Except that sometimes, the terrain of the child within is a freakin' scary place. I'm not even talking about diabolical spring of parent-induced trauma.

For example, remember the routines you had to put yourself through to mentally maintain some kind of control of your surroundings, which you were usually helpless to understand? Habits that would cause a diagnosis of serious obsessive-compulsive disorder in an adult? Not only were there times when you could absolutely not step on any cracks in the sidewalk, but you would have to repeat certain movements or thoughts a prescribed number of times in order to save your mother from dying, or to prevent something equally terrifying from happening. How about the lunacy of verbally repeating or reading words over and over until they appear to be utter nonsense? That one could be kind of fun, until the terrifying realization that nothing is as it appears to be settles in. How about the one where you lie in bed at night imagining infinity? You lay there in the dark, thinking about the universe, and try to get your head around the meaning of never-ending. The existential angst that this produces may not be a desirable re-visitation.

The primal rage of the child within is especially frightening in its lack of control or understanding of its origins. I remember having tantrums in which the blood-boiling anger verged on the homicidal. During one tantrum, I threw the contents of my room into a great pile in the middle of the floor, with visions of torching it all. How does a small child even have these impulses? Does anyone really want to re-visit this violence and fear that is an innate aspect of the child within?

Certain children's entertainment programming induced a kind of primal fear, a cloying existential creepiness that was downright terrifying, and lingers to corrupt the existing child within. Bruno Bettelheim as well as other child psychologists have made careers out of delving into the notion of how children's entertainment, in his case fairy tales, purposely tap into the creeping fear of children so that they can be trained and controlled.

Certainly this was true of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. An adult for more decades than I can believe, I still have nightmares about the repellent Child Catcher. I experienced this same kind of terror once watching one of my favorite after-school programs, Speed Racer. A usually benign show, during this particular episode I succumbed to unstrung shrieking, and ran to my dad in the living room, who was perplexed that a tough kid could be so scared watching something so banal. But he didn't see it. The sequence had to do with someone you love turning on you and becoming evil. It is a frightening archetype of what one actually has to deal with if one has intimate relationships with drunks, drug addicts, or the mentally unstable. Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, I have found this clip of Speed Racer, and I have to say, the creeping horror still spooks me and my child within:

TRIXIE'S DREAM

My husband, a childhood Dr. Who fanatic, describes feeling the creeping existential horror he felt fairly frequently upon viewing his favorite program. This was a show that, though frequently frightening to even adults, was broadcast at 5:30pm on Saturdays, a children's timeslot.

He was also freaked by a certain episode of Space: 1999. Upon viewing it, the child within me indeed recoils:

DRAGON'S DOMAIN

Me and my child within have regressed into a quivering fetal position under the bed, hiding from the bogeyman in the closet.

The Pilgrims Progress was written by John Bunyan in the seventeenth century during the reign of Charles II while Bunyan was in prison for preaching Christian doctrine outside of the state-supported Church of England. The reputation that precedes The Pilgrims Progress may be one of boring catechism. In actuality, it is a floridly imagined adventure on par with The Lord of the Rings, and as rife for cinema. Many of the pilgrims of Bunyan's ilk fled to the New World to escape persecution. And religious freedom is an ideal greatly beloved by Hollywood and America. That is, unless you're Muslim.

The Pilgrims Progress is a hero's journey, an archetype employed in nearly every American action film. Good news, as if there's anything that Hollywood loves, it's repetition. The story follows Christian, an Everyman, as he travels from his humble home in order to find the Celestial City, i.e. heaven. Along the way, he encounters numerous stock characters, such as Faithful and Timorous, whose mere names and respective actions bludgeon one with their obviousness.

