Memory, as they say, and assay, is a strange and curious thing: it has a plasticity that somehow still conveys the truth of something while generously protecting the mind from the horrors and chaos of an uncaring universe, the human condition reduced to its essentials. Any literature aspiring to greatness is going to explore our peculiar predicament of being sentient in what appears to be a mindless cosmos; Clive Barker's additions to the canon, Blakean in their imagery & themes, invoking love (an expression of divinity) alongside corruption (the material world), are what high art is made of. (And as with the highest forms, he takes some of his prima materia from the lower depths.)
From sex, to politics, and religion, it's all about bodies and who controls them, but some of this is about remembering.
I was twenty-two when I saw Nightbreed at the theater in 1990 and had come wondering what the hell it was about since 20th Century Fox insisted that it be marketed as a slasher.
When you're that young, you frankly don't know shit, yet paradoxically believe you know everything, you're molten, outside, unassimilated into society at that point--therefore, "dangerous." Obviously, I've changed a lot since then: now I know how little I know and knew then. At that time, romantic love meant everything to me, now, not so much, yet, life being circular, you tend to come back around to things. Experience leavens base innocence. Barker had a very ambitious agenda indeed when he attempted to foist his non-Manichean monster movie onto an unsuspecting American public used to a more black and white storytelling; what you had was a collision of "mindsets" (his term for it) about fictional monsters being fodder for militarized "heroes." In 1990, no one wanted to try to the understand the other whether they were human or a fictional monster. That should be a reminder that there are no others ultimately, and that the monsters we've conjured in storytelling are often mirrors of ourselves to get beyond that screen.
Context being everything, this all came to a head on the eve of the first Gulf War when the public was being whipped into another cycle (see?) of hating the other; additionally, the movie was released just weeks after the illegal invasion of Panama. The Soviet Union was busy collapsing; German reunification occurred just three days before its release, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, less than a week earlier. Old habits tend to continue on anyway, anachronistically.
The timing was bad on all fronts for Barker who was nobly spitting into the cultural trade winds with his film version of his 1988 novel Cabal: unfortunately, the suits at Morgan Creek wanted something more like Hellraiser, the idea of the monsters in a horror movie (really, a fantasy with elements of horror) being the good guys didn't sit well with them, and they rejected it as out of hand and demanded Barker make extensive cuts and reshoots. What it did was to place the psychotic psychiatrist character played by legendary cult director David Cronenberg more at the center of the story; they also demanded that there be more of an emphasis on the menacing qualities of the nightbreed. Not only did they miss the point of most classic monster movies, they just wouldn't listen to Barker, and so, what went out into the world was a confused fusion of his and their ideas. The good side is, they weren't able to remove the sympathy for the breed, outsiders all, but they did incredible harm to the love story between main characters Boone and Lori with all their meddling. A movie that cost $10 million--and a bargain for Morgan Creek at that--made less than nine, and that was that, it bombed, having an afterlife on cable and home video. Part of Barker's legend as a prodigy was that the total cost of Hellraiser had been under $1 million USD.
Say what you want, but he made an epic with his second film, and that's where the money people come in, and serendipitously perhaps, the themes in the original story material got underlined in real life. The failure haunted Barker for years.
The more jaded among us might see one reading the movie as a parable of the modern world crashing into the author's anachronistic fantasy world with sadly predictable results. Occasionally, the universe smiles and throws something unpredictable out there: a small but fundamental victory for the underdog. You could write an entire book on the themes in Nightbreed, from the content of the script, to the theatrical & final cuts, and the politics of the actual making (or, really, unmaking) of the movie itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum. In the end, the breed are history's losers, and conversely, winners, like the heretics of the world religions and every other kind of social rebel that ever lived under a repressive order. You cannot kill the truth. But in 1990, history seemed settled, that seemed to be that, the show was over, and there are very few second chances with motion pictures. Did I mention that homophobia was actually worse than it is today?
However, a lot of us out here felt that something was missing from the theatrical cut, as evinced in the opening titles of that showed scenes which were cut. (Some still are, but now we're fortunate enough to have access to the outtakes in pristine condition.) Beginning with some of Barker's public statements and various rumors over the last twenty-four years, considerable force has been gaining for a new cut. I direct the reader to search out the story of the "Cabal cut" which made a final reconstruction of Barker's original vision possible, a convoluted tale in itself. After years of searching, an announcement was made last year that the lost film elements had finally been found in a storage warehouse in Dayton, Ohio. What was once the detritus of a lost vision had become a global cause via Internet outreach and public showings of the Cabal cut. By 2013, the stage was set and cinematic history was about to be rewritten, and that's a rare occasion. Shout Factory! has made good on that promise and beyond. Its message of universal love is central, but I believe the restoration is also about fixing a work of LGBT filmmaking that advocates the same message of acceptance as Richard Oswald's Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919), the first pro-gay movie in cinematic history. Both movies were damaged for ideological reasons.
