MR. TURNER and Painting a Portrait of the Future of Existential Modernity

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

“What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.  You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”  

- Morpheus, The Matrix

"My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there."

 - J. M. W. Turner

MR. TURNER is a fascinatingly masterful film by the always brilliant English director Mike Leigh.  The film is a look at the life and work of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner.  The film is wonderfully acted by every single actor involved and the look of the film is breathtaking. Mr. Turner is truly a work of art in its own right, which in that regard lets its audience become aware of its respect for the artistry of its subject.

The film Mr. Turner follows “the painter of light” which Turner was commonly known as because of the beautiful sunsets he painted.  Early in his life he sketched and worked quite delicately and beautifully with water paint.  This talent for painting got him accepted into the Royal Academy of Arts in London.  He later moved on from water painting to oil and started painting these amazingly majestic landscape and sea canvases.  His father, William Turner worked with him mixing his paints and building his canvases.  When his father died this had a profound effect on Turner and his outlook on life and death which made its way into his paintings.

Turner became more subjugated from the people in the world around him.  He traveled to find new vistas and to revisit beloved old ones.  He visited brothels to sketch prostitutes and once had himself strapped high up to the mast of a ship during a massive snow storm at sea, so he could later accurately paint such a storm on canvas.  That particular incident gave him bronchitis which began a decline in his health that eventually led to his death in Chelsea, England in 1851.

Turner was not a soberly sane person which ended up being ideal for his craft.  Soberly sane people generally don’t make good artists in anything really.   The world’s great advances in creativity and invention were more often than not achieved by little encounters with madness.  This form of artistic madness can be destructive not only for the artist but for the poor people that are often in their company, but that is what is often required of the human mind navigating such a structured, controlled society in order to break itself free of the shackles of conformity.

Turner felt that there was something wrong with the world, like The Matrix quote from above, Turner felt it like a splinter in his mind.  He articulated this feeling on his canvases.  His marine paintings were pushing toward the edge of reality itself, where the existential angst of the coming modern machine world made it on his canvas.  Mankind at the time of Turner’s pivotal painting period was losing its religious solidarity.  Turner himself was at least agnostic during his life, forgoing the presence of God for the reality he was searching for in his paintings.  God was in the foreground for many centuries because people generally knew nothing about the natural world.  During Turner's time science was beginning to become just as much a part of life as religion.  For Turner and many other free thinking people, this started to push God to the background and in some cases, out of the picture entirely.  Instead of painting cathedrals he painted the Industrial Revolution as it unfolded.

"It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and the more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye."

 - J. M. W. Turner

The events leading up to the end of the film were at their most existential.  Death is coming for us all and as much rhyme or reason we might want to apply to it, it’s still coming.  This film sees us in our most naked form, spinning thousands of miles per minute in the bleak cold nothingness of the universe.  Turner tried to paint his way behind the curtain to see the truth like so many before him and so many after.  Like others though he became restricted by the very structure he was trying to escape.  The frames of his paintings were as far as he was permitted to go, where the poet is limited by the length of his page, Turner was only able to go so far.  This limitation though is where great art is born.  It’s because of these restraints that ideas hidden in the abyss of the mind can surface, and here the artist’s task is to diagnose them and articulate them in some form of creative expression. What Turner did do was pave the way for impressionism as well as abstract art, essentially launching Modern Art.  He not only painted beautiful landscapes and raging seas, he painted the wonders of science and progress, not necessarily optimistic progress but never the less progress.  He saw that mankind was on a bifurcating precipice and the times as he knew them would be changing forever.  He was born in the age of sail and died in the age of steam during the Industrial Revolution.

The great philosophers, poets, painters, psychologists and physicists all owe their work to those that came before them, and so the future generation will owe theirs to the present.  This work belongs to mankind; it’s a project to better understand ourselves and the space around us we all share.  Turner was a controversial figure during his time because he pushed at the walls of conformity.  Members of the aristocracy and royalty did not approve of many of his paintings, especially the final phase of his career where even his sinking ships and recognizable stormy seas were dissolving on his ghostly canvases, where his paint became quite free and loose blurring the land and horizon, leaving an impending hazy void that he subconsciously saw coming.

