A reviewer of the film Melancholia writes, If you don't love this movie, there is something deeply and profoundly wrong with you.
Well then, I guess so.
I am not sophisticated, I suspect. At least not in the postmodern European National Society of Film Critics kinda way. Despite my education and intelligence, I like a good narrative: beginning, middle, end. And if you're going to get deep and arty, well...at least give me a reason to want to watch what you're putting on the screen. I liked Tree of Life, for instance, deep and arty though it be, weaving together a family in 1950's Texas, the Book of Job, and the Big Bang.
On the level of personal prejudice, don't put Kirsten Dunst in a starring role. Or turn Alexander Skarsgard into a pussywhipped omega over her.
And don't people your achingly slow, pretentious and self-consciously "meaningful" art-cinema with characters whose narcissism is only outdone by their emptiness, ennui and nihilism.
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Have you seen The Conqueror?
It has everything you like in a movie, a strong narrative, lots of action, and John Wayne as Ghenghis Khan.
Ex Cathedra should expect that European higher man, crypto-Buddhist, can't be more than somewhat aesthetically depress'd and somewhat aesthetically nirvana'd at the spectacle of the destruction of the earth by its blue twin. The burnt out pleasure-pain principle. ... Skimming Umberto Eco's "Prague Cemetery," I was struck -- if that's an accurate term -- by the banality of the protagonist and his conspiracy system, though Eco and his reviewers gave the book a sort of 'trigger' warning of extreme evil, horrid anti-semitism, etc etc.
American lower man, in contrast, is rather eager for "apocalypse" -- his end of the world scenarios are peopled with Satan, the Anti-Christ, military take-overs, lurid video for the TV news or, nowadays, YouTube, I suppose. The "Omega" man for Hal Lindsey is Jesus Christ return'd to impose His Will on the earth for a thousand years of American prosperity and justice.
If the artists serving higher man haven't taken up biblical themes with any living eros, this is the fault of higher man. Hal Lindsey's themes are higher -- they are those of Dante and Milton, and indeed the Bible.
Indeed, higher man really is at his most alive in his hostility to the Bible. If a better world really follow'd an apocalypse, or even if the apocalypse were peopled with interesting diabolical and angelic characters, he would return from his withdrawal into neo-Egypt a Boddhisatva of rage and indignation.
What must follow Europe's era of burnt-out superiority to American lower man must be zilch! It would be completely unfair if -- in accord with Plato's principle of property -- History were given over to him who can use it best, and Europe and Anglo-Saxony were given to Nietzschean war of spirit raised up from the underground into the world cave! or even fundamentalist Christianity.
NOOOOO! There must be an end, but higher man is still thumotic enough to rise to peevishness against anything higher than Europe's bland self-ruin 1945-2012. Which higher man in Anglo-Saxony seems only to eager an imitator. There must be an end (desublimational man is tired), but the end must be only a melancholia of boredom and, as Ex Cathedra notes, boringness.
Arendt presumably has a pickwickian meaning in the 'banality' of evil -- maybe the son (ben) of endingness (js5239 NLH) ty that does evil; the son or ego sum does the negation that doubles, completes, the father's naturing. Something like that.
We can't expect our preceptors to see the banality of evil in the Communist exterminations, no matter how banal the rationales may be (liquidating life that can have no future; historically refuted life) -- not because of higher man's 'selective indignation' etc but because these banal exterminations aren't evil but merely the business of progress. Hitler, the SS, et al were to some extent willing to own their evilness, the charisma of violence etc. Marx gave out forced laughter whenever anyone mention'd 'morality.' The moral and the immoral are historically irrelevant items of false consciouseness, so also any designation even of capitalist exploitation as 'evil.' Stuff happens by necessity. "Right" has only a meaning determined by the prevailing mode of production. But for Hitler the future of Germany could be either commercialist Americanist mechanics etc -- or aggressive, violent, etc. It was a matter of choice, not historical inevitiability, to become evil in a way. The Nazi symbolism had a charisma of evil. Thus the Endlösun adminster'd by what's his name in Arendt's book (I really can't think of his name just now -- oh yes Eichmann) was banality of evil. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al are only banal -- even though we'd flee in terror, if we could flee anywhere, at the news that Stalin now rules Anglo-Saxony. Our psyches understand that Marx's laughter at morality is mistaken. ... Just recently I noticed in Agatha Christie's "They Came to Baghdad" c.1950 that the conflict between America and Communist Russia was only a conflict of ideologies for getting stuff done. The enormity was the Nietzschean proposal for a world system whose polis personnel aren't animated by value neutral "humility" (sc no contempt in the Grand Inquisitor's personnel for Selfs who dine in unreal presence on earthly bread-war -- Lechem js3898ff) even if such a world system didn't do death camps, liquidation programmes, etc, since they accomplish 'death' by gelassenheit, passing by selfings that contain no self-reverence and thus can be only hated, not loved. ...
Or maybe 'banality' of evil in terms of Lilith's white (laban bwk banal + liLy with the y as Tsadeh) Lilith, the moon, so that Lilith's black (causing grey in grey eclipse, de-colourization, de-fiqh perception, de-kuffar perception) is the 'good'?
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