Friday, December 21, 2012

Embracing Evil


The disgusting Quentin Tarantino was on a talk show last night being interviewed about his new movie Django.

In true advanced liberal fashion, it is a film denouncing whites, and specifically white men, glorifying blacks, specifically violent black men, and filling the film with scenes of extreme, bloody violence.

Tarantino sat like an overweight adolescent, with his baggy sweat shirt, backward baseball cap, and bloated belly, waving his arms around and speaking in hyper-speed to get his "points" across. He thinks he's the best thing around. But, he is travelling to the other side, where his smirks, twisted fingers and of course the content of his speech, indicate that he has embraced evil and is degenerating before our eyes.

I hadn't been to a movie theater in over a year, until I broke that spell this past December (in New York City, no less) when I went to watch Anna Karenina with a group. As I suspected, movies, or the experience of watching movies, has gotten worse. Movie theaters now engulf us with sound at high volume and huge panoramic screens making the characters reach out to our very seats to drag us into the hyper-real, demonic world in the screen. I found watching Anna Karenina to be an unpleasant, even violent experience. Keira Knightley, who performs as Anna Karenina, overwhelms the screen with her mad eyes and high velocity talking, baring her teeth at us in half smiles of evil. We are transported into her mad, and ultimately evil, world through the superior technology of the movie camera, and the superior environment of the movie theater. I've said that cinema is the ultimate artistic creation of man, both as a good thing (think of all those lovely, memorable characters and stories we've watched in movies) and as something evil.

I've read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina twice. I wouldn't have read it again if I hadn't enjoyed it, in the aesthetic sense and in a more deeper literary and moral sense. I've abandoned books unfinished because I found them badly written, or with evil and menacing purposes. I left Crime and Punishment, another Russian's chef d'oeuvre, unfinished because I couldn't handle the insidious evilness that lurked behind that book and its main character. It actually gave me nightmares.

Anna Karenina, as she was related to me by Tolstoy, was mostly a tragic character, rather than mad or evil. I think her suicide was her realization at how much she had deviated from the goodness of life, and she couldn't bear this anymore. Thus, I cannot empathize with Keiria's characterization, because her performance, and the personality she brings to the performance, give us an evil rendition of Anna.

Our twentieth century artists are adamant on embracing evil. But once they've crossed that line, it is evil that sinks its claws into them.

Keira Knightley as the teeth-baring, mad-eyed Anna Karenina