As Christian journeys, an insane amount of tests and travails occur. Like The Lord of the Rings, there is endless hiking through inclement terrains inhabited by threatening personalities, where epic battles and spiritual tests must be performed. One of the most significant sequences plays out as Christian and his fellow pilgrim Faithful arrive at the moral decrepitude that is the city of Vanity Fair, where their objections to the avarice of commerce manifested therein leads to the grisly execution of Faithful (a perfect foil for Hollywood to exemplify its self-perceived altruism). Christian escapes, only to later enter the Valley of Humiliation, where he spends hours fighting Apollyon, a scaly, winged dragon who, like most of the foes, is a stand-in for Satan. Having survived all this, does Christian get a break? No; with the relentlessness of current action cinema, he continues to endure an all more torturous journey. Christian and his latest traveling companion, Hopeful, become imprisoned in Doubting Castle by the Giant Despair; threatened by their faith, this sad and violent creature beats them and leaves them in an airless cell to starve to death; but through providence, they escape. One can almost feel the itch of the animation supervisors' fingers as they prepare to twiddle the keys of the latest CG technology to illustrate the spectacle.

The second part of The Pilgrim's Progress follows the journey of Christian's wife, "Christiana," and their children, who eventually decide to follow Christian's righteous example to find the Celestial City. Insanely lurid trials and tribulations follow, such as an encounter with a "Romish" monster with seven heads and ten horns, who "would also carry away their children, and teach them to suck its whelps"; and peering into a hole in the hill, "or that commonly called the By-way to Hell." Christiana and her children are weighed down for quite some time by their barely functioning companion, aptly named Mr. Feeblemind. As they at last set out from the Land of Beulah (vaguely akin to Rivendell), Christiana reaches redemption through her long and virtuous suffering. Dad was right all along.

Hollywood loves to show a left-wing face animated by a right-wing brain. And it presently holds a consuming passion for unflagging action sequences, demons, torture, and explosions. What could be a better holiday cash cow than The Pilgrims Progress: The Movie? Once that succeeds, we may finally be ready for The Qu'ran: The Musical.

Hoping for a diversion from existential angst, a friend and I went to see The Dark Knight. What ensued was not a diversion from the angst, but a pummeling further into its depths.
The following commentary is in no way to be construed as currently topical, The Dark Knight having been out for a couple of months. It's just taken me this long to disentangle myself from the malevolence portrayed therein.

Becoming inured to insupportable violence has become de rigueur for film viewing audiences. The Dark Knight encapsulates this trend in filmmaking that I've been hoping would evolve into something else, a film whose primary objective is to beat the audience into submission through a combination of graphic superviolence, fast cutting, a deafening soundtrack, and a disregard for human suffering. This has gone beyond a niche to permeate nearly every film released, The Dark Knight being the present apotheosis of this style.

I mainly enjoyed the first half of The Dark Knight. The shot compositions and camera work showed the talent and skill of the director, Christopher Nolan. The script, by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, was tight and adept. The performance by Heath Ledger was virtuosic in its business of psychopathology, a killer clown run rampant. Christian Bale, an actor I do not always favor due to his often smug and self-conscious portrayals, was subdued and almost touching in the role of a rasping, morally conflicted Batman. Batman has always been an interesting superhero because of his self-enforced duty to fight crime, and the moral conflicts that arise through this imprimatur. But there's the rub: who wants a superhero so morally conflicted that people die and institutions burn because of his mistakes? As the second half of the film sunk into utter darkness without a tad of redemption, I wondered why this is the modus operandi of every superhero now? We have Hancock, why must Batman to be like this too?

The reason seems apparent: that many people feel that we are living in a time in which we can depend on nothing, and the fabric of our governments, economies, and social structures are rending beneath us. The Dark Knight does not just suggest this state of being, but revels in it. Like many great films that concretize the reality in which they exist, it proves that this view is no longer an abstraction. No caped crusader is going to fly in and save us. The wealth, power, and scientific innovation in Batman's capable hands can do little against moral corruption and unmitigated violence. He tries again and again to successfully aid the cynical police department and the vulnerable citizenry, as do his allies on the ground, ably played by Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Gary Oldman. Neither they nor Batman can do anything against the terror and violence wrought by the bloodthirsty Joker.

