'Money Man'

Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Walau

Film review by James LaFond

The middle-class counterpart to Vince Vaughn’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, is a nearly identical story save for the social class of the protagonist. Rather than a doomed working class man, slated for extinction based on uncompromising ethics, the upscale hero played by Nikolaj Coster-Walau is doomed to fall into the abyss based on the racial politics of prison, which leave a white man doing time the choice of joining a white prison gang or getting raped. 

The hero must forever sever himself from his estranged family. The system offers no prospect of redemption in this high end whitesploitation movie, in which a fallen white man has no path back to civic decency. Like Brawl in Cell Block 99, Shot Caller addresses the singular issue, the one straw that has broken the postmodern Aryan camel’s back in the manger, the fact that incarceration for a felony effectively ends any paleface’s chance at a decent life and places him among the felonious races as the priority target for law enforcement, played by a three-race team of law officers with the immense federal hard-on for white identified criminals, who nevertheless respect this man.

The heroic theme is lukewarm in that this hero out-thinks more than he outfights his lessers and his betters. However, the pillar of the shot caller’s moral compass is the same as that of the other white genocide movie under discussion—family. Both heroes, the working class and the upper class, throw their lives away to reserve the remnants of their tiny nuclear families, all of meaning left to them in a mean, meaningless world. The whiggerization and traitorous nature of many white-identified criminals is addressed as a pitfall almost equal to the vastly evil system, which is rendered minimally evil but realistically faceless and soulless.

This movie has too many twists and turns and James Bond like solutions to be truly heroic, but is pleasing, masculine-affirming and might be stomached by the frails in your life. 

‘Blanco’

Brawl in Cell Block 99 with Vince Vaughn

Film review by James LaFond

In terms of masculine affirmation in the face of the indistinct and habitually faceless evil of the modern world, Brawl on Cell Block 99 is a masterpiece of the budding genre of whitesploitation.

The soundtrack is 1970s and new retro soul, although the protagonist is a rural white man with an unshakable moral compass, the moral compass put to the test when he is laid off and comes home to find his wife unfaithful to him.

Bradley, a Christian of Irish decent, who insists on being addressed as Bradley and not the diminutive Brad, lives strictly and truthfully in the bowels of the Lie of Modernity, is utterly and clearly doomed from the beginning of the film—which then expands inward and upward into a study in heroism.

At every step of the way the moral and legal authority figures are Latino and black, yet Bradley’s doom is held in the hands of the white enforcers of the System, just like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull would be killed by slave-traitors of their own kind, when it was decreed by the God of things that the old combative race must be done away with in favor of stepping and fetching souls of scant account.

The violence is first rate, the “bad guys” very often sympathetic actors, with Bradley finding common cause more easily with blacks of his own class—who, according to the soundtrack, bequeathed him their lot on the social swamp pyramid—than with the Latino invaders or the Caucasian traitors.

His best line, before ripping into a pack of Mexicans on a prison yard, was in response to being called gringo. He takes no offense to being called blanco, but when the man who hangs a flag from his front porch is called a foreigner in his own country, he responds that the last time he checked, the flag was not “Red, white and burrito,” demonstrating the primordially gentile lack of diplomacy which won his ancestors more berths on slave ships per capita than any tribe of West Africans.

Brawl on cell Block 99 is my new favorite movie and my favorite action star is now Vince Vaughn and his Frankenstein Fu depiction of a direct actionist possessed of a rare but awkward strength. The Character, Bradley Thomas, reminds me of nothing more than Robert E. Howard’s Esau Cairn, an inspirational hero for the men of a dying race.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

‘No Man Comes Home from War’

Kong: Skull Island

Kong was one of the most enjoyable and least Politically Correct movies in recent years. The plot is right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, combining elements The Land that Time Forgot and Pellucidar [his hollow earth] with H.P. Lovecraft’s To the Mountains of Madness.

An uncharted island in the middle of a perpetual electromagnetic storm system is home to ancient, massive lifeforms.

Two fighter pilots are downed here in 1944, A Japanese and an American, obviously taken from the movie Hell in the Pacific.

