During my sojourn into weekday work and solitude with an aging couple in Utah, great stretches of time with no human aggression grant the peace of mind to cultivate rare fictional perspectives. Among the homes where I am a guest, this is a rare case of one with a TV. Bob likes documentaries and podcast discussions. Deb and Bob love watching movies together, preferring action adventure, which falls right in the center of my taste range.
Four nights a week we will view something on the TV in those few hours between sundown and bedtime. This week we viewed two movies, starring Tom Cruise:
Jack Reacher 2012, was a good standard action adventure who-done-it with all of the standard tropes of American law enforcement drama: cops are for the good, not intended as a boot on the neck, most cops are good, top cops are stupid and hero cops save the day, immersed in a tangled web of plot twists that could never be sorted out in actual court. The hero is ex-military, super-studly and needs no gun, beating up gunman and mobs of tough guys. The leading lady is a beautiful blonde woman in distress, but with a firm character and lots of moral authority. There is even a minor bad guy who is black. Of course, the ultimate bad guys are Russian.
Jack Reacher 2018, has become a feminist vehicle for globo-homo, with the beautiful blonde woman that needs rescued a teen daughter figure and Reacher partnered up with a female ass-kicking machine who is a Military Police lawyer, kills men twice her weight in unarmed combat and can do everything that the masculine hero does. The only good cops are a black man and a white woman. The bad guys are now rural white Americans.
Movies and TV shows, have always taught us who the government and their masters want us to fear and hate, which is what all of the serial killer TV was about for the first 20 years of this century. Serial killer fiction and documentary focuses on the demographic least likely to kill you as an existential threat to us all.
This made me interested in how gay the Reacher TV series must be. But first, in the same theme, while looking for the gorgeous Salt Lake City weather girls—either one, Bob and I came across a NASA news bit, this right after we agreed that the Moon landing is at least suspect. I mean, what else did we do in the 1960s that has not been replicated since.
Artimus NASA news:
Finally, NASA wants to go back to the moon. This is odd in that Stanley Kubrick is dead. But if he could fake it on film, they can surely do it digitally. The nuts and bolts of the mission are presented by two white women and a white man. The moral mission is then presented as a propaganda stunt: to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon while the support team of two white men orbit the moon in safety.
The high functioning mulatto and a woman who is a ringer for the handsomely athletic heroine in Jack Reacher 2018, are billed as the landing team and express themselves very well, they are oddly identical to the standard urban news anchor team, of an authoritative white woman and a caring, partially feminized, articulate mixed race man.
The mission is billed as named Artimus, bigger and better than Apollo. This is deep language. Apollo was the god of arts, the sun, boxing, wolves even, the second most prolific multi-cult god of ancient Hellas. Apollo is further singled out as the lingering enemy of Christianity in the Song of Roland, representing science as a device for piercing God’s veil. Apollo was The Shining One, bringer of plagues and prophecy, and was served by the female Pythia oracle at Delphi.
Artimus is Apollo’s sister, a huntress, an archer second only to “far-darting” Apollo. As a propaganda stunt and metaphorical Space Age hoax, this real time science-fiction endeavor, is nothing more than what JFK intended the first voyage to the moon, a vehicle for national solidarity against the Soviets. Interestingly, the history of the first space race in the 1960s in which the Soviets sent monkeys and a dog up into orbit and we sent men, who we are since told to believe were rescued by the calculations of black women, has been corrected: we did not beat the Soviets to the moon, but the Russians! The Russians are now the enemy, so the Soviets of the past have been renamed Russians.
Not taking Artimus seriously as fact, but as support fiction for the actual programming in terribly formulaic movies such as Jack Reacher 2018, I was eager to see the series.
The series Reacher brings a hyper-masculine hero, who will in spots be rescued, redeemed and made fun of by the women in his life [John Wayne’s standard plight in his iconic westerns], but is a throw-back to the old style heroes of myth: as physically imposing as Herakles, as driven and uncompromising as Achilles, and as crafty as Odysseus. The writing and action scenes in the series are in all ways superior to the phony movie formulas in the two Tom Cruise movies. The actor cast in the role of Reacher begs for a more realistic treatment of the same outrageous story line of rogue law officers fighting bad guys and their crooked bosses. The standard bad guy must remain the dull-witted, rural white man. But, but, I can’t say it here, the name of the ultimate bad guy, is very “Manhattan.”
The key system sanction need, to get the support from actual alphabet soup agencies and real law enforcement departments for the making of such audio-visual pacification yarns, and please the global banks that back the movies and own our rulers, is that the system that all semi-sentient earthlings knows is totally crooked, is redeemable, at least in function, through the mechanism of whistle blowers and crusaders for good inside the system. This is standard TV and cop movies since the 1960s, and goes back the American Western, and must always be vested with vaginal authority.
This is where STORY comes to the rescue, where things will not just get forever more gay, more bitch-tittied, more pozed, but will come back around to old mythic themes in order to support the overarching System lie that the government was intended to serve rather than exploit and that it is run by we, the herd, not the bad shepherds who sheer and slaughter us.
The bigger the lie grows, and the longer it waxes above our feedlot of souls, the longer the moon masquerades as the sun, the more convincing, and hence more real, the heroes chosen by the poets of the lie must be, swinging our mind’s eye back to view previously dethroned images of us, anew.