Didn't the Joker used to be that, a kind of funny, wacky, if dangerous criminal? The Joker in The Dark Knight embodies the kind of violence only seen in the worst possible human situations, like war or prison; or in the insidious everyday desperation of the wicked patriarch who has absolute control of his family through pathological violence and manipulation, like that guy in Austria who kept his family locked away in the basement. This is some evil-ass stuff. This Joker is not motivated by money, like most villains. When he has a huge pile of it, he burns it. He is only interested in the power of unimpeded destruction and control. That it is brought about by a juggernaut of self-loathing seems to be the only conceivable explanation of this extraordinary flaw. That life seemed to imitate art in the death of Heath Ledger upon completion of The Dark Knight makes the bleakness of the film more chilling.

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw a surge in divertingly sugary tales and splashy musicals in the cinema. Will this be how cinema evolves going forward? Or as more people feel alienated from the promise of social humanity, will the filmmaking trend of irredeemable darkness and violence displayed in The Dark Knight continue unabated? Whatever you do, don't go to see The Dark Knight if you're looking for light, comic book diversion. Better to stick with goofy Spider-Man.

BERETTA: NOT JUST FOR ROBERT BLAKE ANYMORE

Also, next door on your right over there, there's new Dregulator flogging an old DARPA robot-horse in a Brave New Way....

Be forewarned: attending an expensive university film program may teach you how films are made, but they will not help you become an independent filmmaker. There are reasons why it is called the film "business." Heed my tale.

I attended the New York University graduate film school. Learning from the same instructors who taught Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee seemed like a dream come true. I would learn motion picture production skills by which I could earn a living. And the greatest hope of all would be that, like Jarmusch and Lee before me, I would have the opportunity to become an "independent filmmaker."

At NYU, we learned of the rigid hierarchy that Hollywood dictates to American filmmaking, and how it was crucial to honor and respect it. It soon became clear that filmmaking was the dominion of the wealthy, steeped in nepotism, and that the school was, in actuality, a male-dominated Hollywood prep school.

Still, this went against the messages we were hearing about the burgeoning profession of "independent filmmaker." Look at Susan Seidelman! Look at Tom DiCillo! These people were making the films they wanted to make on their own terms, and no movie studio could tell them that quirky characters and black and white images were a no-go. Why, Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi on just $5,000 that he charged on his credit card. And it's the hit of the year, and heavy-hitting producers are lining up to work on his next picture!

Those of us who were not making slick, predictable film "products" with the assumption of working for a studio were advised to write a screenplay and shop it around to production companies. You had to work hard and pay your dues, but if you were willing to do so, you could be rewarded by having your film independently produced, your vision as an artist left relatively intact.

I was willing to work hard. I shopped my screenplays around for years, slogging away at the drudgery of freelance motion picture productions in order to earn a living. Working fourteen hours a day on MTV reality shows and A&E intro sequences would all be in the past once I hit my stride as an independent filmmaker. But somehow my screenplays weren't attractive to the production companies. They were too "arty," too "literary." American audiences don't understand subtlety, I was told. Try writing a chick flick.

Why weren't any of my colleagues becoming successful filmmakers by making their own feature films, and "creating a buzz" that would allow them to continue to do so? After ten years, I realized that no one I knew from NYU had become an independent filmmaker. Nor had any of the people I knew from the other major league graduate film schools. Most had given up and started new careers, and the only ones who had hung on were being financed to retain this extravagant dream by affluent and indulgent parents. The luckier Hollywood scions had administrative jobs at studios. What had happened to the El Mariachis of the world?

The answer is that independent filmmaking does not exist. El Mariachi was not made for $5,000. Neither was Tarnation, a 2003 film supposedly put together on the filmmaker's home computer. These films may have been shot for nominal amounts, but the filmmaking process doesn't end there. Films must be edited, a long-term and time-consuming process. Once that occurs, if a production company shows interest in the film, they must put it through innumerable stages of better edits, credit sequences, prints, marketing, and the like, to prepare it for the possibility of commercial distribution. Without distribution, the film will never be seen. Who controls virtually all film distribution in this country? Large Hollywood monopolies consisting of movie studios, cable television giants, and multiplex theatres. These monopolies depend upon polished and formulaic film products that will make them as much money as possible. Remakes are popular, as they are known entities that have already earned large profits in previous iterations. Films holding new ideas and styles outside of familiar genres are not going to be distributed, because their profit margins are unascertained.

