesses a direct connection to a singular consciousness called the “Omega”, a collective alien brain of sorts that controls all the Mimics.   The Alpha’s blood is mixed with Cage’s, giving him the ability to reset the day each time he is killed, waking him up each day back on the military base in a continuous time loop.

Reset.

Cage’s exo-suit is an intriguing piece of technology.  Developed to turn a regular man into a super-soldier, equipping him with weapons on his arms as well as weapons that come out of the back part of the suit.  It gives Cage super strength and the ability to achieve decisive victory.  The problem is; in the beginning Cage has no idea how to use it, he just fumbles with it as people die around him and then he is killed yet again.

Reset.

Cage meets Rita on the battlefield just before she is killed.  Rita is a hero to the armada, a Joan of Arc figure, a hero known by many as the “Angel of Verdun” or the “Full Metal Bitch” behind her back.  She has won many battles against the Mimics in the past but this current battle in Northwestern France, the invasion force, along with Rita, get annihilated due to the Mimics being able to anticipate the entire attack.  Cage eventually gets Rita to train him how to use the exo-suit and fight the Mimics.  The capability that Cage has to reset the day, Rita once possessed but since a blood transfusion she has lost her ability to reset.  Cage attempts to save her and defeat the enemy but he himself is killed over and over again as he tries to learn to beat this alien species by using their technologically proficient ability to alter time.

Reset.

Cage learns about the Mimic’s bio-technology, he learns that they tactically manipulate time to find their enemy’s weakness and kill them before they even see it coming.  The upper hand here is experience, the more they repeat the battles, the more they know what to expect and defend against.  This technology makes them pretty much undefeatable. 

Edge of Tomorrow is a movie about making better choices to advance one’s life and in the fight, knowledge is key.  Knowledge here isn’t just tactical, it’s enlightening.  Edge of Tomorrow has a comedy that it draws its inspiration from as well as a philosophy.  It’s a movie that asks a lot of questions about time and space as well as one’s willingness to rise up and be more than the seemingly sum of one’s parts.     

“A splendid centre of infinity’s whirl

Pushed to its zenith’s height, its last expanse,

Felt the divinity of its own self-bliss

Repeated in its numberless other selves.”

-  Sri Aurobindo

The 1993 comedy Groundhog Day poses a number of similar questions about the nature of reality and how one is able to overcome oneself.  The melancholic weatherman in the beginning of the film is someone that feels that he is living a life with no hope, no meaning and no escape.  He’s a man with no future, no past, just this empty feeling of nothingness that appears to be everlasting.  Is life’s meaning self-created or self-imposed?  What is Phil the weatherman to do in his unbreakable loop of existence that not only he shares but also a huge percentage of the population of the world?

Phil in the film is confronted with the fact that he has no future; he’s doomed to relive an ordinary day over and over again.  Phil attempts to escape Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania but is informed by a police officer that a blizzard is coming.  The officer tells Phil that, “You can go back to Punxsutawney or you can freeze to death!”  What he didn’t realize is the officer was pretty well summing up Phil’s own banal, meaningless life.  Phil chooses to go back to Punxsutawney and avoid freezing to death only to return to the Groundhog Day festival, again and again and again, frozen in this boring passage in time.  Phil, after much difficulty, must realize to not live for tomorrow, but live today.  

Nietzsche looked around and saw a society eating itself apart without ever learning that its Christian values are hollow and its future is bleak, if it wasn’t able to surpass its ancient sensibility and create a future that isn’t so limited by the pasts Iron Age superstitions, society would crumble under its own ignorance.

Groundhog Day was about a man who needed to confront his own banality in order to free up infinite possibility for his future.  He needed to overcome himself and be more than the possibilities that he felt he saw in a mirror.  He needed to finally see his Lacanian ‘lack’.  He needed to see that he is beyond the limitations of his parents and his environment, that he has to take ownership of himself and forge his own future, and not one seemingly psychologically linked to him through blood and tradition.  

