One may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs’ sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer’s notion of America’s “wound culture” to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

-Igor Krstic, Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. p. 101

The social and psychological impact of genocide on a people is undeniable. In the wake of such a catastrophic event, the mind must attempt to process the hows and whys of what has happened and find a way to live in the aftermath of those events. The pain and suffering of the genocide become a part of the cultural identity of both victims and perpetrators and the evidence of this newfound component of their cultural identity trickles down through all levels of society. An excellent example is the media which a culture produces in the wake of genocide. The artists who create these creative works are not any more or less affected by the genocide than any other members of society and, deliberately or subconsciously, their works of art will reflect the changes that have occurred in the wake of genocide or other devastating cultural event. In this paper we use Srdan Dragojevic’s Rane(which translates as “The Wounds”) as a case study to explore the role of film and media in understanding the advent and consequences of genocide to a people. Due to the restriction of space, we will assume that the reader has a general familiarity with the Bosnian genocide, though all information pertinent to the examples given from the film will be included. While, optimally, we would spend a thousand words on both the Bosnian genocide and critical film theory, this would prevent us from achieving the level of analysis required to answer the question. We will also assume that readers have seen Rane and a copy has been included with this submission. Let us begin with a short summary of the interpretive methods we will use to analyse Rane.

The first thing we must acknowledge, when critically examining a film, is that it is completely constructed, an artifice which has been created through an enormous process of deliberation and arrangement. Each component of a film has been placed there to the exclusion of thousands of other possible choices. From the soundtrack to the lighting, the character names to what appears in any given shot, every detail has been deliberately placed before us on the screen. In the academic jargon of cinema studies, this construction is referred to as mise en scene. This stems from a French phrase which literally means “putting into the scene” and was first applied to the practice of directing plays. It was adopted by film scholars to describe the director’s control over what appears in the film frame. Secondly, we must briefly outline a key concept in cinema studies, that of the auteur. Like photography, when film first appeared, it was considered too industrial to be an artistic endeavour.  It used machinery to reproduce an image and studios mass produced films for public consumption. As a result, film makers were relegated to the category of technicians, rather than artists. At the very least, particularly in France, a distinction was drawn between commercial film (typically American) and the European Art Film movement. This changed in the mid-1950s, when a group of young French filmmakers published a number of articles in Cashiers du Cinema, a prominent French film journal, which asserted the idea of the film director as artist. They argued that, of all the hundreds of people who contributed to a film, the director had the most broad-reaching control and, thus, authorial voice. They claimed that, over the career of particular directors, we can see certain trends or preoccupations in their films and it is these directors that can truly be considered artists or auteurs. It is very important that we bear these two concepts in mind because, in our analysis of Rane, we will be regarding Srdan Dragojevic as an auteur and referring to his manipulation of mise en scene to educate his audience about the Bosnian Genocide. Now, without further delay, we will examine what we can learn from Rane about the cultural legacy and impact of the Bosnian Genocide on the Serbian and Croatian people.

At its heart, Rane is a film about what happens to a generation of young men who are disconnected from their cultural inheritance of masculinity and community, and the new cultural practices which they introduce to replace those which have been lost. Using the classic structure of a Hollywood Film Noir (two friends, torn apart by a femme fatal and a corrupt world) Rane presents us with a picture of progressive social and economic deterioration in Serbia between 1991 and 1996. It follows the descent of two young Serbian boys, Pinki and Svaba (which loosely translates to ‘Kraut’) into the expansive criminal underground which arose in Serbia during the Yugoslav wars. The film is almost obsessive in its exploration of the disappearance of Serbian traditional folk culture and its replacement with kitsch trash culture and, particularly among young men, wound culture. We will begin by exploring the idea of the rise of trash culture in Serbia during the 1990s, we will then explore the idea of wound culture.

Over the course of any protracted conflict a great number of people die. When we add genocide to the mix, the number greatly increases. Let us consider for a moment the demographic most likely to engage in, and die as a result of, warfare. On both sides of a conflict it is the 18 to 30 year old males who fight. In the case of Serbia, not only did many men die during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, many had died during the Yugoslav People’s Liberation War (which occurred during World War II in Yugoslavia). The natural effect of this was that many young people growing up in Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s did not have fathers or grandfathers from whom they could inherit their cultural rites of passage, celebrations or religious practices. Even when these rites or events were observed, such an observation became a pale, superficial imitation of the original practice. The result is the amalgamation of traditional Eastern European folklore with popular culture which fills the void left from the severed familial link to the original beliefs and practices of the culture. This cultural heritage is replaced by a “trash culture” which is “replete with signs, commodities and symbols of kitsch, camp and trash” (Krstic, 98). We can see countless examples and representations of this trash culture in Rane, in fact the mise en scene is relentless in its depiction of the new Serbian culture of the 1990s.

The most immediate example of trash culture presented to the viewer in Rane is the blaring Turbofolk soundtrack which assaults the audience during the opening credits and continues as a prominent feature of the film’s soundtrack. Dutch anthropologist, Mathijs van de Port describes Turbofolk as an amalgamation of text, vision and music which draws upon the traditional and modern. Classic folk melodies are used to sing about contemporary topics such as “foreign currency, weekend romances, tractors and bio-energy” (Mathijs van de Port, 57). The traditional meanings and significance of the songs are lost, discarded in favour of the trappings of modern, commercial life. There are several clues which suggest to us that Turbofolk serves a greater function than merely acting as a soundtrack or audio context for the film. Significantly, if we look to Kure (which is an affectionate shortening of a Serbian name, the loose equivalent to “Dickie” or “Sammy”) and Suzana (Pinki and Svaba’s first mentors in the ways of the Serbian criminal underground) we find stellar examples of Turbofolk culture. Suzana herself is a Turbofolk singer and both her and Kure surround themselves with the material symbols of trash culture; gold crucifix pendants, a BMW and brand clothing and shoes. Kure wears a crucifix, but doesn’t attend church or express any faith in the film. The crucifix has ceased to be a symbol of Christianity and become a symbol of Serbian cultural heritage. Similarly, while shooting heroin Kure demands that Pinki and Svaba sing Serbian folk songs not because he believes in the message of the songs, but because (like his crucifix) they are one of the handful of things he has to connect him to his culture.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find Svaba’s grandmother who lives in an urban apartment, surrounded by chickens and living in the glow of her television screen. Fed copious amounts of narcotics by her grandson, she exists in a twilight world in which the modern and traditional merge, where she recounts stories of the massacres of the Second World War in a fairy tale narrative format. With the exception of her grandson, Svaba, all of her family are dead (or at least absent) and her only connection to the world is through the trash culture lens of her grandson and her television. We can see from this that Rane presents us with a society which is experiencing a cultural vaccum, which is in part being filled by trash culture. Trash culture, however, is not the only thing which fills this void nor is the primary concern of the film. There is a darker consequence to the cultural void left by the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide; Wound Culture.

From the very first scene of Rane, Dragojevic presents us with a world dripping with violence and the after effects of violence. This violence and violent culture is often intimately paired with the images of trash culture which we discussed above. For example, the film begins in (and spends much of its time in) a graveyard, which houses both graves and the rusted chassis of old cars and buses. This amalgamation of scrap-yard and graveyard images suggests a close link between the mass-production and consumption of trash culture and death. Similarly, while Kure does push-ups and watches Puls Asfalta (a television show in the film in which criminals are idolized and interviewed) we can see an image of the Last Supper in the background, another marriage of the religious or spiritual simulacra of trash culture and the death and violent crime which were rife in 1990s Serbia. The very first image we see in the film is a crucifix pendant (complete with crucified Christ figure) which is immediately paired with the introduction of the main character, Pinki, who is nursing what appear to be grievous gunshot wounds. Repeatedly, Dragojevic pairs the cultural vacuum of trash culture with death, injury and pain. Perhaps the ultimate instance of this pairing occurs in a scene in which Kure engages in a titanic brawl (in which he wields an entire spit roasted pig as a bizarre bludgeoning weapon) in the club in which Suzana works, while she weeps and sing a Turbofolk song as the fight rages beneath her. While the mise en scene of Rane contains an abundant amount of pairings between the violent and the kitsch, suggesting a cultural centrality of violence in 1990s Serbia, we need not limit ourselves to the subtleties of mise en scene to understand the film’s message about Serbian wound culture; we need only look to the film’s protagonists, Pinki and Svaba.

From the start of the film, we know that violence, and in particular wounds, are central to the film. When we are introduced to Pinki and Svaba they are in a car, driving through the tumultuous anti-Milosevic protests of 1996, Pinki nursing some grievous wounds. The violent and frenetic aesthetic of the riots (much of the footage we see of them is archival) suggests a general violence and destabilization in the characters’ environment, while Pinki’s wounds (and the casual way in which he relates to them) firmly grounds that violent aesthetic in the realm of the personal. We then flashback to the previously mentioned graveyard / scrapyard in which Pinki and Svaba play Serbs vs Croats (essentially cowboys and Indians) with their friend Dijabola. Teams are not chosen, but are allocated based on the ethnicity of the boys fathers, this means that Pinki and Svaba default to Serb and Dijabola defaults to Croatian. We know from the dialogue that these boys have grown up together and consider one another friends, but now one of the ways in which they ritually relate to one another is to throw rocks at each other because of their ethnic differences. When Dijabola cries and asserts that he isn’t a Croat, Svaba replies “Serbs don’t cry like pussies”. This may seem like an inconsequential moment, which could be attributed to male adolescence, but in the context of the ethnically motivated stoning of Dijabola and the arbitrary system of categorization we are given a window into the bizarre nature of the Yugoslav wars. These boys have no reason to hurt one another, but they do, ritualistically, as if it were expected.