Turner’s long time housekeeper, who loved him dearly, was exploited by him sexually and was taken for granted.  She was for the most part, an object for him to use as he wished.  Once she discovered that Turner was living with a woman in Chelsea, she left heartbroken and after his death was left a drift.  Her life was structured around waiting hand and foot for Turner’s grumpy demands.  This defined her life and with him gone she no longer had any idea what to do with herself.  This has always been a tragedy for some people, where they devoted too much time towards the will of others and never really stopped to work on developing themselves. 

Turner’s relationship with the seaside landlady, Sophia Booth, who was a widower twice already, was certainly sad to see Turner die, but she lived on.  A perfect scene at the end of the film has her meticulously cleaning demarcated windows, recognizing life goes on and as such must be lived.  Unlike the hapless housekeeper, Sophia Booth was able to lose herself in structure and routine in order to carry on.  This is also a tragedy for some people where they cling to their things and their routines in order to avoid feeling the pain of loss.      

Society has become so structured that we no longer see the fine detail of it anymore.  If a double-decker city bus takes a busy London street corner at a fast speed, as they often do, the wannabe punk rocker standing on the sidewalk on that same corner, listening to the Sex Pistols through the re-mastered digital download on his iPhone, would barely blink an eye.  But if you were to remove the buildings, all the people, and other vehicles, placing him and the bus in an open field with the bus making the same maneuver, you might find that same bad ass punk-rocker soiling his leather pants.  The reason for this is the structure is an understood agreement in societies.  Without it, it would be just us alone in the world.  So the structure is our predictable Pavlovian maze trap that we as a member of society no longer see but yet require immensely.

J. M. W. Turner lived during a precarious time, where his contemporary Soren Kierkegaard developed existentialism, postulating that the anxiety we feel is the result of our total freedom to choose.  While the sodality of the church continued to proselytize people into believing what the church believes, many were looking to science for their answers about existence.  Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery and Pompeii was discovered at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which put an end to the frivolity of the Rococo Era ushering in Neoclassicism, which was a return to sterile academic form.  The Romantic Era followed as a philosophical and literary movement focused away from disciplines of the Neoclassics and more toward, feelings, emotions, introspection and atmosphere as mankind struggled against the forces of the natural world.   Turner became a vital figure in the art world and in how we look at ourselves while we look toward the horizon searching for the nature of reality.  Mr. Turner is a celebration of the artist's plight in life, the film is raw and as real as they come just as Turner would have wanted it. 

Jupiter Ascending and Harvesting the Most Precious Resource of all, Time

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2015

"Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry.  Right now, Balem is entitled to Earth.  Once you claim it, the Earth will belong to you."

- Kalique to Jupiter

Jupiter Ascending was not a good movie but it also wasn’t that bad either.  The visual effects were stunning but the plot, character development and interactions were more problematic.  The space opera is about a young woman named Jupiter, who’s a Russian immigrant house keeper in Chicago that scrubs a lot of toilets, and is brought into this intergalactic turf war over whether or not she is a gene-matched reincarnation of a royal queen of the universe.

Jupiter, with the help of Caine Wise, a human/wolf genetically engineered interplanetary warrior, discovers that she is in fact royalty.  She must then legally claim her royal position and what inheritance comes with it, namely possession of Earth.  When it is discovered that the matriarch of the House of Abrasax, which is the most powerful of all the alien dynasties, has died, her three children Balem, Kalique and Titus go to war over many years for the inheritance.  Then it becomes known that Jupiter has the same genetic signature as the matriarch of the House of Abrasax and is the rightful heir.  The matriarch’s three children all one way or another, want Jupiter to hand over her inheritance to them.  The more extreme case here is Balem who wants her dead so he can claim the inheritance.

Caine Wise with his pointy ears and Atomic Anti-Gravity boots that allow him to rollerblade in the sky and off building surfaces, comes to Earth to protect Jupiter so she can claim her royal position and reinstate him as a legionnaire, which is a mercenary-type organization that he was banished from for ripping out the throat of what's known as an Entitled, which is another way of saying privileged or elite.  Balem has put a bounty on Jupiter’s head, resulting in her and Caine being intercepted and attacked by interplanetary lizard hunters with wings, these little Gollum-like alien creatures that are able to shape shift into human form, and a number of other bounty hunters.  Caine and Jupiter fight off and evade a number of these unwanted forces until a couple of bounty hunters finally capture Jupiter and take her into space.

