by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

If you walk into the film industry and start interviewing people like Eli Roth, you will almost certainly hear incredible and bizarre things. Roth would tell you that he aspires to “fuck up an entire generation”[1] through movies.

Roth and his brethren have been in the business for years, so they know the drill. Roth probably knows the story of Samson and Delilah. He probably knows that Samson’s lust darkened his mind and eventually sent him to his death.[2]

Roth almost certainly knows that the best way to destroy the morals of his audience is to prey on their lust and appetite. That is why Roth’s brethren have spent years fighting against obscenity laws and pornography in the United States.[3]



roth2

As Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams himself puts it,

“Older generation of Jewish filmmakers and actors, here [Woody] Allen, [Stanley] Kubrick and [Ron] Jeremy, arguably not only increased the Jewishness of their work but updated it to match the new post-1990 sensibility by defining it in increasingly sexualized (and pornographic) terms.”[4]

Abrams declared elsewhere that “Jewish involvement in porn” is actually “is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.”[5]

Another Jewish scholar by the name of Josh Lambert tells us that people like Larry David and Sarah Silverman “are challenging America’s powerful religious, family-friendly culture and asserting their Jewishness by glorifying obscenity.”[6]

Yet David and Silverman are hardly the only people who are “glorifying obscenity” in Hollywood. David Cronenberg obviously beat them to the punch. Cronenberg got to the heart of the matter years ago by laying out his ideological weltanschauung in an interview with Rolling Stone this way:

“Nothing is true. It’s not an absolute. It’s only a human construct, very definitely able to change and susceptible to change and rethinking. And you can then be free. Free to be unethical, immoral, out of society, and an agent for some other power, never belonging.

“Ultimately, if you are an existentialist and you don’t believe in God and the judgment after death, then you can do anything you want: You can kill, you can do whatever society considers the most taboo thing.”[7]

Cronenberg’s moral calculus here is logically and philosophically incoherent. If “nothing is true,” then Cronenberg’s statement that “nothing is true” is not true. In order for the statement to make sense, Cronenberg has to assume that it is true! And if it is true, then the “nothing is true” is categorically false, which means that his entire argument collapses.

In short, Cronenberg is positing truth claims while denying truth exists! He is trapped in his own ideological matrix.[8]

Living the incoherency of his system aside, Cronenberg is basically saying that you can only be free if you can come to the conclusion that nothing is true and that morality is, as philosopher Michael Ruse believes, “flimflam.”[9] But because he is morally and intellectually blind, Cronenberg could not realize that his axiom is self-defeating.

Morality, as we all know, is inexorably linked to practical reason. It is also essential to esthetic truth and intellectual pursuit and honesty. As E. Michael Jones rightly puts it,

“The intellectual life is a function of the moral life of the thinker. In order to apprehend truth, which is the goal of the intellectual life, one must live a moral life. One can produce an intellectual product, but to the extent that one prescinds from living the moral life, that product will be more a function of internal desire—wish fulfillment, if you will than external reality. This is true of any intellectual field and any deeply held desire.”[10]

Truth, as Plato puts it, is like seeing things the way they really are.[11] And the practical reason (another word for morality) is one of the main tools for discovering metaphysical truth.

Yet since Cronenberg dismisses practical reason in his ideological calculus, there was no way for him to make a logical point without falling into his own trap. In the process, he has become a monster, as one scholar has argued.[12]

The Rolling Stone interviewer asked, “Does the artist have any moral or social responsibility?” Cronenberg:

“No…Your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about social or political responsibility, you’ve amputated the best limbs you’ve got as an artist. You are plugging into a very restrictive system that is going to push and pull and mold you and is going to make your art totally useless and ineffective.”[13]

Cronenberg’s philosophy, scholar William Beard tells us, is “the disappearance of ethics.”[14] It is actually “a world of unimpeded desires without consequences, where ‘everything is permitted.’ Metaphorically, this is the world of violent video games, of indulgent Hollywood movies, and also of the transgressive, boundary-piercing cinema of David Cronenberg.”[15]

No responsibility, no morality, no ethical values, and no limit, nothing but ultimate meaninglessness and existential hell in movies. Existence itself, as indicated in Cronenberg’s movie eXistenZ, means corruption, moral degradation, and ultimately pathetic death. The axiom of eXistenZ is that “nothing is true; everything is permitted.”[16]

“Every time I kill someone in my movie,” says Cronenberg, “I’m rehearsing my own death…It’s an existential truth, it’s very raw and real.” Didn’t Cronenberg state that nothing was true? Why is he now smuggling in truth in his philosophical trap?