Earlier, when discussing the rise of trash culture, we noted that one of the central factors in creating this cultural vacuum is the absence of paternal figures and this is central, perhaps even more so, to the rise of wound culture. As mentioned above, Svaba’s parents are completely absent and he lives with his grandmother in an urban apartment, completely devoid of a father figure. Pinki lives with his parents and, while he has a father, he’s somewhat of a buffoon. While Pinki loves his father it is clear that he does not respect him however, unlike Svaba, he at least has a male role-model. Svaba substitutes his absent father with one of the only prominent figures of masculinity in the neighbourhood, Kure. Kure never fought for any cause and places little or no worth in traditional Serbian culture. As we have described earlier, Kure is the poster child for trash culture and a gangster. Svaba introduces Pinki to Kure and the two begin to work for him, dealing drugs. Svaba is the most loyal and zealous to Kure’s lifestyle and philosophy. He eagerly engages in violent crime and Kure’s initiation ceremonies (such as running headlong into Kure’s fist repeatedly as a measure of withstanding pain) while Pinki remains distant. This resistance to the violent lifestyle and philosophy of Kure and Svaba abruptly ends when Pinki’s father kills himself. He joins Svaba in a spiralling descent into drugs and violent crime, and even explicitly states “Torture helped me forget my stupid dead father”. The two become obsessed with being gangsters, not with the profits of crime, but the status of it. Ultimately, however, there is no greater example of Wound Culture and the results of a cultural vacuum from a war than the chilling final scene of the film.

After a dispute over a lover Svaba shoots Pinki five times. Pinki prematurely leaves hospital, finds Svaba and the two travel to the graveyard to complete an unspoken pact. There is no malice or hatred between the two boys, just an understanding that in order to level the score, Pinki must shoot Svaba five times. They even stop at a pharmacist to get bandages and gauze so that Svaba won’t bleed to death. For these boys this is the only way to resolve the situation. Dijabola arrives with an automatic weapon and, in a grim parody of the opening scene the boys play out their Serbian vs Croatian game, this time with bullets instead of rocks. The result is a harsh condemnation of the Milosevic regime and its effects on subsequent generations, particularly the young men of those generations.

To conclude we can see, even from this brief overview that Dragojevic’s Rane is completely fixated on the cultural devastation which occurred as a result of the Yugoslav wars and Bosnian genocide. More than exploiting a moment in history for dramatic effect, Dragojecic shows us the consequences of the loss of patriarchs from a traditionally patriarchal society. We can see that when Serbia lost its connection to its traditional, cultural heritage a cultural vacuum was created, which was filled with trash culture and wound culture and Dragojevic is a true auteur in the sense that he has a clear agenda to educate people about post-Tito Serbia. At every moment he meticulously manipulates the mise en scene of his film to communicate the trappings of trash and wound culture. There was, unfortunately, much we did not have space to cover and this author encourages you, and anyone interested in the cultural impact of the Yugoslav wars, to look closely at Rane. It is a powerful and convincing model for the things we can learn from fictional films which explore historical events.

Bibliography and Further Reading List

• Benson, L. Yugoslavia: A concise history. Palgrave MacMillan. London: UK. 2002.
• Bordwell, D. & Thompson K. Film Art: An Introduction, 7^th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York: New York. 2004.
• Gabrino, J. Beyond the Body Count: Moderating the effects of war on children. In R. Lerner (ed) Handbook of Applied Developmental Science. Volume 2. Sage Publications. Thousand Oaks: California. 2003.
• Krstic, I. Serbia’s Wound Culture: Teenage Killers in Milosevic’s Serbia. In Horton, A. (ed) The Central Europe Review: The Celluloid Tinderbox. www.ce-review.org published 2000. Viewed on 5/10/2009.
• Leavitt, L. & Fox, N. The Psychological Effects of War and Violence on Children. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale: New Jersey. 1993
• Mcleod, M. Saw and spectre of 9/11 in contemporary horror. Published 10/11/2008 www.pleasantfluff.com/saw viewed on 10/10/2009.
• Norwell-Smith, G. (ed) The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1^st edn, Oxford University Press, Oxford: New York. 1996.
• Rane, Srdan Dragojevic (dir), Performances: Dusan Pekic & Milan Maric. DVD. First Run Features. 2000.
• Van de Port, M. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam, 1998.

Here at pleasantfluff.com, we’re all massive fans of Fight Club and today marks the 10th anniversary of its general release in cinemas. In order to celebrate, we’re going to publishing Mr. Bailey Smith’s article on it and (one of) its Japanese counterparts, Battle Royale. We had hoped to get it out by today, but we’re all bogged down in the end of semester quagmire.

Enough bleating! Happy Birthday Fight Club, may you inspire many more young men to adopt an iconoclastic stance in our increasingly alienating world.

This essay arose when Bailey and I (both long time Cronenberg fans) had an opportunity to write an essay about him in the same class. Naturally, a competition ensued. Here was my entrant:

For Cronenberg sex represents intimacy, betrayal, sublimation, absorption and the merging of identities all at once. Cronenberg has stated that the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95). For Cronenberg our physicality and sensual experience of the world is all that we can know for sure (Günberg 95) and, because it is perhaps the ultimate physical act, sex is the intersection of thought, identity and biology. Any pretence of a higher, non-physical person is subsumed in this act of raw physicality and passion. Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash are excellent case studies in Cronenberg’s obsessive pre-occupation with human sexuality because each features a central character whose latent sexuality blossoms over the course of the film, for better or worse. This essay will examine the methods Cronenberg uses to expose and explore the expansive and polymorphous entity that is human sexuality in his films.

Cronenberg was heavily influenced by C. S. Lewis’ work The Allegory of Love, which puts forward the idea that romantic love, as it is known in the western world, is a construct of poetry that arose in the twelfth century (ctd. in Günberg 117). Prior to that point it was unheard of for a gentleman to kneel before a lady or serenade her from the base of a tower. It is apparent that to Cronenberg the western notion of love is a contrived lie. True love, as it appears in his films (and his philosophy), is a more deep-seeded primal experience with its roots in biochemistry (Günberg 122). In essence, love and sex are tied to “a desire to fuse with, to absorb and to somehow cut beneath the surface of” a lover (Günberg 117). The ultimate intimacy lies within the body for Cronenberg. Furthermore, if the west’s accepted ideal of love was invented and taken up in the twelfth century then the implication is twofold. Firstly, there was another, alien, notion of love prior to that and secondly (perhaps more importantly) concepts like love in our society that are presented as absolutes are “variable and they’re open to change and transformation” (Günberg 122).

This notion of nothing being absolute is essential to understanding Cronenberg. He has an obsession with shattering the aesthetics of the modern age and opening the possibility of new ones (Günberg 92). This has an intimate relationship with Cronenberg’s obsession with the body. His films continually attempt to redefine the definition and limitations of the human body and, as a result, human sexuality. In the Videodrome Commentary Cronenberg states, “I love to re-invent the human body”. He goes on to say, “In society now we are allowing the expression of things that a few years ago would not have been allowed … [people] think of these things as sexual delights or explorations. They don’t even want to call these things perversion … but if you [called them] new forms of expressing love, people would probably get very upset.” (Günberg 123). This is evident in Videodrome in many places (such as the ear piercing and sadomasochistic scenes) but also in Videodrome’s general exploration of society’s limits on what the media can and can’t depict (a debate which Cronenberg’s films have often fuelled). Are sex and violence something that will corrupt people from the outside or are they lying dormant within us? For the protagonist of Videodrome, Max Renn, they appear to be very much an existing part of his psyche, waiting to surface.

With societal restrictions and enforcement of a ‘norm’ we’re much less likely to get to the full spectrum of something as complex and varied as human sexuality. People will not readily admit to being aroused by something that is branded ‘perverse’, so how can we hope to know how ubiquitous any sexual fantasy is? This results in the creation of an outward sexual normality which, Videodrome, Nikki Brand is the physical manifestation of. In the television interview with Max she condemns his TV station’s broadcasting of violent and pornographic material despite dressing in a very provocative fashion and flirting with Max off air. Publicly, she presents herself as socially and sexually conservative but, in private, her social and sexual realm of experience very much align with (and exceed) those of Max. Max, on the other hand, is the physical manifestation of the latent perversion. We know that Max always had sadomasochistic tendencies (as evidenced by his branding the series Samurai Dreams ‘too soft’, expressing a desire for something ‘harder’ and more ‘extreme’) but it took meeting Nikki Brand to bring them out.

It is interesting to note the way in which Nikki opens the dialogue on sadomasochism with Max. She goes through his videos, looking for pornography (which she claims ‘gets her in the mood’) and finds Videodrome. The dialogue is as follows:

Nikki: What’s this? Videodrome?

Max: Torture, Murder…

Nikki: Sounds great.

Max: Ain’t exactly sex.

Nikki: Says who?

Nikki then has Max pierce her ears with a needle. Cronenberg comments “For a kind of mini-sadomasochistic experience ear-piercing was quite potent. If you want to introduce someone into the world of sadomasochism then maybe getting them to pierce your ears is the way to do it” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary). Just as Nikki is peeling away the layers of what Max finds sexually permissible, Cronenberg is doing the same to his audience. First we are introduced to the notion that there exists a link between pain and sex. Then there is a miniature foray into sadomasochism with the piercing of the ears. The images layer and accumulate until we are flung with Max and Nikki into an alien sexual space; the Videodrome set. The juxtaposition of strong eroticism generated by the sex scene and resonant violence left by our last experience of the Videodrome set combine to violently change our perception of Max and Nikki’s relationship. As their relationship escalates Nikki leads Max through more extreme acts. When she invites him to burn her with a cigarette Cronenberg comments “Nikki’s drawing him into a part of himself that would be better left unexplored. Does this movie draw its audience into places that would be better left unexplored?” (Cronenberg Videodrome Commentary).

As Max is drawn deeper and deeper into his Videodrome hallucination his body, technology, violence and eroticism merge into a single perverse continuum. Nikki’s image appears on Max’s television, the camera zooming in to focus on her red, luscious lips. Max is drawn to the television set, which grows a series of veins and arteries and begins to sensuously pulsate as Max caresses it.  The screen, with Nikki’s lips projecting from it, billows out into a breast shaped dome which Max buries his face in while he caresses the rest of the television set. Beard (134) comments that this organic transformation of the television set “transfer[s] technology into the intimate and personal realm of the body”. For Max and Nikki, Videodrome (and by extension, television) and sex have all bled into one. His aberrant sexual practices with Nikki while watching Videodrome have made television and technology a part of the spectrum of things he finds erotic. When Bianca O’Blivion comes to visit Max, he flies into a rage and slaps her when she mentions Videodrome. For an instant Bianca becomes Nikki as Max slaps her. This is further reinforcement that for Max Nikki, violence and television\Videodrome are intimately linked. We can see from these examples that, at its core, Videodrome is a hallucinatory journey through Max Renn’s innermost desires and this is a common thread that ties all of Cronenberg’s work together.

