#save me european madmen

[samijey]

okay mildly unhinged take but i think ilja should shave his face for his first main roster match against gunther to recreate that more youthful and vulnerable appearance he had in their famous NXT UK championship match (maybe chill on the tanning too so those chop marks can REALLY show im just saying). he should then lose that first encounter to build to a more emotional rematch later and by then have the full facial hair back adding that visual contrast to their first match brrrrrrr the possibilities with this feud already have me acting UP

[nonameinanytongue]

The Infinity War: How Marvel’s Bloodless Violence Saps Meaning from Fiction

In The Avengers, Joss Whedon’s 2012 superhero flick from Disney subsidiary Marvel Studios, aliens called the Chitauri invade New York City en masse, herding civilians at gunpoint into wailing crowds and laying waste to the cityscape as they do battle with the titular superheroes. During this confrontation, not one civilian dies on screen. Armored leviathans crash into skyscrapers, snarling aliens menace helpless New Yorkers, and nobody dies. A glimpse of Captain America’s blood is as close as we get to the idea that violence has consequences.

In Whedon’s 2015 followup, Age of Ultron, even greater pains are taken to assure us that no fictional civilians were harmed in the making of the film. The super-fast Quicksilver and a faceless soldier or two dies during the evacuation of Sokovia, a fictional Eastern European city around which much of the movie’s action is based, but we’re treated to several long, deliberate sequences of civilians being helped onto hovering conveyances. Later, we’re told explicitly during an exchange between Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man that every last civilian has been shepherded to safety.

The logistics are troublesome, but picking apart the “is that really possible?” of any movie is dullard’s work at the best of times. What’s really itchy here is the movie’s insistence on telling stories about war and violence while avoiding any uncomfortable depictions of the consequences of said violence. It’s a sanitized handling of war, the ugliest theater of human endeavor, and it’s an integral part of a franchise which got its start milking the War on Terror for inspiration. 2008’s Iron Man, the John Favreau-helmed ship that launched the modern fleet of twice-yearly Marvel movie releases, includes scenes of protagonist Tony “Iron Man” Stark killing ersatz Taliban/Al-Qaeda partisans in order to protect innocent villagers from their depredations. It’s an ugly portrayal of the Middle East as a land of sadistic madmen and helpless sheep in need of a wisecracking American savior who has wisely left arms dealing behind and gotten into the much more controllable business of being a weapon.

There’s a nasty neoliberal rabbit hole to be gone down here, but it’s tangential to our focus, which is war and its depiction. In Tony’s attack on the terrorists menacing the real Afghan town of Gulmira, he manages to wipe out the aggressors and save every last villager without incident. It’s presented as a clear and straightforward triumph. The bad guys are dead, the innocents are shaken but unscatched and appropriately grateful, and the good guy flies away into the sunset. On his way home, when two American fighter pilots flag him as a bogey and fall in on his tail, Stark is careful not to harm either man during his escape.

I would contend that the Marvel movies trade on our desire to see violence used for righteous ends. Violence is certainly a central, if not the central element in every franchise entry so far released. That the studio scrupulously avoids making audiences uncomfortable by depicting this violence in an upsetting or unpredictable manner seems, given the above examples, self-evident. Contrast the bloodless fireworks show of The Avengers or Age of Ultron with the opening minutes of, say, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Peter Jackson’s big-budget follow-up to his critically beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy is by no means a perfect movie. I find it moving and exciting, but it sags here and there and parts of it look and feel distinctly unfinished, like it was rushed out onto the showroom floor to meet some corporate deadline (which it was). All this to say, by the time the title screen hits we’ve seen an old woman baked to death by convection, bodies fall burning into a freezing lake, the homes of hundreds of people laid waste, and one of Middle Earth’s most terrible and beautiful monsters breathe his last in a moment allowed to be at once triumphant and tragic.

By choosing violence as a storytelling medium, artists accept responsibility for depicting that violence in a way that honors and bears witness to those who suffer in reality. Marvel, I think, sees this kind of honesty as an impediment to selling movie tickets and merchandise, a cynical stance which even the market fails to bear out (just check the box office receipts for The Return of the King). Every aspect of each of their movies is designed to be as inoffensive as possible to as wide a segment of the populace as possible. As a longtime lover of horror, I’ve spent my career as an author and a critic trying to parse and enunciate the value of looking at things which make me upset and uncomfortable.