Cronenberg, who has a “historic affinity with existentialism,”[17] is also playing with the lives of his viewers. He admits that eXistenZ is filled with “existential propaganda.”[18] Scholar William Beard comments:

“The disappearance of stable theoretical foundations for human society and human values, the stark realization of the insignificant position of humanity in a material cosmos, the undermining of all kinds of knowledge about the world and ourselves, leaves the existential human subject without a clear guideline for living, with no certainty of anything but his or her own death…Culture, science, the whole edifice of modern European civilization are ineffectual in addressing the individual’s desperate plight.”[19]

Once the existentialist denies metaphysical truth, he has to start creating his own “truth”: “From this, we must create ourselves as meaningful beings, and create the world as meaningful for ourselves. From this we must build up the new foundations of our own lives, adding other people, culture, history, and politics tentatively and fragmentedly as necessary…”[20]

Existentialists like Cronenberg, says Beard, “cut individuals off from the fundamental questions of personal existence, and leave them alienated in a world crowded with facts but void of meaning.”[21] The philosophy of existentialism teaches Cronenberg that people “are all doomed to die and be swallowed up by Nothingness, but along the way, we may carve out a niche or ledge on the cliff…”[22]

Therefore “science” and technology are meaningful if they can advance sexual desires and appetite.[23] It was no coincidence that Cronenberg seized technology in the information age to advance his appetite to a wider audience. He bragged that “technology is with us,”[24] meaning that he can use that kind of medium to get his essentially Freudian and therefore Talmudic ideas to unsuspecting viewers.

Put simply, Cronenberg is indirectly reinventing what Nietzsche would have called the transvaluation of all values, which again states that morality is an illusion and that any culture which becomes docile to the moral order must be overthrown.

But in order to do that, Cronenberg has to go back to his revolutionary roots, which is neither Western nor rational but essentially Talmudic or Freudian: “I think we start off with what Freud called a polymorphous perverseness.”[25]

One can easily argue that this “polymorphous perverseness” is at the core of virtually every Cronenberg film. In fact, Cronenberg admitted that characters in movies like Crash, M. Butterfly, Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, and Stereo, were “reinventing sexuality,”[26] which is another way of saying that Cronenberg’s characters were subverting the sexual order.[27] Cronenberg’s existential philosophy, Beard says, is

“sexual or predatory, a drive, an appetite, that invokes Freud far more readily than the Sartre who heatedly rejected a Freudian view of life in which individuals were unfree prisoners of their psychic histories and hardwired desires.”[28]

Cronenberg’s characters in eXistenZ, Beard continues,

“seem to reproduce that quasi-Freudian sense that their individual freedom—a sacrosanct item of the existentialist creed—is compromised by appetites that are so powerful they are strongly impelled to do something ethically ugly. This happens to Pikul in the Chinese restaurant. He finds he wants to kill the waiter and is told by Geller that the impulse is part of his game character’s make-up and that he won’t be able to do anything to stop it.”[29]


David and Brandon Cronenberg
David and Brandon Cronenberg

The interesting thing is that Cronenberg has successfully passed his essentially diabolical ideas to his son Brandon, who is now following the family tradition. That fact became quite obvious when David edited Brandon’s first feature film Antiviral,[30] which the Rolling Stone itself has described as “sickening,” and which has the same “disturbing obsession with bodies and technology that animates his father’s films, from The Fly and Dead Ringers to Videodrome and Existenz.”[31] The Rolling Stone reported,

“The son was infected with his father’s own sense of cerebral horror, and he is not rebelling against it. ‘I wrestled with it at first,’ he says, ‘but you get affected by how you grow up….’”[32]

Cronenberg, whether he likes it or not, should be called a Satanist precisely because he is anti-Logos.[33] But there is a bigger picture here. Cronenberg’s ideology has been transported to places like Japan as well. For example, one of Japan’s most controversial filmmakers is none other than Takashi Miike.