Of all of Cronenberg’s literary adaptations, Crash and Naked Lunch are the most sexually charged. Both focus on a protagonist who undergoes a journey of transformation in which their latent sexuality manifests itself as a powerful force of change in their lives. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs sprawling, anarchic and hallucinatory novel, Naked Lunch, we are presented with a torrent of raw biology and human sexuality. William Beard (282) claims that in order to understand the rampant sexual imagery present in Naked Lunch we must look to Burroughs own psychopathology before we can understand the ways in which Cronenberg co-opts and transforms it in his adaptation.

Burroughs was, at his core, a self-loathing homosexual (Beard 297). He was a man who struggled, through his writing, to rationalize his sexual desires which he equated with “cruelty, violence and a deep [revulsion]” (Beard 297). As a result, Burroughs writings are riddled with images of cruel homosexual sexual predators that prey on young men and transform into monsters during the sexual act. The following example is just one of many:

During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab

from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted

a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut.

-Burroughs 91-2

This self loathing resulted in Burroughs developing a number of paranoid fantasies to explain away his sexual urges, most involving a clandestine power conspiring against him and forcing sexual perversion onto him as a means of control (Beard 300). This seems to have been Burroughs’ only way to account for his utter self loathing and ongoing drug addiction. This is the final crucial thing we must understand about Burroughs before we can talk about Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch; Burroughs was a drug addict. While heroin played a large role in Burroughs life (as evidenced by his autobiographical book Junky) Burroughs didn’t limit himself to any one drug. In the Naked Lunch DVD Commentary Peter Weller (who stars as William Lee in the film and researched Burroughs extensively) claims that the first thing Burroughs would do when he landed in a new city or country was to explore the drug trade (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). As a result of his extensive experience with narcotics and addiction Burroughs developed some very strong ideas about the nature of addiction. He felt that drug addiction was an analogy for anything that placed barriers between a person and self understanding or clarity (Beard 2006, Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). For Burroughs drugs, alcohol, sexual pleasure and any number of other human distractions were a part of the aforementioned ‘conspiracy of control’ which prevented people from really living. Ironically for Burroughs, rather than both heroin addiction and homosexual drive being barriers to self understanding, it was perhaps drug addiction that Burroughs used to avoid the ultimate truth of himself; that he was homosexual. When we consider these three elements; self-loathing sexuality, outside control and layers of deception we can see why Cronenberg would be drawn to such a project.

In order to adapt Naked Lunch Cronenberg was faced with the problem of inserting a narrative structure to what was a rambling, incoherent, apocalyptic miasma of social and political discourse. His solution was an elegantly simple one; he took events from Burroughs life and other short works and weaved them together with the hallucinatory discourses and treatments from Naked Lunch. The result is a psychotic hallucination of a man coming to grips with his true nature. Burroughs’ surrogate on screen, William Lee (which was Burroughs pen name for many of his works) frequently encounters giant cockroaches which have a large anus on their backs out of which they talk. Cronenberg claims that this was his way of “employing Burroughs’ device of the talking ass-hole without being censored in every country” (Cronenberg Naked Lunch Commentary). There is more at play here, however. Peter Weller comments that Burroughs uses the talking anus as a metaphor for the part of us that we “don’t want to address” or acknowledge (Weller Naked Lunch Commentary). We cannot ignore the fact that these talking anuses often appear alongside scenes linked to Burroughs homosexuality. In the first instance of the bug typewriter appearing (complete with talking anus) William Lee is instructed by it to “type something into me, it’s not something you’re going to like”. The typewriter instructs Lee to type the phrase “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have” into his report and seems to receive great sexual gratification from Lee’s touch and typing. This is a clear moment of Lee’s psyche partitioning itself in such a way that it can admit it’s darkest secret to itself. Furthermore, this secret is delivered via the Burroughsian trope of the talking anus which stands for everything about ourselves which we cannot face. Lee would not offer this information freely, it can only manifest itself as hallucination of an outside, controlling force instructing him to associate with homosexuality. It is also significant that Lee’s homosexual subconscious manifests itself as a talking anus when we consider that anal sex is the default association that most people have with male homosexuals.

At first ‘meeting’ (for it was, after all, a hallucination) between Lee and the ‘talking bug’, Lee is instructed (by the bug) to kill his wife. The bug claims that she’s an ‘enemy agent’ and a member of an ‘alien species’ (which alludes to both women and heterosexuals as ‘alien’ and incomprehensible). Not only does Lee accept the bug’s presence and murderous instructions, he actively carries them out, shooting his wife in the head. The hallucinatory bug powder (which is revealed to be a highly addictive substance) which Lee works with on a daily basis has given his homosexual psyche a way to communicate his dissatisfaction with his marriage and instructs him to kill his wife, in effect killing heterosexuality. As we have seen in Videodrome, hallucinations are a vital storytelling device in Cronenberg’s films because they allow him to expose the fears and desires of his character’s subconscious, a device he shares intimately with Burroughs.

Over the course of the film Lee jumps through many addictions in an attempt to hide from his true, homosexual nature. He begins with a bug powder habit, which he inherits from his wife. Dr. Benway exposes Lee to the Tangierian centipede powder, which Lee consumes with gusto, going so far as to move to Tangier after killing his wife so that he can be closer to the source (which his subconscious rationalizes as a trip to get closer to ‘the enemy’, Interzone). Each successive addiction is ultimately unsatisfying and, finally, in his descent into drug induced psychosis, Lee turns to homosexual sex when he is rescued from living on the streets by a Tangierian boy, Kiki. After a brief affair with Kiki, Lee cannot cope with the truth and takes Kiki to the house of the gay sexual predator,  Cloquet. He effectively trades Kiki’s innocence for information by allowing Kiki to be raped by Cloquet after receiving ‘dirt’ on Interzone agents. Cronenberg reveals the rape of Kiki in a classically Burroughsian style. Cloquet is transformed into a gigantic crustacean whose pincers painfully pierce Kiki’s flesh, resulting in painful, weeping sores while Cloquet’s giant carapace undulates and thrusts from behind the young boy. When Lee attempted to live with his true nature (by engaging in a homosexual relationship with Kiki) his psyche couldn’t handle it. He rejected it, casting the boy into the hands of a sexual predator and once more seeing homosexuality as a state inhabited by monsters. Ironically, by delivering Kiki to Cloquet, Lee is a crucial component of this monstrosity. Without his interferance, Kiki and Cloquet would not have met.

Finally we turn our attention to Crash, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s novel. More a case study in the evolution of human sexuality than a feature film, Crash explores the marriage of technology and eroticism. The protagonist, James, is involved in a series of car crashes. While in hospital he meets Vaughn, a man obsessed with car crashes and “the eroticism of wounds”. As James spends more time with Vaughn his sexual associations shift and he becomes consumed by an erotic obsession with cars, in effect becoming Vaughn. The parallels with Cronenberg’s other works are clear. Obsession, control, a bridge between the biological and technological and a pervasive, mutable sexuality are present. It is likely that the core of Cronenberg’s attraction to Crash as a novel to adapt to film lies in a simple passage:

The crash was the only real experience I had been through in years.

For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an

inexhaustible encyclopaedia of pains and discharges.

-Ballard 39

If, for Cronenberg, the body is the “first fact of human existence” (Günberg 95) then this revelation by James is telling. James is a disillusioned, disconnected member of society who has been distanced from his body. It took the violent and sudden trauma of a car crash to reintroduce James to an intimate relationship with his own body. The logical extension of this is the pairing of any intimate experience for James with violence and technology.

James and Catherine (the other crash victim) develop a relationship which quickly evolves into a sexual one. James’ sex with his wife becomes stale and unsatisfying compared to the sex he has with Catherine. Beard (400) asserts that this is because, for James, the sex with his wife is too “beautiful” and “perfect”. After his car crash, James’ marriage and sex life with his wife have become just as stale and superficial as everything outside of the crash. Because Catherine has not only experienced a car crash, but the same car crash as James, his sex with her is filled with the intimacy and bodily communion that he experienced at the moment of his crash.

Catherine introduces James to Vaughn, although they briefly met in hospital when Vaughn admired James’ wounds. If James is beginning to embark on a journey of erotic rebirth then Vaughn is the end-point of that journey. His body a litany of scar tissue, Vaughn is a “creature who delights in [his] creatureness” (Beard 401). Vaughn occupies his time working on “the project”, an umbrella term for a wide range of activities which marry car accidents and eroticism. These activities include photographing car accidents, having sex in car washes and deliberately causing car accidents. Cronenberg films these accidents in a remarkably sexual fashion. Vaughn stalks his potential victims, his gaze upon them a clearly sexual one. He initiates contact with his target by thrusting towards them and breaking suddenly. His thrusts into the car in front of him become increasingly powerful until he connects with them. For Vaughn the separation between man and machine no longer exists. His car is a phallic extension of himself which he uses to violently penetrate the cars of others. This behaviour eventually kills Vaughn, James resurrects his car and assumes Vaughn’s persona in the film. He then uses Vaughn’s car to crash into his wife and has sex with her mangled body while they lie beside her mangled car. It is only after he has forced his wife to endure the same trauma he experienced that James can have a fulfilling sexual experience. He has at once merged his old and new sexualities together by incorporating the extreme elements of Vaughn into his personality and drawing his wife into the same sexual realm.

In conclusion, when we examine Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash we can see that not only is the cinema a sexual entity for Cronenberg but his consuming obsession with human sexuality manifests itself in the protagonists his films. In each of the three films we examined in this essay we see character whose latent, abnormal sexual urges are brought to the surface by external forces. For Cronenberg the body is the central focus of human existence, but there could be no body without sex. In effect sex takes on a hyper-real status in Cronenberg’s films. As Cronenberg said himself, during the Criterion Collection Naked Lunch Commentary, “sexuality transforms you into something more than human”. Nothing could be truer for Max Renn, William Lee and James Ballard.

Works Cited

• Ballard, J. G. Crash London: Vintage 2004
• Beard, William The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg
  Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006
• Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch New York: Grove  1966
• Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine New York: Grove 1961
• Crash dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Spader & Holly Hunter. Alliance Communications Corporation 1996. DVD Newline Home Entertainment 2005.
• Günberg, Serge David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grunberg London: Plexus Publishing Ltd. 2006
• Naked Lunch dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Peter Weller & Judy Davis. Film Trustees Ltd. 1991. DVD Criterion Collection 2003. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Peter Weller.
• Videodrome dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. James Woods & Deborah Harry. CFDC 1983. DVD Criterion Collection 2004. DVD Commentary by David Cronenberg and Mark Irwin.

