With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s Rod Dreher commenting on this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water. (If you aren’t familiar with the story — due, perhaps, to your having been in a coma for several months — it is about a woman who enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with an anthropoid fish-creature.)
Mr. Dreher offers an acute comment from a reader:
[T]he turmoil we’re witnessing is basically a transfer of power from “regular” people to the freaks. Everything previously deemed inferior, abnormal, marginal, obscene is now not only normalized but embraced, even glorified. In his book The Antichrist, Nietzsche denounced Christianity as a perversion of all good and healthy values. He called for a total revolution in values, to overturn Christian morality and replace it with its opposite. That’s what we’re seeing now, at a very deep level.
This wouldn’t matter that much if our new lords weren’t so full of rancor and determined to get their revenge on those who humiliated them, hence the attacks on the various “privileges” that systematically target the representatives of the old order: patriarchy, masculinity, heterosexuality, “whiteness” and — yes — Christianity. As a member of a minority group, this shouldn’t worry me so much, as many aspects of said “old order” were not worth preserving or friendly to me. But I’m telling you, what is coming threatens to be much worse because it’s revenge, not justice.
Revenge it is. Another of Mr. Dreher’s commenters quotes Jimmy Kimmel, hosting the Academy Awards on Sunday, on another popular movie:
“We don’t make films like [pederasty celebration] ‘Call Me By Your Name’ for money, We make them to upset Mike Pence.”
Whither hence, readers?
4 Comments
“One of us! One of us!” … In modern culture, freaks have been lauded as somehow blessed for a long time. Sure it’s revenge, but it’s more about TPTB encouraging the freaks as shock troops. That’s working much better than when they tried to use the poor and minorities, at least in this country.
Freaks for revenge? What is that somebody said about revenge…if you set out to get revenge, first dig two graves?
After a while normal people will get tired of freaks and fight back in some surprising ways. Some people will only be pushed so far.
To be fair, I don’t think that Nietzsche would have seen ” The Shape of Water” as anything but late-Bourgeoise decadance. Or as Lenin once said ” All Bourgeoise are disgusting, but the most disgusting of all is the Anti-Bourgeoise Bourgeoise!”
I did a review too of this hideous movie right after seeing it on Christmas Day.
I echoed the sentiments and also summoned Nietzsche, yet clearly Nietzsche would see this film as an abomination, as his rubric for the transvaluation of values no way approbates vengeance.
This film is the paragon of a myopic, decapitated Christianity, wherein meek narcissism which rejects veritable adaptation to an external world frames the categorical progenitor of thriving in it – the white man – as villainy. All because he has standards for maintaining the acme of human civilization.
Isn’t it intriguing, though, how the cultural degeneracy has intensified correlative to its enervating influence? I speak of course to the dissolution of mass culture evidenced by the decline of mass media since the birth of the world wide web.
I am hopeful this film, and its celebration by a cabal of moral degenerates who sardonically aim at sermonizing through art, is an inflection point.