Jupiter is acknowledged as royalty and is helped to make it official by space military forces who wish for new representation, after fighting in a number of wars.  Jupiter is then captured by Kalique, daughter of Jupiter’s genetic signature which they call a Recurrence, and told of the great resource that is fought so hard for in space, which is - time.  Kalique demonstrates this by walking into a plasma pool as a woman that looks like she’s in her later forties, submerging herself and then exiting the same pool looking like a twenty year old woman, her age is actually over 14 millennia.  Jupiter is clearly amazed at this level of technology and is then rescued by Caine where she is taken again but this time to Kalique’s brother’s massive gold-plated ship.  There Jupiter is told about the harvesting of human beings into a youth serum that allows these well-to-do aliens to live forever.  She is told by Titus that many planets just like Earth are farms for the purposes of harvesting, once the humans on that planet reach their Darwinian state of perfection and have exhausted all their resources.

Jupiter Ascending is pretty silly throughout and there is zero chemistry between Jupiter and Caine, even though the story attempts to create a romance between them.  The real interesting part here is the extent that capitalism is willing to go so the filthy rich get to live forever.  This movie knocks that home in the clearest sense, if the oligarchy of this planet scientifically found a way to harvest the third world for their life force, would they do it?  They absolutely would within a fraction of a blink of an eye.  In the movie people are described in the form of a pyramid with the royalty on top where the people at the bottom are seen as mere cattle.

The movie is saturated with so much visual effects that it will make the average candy-junkie truly feel what a sugar rush is, but hidden beneath all the explosions and cheesy dialogue is a true commentary on the future of mankind in cautionary tale form.  This movie demonstrates the potential effects of capitalism, if technology allows it to exploit even more of this planet and its living organisms for profit.  The movie explores the extent of what ownership means to the elite as well as the poor people that inhabit the lands that are being bought up by corporations.

Jupiter Ascending is about the future of mankind after abandoning the socialist recommendations of Karl Marx, where the fruits of industry must be shared for mankind to prosper.  Clearly that project was railroaded by the power structure because the world we live in today is cutthroat capitalistic economics, where the rich kill anything or anyone that even breathes near their piles upon piles of money.

Probably the greatest fallacy of not only human existence but all living organisms is that everything dies.  Human beings are in the unique and probably unfortunate position to be aware of their own mortality.  The fear of all our impending deaths has given rise to all manner of beliefs to distort that reality.  Everything from religions to reincarnation were invented by men as an illusory scapegoat from death.  Most of our existence is based on lies that can be traced back to that first major cover-up; we die and that’s it.  There’s no heaven for us to visit long dead loved ones while we sip red wine at a dinner banquet with God.  There’s no soul that lives on as our bodies die and are reincarnated into some other life form.  We die, like any other species on this planet.  We are only special because there isn’t anything else around that can tell us otherwise.  Every human on this planet was born into this lie and most believed it because the thought of death scares the hell out of them.  Not to mention its abstract, the very concept is almost incomprehensible because our only experience on this planet is living.  So life after death was invented to carry on that experience.
  

Jupiter Ascending is a cartoonish movie with big ideas. On its surface it wants us to have a fun and exciting movie going experience.  Beneath its gloss it wants us to feel that there's something wrong with the current system we are all living under. Governments and corporations are controlling our potential, they are controlling our minds ability to evaluate what's truly right or wrong for our well-being.  Instead our ability to evaluate has been appropriated for the purposes of mass consumption.  We are being lured away by fantasies of being famous and recognized and are severing ourselves from the very planet that we need to survive.  If this wasn't so incredibly pervasive and omnipresent it might be seen for what it truly is, sheer madness. 

In the ancient past the stars and the sun were gods, then the Greeks and the Romans anthropomorphized them into their gods which led polytheism to monotheism.  Today along with superheroes and celebrities, average people are scratching the eyes out of competitors in order to deify themselves into god-like status.  In our consumer society, we've become increasingly desperate to be seen and someone special but sadly, not with skills and talent.  We want the fast food route to greatness without all the work and struggle that Nietzsche said was required to overcome what holds us back.  The villains of Jupiter Ascending 'harvested' entire planets to benefit themselves both physiologically and financially, without any real afterthought of the millions of lives whose future potential was stolen from them. This is the unfortunate path we as a society are seeing ourselves on as corporations and governments harvest our wills to live outside their overpowering agendas.