Columbus’ first action on Caribbean soil was to plant a flag and claim the land in the name of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. This action was the first to take place with both Europeans and Taino present and both would have viewed the event in a completely different light. The Spanish would have seen the planting of the flag as very significant and reflective of the way in which the Feudal system of Spanish governance operated. This is evident in the special attention that is placed on the planting of the flag in the accounts of the occasion, in which particular emphasis is given to the King and Queen that the land is being claimed for. Columbus himself notes in his journal that he “had taken possession of the island … for his sovereigns.” This theme of claiming land and resources continues strongly through the Journals and they make many references to “Your Highnesses”, indicating that they were written for the Monarchy who had funded the voyage.The Taino, on the other hand, seemed to view the situation with initial curiosity and “swam out to the ship’s boats in which [the Europeans] were sitting”. After receiving “red caps, glass beads … [and] many other trifles” they appeared to view meeting the Spanish as a lucrative trade opportunity and “they willingly traded everything they had”. The Spanish had brought with them many things that the Taino had never encountered before and that would have represented a high market value for trade. While “glass beads, hawks and bells” would have seemed somewhat worthless to the Spanish, their rarity in the Caribbean made them worth a great deal to the Taino.

After this initial meeting and trading, Columbus was very concerned with fostering good will with the Taino to create a favourable impression among them. He writes “I was anxious that they should think well of us so that they may not be unfriendly when your Majesties send a second expedition here.” Columbus also made great efforts to open the communication barrier between himself and the Taino by “[taking seven Taino] aboard so that they may learn our language”. Unfortunately, until the Taino and Spaniards breached the language barrier there were some serious communication problems.

The main method of communication between the two groups was with “signs”. Signs, however lend themselves to subjective interpretation. In one such interpretation Columbus says “We understood them to be asking if we came from the sky”. This would be a fairly complicated concept to communicate in sign language, especially when between groups with significant cultural differences. The Taino in question could have been trying to communicate a great number of different concepts. Columbus’ interpretation gives us a good example of what Europeans might have thought about Non-European cultures with respect to their notions of spirituality or religion. It is unfortunately also an example of how limited the accounts can be in accurately depicting the culture and perspective of the Taino.

Columbus also states after his first encounter with the Taino that they “appeared to me to have no religion”. Like the assumption that the Taino believed the Europeans came from the sky, this also gives us a clue to what constituted religion to a European in 1492. While the Taino show evidence of being religious when Columbus discovers “many statues in the shape of a women, and finely crafted heads like masks”, they did not appear to worship in a church or create religious iconography that would be recognisable to a European.

Some of these attitudes regarding the Taino’s spirituality begin to change toward the latter half of Columbus’ voyage. When he discovers the statues in the shape of women and masks he cannot decide if they are for “decoration or worship”. Columbus even begins to doubt his interpretations of what the Taino have said to him, admitting “I do not know their language”[16]. It is especially interesting to note that towards the end of the journal entries Columbus doubts his ability to interpret the Taino language. In the letter he writes on his return voyage, however, he appears more convinced that his observations about the Taino with regards to the presence of gold, their belief in the Europeans as Gods and their suitability as Christians are correct, rather than taking his earlier doubts in the effectiveness of communication into account.

This is a major limitation of the Journals as a source of information on the Taino because they are written from a European perspective, which carries with it notions of what religion and civilization are. This is coupled by their inability to accurately communicate with the Taino. While the Taino had been settled in the East Indies for a long time, they were not settled or civilized to European eyes because the way that the Taino existed was radically different from that of Europeans.

The documents are also limited by the apparent European spirit of conquest. This is evident in the numerous references about the resources of the East Indies and their suitability for settlement that Columbus notes. On the first island that he encounters, Columbus dedicates an entire day to surveying its coastline “to decide where a fort could be built”. This seems to be another direct comment to Ferdinand and Isabella and he invests a great deal of time emphasising the Taino people as a resource in and of themselves. Columbus makes many comments about the suitability of the Taino as both slaves and Christians. In one journal entry he says that “I believe they would be easily made Christians” and in another (directly addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella) he says “All the inhabitants could be taken away to Castile or held as slaves on the island, for with fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we wish”. This is another clue about the European attitude towards Non-European peoples that designated them as a resource rather than people.

The comments about the Taino people are few compared the huge attention that Columbus pays to the resources available in the East Indies to cement their worth to the Spanish Monarchy. We can presume this was in order to secure funding for a return trip as special emphasis is paid to these resources in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. The most frequent resource discussed is gold; in fact the first Taino word to appear in the documents is “Nucay”, which is the Taino word for gold. In one of the biggest selling points of his letter Columbus speaks of an island the Taino tell him about “in which there is incalculable gold”. Gold, however, is not the only thing Columbus deliberately notes about the island’s contents.

Columbus makes many references to the abundant flora and fauna of the islands. He says that “it grieves me extremely that I cannot identify them, for I am quite certain that they are valuable”. In fact, so great is Columbus’ desire to find proof of the spices on the islands, when he discovers a spice he can identify, Aloe, he orders his men to collect all they can find.

This desperation to sell the value and profitability of the East Indies, coupled with a limited ability of the Europeans to communicate with the Taino forms the crux of the usefulness of these documents as a source on the interaction between the two cultures of the Tainos and Europeans. While we can certainly learn a lot about the Europeans, based on what observations they make in their accounts of the East Indies and the conclusions that they draw from them, we are limited in what we know about the Taino because of the subjective nature of these conclusions.

Disregarding these subjective conclusions, we are left with the observations that these conclusions arose from. If we are to learn anything about the Taino we need to separate these observations that the Europeans made from the opinions they offered to explain them. While we cannot avoid the cultural influences that coloured the Europeans view of the Taino, these journals and other personal accounts are all that we have left of these people. If we wish to learn about them we can only use the resources available to us and read them aware of the factors that may have influenced them.

Further Reading

• Cohen, J.M., (ed.) The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, pp. 50-76.
• Cummings, John, The Voyage of Christopher Columbus, London, Wiedenfield and Nicholson, 1992, pp. 109-112.
• Jane, Cecil, The Journal of Christopher Columbus:
  , London, Anthony Blond, 1968, pp. 191-202

]]> http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/09/06/christopher-columbus-the-tragic-poster-child-for-colonialism/feed/ 2 http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/08/08/smoke-signals-a-turning-point-in-indginous-media/ http://www.pleasantfluff.com/2009/08/08/smoke-signals-a-turning-point-in-indginous-media/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:35:29 +0000 Morgan http://www.pleasantfluff.com/?p=1794

Depictions of Native Americans in film have existed since the beginning of the film industry and similar depictions existed before film in the form of wild-west shows. Historically these depictions have been created by and for Euro-Americans and, as a result, present a skewed and stereotyped image of Native American people. While Native people have been involved in the film industry for over a century, it took until 1998 for a completely Native American production to arise with a Native writer, director and crew. Smoke Signals premiered at a time when, regrettably, many people thought that Native Americans no longer existed as a distinct culture or people. This essay will explore how Smoke Signals challenged contemporary and historical views of Native Americans in American film. However, before we can understand the significance of Native American depictions in Smoke Signals we must first gain and understanding of how Native Americans have been historically depicted in American films and entertainment and why such depictions are significant. Since the late 19^th century Native Americans have been exploited for the purposes of entertaining Euro-American audiences and it was during the late 19^th century that many of the media stereotypes relating to Native Americans were popularized. These began in the Wild West Show phenomenon, a traveling entertainment show which in equal parts reenacted and embellished upon “renowned battles” from the American frontier (King 12). These shows emerged at a time when the American frontier was essentially considered civilized and the focus on relations with Native Americans had shifted from a militaristic to an administrative nature (King 12). This presented a problem for the American public because it meant that a people who had, historically, been viewed as an enemy or threat were now, effectively under their care. The Wild West Shows “encouraged Americans to grapple with questions of racial difference and cultural evolution, while prompting nostalgic yearnings for nature, tradition, and indigenous communities destroyed by progress and manifest destiny” (King 12). In effect, with the war over, the Euro-American population needed ways to rationalize the treatment and ultimate fate of the Native American people and the Wild West Shows presented them with a set of cultural stereotypes which allowed them to do that. Native Americans were divided into a collection of archetypes; the noble savage, the brutal warrior, the loyal sidekick, the chief, the princess and the squaw (King 5). These early archetypes combined with a handful of narratives (civilization conquering the frontier and progress vs. primitive life were the most common themes) to create what would become the predominate Euro-American perception of Native Americans (King 12).