Groundhog Day was about changing one’s constitution for the better.  Phil was an angry, bitter man that most avoided to be around, but as the film progressed Phil started to see that change was paramount and more importantly, that change has to come from him.  As the same day kept returning when the alarm clock went off at 6am, Phil experienced a number of psychological stages.  He played for a bit and then killed himself a number of times, then got bored and then woke up.  Love in this story is what ignited his desire for change, but I think it wasn’t until the old homeless man kept dying and Phil kept on failing to find ways of saving him, that Phil truly experienced an awakening.

Phil began to better himself and not in selfish ways like he did before, picking up girls and embarrassing other people for example.  Phil set out to become the Overman, the man that surpasses himself through epistemological means.  Along the way Phil became a better person because knowledge brings understanding, it brings perspective, and in the end, knowledge brings wonder.

Edge of Tomorrow and Groundhog Day are both fascinating narratives, expressing the path to enlightenment, the path to awakening.  These movies are about freeing oneself from the loop of automatic piloting, of avoiding what is expected and replacing it for what is right, not only for you but for those you live your life around.  Nietzsche wasn’t pleased with society’s backward ignorance and only hoped that mankind would evolve out of it.  He was right in thinking that wouldn’t be easy, and more realistically, unlikely at all.  The fight to free one from the shackles of tradition, the chains of conformity is a fight most will never encounter in their lifetime.  But with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and films like Edge of Tomorrow, one can only hope to wake up in the loop and take the path toward breaking it.

“This is a world where nothing is solved.  Someone once told me, ‘Time is a flat circle.’  Everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over and over again…..and that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again… and again… and again… forever.”

  - Rust Cohle, From the HBO’s True Detective

“Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being.

Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being.

Everything breaks, everything is joined anew: eternally the same house of being is built.  Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself.  In ever Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There.  The center is everywhere.  Bent is the path of eternity.”

 - Nietzsche

X-MEN: Days of Future Past and the Fight for a Dying World

by Christopher Barr

“Mutation, it is the key to our evolution.  It has enabled us to evolve into the dominant species on the planet.  This process normally takes thousands and thousands of years.  But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

– Professor X (X-Men 1), Jean Grey (X-Men 2)

X-Men: Days of Future Past was a fantastic, fun extravaganza to be hold.  Its story was complex with time jumping and memory swapping and its action scenes have something fresh about them.  Director Bryan Singer had a lot to make up for after bowing out of X-Men 3 to do the not-so-bad Superman Returns.  The problem is the third installment of a comic book franchise, that was just coming off the mass success of the masterful X2: X-Men United, was put in the hands of mediocre filmmaker wannabe Brett Ratner.  As a result the momentum that the first two garnered was all but a corpse after the first screening of X-Men: The Last Stand.  The CGI was sloppy; the action scenes were contrived and the story was horrible.  Not to mention all the main characters that were killed off in unmemorable and unnecessary ways.

This last installment, a sequel to X-Men: First Class, a prequel to The Last Stand and a reverse crossover, hybrid of The Wolverine, was Singer’s way of dealing with damage control for The Last Stand and to undo some of the comic book blasphemy that was in it, restoring the balance back to the X-Men universe’s future and past.  Singer brought the narrative back to its fundamental human problem, discrimination resulting in extermination.  This marvelous movie has its fun moments with one in particular involving Quicksilver, in the best action scene in the film, and a number of security guards firing upon himself, Xavier, Magneto and Wolverine, the moment was priceless, it was also reminiscent of the Nightcrawler scene at the beginning of X2 .  But the real achievement was Singer brought the seriousness that Ratner shamelessly did away with back. 

We see this seriousness right from the start when a cargo box is tipped up and dead humans and mutants roll out into a pile, while a number of other mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans are escorted to a likely death chamber, in a very dark despotic future circa 2023.   This is a bleak world that is overrun by Sentinels, huge powerful robots that have been originally designed to track and eliminate all mutants.  This scene was also throwback to the first film and a reminder of the fact that something simply don’t change, even if we want them to.  This post-apocalyptic wasteland is all that remains as humans and mutants are well on their way to extinction.    