Why perpetuate the myth that independent filmmaking exists? Because exclusive institutions such as NYU, staffed and attended by Hollywood progeny, need breeding grounds where the misinformation that filmmaking is a democratic pursuit is maintained. And more importantly, because Hollywood is an industry that relies on myth making and mystique, and on the collective fantasy that anyone can do anything in America. Hollywood executives love the delusion that they will be the ones to discover the next, hugely profitable talent. That almost all of this talent has no possibility of reaching them is of negligible concern to the myth itself.

I have since learned that all the big names in "independent filmmaking," including some of the aforementioned, have rejected the notion as well. They have either been absorbed by the Hollywood system, or burned by it to the point that they work only on its periphery. Some operate in other countries, or, if they have been commercially successful at some point, by financing their own production houses. They do not believe in the existence of the independent filmmaker, and neither should we.

Because the commercial formula that we see in every Hollywood film was cemented early on, the artistic and experimental possibilities of the medium were eschewed to the netherworld, where they remain. Motion picture is too expensive a medium to play around with, and due to this country's distribution system, we will never see the few experiments.

Can't you hear that "symbolic crash" resounding all over America?

I AM THE PARACLETE

So many public figures, lately, are ethically choking themselves out and prove the world wrong for loving them. Some gnawing suspicion that they do not deserve what they have; some desire to build a Jenga-style champagne glass fountain in their private lives that grows large enough to shred their careers when it all comes tumbling down.

America sees its shadow; feels fear. The dollar is worth less that 100 yen. Repent.

Entropy Itself

It's his job to represent his brand of cultural malignancy, and my job to simply, factually report on it, for Salon.com

Once a year, fiends. Like The Easter Bunny, hollow chocolate eggs and all.

Skol.

X.

I hope we can all laugh about the Great American Sliming of '07 someday, and not just because we all bought the new Wii version of GOP Ultimate Smackdown.

In any case, it finally feels like Good is trying to snap out of its Zoloft stupor and figure out how to triumph over Evil again. Mary Baker Eddy was probably right: Evil has to go down. In the end, it always reveals itself as so fearfully square that nobody with any style wants to be seen with it.

Happy New Year, Fiends, and Alafia and ASH-X for All.

X.

MAD LOVE TO THE COMRADES

It was also, although we had no way of knowing it then, weirdly prophetic of future events that seemed unimaginable at the time.

Written by and starring La Cobra Blanca. Directed by Tim Boxell. Thank you internet Gods.

Goldman Sachs has some very heavy alumni creedling around the halls of power, performing the dark arts of macroeconomic sorcery. Bob Zoellick, John Corzine.....why, it's practically a bacterial petri-dish for breeding the most virulent, humanism-resistant strains of PNAC.

Mac n' Sleaze

Brrrr. Kind of makes you want to run away to a yurt and eat bark, if there was a way to do it that didn't involve hippies. Lord knows that macroeconomics are easier to eat than macrobiotics. But only just.

Select quotes from the text:

"Charged... with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism 'Enhanced Interrogation,' (Daniel) Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them ... was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be waterboarded....

.... And he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die -- still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him,could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us, the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love, he could not convince his being that he wasn't drowning.

Waterboarding, he said, is torture. Legally, it is torture! Practically, it is torture! Ethically, it is torture! And he wrote it down.

Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd president: 'The United States of America ... does not torture.'

Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.....

....Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction -- well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find ... because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison."

****

Keeeeeeeith. Keeeeeith. I toss rose petals at your gleaming chariot.

Thanks again, Mr. Olbermann.

And if you don't like it, talk to the kids I adopted from the Sudan Liberation Army.

Mama Say Knock You Out

Ha ha! Made you eat it!

Who knew that those mean boys in the alley who made "stew" in old milk cartons and force-fed it to the smaller boys would someday end up controlling the everyday grocery supplies of our great nation....with hilarious results!