It is estimated that over 2000 films and over 10,000 television shows have been produced which feature Native Americans since the end of the 19^th century (Churchhill 43). The majority of these productions were created by and for the Euro-American market and perpetuated many of the stereotypes established by the Wild West Shows (the two, in fact, overlapped with the last of the Wild West Shows occurring in the 1930s) (King 12). More than any other culture, the Native American’s image has been defined through film (Rollins ix). The question arises then, how is it that these media depictions can define a people’s image and why does such a definition matter? For one thing, Native Americans represent a very small portion of the American population and, for many Americans, media such as film and television are the primary way in which they are represented (King 6). The ways in which people, places and ideas are presented in the media shape the conceptions of those who access that media (King 7). This is problematic for Native Americans when we consider that while there has there been a huge saturation of media with Native American content, the overwhelming majority of that content works to reinforce negative 19^th century stereotypes (King 7).  This has created a positive feedback loop where the Euro-Americans who had the means to produce this media had been consumers of it all their lives. After several generations of this style of media production the media is completely removed from any truth about Native Americans (or even from a deliberate intention to create anti-Native American propaganda) and relies on simulacra of Native Americans which were created at the turn of the century. Rather than producing films and television shows based on Native Americans, the industry was creating films and television shows based on earlier film and television shows. It is for this reason that Smoke Signals is such a significant film. For first time, Native Americans had the opportunity to represent themselves in film and to challenge many of the stereotypes which had plagued them for the last century. A major departure from the classic treatment of Native Americans, Smoke Signals is an outwardly human story, riddled with subversive political comment. Amanda J. Cobb, a Native American Studies scholar who has researched Native depictions in film extensively, attributes much of the film’s success to its quietly political nature and the fact that its political subtext “never becomes overtly political” (Cobb 213). The narrative is one which many could relate to, with its focus on human relationships and redemption. Two young men, Victor and Thomas grew up together on a Reservation. When the two boys were young there was a house fire on the fourth of July which killed Thomas’ parents and many of Victor’s relatives. Victor’s father, Arnold, saved the two boys from the fire, but was emotionally crippled by grief and turned to a life of alcohol and violence. Arnold eventually leaves the Reservation and, years later, Victor receives word that his father has died in Arizona. Someone must collect the Arnold’s estate but no one in Victor’s family has the money to travel to Arizona, and Victor has little but bad memories of his father. Thomas, who never experienced the alcoholism or domestic violence that plagued Victor’s childhood, idolizes the man who saved him from the fire and offers to give Victor the money to travel to Arizona, as long as he can tag along. On the surface, Smoke Signals is structured as a classical Hollywood buddy road movie, in which two friends or companions travel across the country together. Beneath this veneer of comedy and character development there exists a barrage of references to Native American history and culture (Cobb 210). The Reservation in which Victor and Thomas grew up is utilized extensively by the screenplay’s author, Sherman Alexie, who uses humor and elements of mise en scene to establish the poverty and socio-economic issues which still plague reservation life, while challenging the perceptions that people hold about life on reservations. The first thing we encounter on the reservation is the sounds of the KREZ radio station, accompanied by the housing and local businesses of the reservation. The radio station crosses to its weather and traffic van, which broke down years ago and whose driver\reporter still sits atop of.  This serves a two-fold symbolic purpose. Firstly, the reservation we are presented with is relatively modern, with individual housing, cars and commerce. The Native Americans here are living a comparatively modern existence (no teepees or longhouses). There is, however, a flip side to this modern depiction. Despite the modern veneer there are serious economic problems on the Reservation. We can speculate that while the community has a traffic and weather van, there is so little money that the van cannot be fixed when it breaks down (even after a number of years). This is echoed later when Victor and Thomas encounter their relatives, Velma and Lucy, who are driving a car which only travels in reverse. Anywhere else in the country the car’s gearbox would be replaced but here there is simply no money for such repairs.  Where many film makers would deal with these reservation related issues with heated political debate, Alexie uses strong political statements, “subtly veiled” (Cobb 210) with wry humor. Appropriately, much of the film’s political subtext relates to Native American representations and identity. In a particularly telling exchange between Victor and Thomas it is revealed that the negative impact of inaccurate media representations is not restricted to Euro-American consumers. Thomas, who styles himself as a latter day medicine man and dresses in cheap suits, is berated by Victor for not knowing how to act like a “real Indian”. Victor jeers at Thomas for styling himself as a medicine man and for being too influenced by films like Dances with Wolves. However, when Victor tells Thomas that he should look “stoic” and like he’s “just killed a buffalo”, Thomas counters this by telling Victor that their tribe, the Coeur d’Alene, never hunted buffalo and were fisherman. This exposes both young men as victims of the same cultural whitewashing that has shaped Euro-American’s perceptions of Native Americans through film and television. In this respect Native Americans are not only “objects of popular culture” but also “consumers and participants” in the same media and culture which capitalize on their image (Cobb 216). Ultimately, however, the real symbolic core of Smoke Signals exists in the personal relationships of the characters, particularly those they have with their parents. The precedent for this is established at the beginning of the film, during Thomas’ opening monologue: You know there are some children who aren’t really children at all, they’re just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them… Victor and me, we were children of flame and ash.

-Thomas, Smoke Signals

By styling himself as a latter day medicine man, with his incessant stories, Thomas seems to have little regard for hurting others feelings with his tales in fact, it often lands him in a great deal of trouble. In this respect, Thomas is a pillar of flame that burns everything he touches. Victor, conversely, is so emotionally devastated by his past that it is impossible for him to emotionally engage with anyone and, in effect, “fall[s] apart” when anyone touches him.  This is not only a neat metaphor for the psychological profiles of Victor and Thomas, but for those of many Native Americans. Let us consider those living on the Pine Ridge reservation during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. The reservation was under the control of tribal chairman, Richard Wilson who ruled the reservation with an iron fist (Iverson 152). Firsthand accounts of those living on the reservation allow us to categorize them into these two loose psychological profiles, laid out by Alexie in Smoke Signals. Many of those who lived in the reservation with Wilson (and his vigilante squads) lived in absolute fear and either became violent themselves (fire) or withdrawn (ash) (Iverson 152). Wilson and those who responded violently to him and the FBI could easily be described as “pillars of fire” like Thomas, “burning everything they touch”, while the more subdued members of the community simply could not. Both the Native American council on the reservation (Wilson) and the United States government (represented here by the FBI) had completely failed them and thus they “[fell] apart when [anyone] touches them”, like Victor whom family, government and ideology have failed. Ultimately, the greatest parallel between the narrative Smoke Signals of and the legacy of injustice between Native and Euro-Americans is the constant theme of betrayal at the hands of a father. Victor and Thomas have both been dramatically affected the absence of Victor’s father. Native Americans have a history of referring to the President of the United States as the “great white father” and this gains a special resonance when we consider Thomas’ closing monologue in the film: “How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?“ This final meditation on Thomas’ part is a reflection on the relationship between a colonial power and the indigenous people it takes in its charge. The colonial past of Euro-Americans placed them in a traditionally antagonistic and authoritarian position, i.e. in the role of the father. By the tail end of the 20^th century, when Smoke Signals appears, Native Americans still find themselves subservient to an abusive, neglectful father. How are you supposed to feel towards this father who has alternately neglected and interfered with you? How do you heal a legacy of pain which has existed for generations? Finally, if you do decide to forgive this awful parent, what comes next? It is by virtue of these astounding layers of complex symbolism and political comment that makes Smoke Signals a departure from other depictions of Native Americans in film. While the significance of Native American involvement at all levels of the production cannot be ignored, it is the thoroughly human and emotional level with which Smoke Signals appeals to its audience in order to communicate its message that sets it apart from other attempts. Bibliography

• Churchhill, W. “American Indians in Film: Thematic Contours of Cinematic Colonization”, in Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender and Sexuality Through Film, Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2003
• Cobb, Amanda J. “This is What it Means to Say Smoke Signals”, in Peter C. Rollins and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003
• Iverson, Peter. We Are Still Here: American Indians in the Twentieth Century, Illinios: Harlan Davidson, 1998
• King C. R., Media Images And Representations. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2006
• Rollins, Peter C. and John E. Connor, Hollywood’s Indian, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.

• Smoke Signals Dir. Chris Eyre. Shadowcatcher Entertainment. 1998

When we consider the modern sexual politics of the Catholic Church they are, in comparison to those of the broader secular world, quite conservative. What many don’t realise is that much of what makes up the contemporary sexual politics of the Catholic Church stems from the works and thinking of one man: St. Augustine. This essay will explore the life and works of St. Augustine and how it was that he profoundly affected the thinking of both the Catholic Church and the broader secular community right up to the present day.

Essential to understanding the works of St. Augustine is an understanding of his background leading up to his career as a member of the Catholic Church. Augustine lived from 354CE to 430CE and was born to a devout Christian mother and devout Pagan father in Thagaste, a Numidian town. His mother was earnest to raise her son a Christian and this, coupled with Augustine’s brilliant scholarly ability and the patronage of a wealthy benefactor led to his education in Carthage. Augustine took easily to education and he exhibited an insatiable lust for knowledge, coming quickly to grasp Latin and the finer points of rhetoric. Early in his life Augustine had become a teacher of Pagan rhetoric at Carthage, regardless of his mother’s wishes. Augustine was very much his own man who not only went against the wishes of his family (especially his mother) but seemed to often behave in an actively antagonistic fashion. Augustine had a self-professed and over-active libido and, much against his mother’s wishes, Augustine took a concubine with whom he had a child, named Adeodatus, meaning “the gift of god”. Riling against his mother’s desire for him to seek Christian spiritual guidance, Augustine joined a Persian derived sect called the Manichaeans who related evil to matter and the realm of the physical. His devotion to the Manichaeans was shaken, however, when he met Bishop Ambrose at the request of his mother. Ambrose answered many of the Manichaeans’ objections to the Old Testament and exposed many of the flaws of Manichaean thinking with an eloquence and intellectual strength that amazed Augustine. The influence of Ambrose on Augustine was profound, as Bainton notes “here was a man who grappled with the problems of faith and who showed that one could be an intellectual and a Christian”. During Easter in 387CE Augustine and his son were baptised by Ambrose. Soon after this Augustine became a monk and then, in 396CE became a bishop in the town of Hippo in Northern Africa.

Throughout his career Augustine never lost his love of the scholarly pursuits and spent much of his time reading about and writing on Christian theology. Much of this seemed to be fueled by his apparent obsession with his own sexuality and with the nature of human sexuality in general. This is best displayed in his reflective autobiography and spiritual treatise Confessions which first appeared in 397CE. This document formed the core of what would become Augustinian sexual politics and, eventually, Catholic doctrine. Central to Augustine’s notion of human sexuality is that of Original Sin. According to Augustine, man was irreversibly corrupted by the fall of Adam and is inescapably tied to his sin against God. Adam’s (and by association man’s) punishment for disobedience to God was one of forced disobedience to one’s self. This is essentially the notion that the human body and mind became separate and opposed to one another. The free will of the human mind could no longer exert itself to control the base desires of the flesh. This is most notably present, Augustine claims, in the sexual passions of human beings. Augustine observed that sexual arousal seems to occur automatically, regardless of what the mind desires. Augustine saw this as proof that the body’s disobedience of the mind often manifested itself in the form of lust. The central problem for this explanation of the uncontrollable sexual desires of mankind was explaining how it is that something that Adam did could condemn every subsequent human.