The first X-Men movie started off with rain pounding down on a large number of Jewish people being herded off to the gas chamber during the atrocities of World War 2.  The screen was bled of most of its color leaving a pale, grim suitable atmosphere as a young Erik Lehnsherr is separated from his parents who are among the number of sad souls off to their deaths.  Understandably angered by this, he draws upon a seemingly foreign ability held deep within him, and generates a magnetic field between him and the closed metal gate that divides him and his parents.  The angrier he becomes the more powerful the magnetic field becomes and manipulates the metal gate, violently bending it toward him until a guard hits Erik in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him near unconscious to the muddy ground.

“You’ll have to kill me, Charles – and what would that accomplish?  Let them pass that law and they’ll have you in chains with a number burned into your forehead!” 
- Magneto

This opening scene did a number of things; it let its audience know that we are entering new territory here when it comes to the superhero movie.  It said that this movie is going to be the polar opposite of the horrible 1997 movie Batman & Robin, but it also made the statement that we are going to take this material seriously.  Clearly the unfortunate events that occurred in concentration camps during World War 2 were appalling to say the least.  So for a comic book movie to start out reminding its audience of these events is saying a lot. 

This scene, our first look into the world of the X-Men on the big screen, was to set the tone for the entire series.  It was making a bold statement about the madness of division, about fearing what we don’t understand and hating what we fear.  It’s saying we can’t just kill what scares us; first we must understand why we are scared in the first place.  The result has been proven over and over again; if you begin to understand you become less afraid and if you do that, you become less likely to resort to violence as a result.

Difference has always scared the hell out of humanity, and at an earlier point in our history, that fear of difference was understandable.  It’s natural for a person to be afraid if they don’t know what is going to happen next.  Our defense mechanisms assure us of this on a daily basis.  But whether it’s the religious differences that led to the genocide in Rwanda or the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War 2, it is clear that as we grow as a civilization, we grow fearful of all the change that is out there.

Change has always scared the hell out of humanity because we seek comfort and avoid predators, just as our early ancestors did.  We are hardwired to survive long enough to have off-spring and raise them through cautious means of survival.  So when a foreign ship lands at our shores, we rightfully become fearful, not only for ourselves but for our young, for others that may be part of our group or tribe.  As a direct response to that fear, we naturally become defensive and it just depends on the group whether they kill and then ask questions or they take the more civil other way around.  

“…and there are even rumors, Miss Grey, of mutants so powerful that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts, taking away our God-given free will. Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants. To be taught by mutants! Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that mutants are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do!”

– Senator Kelly (X-Men 1)

Mutants have a variety of powers and Senator Kelly at the beginning of the first film does make some valid points about the potential dangers of that fact.  What’s to stop one that can walk through walls, from entering a bank vault or the White House, which Nightcrawler does during the magnificent, spectacular opening scene to X2: X-Men United?  He is under the chemical control of William Stryker but never the less; Senator Kelly’s point is that it is possible.

Persecution is the resulting effect of not understanding another group of people and more horribly, not attempting to understand another group of people.  Magneto was that young boy who watched his parents carted off to certain death while lying helpless on ground.  Later we find out that his mother lived only long enough for Sebastian Shaw to shot her because Erik was unable to use his powers at will, during the opening scenes of X-Men: First Class.  Magneto has struggled over the years to realize his goal of mutant supremacy.  In the first film he tried assimilation, the second annihilation and the third mobilization, all in an attempt to not be that scared little boy, lying in the mud, helpless.

Scottish philosopher David Hume saw societies being run by passion and emotion and not reason and logic.  The X-Men live in such a society, one where people’s feelings about change and difference outweigh their critically reasonable side.  Because most societies are governed with an emotional purview; problems with equal rights, same sex marriages, racial differences, cultural differences, stem-cell research, terrorism, genocide, climate change and media, governmental and corporate propaganda will always exist.  These are not logical problems; these are not problems that when you apply a little reason cannot be solved.

I would never want humanity to dampen the flame of its passionate, emotional side and become Vulcans, where logic is their only means of understanding, but I ideally would like it see a society, and certainly live in one, that applied actual logic to its foreign policy, one that would see that same sex marriage is not a problem and that it’s a waste of everyone’s time even debating about it.  Clearly most of the above so-called problems listed are religiously traditional tenets that a healthy, growing society should be ashamed to admit that they advocate, but yet here we are, in a world that is a troubled place, because it is feeding off its immature emotional side and not growing up to the necessity of reason and logic.

