Sunday, November 28

Kubrick's sterile humanity

Impressionistically reviewing his work, I hypothesize Kubrick preferred solutions borne of intellectual externalities, functioning on deeds which champion anthro-conquest, our doctrine of conquering nature. In 2001, that thesis is strongly bracketed; the savage weaponized femur turns to elegant spaceship, then alien superbeings thoughtfully gift a new improved human edition, the Star Child, as if questing the greatest externality--the infinite womb of space--will bring us blessings, improvement. Oh how far we've come!

Yet what we may need delivered instead, as Derrick Jensen suggests, is a Stone Age being, a relatively ambition-less "primitive" who consciously curtails violent growth so as to not accelerate world destruction.

If the gift is not a future science-fictiony offering from aliens and superbeings, then perhaps the blessing is something we already have: memory, the cushion of our soul. After all, the cultural act of forgetting is a kind of ignorance, a scourge of civilization failing to learn from itself.

Kubrick was fond of spoofing & juxtaposing cultural schizophrenias; a computer programed with human contradictions to kill those he's meant to protect, the manic ironies of war, civilization as a veneer for savagery, etc. I don't do justice summarizing his critiques of our world.

Here, we mischaracterize our humble beginnings, restyle nature to our own liking, disconnected as products of glorious Cartesian separations.

Cogito Ergo Sum, Kubrick?