Unlike the archaic biological notion of preformationism (which suggested that a child existed perfectly formed in miniature inside of its parent’s sex cells, extending all the way back to Adam and Eve), Augustine contended that the entire human lineage had not existed within Adam but that the whole of Adam had been corrupted, including his semen. This meant that every child that Adam created was imbued with evil, sinful seed which passed his sin onto all of his children. Therefore all descendants of Adam (that being the entire human race) were created with fundamentally flawed semen and inherited the Original Sin from all of their descendants. The implications for Augustine arriving at this conclusion were enormous. If all human beings were inherently flawed and sinful, then that meant they could not possibly be trusted to administer to anything without the constant guidance of God. This meant that perfection or a utopian, peaceful existence was impossible for mankind. Furthermore, if we couldn’t trust our bodies to behave appropriately towards sexual desire (because of the rampant influence of lust) then how were we to know what kind of sexual interaction or attraction was safe in the eyes of God? The only safe solution, according to Augustine, was to only have sex for the purposes of procreation which meant that only sex within marriage was acceptable. Augustine contended that the physical act of sex itself was not sinful, but that it was inexplicably linked to a lustful sexual desire that caused man to lose his rational control of himself and his body. However, because God ordained the marital bond, the lustful experience of sex within marriage was far more acceptable than sex outside of marriage that wasn’t for the purpose of procreation.

There was naturally opposition to these views. The transition from the writings of one man to official Church doctrine was by no means an instant or unanimous one. Julian of Eclanum was appalled at the notion that human sexuality or semen could in any way be sinful or anything but completely natural:

God made bodies, distinguished the sexes, made

genitalia, bestowed affection through which bodies

would be joined, gave power to the semen, and

operates in the secret nature of the semen – and

God made nothing evil.

-As quoted in Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, p. 132

So why would St. Augustine’s beliefs become adopted by the Catholic Church as doctrine? One possible explanation is that it would have been a very effective way for the Church to assert its place and power within society. If mankind cannot be trusted to control his base physical urges and requires a constant spiritual communion with God to save his eternal soul, then the Church is there, ready to offer spiritual guidance. If human beings cannot be trusted to govern themselves without the guidance of God, and the Church is the representative God on Earth, then that places the Church in a unique position of power. This alone could not account for the adoption of Augustine’s stance on Original Sin. Elane Pagels suggests that is the simplicity and compelling nature Augustine’s theory that allowed it to endure. In the face of human suffering, it answers the question of “why is this happening to me” by simply and efficiently removing the immediate blame from the individual and placing it on our collective ancestors, Adam and Eve. Augustine’s thinking tells us not only the cause of our suffering but also gives our suffering meaning and significance. The other advantage in this kind of thinking is that it removes much of the responsibility or guilt which stem from suffering or wicked behaviour by removing the blame from the individual. If good and evil are predetermined and we’re all sinners, then we can do anything we like as long as we ask God for forgiveness and absolution.

Let us now consider the legacy that St. Augustine has left and where it endures to this day. The Catholic Church still has a hard-line policy with regards to sex. Sex before marriage is unacceptable, sex is to be strictly for procreation and, as a result, contraception is strictly forbidden. Catholic priests are celibate, in order to turn their attention wholly towards matters spiritual. We need to understand, however, that St. Augustine’s thinking has had a wide-reaching and insidious effect on broader, secular society. We are very body conscious and have a number of nudity taboos (such as the generally negative view of public breast-feeding or nude swimming) and tend to frown on excessive premarital sex (especially in the case of women). While contraception is more acceptable in secular society it is often more for its uses as a means to prevent sexually transmitted diseases or allow for family planning amongst married people or couples in ‘committed relationships’.

In conclusion, the works and thinking of St. Augustine has had a powerful effect on both the thinking of the Catholic Church and broader secular society. The concept of Original Sin provided both a platform for the Church to assert itself within society and a mechanism with which the lay person could rationalise and understand suffering in their lives and in the world in general. Many of the central elements of Augustinian politics are preserved in the beliefs and social conventions of both the Catholic Church and secular society to this day. St Augustine may not be a figure of popular conversation but when we examine his life and his works we can see how profoundly one individual can personally alter the thinking of millions.

Further Reading

• Bainton, Roland, The Penguin History of Christianity, Vol. 1, London, Nelson, 1964, pp. 129-135
• Chadwick, Henry, The Early Church, London, Hodder Stoughton, 1968, pp. 216-236
• Pagels, Elaine, Adam, Eve and the Serpent,New York, Random House, 1988, pp. 98-150

The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama.

Running against the grain of the gangster genre is the film’s ability to humanise these disreputable and oft-outright criminal characters and effectively communicate the very human costs that their lives have to both themselves and their families. Like the so-called ‘heroes’ of the gangster genre, Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, Henry Hill and Frank Lucas. the characters of Cedar Boys endure the same heady highs and harrowing lows of a life of crime and of a classically-informed tragedy, but do so in the vastly understated, fundamentally parochial manner that marks many of the best Australian character-based dramas.While many gangster films focus on characters with immigrant or ethnic characters, Cedar Boys also draws on a long Australian tradition of films dealing with immigration, ethnicity, racial tension, the fight to attain or resist assimilation and the loneliness and alienation of being a stranger in a strange land. From the misguidedly prejudiced They’re a Weird Mob to The Combination, Romulus, My Father, Romper Stomper and the astounding mini-series Marking Time, Australian filmmakers have been exploring and expounding upon the pathos of migrant life for decades.