The X-Men are a Marvel comic book creation by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby.  These men created these characters to have purpose, to mean something, to reflect a problem they saw in society that was and still is, tearing it apart.  We are unable to get over our differences and instead of dealing with that unavoidable fact and grow with it; we stick our precious little heads in the sand and say, ‘kill anything that isn’t like me’.  Apathy, ignorance, racism, nationalism and intolerance all stem from our fear of the unknown. 

X-Men: Days of Future Past was dealing with a lot of those same problems as the previous films, where the ignorant only desired death to the mutants.  So it was humans vs. mutants but it was also mutants vs. mutants.  Magneto is a tragic figure that is unable to get over his bitterness of his childhood.  Some would rightfully say why should he but his lifelong friend Charles Xavier only wishes for him to take the compassionate path of righteousness.

Charles is truly a noble figure, a guru of a man that wants peace above all but isn’t afraid to fight for it.  Essentially he’s a very smart man trying to convince all the ignorant people that what they are doing is wrong, that there is a better way to do it and that is through knowledge.  Tolerance on a massive scale requires a sleeping population to wake up out of their mind-controlled slumber and live their lives in a more productive, open-minded, fulfilling way.

This is what was so great about X-Men: First Class; is we got to see Charles and Erik’s relationship develop and we got to eventually see their ideologies separate.  We got to see how one man’s strength was not enough to save his friend from the fall of dispair.  Charles never had the opportunity to tell Erik that his way of thinking, mutants above all, was quite similar to the way of thinking Hitler employed during his extermination campaign in World War 2.

Stan Lee said that he based Charles Xavier on Martin Luther King Jr. and Erik Lehnsherr on Malcolm X, both men who had their hearts in the right place, but one that couldn’t escape his anger over how his fellow African Americans were being treated.  I do think that noble men like Xavier and King are rare indeed and I would argue that most would likely not have the strength to look their enemy in the face and grant mercy.  True strength is not to see your enemy as an enemy at all but as misguided.  A true teacher would only want to guide such a person or group onto a path that grants equality for all.

The real fantasy of Days of Future Past is the chance to make it right, the chance to go back and correct a mistake that created a ripple effect to the destruction of us all.  It’s something that would have passed through the minds of most people because most people harbor regret for some of the things they have done, but didn’t have the wisdom at the time to see that.  If only wisdom came before we all got so afraid of most of the things around us.  What a world that would be, a world that would finally realize that fear is an illusion that the mind creates to sound the alarm bells, and that alarm doesn’t always mean something is wrong.

There is a new timeline in the X-Men universe, much in the same way as the new Star Trek franchise.  I certainly would've liked to have seen more moments from the future, but I also see that its purpose was to let us know of the devastation that was being fought there and not to explore its detail.  Essentially we just needed to know enough to feel the weight on Wolverine’s shoulders once he went into the past, what was at stake and what would have been lost, salvation for all was the goal.  The next film is called X-Men: Apocalypse, so maybe this timeline change will cause more problems than they bargained for.  

The X-Men will continue to fight the treachery of evil men in order to maintain their place as an evolutionary leap for the future of mankind.  They will fight those that only wish to hold us all back from growing and expanding our view of the world, and all those that inhabit it.  The X-Men will fight for what most free-thinking people should fight for; the future of our species, because if we let the warmongers and politicians have their way, we might well be heading toward a post-apocalyptic wasteland of our very own.

“I’m looking for hope.”

– Professor Xavier

GODZILLA: The Embodiment of a Living Atomic Bomb

by Christopher Barr

“The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control... and not the other way around.”

- Dr. Ichiro Serizawa

……….Let them fight.

Godzilla ゴジラ is back in theatres and for the most part, it was a pretty decent version of the Japanese icon.  There were some wooden characters, the only character that was three dimensional and had potential was killed off less than half way through the film.  But aside from some minor plot holes and a little silly dialogue, Godzilla was a thrilling ride at the movie theatre.  The special effects were top notch, realizing the mammoth creature in all his potential.  I enjoyed the tension that was created, especially in the first act of the film.