If Barker's Cabal and Nightbreed remind us of anyone in literature, it's Arthur Machen. Machen was a Welsh Catholic who, ironically enough, had an intense fear of forbidden sex, a kind of ritual sex he was made aware of by fellow occultist and American expatriate A. E. Waite, co-author of what is still the most popular version of the Tarot. To be a Catholic in Britain at that time was considered a little eccentric. After Cornelius Agrippa, Waite was also the first to systematically catalog and study the Western inner tradition and was a sworn enemy of Aleister Crowley. When it comes to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there's plenty of subversive sexuality, inside and outside of the magic circles. I'm not suggesting that Barker based Nightbreed on the politics of esoteric lodges, no, albeit a lodge of that sort could be considered a "cabal" of another kind. Here, we really could go on forever, because that's how the occult works, it's a rabbit hole. Similarly, the Gnostics and other religious minorities and sects were once smeared as sexual deviants; the pagan has been equated with homosexuality; accused witches were blamed for male impotency, and so on. Being different can be dangerous in human society.
The reason I mention Machen is that he wrote similarly weird tales that dealt with shunned races who fled underground from human society. That sounds just like the tale of any human outsider. But is it really metaphor when faced with the incredible fact that everyone who isn't African has a percentage of Neanderthal coursing through their veins? And not so long ago, the bones of "Hobbits" ("homo floresiensis") have been found in caves on an Indonesian island, suggesting that the human story and what constitutes human beings is plastic, always changing, and open to wide interpretation and revision, if not correction. The results of some of that pondering have been catastrophic, such as in the application of eugenics philosophy to social problems, first, in North America, and not much later, Shark Island and in Nazi Germany. Artistic truth can be funny in the way that it naturally draws our attention to these truths of the human experience. A lot of what happens in Nightbreed in its final cut has a lot to do with the first half of the 20th century and the legacy of a long history of genocide.
Machen wrote most of his incredible weird tales about "little people" (and worse) living underground--"where the monsters live."
"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing they have in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. ... But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain? (from "The Black Seal," 1895)
The Basques have been found to have an unusual genetic connection to the Neanderthal. Who are the monsters, and who are the humans? Only action and love as will can tell us.
And now, my memory of Nightbreed is changed forever, and base metal has been transmuted to gold. Being human is to be in the process of remembering and forgetting. Nightbreed is about remembering where we've been.
You know, Bill Maher is a smarmy, egomaniacal asshole, a complete jerk. I wasn't going to bother watching this movie when my brother called me about wanting to see it. We almost never see movies together, maybe every five-years-or-so. What did I have to lose?
So I went, and my brother showed-up about five-minutes-in claiming it took a flying saucer to get him there--something like that. Then he started shouting at the screen unintelligibly, throwing popcorn everywhere like a Hunter S. Thompson sidekick. Anyway, I would have been missing-out had I not taken him up on seeing this very provocative movie.
I can't say that I expected much: Maher's HBO shows like "Politically Incorrect" and "Real Time," are reasonably popular but also tend to showcase Maher's egocentricity and brand of reactionary assholism. The comedian frankly reminds me of his personal friend Dennis Miller whose long-lost career as a comedian caused him to go begging around at Fox News for a job at...being who he really was all-along, an arch-conservative, reactionary asshole. Maher strikes me as different, but with tendencies towards the same direction as his pal Miller. It's isn't that I don't agree with him much of the time; it's how he tends to come-off, which is as a cocksure materialist Hollywood asshole.
And yet, here in his film "Religulous," he's correct again and a much more restrained kind of asshole.
The film is a kind of documentary with more than a few nods to Michael Moore's style, interspersing the interviews with rapid-fire retorts from Maher and company in the form of excerpts from cruddy Hollywood biblical epics (think Cecil B. Demille), dorky religious "educational" films, and from news archives. It's a very effective style, especially when Maher goes as far as to have text-comments responses and observations on the screen when he's sparring with various religious idiots of various persuasions. This makes for a very funny approach that gets a lot of well-earned laughs for their wit and concision. At times, Maher competes with Lenny Bruce in how astute and unique his observations are, but like Lenny, he has similar limitations.
But how can you beat those Christian creationist-themed museums and amusement parks? One can imagine hipsters running-roughshod over each other to get into the places to experience them in an "elevated" state of consciousness...
One might call the film's approach to its subject unfair, but this is also entertainment, let's face it. It's hard to say how much input the oddly-attired director Larry Charles (Borat) had in all of this, though it appears that most of the time all he and Maher had to do was to concoct a few meetings and scenarios, write a few questions, and let their camcorders record what happened after that. This is a simple and economical way of film-making in many respects since the comedian has a decades of improvisational experience. Several reviews have stated that Maher picked straw-man opponents who were easy targets for a man who's done stand-up comedy and media appearances for 30 years, yet you don't tend to get this impression watching the film. That's a red herring argument. He approached believers, the main criterion. It's about faith, stupid.
Yes, sometimes one could say that Maher's "rude" and even "pointed" in his interrogations (sorry, couldn't pass on that one), that he's "unfair" and "biased" in his sense of "superiority," but they're simply missing-the-point. It's doubtful that very many religious thinkers and fundamentalists were going to talk to him at all, so he took a more "populist" approach and went out to talk to the rank-and-file, really the most important part of religion as a problematic part of human life and culture.