A still from Serhat Caradee's Cedar Boys

The combination of these two genres gifts a third dimension to the film. The careful and patient attention paid to showing us the lives of the characters before before the fall makes the consequences of that fall devastating, to both the characters and audience. This gives the film a definite noir sensibility. This is nothing new in Australian film, the many shining moments of which include Two Hands, The Bank and The Square. This film is, essentially, more than the sum of its parts and they’re all good parts. - Morgan

~~~~

What strikes me perhaps most forcefully about Cedar Boys is the manner in which its atmosphere, sensibility and aesthetic are all procured through, and sustained by, an arguable lack. Digital video lacks the sumptuous analog texture and vibrancy of the 35mm film stock that informed crime epics like The Godfather (though shooting digitally gifts Cedar Boys with a greater sense of urgency, immediacy and spontaneity than that film), while the contemporaneous era in which the film is set lacks the overwrought sense of self that characterised the ’70s and ’80s and films (and media, more generally, regardless of its medium of production) of and about those eras, and even Australian currency lacks the sheer value and worth of, say, the British pound or the American dollar, imparting a certain provincial triviality to the proceedings in the context of global crime narratives.

Chief amongst these is that last: there is a charming and beguiling lack of pretension about Cedar Boys. There is no real effort made to aggrandise the grubby, low-down business of drug dealing or those who are drawn to it, and the privileges and advantages that Tarek and his friends risk their lives and their futures for are transient at best and heartbreakingly ephemeral at worst.   Sam, for instance, buys rims with his newly acquired wealth, in what might very well be seen as a vicious parody of the classic montage-sequence-as-indicator-of-success, while all Tarek wants, desperately, is to raise the funds necessary to fast-track his older brother’s legal appeal. The overarching message of Cedar Boys, to its audience as well as to those disaffected youths it hopes to portray (and these two groups may very well be separate), is that this, all of this, is fundamentally and inarguably not worth it, in the most literal as well as abstract fashions, and it manages to say so without preaching.

Aesthetically, this dearth of glamour is reflected always and primarily in the workmanlike cinematography, ‘workmanlike’ being a descriptor I choose carefully and without deprecatory intent: by this I mean the art direction to be rarely showy, always prizing functionality and the comprehension of the audience over the artistic qualities of compositions such as you might find in, say, the work of Scorcese (most, if not all, of Scorcese’s efforts in manipulating the frame alone could be framed in their own right, his penchant for characterising his cities of choice through their architecture is a trend that goes back at least as far as Mean Streets), and in this way Caradee retains the essential kernel of truth at the heart of his film: by not giving in to the desire to make things more than they are, a commendable instinct and one that the odious One Perfect Day (which deals with similar subject matter, if tangentially and with hands of ham) could have benefited greatly from. Les Chantery’s performance as the disabused Tarek is remarkable in its spareness, in its very minimalism; he conveys only just as much as is needed in the early stages in the film so that when he is finally called upon to express something, anything, in the vein of Travis Bickle, he seems to suddenly explode (though unlike Travis, it is grief rather than rage that fuels the fire and that mushrooms up from the ruins of his life). So it is that Chantery sublimates himself in service to the film, to the point that the untrained eye might suspect him of genuine reticence or some form of thespian incompetence when the reality is far-removed from such assertions.

That said, the film is rarely drab, in either performance or the visual aspect, but one occasionally wishes Caradee would loosen the reins ever-so-slightly: there are a handful of moments that display his natural cinematic flair (a late-night party at a suburban mansion, for instance, is luscious with wealth and dimly-lit sleaze), and on the quality of that handful alone, a few more would have been unlikely to endanger the serious (often dour) nature of the tale under discussion: indeed,  noir was always, historically, attracted to and informed by the stark lines and monochromatic obsessions of German expressionism and later architectural modernism, and in its unrepentant identification with the noir ideal, Cedar Boys could afford to freewheel further than it does.

If Cedar Boys can truly be said to fall down in any way, it is only in the straightforwardness of its gist, in its lack of twists and turns, in the telegraphing of its punches. As an exercise in mimicry of what, it might be argued, is a steadfastly American criminal-tragedy tradition, a staggering, stumbling post-modern behemoth like the permanently off-kilter Two Hands does a much better job of making the form its own, however grotesquely bloated it eventually becomes through its own narcissism.

I don’t think, however, that Cedar Boys should be marked on its ability to bend its genre of choice or its ability to make fresh again perhaps that most overdone of cinematic formulas. Instead, it should be marked on its honesty, its refreshing lack of irony, and its steadfast desire to depict a ethno-subcultural tradition: it’s more social document than narrative innovator. Cedar Boys is to be commended for, perhaps like (of all things) The Wrestler, being of the world it depicts instead of about the world it depicts, for better or worse (David Field’s The Combination functions in a similarly narratively transcendent manner). Its portraits are perhaps not deep, but they are vivid, and that counts for a lot. - Martin

Cedar Boys opens in a limited release in Australia and screening locations can be found at the official website. While the release is certainly limited, it’s not that limited, with the film receiving screenings at most Hoyts and Palace Cinemas.

When we turn to significant landmarks in human cultural history it is often easier to acknowledge that a landmark occurred than it is to pin down the specific details of that landmark. It is an oft touted idiom that “history is written by the victor” and, even when we are not concerning ourselves with military victories, the same phenomenon of historical whitewashing occurs with cultural revolutions. While historians agree that the Western world is a predominantly democratic one, one would be hard pressed to find two who reached a consensus about the origins, birth and development of the concept. Did it begin with the Ancient Greek senate or was that such an alien form of democracy from that which we practice today that it doesn’t bare comparison? The same problems arise for any historian that attempts to trace the origins of the momentous cultural development that was Israelite Monotheism. This article will attempt to trace the roots of Monotheism in Ancient Israel and assess the speed with which it was adopted.

Before we can examine the rise of Monotheism in Israelite culture we must ask the crucial question of why such a belief system arose. Polytheism was and had been the accepted model of worship in every major civilization in the region, from the Egyptians to the Mediterranean to the Babylonians and Assyrians of Mesopotamia. It was not only an established model, but likely an apparently sensible one to those living in the ancient world, particularly those in the Ancient Near East. Firstly, the natural environment in which people found themselves was a harsh and contradictory one. Subject to droughts, floods, sand and dust storms as well as fierce electrical storms assailed the settlers of the Ancient Near East (Boadt 545). It would be difficult or near impossible for people to simply rationalise these natural occurrences as the work of a single deity. Such a deity was surely a cruel and fickle one who cared little for the plight of his people. It was almost certainly much easier to believe that these natural misfortunes were the work of several conflicting gods, some of whom were benevolent (or at least indifferent) towards human beings. Furthermore, when there is more than one entity which has an influence over the world of men it is easier to rationalize faults in those entities. Each god has their strengths and weaknesses, areas of responsibility and personal shortcomings (Boadt, 245). Across the entire pantheon these various strengths and weaknesses balance one another out in such a way that everything is under the control of a god and any discrepancies in the expected outcomes or events of these gods’s work can be explained away by inter-deity conflict or shortcomings. Finally, representing the gods as a community of interacting entities, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and interactions with one another creates a set of higher beings who are, ultimately, easier to understand and identify with. The question then, is why would a culture develop a need for Monotheism?

The answer lays in an unusual permutation of the common Near Eastern Practices of adopting and distorting the myths of neighbouring peoples and the tying of the actions of the Gods to the events in the world of men. The successes and defeats of the deities of the Ancient Near East were, naturally, tied to the successes and defeats of their earthly subjects. Let us examine the Canaanite pantheon as an example, as it is in this region that Israelite Monotheism would eventually arise. The Canaanite religion was typical of the Ancient Near Eastern polytheistic religions described above, with each god controlling a specific portfolio, each of which directly related to a component of the natural world and the impact that component had on the pantheon’s mortal subjects. A brief summary of each major god of the Canaanite pantheon follows:

El: The father of all gods and chief creator of all creatures. The authority figure of the gods, El is the chief judge of any dispute amongst the gods but is apparently distant from his human subjects.

Baall: The god of the storm. Baal is responsible for the annual rainfall and fertility cycle of the earth. Baal is often also depicted as the triumphant General and lord of War.

Asherah: The Goddess of the Sea and wife of El. An important council to El with a minor association to fertility.

Anat: Sister and wife of Baal. Like the Babylonian Goddess, Ishtar, Anat combines the aspects of the goddess of love and war simultaneously.

Astarte: Another Goddess relating to fertility, strongly resembling Anat.

-All sourced from Boadt, 218.

We can see from this brief summary that, in this small sampling of Gods, each has a link to both the natural and human world. Baal is the god of storms (natural) and the god of war (human). Asherah is the goddess of the sea (natural) and the goddess of conciliation (human). Astarte and Anat are goddesses associated with both natural and human fertility, as well as human passion. Even in these god’s portfolios we find a direct relationship between the events of the human world and actions of the Gods. To further illustrate the relationship between the actions of the gods and the world of men, we must turn to the Epic of Baal, which accounts a conflict between Baal and Mot, the personification of death (Boadt, 219). Through a successful military campaign, Baal becomes the king of the gods. Unhappy with this and believing that he is more deserving of the kingship, Mot demands that the other gods to hand over Baal to him. Baal accepts the challenge and travels to the underworld to battle Mot, but eats the bread of death and is overcome. Without the god of storms, the earth wilts from lack of rain. Anat goes searching for Baal, finds him and frees him. Anat battles with Mot, who she defeats, shreds to pieces and sprinkles like seed across the earth. Baal returns and, with him, comes the rain that the earth was lacking. The rain of Baal causes the seeds of Mot to sprout and the earth is rejuvenated (Boadt, 219-220). We can see, very explicitly, in this story that conflict of wet and dry seasons in the Ancient Near East was tied directly to the trials and tribulations of the Gods. In order for civilization to prevail, Baal must prevail (Boadt, 220). We can see exactly the same thinking in the creation, depiction and evolution of Yahweh, the god of the Israelites.

It is crucial to understand that, for the Ancient Israelites, there arose a point in their history when, besieged from all sides, the most important and significant element of the divine to them was that which protected the Israelite people and destroyed their enemies (Boadt, 221). Many accounts openly steal from the other Near Eastern accounts of the triumphs of the Gods who were sympathetic towards human beings over those who were not (Boadt, 222). As Boadt astutely observes, “While rejecting the multiple gods and the nature myths of Canaan, Israel felt itself free to use many of the themes to enhance the power of Yahweh” (Boadt, 222). An excellent example of this is the manner in which the Israelites selectively condemned parts of Baal’s portfolio while adopting and attributing those that suited them to Yahweh. While the Israelites were uncomfortable with the fertility rights associated with Baal and his wives and condemned them, they were happy to adopt other aspects of Canaanite worship and adopt them to suit their needs (Boadt, 223). For example, both the Canaanites and Israelites placed a large significance on the power of sacrifice and the Israelites adopted many of the rites and details of Canaanite sacrifice (down to modelling their sacrificial altars in similar shape to those of the Canaanites) they dispensed with and forbade the Canaanite practice of child sacrifice (Boadt, 223). When we examine the development Israelite monotheism we can see that it appears to be an amalgamation of polytheism in which the powers and portfolios of all of the Gods are brought under the single name of Yahweh.

If we examine the early works of the Torah we can the pushing and pulling of these schizophrenic divine personalities pushing and pulling against one another. In Genesis we can see a suggestion of a dual male/female identity for Yahweh, despite the assertion that of Genesis 1:1 that “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (King James Bible, Genesis 1:1). This position of a solitary creator is diametrically opposed to other Near Eastern creation myths, like the Babylonian Enuma Elish, in which creation results from the interactions and conflicts of many gods. We still see all of the portfolios of Near Eastern God’s represented in Genesis, except they are either subsumed by Yahweh himself or his actions/creations. For example, each of the stages of the Genesis creations myth mirrors the stages of creation in the Enuma Elish except that in the Enu Elish, a different god is responsible for each stage (Frymer-Kensky, 154). Instead of Apsu and Tiamat creating water from their mere presence in the chaotic void, Yahweh wills there to be water from the chaotic void. The end result is the same, but the origin has been subtly altered to allow for a single deity. Hooke presents and excellent example of this in his analysis of the story of the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis 3 and its similarity to the Babylonian myth of Enki and Ninhursag:

“According to Sumerian myth the only thing Dilmun lacked was fresh water; the god Enki (or Ea) ordered Utu, the sun-god, to bring up fresh water from the earth to water the garden… In the myth of Enki and Ninhursag it is related that the mother-goddess Ninhursag caused eight plants to grow in the garden of the gods. Enki desired to eat these plants and sent his messenger Isimud to fetch them. Enki ate them one by one, and Ninhursag in her rage pronounced the curse of death upon Enki. As the result of the curse eight of Enki’s bodily organs were attacked by disease and he was at the pain of death. The great gods were in dismay and Enlil [the chief god] was powerless to help. Ninhursag was induced to return and deal with the situation. She created eight goddesses of healing who proceeded to heal each of the diseased parts of Enki’s body. One of these parts was the god’s rib, and the goddess who was created to deal with the rib was named Ninti, which means “lady of the rib”.”