Godzilla's visceral roar vibrated through the city buildings the way we lovingly expected it to, like the god we portray him to be, a deity figure for us all.  The film dealt with its unrealistic narrative with a mature form of pacing, allowing its audience to properly suspend their disbelief long enough to relish is the magnificent battle of the monsters at the end of the movie, and what a great time that was.  But it still wasn’t on par with Jaws and Alien, both films effectively concealed their creatures until the end, but the difference with them was the human characters were so worth watching.  Chief Brody and Ripley were interesting, fleshed-out people that you cared about, especially when they were on their own, in their respective films, at the end and faced their nightmare head-on.  Side note; it is clear the family’s last name Brody, in Godzilla was a nod to Jaws.

Poseidon’s behemoth slumbered for eons before being woken up to fight a battle that ends up destroying cities.  Godzilla is covered in tumorous-looking scars intended to resemble those experienced by victims of radiation.  He is truly a massive creature clocking in at 350 feet.  He is a wrath of nature that has come to punish those that have abused it; this is certainly odd when you look at it literally within the sense of the movie.  Godzilla is an environmentalist?  No, Godzilla is and will always remain a metaphor against the misuse of radiation technology to benefit greed and power.

This American version brought the monster out of the culture of Japan and onto the streets of San Francisco.   There is a somewhat disturbing irony found here, Godzilla is a Japanese creation to help disseminate the atrocities that the country underwent in WW2 to their Japanese viewers.  Now the very nation responsible for these atrocities in the first place has co-opted the Asian beast and made it their own.

In the above quote, Dr. Serizawa in the film talks about the arrogance of man thinking nature is in their control.  I would take that one step further and state; the arrogance of an American movie studio to take a Japanese icon, that's genesis was the result of the United States fire-bombing and dropping two atomic bombs on their soil, and then turning him into an American hero.  Only in this day in age is this not laughable if not disrespectful to a nation that suffered plenty at the hands of the American military industrial complex.  I would note that the Japanese military was not innocent during WW2, in fact quite literally the contrary.  The Japanese army was out of control and did have to be stopped for the atrocities that they were unleashing on the Chinese.  It’s known now that the United States government was well aware of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour prior to December 7, 1941, but at the time the American people and the average fighting soldiers were unaware of that fact and rightfully wanted revenge.  That being said, the citizens of the Island of Japan did nothing wrong to anyone and certainly didn’t deserve their hellish fate.

The 1954 original Japanese version of the film Gojira (Godzilla) helped lift the Japanese out of their past World War 2 depression, by restoring a portion of their national pride and began a healing process from the festering wound sewn into the fabric of their society.  The film was obviously bad, save the spectacular score, but that was fine because it ended up becoming an instant cult classic as a result.  It was also unflinchingly bleak, dark and deceptively powerful, it was a film by a wounded filmmaker living in a wounded country that could still feel the pain of hell on earth.  The film portrayed the first mass media character that warned us of the horrors unchecked by atomic weapons.  The opening scenes of the film show the monumental force of such a holocaust.  An American reworked version of the film called Godzilla: King of the Monsters was released in the states in 1956.  Their version removed a lot of the blatant atomic connections to the beast simply because they were responsible for that connection in reality a decade earlier.        

On August 6^th 1945, the American Military Forces dropped “Littleboy” a uranium atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Three days later on August 9^th they dropped “Fat Man” a plutonium implosion-type atomic bomb on Nagasaki.  Within the next couple of months of the blasts, upwards to 166,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki; half of which were annihilated on the first day and the remaining victims suffered agonizing deaths as the months passed by while the effects of burns, radiation sickness and other such injuries slowly claimed the rest of them.