The scene then shifts to the eve of the fall of Saigon and a paranormal researcher played by John Goodman seeks the secrets of the Island.

For security, a troop of U. S. Army Air Cavalry are charged with helio-insertion and then they run into a Japanese style King Kong, a beast so big that the Empire State Building would have never supported his weight. The best part of the movie for Ishmael and I was watching the U.S. Army helicopter troop get annihilated by a massive, manlike creature. If Kong downing the bi-plane in the original movie was your favorite moment, then you get ten minutes of that in Kong!

Our glee at the slaughter of a human-piloted machine army was so brutally adolescent that it caused some soul searching, with us agreeing that what we were cheering for was masculine defiance in the person of Kong against the machine forces of modernity. Certainly, the few remaining American men will be hunted like coyotes by Home Land Security, the FBI, ATF and DOD before the century is out.

Goodman plays a convincing role.

Samuel L. Jackson, as a hard ass Colonel gives one hope as he dives into the bad guy role rather than the martyr and sage rolls usually written for A-list black actors.

The best role was John C. Riley as the marooned aviator from WWII.

The supporting cast was good and the female eye-candy of a quality targeting a Japanese audience, with some Jap super-babe incongruently wielding an assault rifle.

The leading man and leading lady stayed with the convention established by the first movie.

Kong: Skull Island, bringing together a round dozen of movies and pulp authors into one brutal adventure, is, on one hand, a sign of these unoriginal times and on the other hand an indication that mankind still identifies more with a hairy brute than with the sissy, soul-stealing matrix that feeds upon us.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Pondering on Weathertop

Impressions of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," Revisited via the movie.

The reader should be familiar with the movies based on Tolkien's iconic trilogy; if he is not, having read the trilogy twice, this reader found no contradiction between the movies and the novels they were based upon. The movies are faithful enough to the text and seem to harbor less Hollywood poison than any other film adaptation, that when I feel moved to revisit the story, I choose the expedient of the movie. For this viewing, I sat with a companion who had never seen the movies, nor completed the trilogy, but had read "The Hobbit."

Her initial thought was to view them according to the story chronology with "The Hobbit" first. However, having viewed all three of the Hobbit movies, I informed her that unlike "The Lord of the Rings," the three-part screen adaptation of "The Hobbit" had progressively demonstrated the onset of the Hollywood cancer. Filmed at a video game pace, "The Hobbit" movies surrendered to the most virulent politically correct tropes; nordic negroes, a killer heroine flying through the air, slaying armies of armored giants, and a completely inserted subplot involving an interracial love affair between an elf princess who rejects her heritage and a doomed martyr dwarf. By the end of the last movie, I was so disgusted and had developed such a vicarious hatred for dwarves and elves that I embarrassed my son by cheering gutturally with a fist of power to every stroke delivered by the only masculine figures fighting for their heritage--the orc chieftains played by modern Maori stunt men. The message of Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," so keenly preserved in the movie, with Orcs representing the evils of industrialism and mass mongrelized society, was so twisted out of all shape by the same production group a mere ten years later that the only thing left representing a shred of Tolkien's metaphor was the depiction of the defiant Orc chieftain battling against all odds, against the greed of men and elves and dwarves, in a doomed fight to preserve his tribe.

I revisited The Fellowship of the Ring from a mythic, masculine perspective, the only passion I have left to me. I find myself identifying with the ring wraiths in this way. I identify the following themes:

1. The inevitable corruptibility of Men in Power,
2. The innocence and hope of children,
3. The damnation of the elite,
4. The industrialization of life,
5. The primacy of nature,
6. The alchemy of knowledge,
7. Intercession.

We'll come back to these as they appear in the story line.

First, we want to cover some plot elements. The persistent foibles of two of the hobbits, Merry and Pippin, seem to represent the stupidity and utility of common people who exist purely in the temporal sphere, who have no inkling of the transcendent. While the two lesser hobbits get the fellowship in plenty of trouble, demonstrating little or no forethought, their survivability reflected in their knack for navigating the violence of the physical world, is crucial to the quest. These commoner hobbits both facilitate Frodo's escape from the forces of evil as well as assuring that the evil forces are aware of the quest.