One specific interview with a UK Pakistani rapper Aki Nawaz (aka Propa-Gandhi) who extols religious intolerance and war makes a good argument for the renewal of Paki-bashing, though his his subject does a much better job at undermining his arguments than Maher does. Nawaz is clearly an idiot and a hypocrite, but you have to show these people for what they are. Some have written that Maher won't let the bizarre rapper get a word in edgewise, but when you see the lyrics to his raps on a split-screen, it's forgivable. It's one of the few times he does it in the entire film.
This is what's so impressive about the movie itself: Maher is generally known for being much more hyperbolic and confrontational than this, and he tends to let his subjects skewer themselves, often just posing a few reasonable questions and listening to the absurdities flowing from them. Granted, when he hits, he hits hard, but he's not being unfair here. The man has certainly grown and I'm impressed.
But then, there's the faults in the film (though they're few): Maher does a strange thing and trots in Jewish Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta sect who's against the existence of the state of Israel (an "anti-Zionist") on theological-grounds. This is where Maher strays badly, as there's an inverse to the rabbi in the far-right Israeli and international Jewish community's--and strongly religious--reasoning of a sole Jewish stake in Palestine. This is just one example of the comedian's arch-conservatism inside and outside of the film. Indeed, Maher shows us how truly bizarre and wrong Judaism and most other major faiths are, but he makes an exception with the rabbi, exposing his own very slanted bias about the Palestinian question. This isn't to say that he's "wrong"--his very strong opinions for a Jewish state are valid after the Holocaust. They ring true, as Western history has amply illustrated. As a matter of fact, the core of his own reasoning here is more-than-valid, and Jews have good cause to aspire to statehood for logical security reasons. But he's making a very odd exception here that's troubling, and like most Jewish statists, he goes too far, just as Yisroel Dovid Weiss and his inverted opponents. When Maher walks-out on him, it's unsurprising, and I don't support his views here at all.
Yet, with 1 billion Muslims in the world, and 14 million Jews, his opinion is not unwarranted. What he misses, however, is that Israel is still being used a client state to control, destabilize, and divide the Middle East for geopolitical aims. Once it was the Romans, now it's the Americans and the rest of the West, hungry for cheap oil. In some ways, he misses his own point underscored at the end of the film. Whether his omissions are intentional or just a matter of running time, or just too many roads to go down, is the question. One could go on-and-on about the Palestinian question, and Maher probably saw a real quagmire in his section on Judaism and so just stuck to more superificial-aspects of how wacky the Orthodox version of the faith really is (trust me, it is). For the record, this writer believes that Israel has the right to exist, as does a Palestinian state and that it should be brokered diplomatically rather than through violence by all parties.
Even with its problems, Maher and Charles have made a very accessible argument for why religious belief is a "plague" (stated not by Maher, but by a Vatican astronomer) infecting humanity.
One of his finest-points is about Islam: like Christianity, it's undeniably a conquest faith that nowadays has very little tolerance for the beliefs of others on almost any level, and that's coming directly from the Koran. Judaism is essentially the same these days in its statist incarnation, but a quick look at the Torah (the "Old Testament" to Christians) offers-up numerous examples of conquest and even genocide by the tribes of Israel.
What's so interesting and enjoyable about Religulous are the gaggle of morons he interviews and just how obviously hypocritical (and possibly nuts) many of them are. His interview with Senator Mark Pryor, a faux-Democrat from Arkansas, must be seen to be believed. At one point, Pryor admits, "There's no I.Q. test to be a senator." No shit? There should be, even trumping election results if they don't pass. While we're at it, how about a mandatory psychological examination for office-holders as well? The audience I watched the film with all laughed very heartily over Pryor's statement, their chortles coming from the news of our current economic crisis and the last eight years of misgovernance. Hey, people still went to the movies when the Great Depression was on, so why can't we?
Perhaps the biggest hole in the film is the exclusion of other major religions, though they're tapped by the film by-implication. Surely, though, we could have seen how ridiculous many Eastern religions are, especially Hiduism with its castes and absurd rules and laws dictating behavior. There are so many other examples as to be dizzying, and that's part of the answer. Maher goes after the "worst offenders," the major world religions. He might have included Buddhism, though it really does struggle to match the absurd credulities required to be a follower of Islam and Christianity.
Maher's most successful accomplishment is in illustrating that religion has enslaved humanity to the few for millenia, and he deserves a great deal of credit for stating it where he states it. The majority of us know about the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the crusades and Islamic holy wars that spread the faiths across the globe, and violently more often than not. We all know this. Truisms don't need repeating. That's one of the main messages of the film itself--the toxic-effect religion has had on humanity is well-known from the historical record, and talking with biblical scholars isn't going to shed much more light either as they tend to agree generally with Maher on the oddness of literalism and fundamentalism in religion rather than a symbolical or allegorical reading of the "sacred texts." No film--even one five-hours-long--could adequately address all of this. Good job, and we "non-believers" have a lot of work to do.