Prior to these Atomic bomb drops, United States’ Operation Meetinghouse saw the firebombing of the city of Tokyo along with a number of other cities being napalmed, releasing a scourge of disaster across the island of Japan.  There never has been a city in the history of warfare where as many bombs on Tokyo were dropped.  But after all this devastation it wasn’t until March 1^st of 1954, when the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear device test at Bikini Atoll, near the Marshall Islands, that a lonely tuna fish ship called Daigo Fukuryū Maru, otherwise known as the Lucky Dragon 5, got hit with the fallout of a nuclear blast.  The ship, with its 23 seamen aboard, was inside the danger zone which the U.S. government had declared in advance, that being said, the test ended being twice as powerful as expected and the fallout, in the form of fine ash went outside the danger zone.  The following months after the blast the men started to die one by one of radiation poisoning.

This incident, along with the last decade of devastation to their country, showed the Japanese that man has gone too far, man can now willfully tear apart and destroy the fundamental particles of the universe.  It showed them that ‘the bomb’ was still very much alive and that the atomic nightmare, they have been just through, wasn’t relegated to World Wars but was an omnipresent threat to their nation.  This tragedy galvanized an emerging movement in Japan against the future use of these potential global killers, eradicating them for good.  This movement was a symbolic protest against the proliferation of weapons that are capable of annihilating all life from the surface of the Earth.

Japan was occupied by the U.S. Army up until September, 1952.  Before their departure the American forces banned any information about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs and their aftermaths, namely the radioactivity-induced diseases, from getting out.  It was to remain quiet that millions of civilians that weren’t directly connected to the war were the bulk of the massive casualties.  The metaphor for this disparaging scientific revolution was in the form of a daikaiju, a massive green monster named Godzilla, a catharsis for a limping nation.

Godzilla, in 1954, is awoken from his underwater sleep by a nuclear detonation and travels to the city of Tokyo and unleashes his fury just as the atomic bombs did, crumbling Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   He was to become the first major expression in pop culture of the unspeakable tragedy Japan suffered during the war.

Today the threat of annihilation hasn’t gone away with the disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.  Radiation at the restricted site to this day is pouring underground water that has been mixed with contaminated material into the Pacific Ocean by the millions of gallons.

The city is like a post-apocalyptic landscape frozen in time, a place where the radiation is deadly and land uninhabitable, the Janjira disaster in the new film has clearly drawn comparisons to the real life Fukushima meltdown.  Radioactive isotopes are spilling into the ocean and having a drastic effect on the sea life as it travels with currents across the ocean to Canada, the US and as far as Mexico.  All the Japanese have been able to do to slow the radioactive flow of water into the ocean, is to pump it into leaking, monstrous holding tanks.  These tanks are quickly built and filled within a day and half leaving the remaining overflow into the sea.  This is only an inadequate immediate solution to a long term problem that, as far as experts are concerned, is unfixable, it is also believed that the technology required to fix the problem is years away from being realized.

The threat seen by the Japanese at the end of World War 2 still exists here today and still on their soil no less.  Godzilla over the years has thus possessed a bit of a schizophrenic attitude toward atomic power.  Nuclear bombs are destructive, but yet atomic power can also produce electricity; radiation from the bombs killed more people than the actual blasts but radiation therapy can save lives by killing cancer cells.  I suppose the obvious question which outweighs the other?

The problem here is as a society; we are messing with the forces of nature and increasingly confronting the unfathomable consequences of that power.  Godzilla is a manifestation of that global killer, that if unchecked, if unleashed could devastate the very world we inhabit.  Godzilla is the hellfire that man let out of Pandora’s Box and as an allegory he cannot be killed.  Maybe that’s why he appears in just under 30 sequels or maybe he doesn’t die because of our ambitions for power, literally and figuratively, are unflinching.  Maybe we are the very Godzilla that we all wish to stop, unless another towering beast comes along in the movie ‘arms race’ for the biggest monstrosity, then we’ll need Godzilla to kill it for us.  I’m not sure if that is poetic or madness but like the spectacle of life; we all want to stick around and see what monster wins at the end of the day, even if that may mean that we all lose in the long run, because we can’t win this fight.  Nature will always win that battle and that is the heart of these movies, Godzilla is the punishment we all deserve.

“Power does not corrupt.  Fear corrupts….perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

 - John Steinbeck