Frodo and Sam represent incorruptibility and honor, elements which rise up enough in the course of human affairs to frustrate the drive toward the dark side. They are, however, shown to be too trusting and direct, and certainly too few to be able to survive without the assistance of baser types of their kind, i.e., Merry and Pippin. Taken together, the four hobbits represent a synergy of honor, purity, criminality and recklessness necessary to frustrate any systemic effort to eradicate the human spirit. Each pair of hobbits make a whole as well as the two pairs together.

As a general note, Tolkien stands out as a philologist, a folklorist, and a mythologist. His story-telling skills when compared to commercial fiction writers, from contemporaries like Edgar Rice Burroughs down to writers of suspense, like Robert Ludlum and Eric von Lustbader [creator and inheriting author of the "Bourne" adventure series], are fairly pedestrian. Tolkien could never write a whodunit or a mystery novel. He relies on stupid mistakes as do authors of modern horror scripts and relies on improbable resurrections as do authors of religious texts. Tolkien's genius is in the texture of his world and the composition of its moral fabric.

The sacrifice of Gandalf in the ultimate cause results in the breaking of the fellowship that had been formed toward that same ultimate goal. In order for Tolkien's themes to be played out, the breaking of the fellowship was necessary in terms of the plot, so necessary, that it is indicated in the title, with the different characters, separating but still committed to the same goal, we have a story that evokes the Grail romances in "The Life of Arthur" by Mallory.

Theme One: The Inevitable Corruptibility of Men in Power

The central theme of the trilogy is clearly the ring, as indicated by the Title. The ring of power is a mythic artifact representing the corruption of power or the dictum that power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. This represents the gravity or the moral weight that affects all of the lesser thematic elements of the story.

Theme Two: The Innocence and Hope of Children

The characters, Frodo and Sam, represent innocence and hope respectively. As the element of innocence, Frodo supplies resistance to corruption. As the element of Hope, Sam represents the courage and commitment to honor necessary for the persistence of the purity embodied in Frodo. If this were a modern, more concise tale, Frodo and Sam would be the conflicting elements of one character.

Theme Three: The Damnation of the Elite

This is represented by the conference in Rivendell and embodied by the person of Boromir, the son of the steward of the great kingdom of Gondor. Boromir wears the trappings of the hero and when in combat, acts heroically, but he is in fact a representative of the intrinsically corrupt elite class and can barely keep his hands off of the ring for the entirety of the fellowship's quest. As a character, Boromir annoys the viewer every bit as much as the politician annoys the voter, for both the viewer and the voter are compelled to back the representative in his struggle, knowing full well that he will betray the cause. The lady, Galadriel, and Boromir's deep dread of her in the meeting, recall the politicians fleeting realization that he lacks the character of his ancestral counterpart, the hero.

Theme Four: The Industrialization of Life

Saruman, the wizard, Lord of Isengard, represents the industrialist and the modern nation state, his Orcs representing the soldier of machine warfare,--the warrior debased to a cipher—nameless and without identity. Saruman's campaign to industrialize his formerly sacred fiefdom was very strongly represented in the film, possibly inspired by Tolkien's experience in World War I.

Theme Five: The Primacy of Nature

This is best illustrated, in Tolkien's hands, by the unnatural ring wraiths, the nine dark riders that oppose the nine members of the fellowship. The wraiths, "were once kings of men," and so they appear the shadowed outline of what once might have been a hero king. These are the corrupt leaders of industrialized mankind. Interestingly, they appear unable to travel except by road, and the members of the fellowship fall into deepest peril at their hands when they gather in a town and when they seek the shelter of the ancient fortress turret now known as Weathertop, the most powerful and therefore most corrupt, and they only apply their power along the well-trodden axis of man's technological development. This is most tellingly illustrated when they attempt to cross a river with a diminished flow, only to be washed away by a torrent, called down by the elf princess.