Miike says that he is a fervent admirer of directors like David Lynch (Lost Highway), Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), and of course David Cronenberg. These people are what one should call cultural subverters. Verhoeven meant it when he said:

“As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They’re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic.”[34]

Verhoeven also declares that he has been “fascinated by the occult: black magic, UFOs, and kinetic energy. I also experimented with hypnotism, trying to get my friends to remember former lives.”[35] It was a natural step for Verhoeven to move from an interest in the occult to bringing his viewpoint to life in films. Turning from the unknown and unknowable, Verhoeven replaced his own ideology with reality:

“My films became my anchor to reality, and I began to make extremely realistic movies. I felt compelled to show things as explicitly as possible—a tendency which many film critics have dismissed as banal.”[36]

Verhoeven applied this tendency most often to the area of sexuality, explicitly portraying sex in movies like Showgirls, Basic Instinct, Turkish Delight, and The Fourth Man. Yet even in RoboCop, which in comparison has little sexuality, Verhoeven’s worldview is clear—this time he is substituting Logos incarnate with his own imagination:

“It’s pure resurrection. For me, RoboCop is a Cytale. First, Murphy is gunned down in the most horrific way: that is Crucifixion. And it has to be so violent because the audience has to remember him.

“Before that, he has not done anything in the film. He comes to the police station to put on his uniform, then he goes after the villains with his partner, and bang! he is dead. That shooting is the only thing about him—I did that deliberately.

“Next, the film makes a steep descent into the finite, after which he experiences his Resurrection, in a modern-day…RoboCop is a Jesus figure—an American Jesus…Americans want to be humane, but if they think it takes too long, Christian morality is pushed aside for the moment and they go for their weapons—just like Robocop.”[37]

Biographer Rob van Scheers writes,

“Both in his films and in his personal life, Paul Verhoeven has always practiced a free sexual morality of which he makes no secret…Verhoeven would add in the gay magazine The Advocate: ‘Sex is a form of play—doing what you did when you were four or five years old and were playing in the street with your friends. Once you are grown up, it is difficult to be playful, but one of the ways you can is with sex. It is a way of showing yourself: That’s how I’m made. This is what I like.”[38]

Takashi Miike and Eli roth
Takashi Miike and Eli roth

In short, Verhoeven and Takashi Miike are on the same subversive boat. Both individuals want to overthrow the moral order. Eli Roth and Takashi Miike are also in the same boat, working to “fu$k an entire generation.” Of course, Roth himself admitted that he admires Miike’s work. In fact, Roth would have loved to make Ichi the Killer 2. Keep in mind that Ichi the Killer is one of Miike’s “most controversial films,” an “ultra-violent” film that portrays “sadomasochistic” scenes.

Miike admits in an interview with the BBC that he is a “feminist,” so it was inevitable that he would pull this ideology out of his film. “Miike has garnered international notoriety for depicting shocking scenes of extreme violence and sexual perversions…” Of course, this is exactly what Eli Roth and David Cronenberg have been doing for years.

What we are seeing here is that Hollywood stirred the subversive pot, and other nations such as Japan and South Korea followed suit. Even the new South Korean movie, Train to Busan, “borrows heavily from World War Z in its depiction of the fast-moving undead masses while also boasting an emotional core the Brad Pitt-starring extravaganza often lacked.”[39]

If no social progress is possible outside the moral order, then Satanists in Hollywood are contributing to the demise of social docility and cultural harmony around the world. The solution?

A return to practical reason and metaphysical Logos, the essence of true creativity and beauty. Movies such as The Lord of the Rings were written under those premises. As Israel Shamir rightly points out, Logos is “the main fountain of creativity.” Shamir also argues that true visual art or poetry simply cannot exist outside of Logos.[40]

If Satanists in Hollywood reject “the main fountain of creativity,” then they can only produce degradation, ugliness, meaninglessness, despair, and ultimate chaos and confusion. It was only a matter of time before the art world was used as a weapon against Logos:

“A photograph of a crucifix in a container of urine, entitled Piss Christ, was exhibited in the Whitney Museum, which is headed by a great friend of [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon, a member of Mega, Leonard Lauder.”[41]

This is one reason why people like Carolee Schneemann use nothing but blatant sadistic/ sadomasochistic sexual imagery in their “art.”

First published in October 2016.