-Hooke, pp. 114-115

The parallels here to the tree of knowledge story in Genesis 3 are obvious. What is significant, for our purposes, is that rather than the eating of forbidden fruit and the consequences of such an action are not a collection of happenstance interactions between various gods, but stem from the deliberate action of Yahweh (who created the tree of knowledge), the folly of man who disobeyed him and the fallout from such disobedience. We see the same plundering of myth and absorption of foreign gods in the Genesis flood story and the flood stories found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish (Hooke, 127).

We can see from these parallels in Genesis that there was no instant ‘switch’ between monotheism and polytheism. While lip service is paid to the notion of one God, the behaviour of that single god is drawn directly from the myths of polytheistic cultures. In many cases Yahweh behaves in contradictory or inexplicable ways, which are not easily rationalised in terms of a single god. It takes a long period of time until Yahweh is completely unified with a purpose for himself and the Israelite people and there is a gradual evolution of concrete monotheism. In Exodus 34:14, in which Yahweh commands “thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (King James Bible, Exodus 34:14) he does not deny the existence of other gods, merely prohibits their worship. This is immediately reinforced in Exodus 34:15 in which Yahweh forbids his followers from making “a covenant with the inhabitants of the land” and “whoring after their gods” (King James Bible, Exodus 34:15). By the time we reach Deuteronomy 4:39, however, the message could not be more absolute.

“Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else”

-Deuteronomy 4:39

Furthermore, when we arrive at the books of Joshua and Judges the classic model of Israelite Monotheism is complete, with the firm depiction of Yahweh as not merely a single god, but the God, with the Israelites as his chosen people (Herrmann, 155).

It is impossible for us to say precisely when the Israelites completely embraced monotheism (Garbini, 32). There are too many unknown variables at work. For example, let us entertain the question of whether there was a discrepancy in monotheism’s adoption in the cities over the rural areas? Centres of spiritual and military might, as well as being the symbol of centralization and streamlining, the cities were likely to adopt the notion of Monotheism faster. Conversely, rural farmers, shepherds and pastoralists were more intimately concerned with the themes present in and adopted from the Babylonian myths, specifically as fertility and the cycle of seasons. Surely, the people in these rural communities would take much longer to fully embrace the tenets of monotheism. We run into further problems when, as we have seen above, the nature of Israelite monotheism was not a static one. The faith begins with the amalgamation of many local deities and myths, under the banner of one God. Yahweh is not instantly a unified entity, but becomes one, slowly over time and under the supervision of countless authors and editors. All we can say, with any certainty, is that the introduction of Monotheism to the Israelites was definitely a gradual one.

Bibliography

• Boadt, L. Reading the Old Testament, New York, Paulist Press, 1984
• Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, “The Atrahasis Epic and its Significance for our understanding of Genesis 1-9” Biblical Archaeologist 40 (4), 1977
• Garbini, G. History and Ideology in Ancient Israel, London : SCM, 1988.
• Hermann, S. A history of Israel in Old Testament times, London: SCM Press Ltd, 1981.

• Hooke, S. H. Middle Eastern Mythology. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. 1978.
• King James Bible.

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Welcome to what is, I hope, the first of many history articles on Wonderbread. In completing a double major in cinema and history I’ve learned many interesting things and would love to share some of them with you. Some of my fellow history students will also be contributing articles, so keep your eyes on the History category. I’d like to open with an article I wrote earlier this year for a class on Ancient Israel. It explores the similarities between the Ancient Israelite creation and flood stories and those of the Babylonians before them. Ultimately, we can see that there is common mythic tradition in the Ancient Near East.

-Morgan

When we examine the narrative and thematic structure of Genesis 1-2:4a we can see a structural and thematic core which appears to originate from a broad mythic tradition which existed in the Ancient Near East, long before the Israelites codified their scripture in writing. The central parallels exist in the Babylonian texts of the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis epic. We can find elements of each of these ancient stories present in Genesis, however, it is the differences (rather than the similarities) in these narratives that reveals to us the details of the philosophy of the Iraelites which distinguished them from their contemporaries. It is worthwile, however, to consider the similarities because these provide us with useful information about the collective experience of life in the Ancient Near East.

The central and broadest similarity that exists between Genesis 1-2:4a and Babylonian myth comes in the form of the Creation Myth presented in the Enuma Elish. The notable (and obvious) exception between the two myths is that, while the Enuma Elish presents a polytheistic model, the Genesis creation myth seems to lean towards a monotheistic model (we will address this after we examine the structural composition of the two myths). It is worth noting that, while they arrive at completely different answers, all of the myths which we will discuss attempt to define the relationship between divinity and humans and to why life in the ancient near east was so difficult. Let us begin by examining the narrative structure of the Enuma Elish.

We begin with two Gods, Apsu (male, relating to fresh water) and Tiamut (female, relating to salt water and chaos?) who exist in a formless void (Heidel, 3). From this initial generation comes Ahmu (male),  Lahamu (female) who are both silt deposits as well as Anshar (the rim of the sky) and Kishar (rim of the earth). Anshar and Kishar engender Anu (the sky). Anu gives birth to Ea and his wife is named Damkina.

At this point, we can already see similarities to the Genesis creation story. The basic, fundamental material elements of creation appear first (before they are structured and joined by life) but rather than these elements being made or shaped by a single God, acting as a divine architect, the Gods themselves make up the raw material of creation. This is a trend which continues throughout the Enuma Elish, which we will see as we return to its narrative.

The younger and older Gods are divided into two generations. Apsu and Tiamut form the elder generation, who have stagnated and prefer a lack of activity. The younger generation (comprised of all the Gods spawned by Apsu and Tiamut) have grown noisy and, irritated by this imposition, Apsu plans to kill them. The younger Gods learn of this plan and Ea puts Apsu to sleep and kills him. At this point Ea and Damkina build a house on Apsu’s body and have a son, Marduk. Anshar asks Marduk to kill Tiamut and Marduk agrees, as long as he’s made ruler over all of the Gods. Marduk and Tiamut meet in a titanic battle and, when she opens her mouth to swallow him, he sends the winds to lock her jaws open and shoots an arrow down her throat which pierces her heart.

He then vanquishes her army and captures her son and consort, Kingu. Marduk splits Tiamut in half, dividing the waters above from the waters below. He removes her eyes and the Tigris and Euphrates are formed. He puts the Gods in the heavens, which form the stars and is proclaimed King of the Gods. The Gods begin to work the land which Marduk has created but soon find that the work is too hard. Ea creates human beings out of clay and the blood of the executed Kingu so that the Gods will no longer have to work.

We can see from this summary that the prevailing message from the Enuma Elish is that the Babylonian Gods have, at best, an antipathetic relationship with Human beings and the world that they have created. The structural nature of the world is directly related to the creation and activities of the Gods and the Humans are only created as a subservient means to save the Gods from working the land. It establishes a series of etiological explanations for why life in the ancient Middle East was hard and the resounding explanation is the presence of an uncaring, fickle pantheon.

The Genesis narrative, on the other hand, presents a very similar narrative with two key (and significant) changes. The first is that the creation myth is presented with a single God. The Enuma Elish’s basic structure is kept, but rather than the birth and actions of various Gods being responsible for the stages of creation, each stage results directly from the action of a single deity and is represented by a single day:

Day 1 Created light. Light called day and darkness called night.

Day 2 Expanse between water from above and below. Expanse = Sky

Day 3 Dry ground / Vegetation: Plants and Trees. ” According to their various kinds”

Day 4 Light in sky to separate day and night. Sun / Moon / Stars

Day 5 Life in water and birds in the air. ” According to their various kinds”

Day 6 Land Animals ” Each according to its kind”     Then God created man in his image to rule over: Fish / Birds / Livestock     Every green plant is given for food.

The second significant difference lies in the relationship which is established between human beings and the divine. While in the Enuma Elish man is created to be a slave to the Gods, the prevailing message throughout Genesis is a single, loving and involved God who creates the earth and mankind in his own image. This distinction in divine attitudes persists when we compare the Genesis Flood Story with the other flood narratives of the Ancient Near East.

The accounts are nearly identical in their narrative. Each of them follows the basic formula of :

1. God(s) create humans
2. There is a problem with the humans.
3. God(s) send a flood.
4. A new order is created to fix the problems which existed before the flood

The differences lie in the moral tone of each story and the manner in which God(s) are depicted. Let us begin by examining the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Gilgamesh epic uses the flood story as method of explaining human mortality. The story focuses on Gilgamesh’s quest to become immortal, after the death of his friend Enkidu. Because this issue of mortality is the central narrative thread in the story the flood component is only used in relation explaining human mortality. Gilgamesh encounters Utnapishtim, an immortal man and asks him how he gained his immortality. As Utnapishtim relates his story, we can see clear parallels between him and Noah in the Genesis flood story. However, the reasons for the flood are not stressed, only that Utnapishtim’s reward for being a dutiful servant and saving humanity was immortality. In this sense, the Gilgamesh epic is not concerned with the hows and whys of the Flood, only in its usefulness for explaining the problem of why people die (Frymer-Kensky 154-5).

In the Atrahasis epic, on the other hand, is a more direct parallel with the Genesis flood story (the scope of the Atrahasis epic is much broader than merely describing the flood, but we will focus on the flood component alone for now). In the Atrahasis the flood is used to describe the antagonistic relationship between the Gods and humanity (the flood is sent because the humans have grown to populous and are too noisy). The narrative of the flood itself is almost identical to that of the story in Genesis, but there is a major difference in tone. The Atrahasis epic gives us an interesting window into the psyches of the Babylonian people (Boadt 127).

When we consider the climate and geography of the ancient Middle East, with its droughts, storms and floods it is easy to imagine why their Gods were depicted as angry, fickle beings. It is the obvious explanation for the climatic woes which beset them.

If we turn now to Genesis we can see that while the flood narrative is essentially the same, the moral and depiction of God’s relationship to mankind is completely different. While in the Atrahasis epic presents a relatively flippant reason for the floods (the humans were annoying) the Genesis flood is released by God because the world has become corrupted. To say that it was simply because humans had been wicked undermines the deeper meaning of the shift in moral and tone. If it were merely a case of human beings being wicked, why not simply wipe out the humans rather than killing the humans and everything else on earth? We can gain an understanding of both God’s motivations for the flood and society and belief in ancient Israel if we examine the covenant God presents to Noah and his sons after the flood.

• God’s covenant contains 3 basic rules:
• Be fruitful and multiply
• You may eat animals, but not alive and no drinking blood
• No one, beast or man, may kill a human being

The first covenant seems to be in direct opposition to the Babylonian explanation of overpopulation and the annoying nature of humans as a reason for the flood.

The second covenant contains clues about both Israelite society and culture and the third covenant. First we can infer that before the flood, if vegetarianism wasn’t the norm then eating meat was, at the very least, a taboo. Second, the mention of blood and the prohibition of drinking it hints at the strong significance of blood in Israelite culture.

Frymer-Kensey (152) comments that blood holds a special significance for the ancient Israelites. They believed that the spirit of an animal (and possibly humans?) existed in the blood. It was a great taboo to spill the blood of an animal anywhere outside of the temple. The blood spatter on the altar was considered redemptive.

The commandment against killing human beings is a new one. In other near eastern legal systems it seems that capital punishment is widespread. We need only to look to Hammurabi’s law code, which proscribed capital punishment for many offences. Frymer-Kensey (152) notes that in Israel, capital punishment was reserved only for the most serious offences against God and was ‘never invoked for offences against property’. Conversely, murder could not be rectified by commercial means, only the death of the murder could set things right.

We can infer from the 3^rd commandment that the antediluvian Israel was as enthused with capital punishment as the rest of the world. Frymer-Kensey (153) suggests that it is this which is the reason that God sent the flood in genesis. He suggests that Murder has its consequences for both the murderer and the earth itself. In Gen 4:10-12 God tells Cain that the blood he spilled on the ground has made it infertile for him. In Israelite theology, the blood of innocents, when spilled on the ground, passes a physical taint to the earth itself, corrupting it. By the time of the flood, the sheer scale of the murder of innocents meant that the whole earth was physically corrupted from the blood spilt upon it. We know (from Acts, Leviticus and Ezekiel) that the ancient Israelites believed that physical acts of moral wrongdoing tainted people and places physically.  Frymer-Kensey (153) sums it up beautifully:

“The flood is not primarily an agent of punishment … but a means of getting rid of a thoroughly polluted world and starting again with a clean, washed one”

Bibliography

• Boadt, L. Reading the Old Testament, New York, Paulist Press, 1984
• Frymer-Kensky, Tikva, “The Atrahasis Epic and its Significance for our understanding of Genesis 1-9” Biblical Archaeologist 40 (4), 1977 pp.147-155
• Heidel, A. The Babylonian Genesis, Chicago: University of Chicargo Press, 1963
• King James Bible.