Theme Six: The Alchemy of Knowledge

In The Lord of the Rings, there are only a handful of wizards. Foremost among these are Gandalf and Saruman. These two characters offer a dualistic study of light and dark sorcery, sorcery being the use of knowledge to affect the course of events, with the character of Saruman representing the corruption of humanity which occurs when knowledge is bent to serve power. Gandalf represents the sacrifice necessary to use knowledge as a means of thwarting the accrual of power in corrupt hands.

Theme Seven: Intercession

The character of Aragorn represents the reluctant hero who fears taking on the powers of kingship from the knowledge that kings, most clearly exemplified by his corruptible ancestor, are often corrupted by their assumption of power. Conversely, Aragorn represents the hope of common people for an intercessor, a supra-elite being who possesses enough power in his office that he is above the corrupting pursuit of power that typifies the twisted souls such as Borimor, and might check that corruptible pursuit. Consider again the scene at Weathertop, where Aragorn, the man who would reluctantly accept kingship, fights off all nine of the undead ring wraiths, who have through their pursuit of power degenerated from his heroic form to a state of empty predation. Aragorn represents to the ring wraiths what they once might have been and so they fear him, just as they represent what he might become, and so he drives them off like figments of a nightmare. This is the scene, midway through the first of the three novels comprising the trilogy, that predicts the third novel and names it, "The Return of the King."

Taken as a whole, "The Fellowship of the Ring" is a study of the hero in various forms, striving to survive a system contrived to make him an impossibility. In this sense, as long as there is a hero, there's hope.

A Well of Heroes

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Wishing Well: Gender and Race in Horror Movies

I take the horror genre overall as reaching its modern form with Bram Stoker's Dracula, just over a hundred years ago. The horror movies seen by the generation of my grandparents and parents held to this same form. The form places a small group of people in the path of some supernatural horror, which in many cases has a sympathetic element as the monstrous threat is often personalized to reflect a more primal human state. Looking at Dracula, he is, in a sense, a super masculine threat to a man and two women. This man and a small group of companions attempt to defend the women. They fail in saving the first woman but succeed in saving the second, although one of their number is killed. There is still an element of the heroic in this character's death, also in the battling against the monstrous, and the sense of heroism is even granted the monster who was battling the entire world.

This last element, the heroic monster, has gained increasing traction with the viewing public as society has increased in size and scale, magnifying the individual's sense of alienation. This got to the point in the early 1980s that monstrous horror became a type of fantasy literature, spawning fantasy movies in which the viewer identifies with protagonists who are themselves monsters, vampires and werewolves predominantly. This is essentially no longer horror but fantasy, as the viewer identifies with unthinkably powerful beings who literally feed on the greater part of humanity which is reduced to a herd.

So what has happened to the horrific element, and how has it been treated in films, particularly those directed at a youthful audience? In fantasy films, we get one element of the moral degradation of the hero by sketching them in the form of the monster which feeds on the people that the traditional hero was supposed to represent and defend. Heroes, as they were primally understood, no longer exist, having been replaced by super heroes. Though it's beyond the scope of this article, this writer believes that the super hero genre was conceived in order to eradicate the idea of the hero, of placing the hero in godlike and monstrous form, where previously heroism was within the reach of every man. In ancient epics, the hero rose from among men to challenge the petty gods and their monsters. Super heroes and super hero villains have very little in common with the ancient hero but with the petty gods with their narrow powers and their monstrous pets.

This leaves us with the modern horror story of the slasher variety, which is entirely bereft of the supernatural and of the heroic, and is reduced to a sadistic hunt. Let us examine the standard tropes in this end time genre:

1. The protagonists are urban/suburban youths.

2. The setting is rural.

3. The killers or the monster are exclusively male.

4. They are always Caucasian men.

5. The protagonists continually act against their own self-interest and survival, which empowers the viewer. The endearing aspect of this genre is that viewers will yell warnings at the stupidly acting protagonist who is about to meet a grim fate.

6. Victims who die early, representing the iniquitous price paid for the bad course charted by the group, traditionally come in three varieties: slut, jock and a person of color.