Citations

  • [1] Quoted in Stuart Dredge, “Netflix series Hemlock Grove: ‘People want their horror horrific,’ says Eli Roth,” Guardian, April 10, 2013.
  • [2] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1054-1056.
  • [3] See Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
  • [4] Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 72.
  • [5] Nathan Abrams, “Triple-exthnics,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004.
  • [6] Josh Lambert, “‘Dirty Jews’ and the Christian Right,” Haaretz, February 3, 2014.
  • [7] David Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70.
  • [8] It is almost the same thing with relativism. I have been listening to an interview E. Michael Jones did with Alex Fontana during which Fontana declared that he doesn’t know if he agrees with “objective reality.” He then lays out his position by saying, “I guess I am a relativist.” I was completely stunned because during the entire interview Fontana was basically dissecting some ideas in the culture and implicitly arguing that they were wrong! Fontana could not see that there is no way to adjudicate two fundamentally opposite ideas if relativism is true. I was also shocked because relativism has been abandoned by serious thinkers years ago precisely because it is devoid of coherency and rigor. This is why Jones told him that relativism “is incoherent. It makes no sense ultimately.” I have discussed the incoherency of relativism in numerous articles. An example can be found here.
  • [9] Michael Ruse, “God is dead. Long live morality,” Guardian, March 15, 2010.
  • [10] E. Michael Jones, Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2012), 15.
  • [11] Plato, The Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 116.
  • [12] See for example William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
  • [13] Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70.
  • [14] William Beard, The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 434.
  • [15] Ibid., 443.
  • [16] Ibid., 434
  • [17] Ibid., 429.
  • [18] Ibid., 430.
  • [19] Ibid., 430-431.
  • [20] Ibid., 431.
  • [21] Ibid.
  • [22] Ibid., 433.
  • [23] Ibid., 430.
  • [24] Ibid., 446.
  • [25] Breskin, “David Cronenberg: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, February 6, 1992: 66-70.
  • [26] Beard, Artist as Monster, 452.
  • [27] Beard goes into great detail of this. See pages 452-453, 455-456.
  • [28] Beard, Artist as Monster, 433.
  • [29] Ibid., 434.
  • [30] Bruce Kirkland, “Brandon Cronenberg brings first feature film ‘Antiviral’ home,” Toronto Sun, September 9, 2012.
  • [31] Logan Hill, “’Antiviral’ Explores Sickness of Celebrity Culture,” Rolling Stone, April 10, 2013.
  • [32] Ibid.
  • [33] For a dissertation on this, see E. Michael Jones, “The Great Satan and Me: Reflections on Iran and Postmodernism’s Faustian Pact,” Culture Wars, July/August 2015.
  • [34] Rob van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 159-161.
  • [35] Paul Verhoeven, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), xi, 5.
  • [36] Ibid., 6.
  • [37] Van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, 195.
  • [38] Ibid., 258.
  • [39] Clark Collis, “Train to Busan: EW review,” Entertainment Weekly, July 22, 2016.
  • [40] Israel Shamir, Cabbala of Power (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, 2007), 153.
  • [41] Ibid., 150.

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4 COMMENTS

  1. A friend of mine cornered it well….

    “That triangle between a virgins legs is the most expenxive piece of real estate ever”

    and…books/films/dynasties…rebound off walls to give sanctity/licentiousness and protection

    to indulge in consumption.

    Take a look at all the catholic words that describe the virgin….

    so…
    morals!!!

    getta life….

  2. I wasn’t interested in the underhanded intrigues of Hollywood before, but now I see a certain number of moral freaks, rich and depraved freaks who hide behind high-sounding words. And in fact, they cripple the viewer’s psyche.
    It’s like a Hollywood deep state. Therefore, as I get older, I like old movies of the 60s and 70s more. In the USSR, there was state censorship in the cinema. And it, I must say, worked perfectly. In the movies, the actors taught the audience kindness, sincere human relations, condemnation of vices. True love, joy, the triumph of justice, sincerity, mutual assistance – that’s what Soviet society saw on TV screens or in movies. That’s what I’m proud of and nostalgically remember both our old good films and Soviet society. It was a unique phenomenon of culture and society. It is very sad to realize that this cannot be returned…

  3. At least Paul Verhoeven is honest. Turkish delight after a book by Jan Wolkers. It is the Sexual Revolution that created this socalled freedom. Whereas now 2/3 of relationships end in divorce/separation. 50 % of people suffering serious attachment disorders. I do not believe it is to weaken the dominant exissting colour. It was just the same in Berlin pre WW II.The Talmud has some phrases in it were pedophilia with 4 year olds, boys and girls is stimulated. With the phrase it is nothing to those children. Then again we now have plenty research proving not only Female Genital Mutilation causes trauma, but it is the same for male circumcision. also mutilation and causing trauma. Once maybe a good thing, in situations where there was no water and men could not was beneath the foreskin and passed on diseases to young fertile women causing cancer, but in modern days should have been obsolete decades ago. Lucky for western women the USA promoting female genital mutilation did not have the same success as male circumcision did for american, non jewish men. In the Netherlands men are not circumcised unless for a medical reason.

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