7. Masculine resistance, initiative and intervention by or on behalf of the victims always clearly fails. A classic example of this, combining tropes 6 and 7, is from the movie, "The Shining," in which the black clairvoyant adult played by Scatman Crothers who is coming to save the boy clairvoyant from the evil white father is immediately butchered upon entering the hotel. Black characters in general are cast as victims, are in the minority, and are killed in a way reflecting the hopeless condition of their kind in general. This has recently changed and will be discussed toward the end of this essay.

8. The primary target of the monster is a virtuous white woman [sometimes a precociously moral child], who, crucially is not believed by her husband or male love interest when she realizes she is being hunted.

9. The survivor of such a story is either a child or a young woman who did not have sex during the course of the story.

10. Any hero-type actions that are successful will be committed by this escaping, non-masculine victim of innocence.

The changing point for the status of the lone black victim in these predominantly Caucasian herds of victims was in the unique, heroic horror movie, Deep Blue. In this late 1990s movie, an evil female scientist uses a heroic white man as a tool in her breeding of super sharks. When the sharks predictably turn on their makers, the heroics of the man work, and the evil woman is killed by her monster. There is also an endearing scene when the cook in the experimental aquarium, a black character played by L.L. Cool J is wading through his flooded kitchen and just as the reader expects him to be devoured by a shark, he says to himself something to the effect that he was in a bad spot, because in a movie, this is where the black guy always gets killed. At this point the story diverts from the standard horror narrative and could be classified as a type of heroic science fiction. Another notable example of this type of heroic science fiction with many heroic masculine elements, made in the same period in the early 2000s is Pitch Black, which become the starting point for a cycle about a primally masculine hero struggling against an evil system.

The movies just discussed above with the science fiction angle and a heroic element might be seen as reactionary films, just as the slasher genre typified by the Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth series had become impotent to the point where the audiences were cheering on the villain. Since that time, there has been a serious effort to remake some of these films based on more realistic understanding of psychopathic killers with more sympathetic victims and more well-rounded monstrous white men. To bring us up to date, I'd like to discuss two movies that I recently watched, which are targeted to a youthful audience in such a way as to maximize appeal among white female and black viewers.

"Hush" is a film about a deaf woman who writes novels alone in a prodigiously windowed cottage in the middle of the woods. She is estranged from the big city and her black ex-boyfriend, a distant hunk who remains improbably supportive of her writing career. She and her neighbors, a traditional couple, attractive woman and very masculine, handsome white man, come under attack by a white male psychopath. This pretty much tells you all you need to know about the movie. The he-man, next door neighbor, will be butchered by the geek with the knife, who is hunting the women, and the primary female victim becomes a gritty heroine slaying her hunter, with the underlying moral of the story being that she should not have left her black boyfriend in the city. The movie ends with police cars coming out of the city to save her: rural bad, city good; white man bad, black man good.

The next movie, "The Watcher," features the only type of married couple that Hollywood wants to promote these days, a white woman and a black man, who move into a house that appears to be haunted. The previous owners of the house were an elderly Asian couple, victimized by the ghost. The real estate agent who heartlessly sold the haunted house is a white woman. The creepy neighbors consist of a nosy white woman and her retarded teenage son. The good neighbors are black: a well-heeled strong woman with a husband who is a Hollywood stunt man. The entire police department consists of females and black men. There is not an adult Caucasian male in the movie. Unlike the ineffectual Caucasian man of the traditional slasher flick, the black men believe the woman is under threat and are able to defeat the evil that threatens the white wife. Up until the final scene, they think that this evil is the nosy white woman next door. But in the final scene, just after they adopt the poor retarded son of the nosy white woman, it is revealed that he is the psychopathic killer and terrorizer of women--suddenly shedding his boyish handicap and turning into a towering monster of a man. The moral of the story is that white people are either crazy or evil. That's it.

To review the horror genre, with few exceptions, horror from the age of silent film in the 1920s and up through the early 1960s was infused with heroic elements, generally placing a virtuous woman in danger. Danger she cannot defeat on her own.

Ignoring the branching fantasy genre typified by romanticizing the monster, essentially founded by Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, and the branching into Science-Fiction horror tales, beginning with Aliens [featuring a strong female protagonist, but also masculine heroism], remaining horror has tended to the gross slasher flicks discussed above and of more mature supernatural horror stories which follow the satanic threat complex, which eradicates heroism without targeting rural white men as the ultimate evil.

Overall, since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, horror films in general have stridently attacked the notion of heroic action as impossible and even childish.

Secondarily, since the 1960s, villains in non-supernatural horror have all been rural white men. Even the location of many supernatural horror tales ends up being rural.

The tertiary message of horror films, that the man will not support the woman in times of crisis, seems to be the solid third runner, until very recently, with the reintroduction of heroics in the form of the female victim and her black man, who is properly submissive to the fears of his white wife, rather than dismissive. The addition of these last themes strike one as overly contrived and may ultimately occupy a passing fad or niche in the genre. Will these themes of black masculine virtue expand, resurrecting the dead hero in limited guise?

What is of most interest to this reader is the obliteration of the idea of the hero, especially when taken together with the civic neo-paganism of the wildly popular superhero genre.

But returning to the horror genre itself, of that narrow classification of film that focuses solely on the horrific actions of men, heroism might be viewed as a necessary casualty in the process of scaring the viewer in his/her seat. For the introduction of a single competent man with a handgun would shatter the fragile story line, built as it is on bad decisions.

What then, is the main thrust of slasher-variety horror fiction?

It is quite obviously the same theme that one sees in such iconic films as "Deliverance," "Forest Gump," "The Green Mile," in the Denzel Washington films, "Man on Fire," "Safe House," and "The Equalizer," in the little known 70s film, "Southern Comfort," in the classic and remake versions of "The Hills Have Eyes," "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and "Halloween" movies and in the entire crop of recent Rob Zombie films such as "The Devil's Rejects," and even in the quirky "Secret Window," that white men are evil, an incredibly lethal strain of humanity. However, taking the broad overview, it is obvious that the most evil white man is the rural one, who owns a gun and lives in hills or words. Failing that he’s an Eastern European white man.

[Since the late 1980s, action films have featured Eastern European bad guys in profusion. In a recent viewing of an FBI action TV show called "Numbers," in five episodes there was not a single person of color or female among the swarming army of white male villains, though black heroes did fight alongside conflicted white agents against them. Police dramas are not generally set in rural locales, but feature an overwhelming preponderance of white male criminals, in the very urban settings that are in fact dominated by criminals of color.]

The connection between evil, the white man and the rural setting is so strong in the horror genre, that its premier author Stephen King [advertisements for King’s books and stories about his work dominate and literally keep afloat no less than two horror magazines] has penned two novels about a white male writer seeking solitude in the remote countryside, with this isolation from the city turning him into a vehicle for evil, in both cases attacking his own family.

Upon consideration of the cinematic weight—even in comedy with films such as "City Slickers"—that equates rural white men with evil, and realizing that all of the filmmakers and actors involved are suburban or urban persons, we see a vast prejudice. For everyone in America knows that all of the most violent and deadly environments are cities and their sprawling suburbs, in which the vast majority of violence is committed by people of color. Yet films across a variety of genres depict urban environments as safe havens, people of color as so virtuous and non-violent as to render these characters non-interesting, and depict rural white men as prodigious killers, with the rural enclaves, that in actual fact see almost no murder, appearing in movies as virtual slaughter zones for trophy killing.

Could it be, that somewhere deep in the elite, urban American soul, that there remains a cultural memory that when the white slaves brought to this country in chains to work plantations [1] that are now paved over by urban centers, that they escaped the slave matrix through either flight, hard work or insurrection and fled, gun in hand, to those very hills and forests that modern filmmakers have peopled with monsters for over a half century? Is the modern slasher flick nothing more than a retelling of the tale the slave master of old told his white and black slaves, that to leave the plantation was to cast off the fetters of security for the perils of the savage wilderness, peopled by predatory outcasts?

Notes

1. A plantation planted people to form a taxation and labor base for claiming possession in the name of the home country.

(c) 2017 James LaFond