Let me put it as succinctly as I know how: If you want to tell a story about landmines, you’d better fucking show a legless kid.

[marilynngmesalo]

‘THE FIGHT FOR HIS LIFE HAS BEEN LOST’: Polish mayor stabbed in heart, dies

‘THE FIGHT FOR HIS LIFE HAS BEEN LOST’: Polish mayor stabbed in heart, dies ‘THE FIGHT FOR HIS LIFE HAS BEEN LOST’: Polish mayor stabbed in heart, dies https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

WARSAW, Poland — The popular liberal mayor of the Polish port city of Gdansk died on Monday after he was stabbed during a charity event the evening before by an ex-convict who stormed onstage and said it was revenge against a political party the politician once belonged to.

Pawel Adamowicz, 53, died as a result of wounds to the heart and abdomen in spite of efforts to save him that involved a five-hour operation and blood transfusions, Health Minister Lukasz Szumowski said.

“The fight for his life has been lost,” Szumowski said.

The assassination of Adamowicz, a six-term mayor who often mingled freely with citizens of his city, sent Poland into shock.

Mayor of Polish city stabbed on stage during charity event

Even before his death was announced, rallies against violence were being planned to take place across Poland in the evening. In Gdansk, the city flag was lowered to half-staff and a Mass was planned for later in the day.

The right-wing ruling Law and Justice party faced accusations from its critics that an atmosphere of hatred against Adamowicz and others liberal political opponents helped instigate the attack.

Government officials appeared to be pushing back against that accusation, strongly denouncing the attack and stressing that the 27-year-old perpetrator had a history of violent bank robberies and possible mental illness.

The ex-convict who rushed onto the stage with a knife Sunday and stabbed Adamowicz shouted that it was revenge against Civic Platform, which Adamowicz belonged to for many years.

The assailant shouted from the stage that he had been wrongly imprisoned under a previous government led by Civic Platform. He said his name was Stefan and that “I was jailed but innocent. … Civic Platform tortured me. That’s why Adamowicz just died.”

Deputy Chief Prosecutor Krzysztof Sierak said there are “doubts” as to the mental state of the attacker, who used a 14.5-centimetre (5.5-inch) knife on Adamowicz, and that two psychiatrists will examine him. He had served 5 1/2 years in prison and was released toward the end of last year.

Adamowicz, who has been the city’s mayor for more than 20 years, grabbed his belly and collapsed in front of the audience during the “Lights to Heaven” fundraiser organized by the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity.

The attack triggered an outpouring of solidarity, with many people donating blood in Gdansk on Monday. Some said they were given time off work to help save Adamowicz.

The spokeswoman for the ruling Law and Justice party Beata Mazurek said the attack should be “absolutely condemned by all, regardless of what side of the political spectrum they are on.”

She insisted politicians in Poland need “greater responsibility for words, for deeds” because “there is no shortage of madmen on both sides” of the political scale.

Ruling authorities also sent a government plane to transport the mayor’s wife, who had been travelling, from London back to Gdansk.

The government’s critics, however, said that they believed that animosity voiced against Adamowicz by ruling party officials, sometimes carried on state television, as well as by extremists, played a role.

Adamowicz was part of the democratic opposition formed in Gdansk under the leadership of Lech Walesa during the 1980s. After leaving Civic Platform, he was re-elected to a sixth term as an independent candidate in the fall.

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As mayor, he was a progressive voice, supporting sex education in schools, LGBT rights and tolerance for minorities. He showed solidarity with the Jewish community when Gdansk synagogue had its windows broken last year, strongly denouncing the vandalism.

Adamowicz also advocated bringing wounded Syrian children to Gdansk for medical treatment, a plan, however, blocked by the Law and Justice government. After he took that stand, a far-right group, the All-Polish Youth, issued what they called a “political death notice” for Adamowicz.

The last politically motivated attack in Poland was in 2010 in Lodz when a man shouting that he wanted to kill Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski fatally shot an aide to one of the party’s European Parliament lawmakers.

Kaczynski, at the time an opposition leader, blamed the attack on an “atmosphere of hate” under Civic Platform.

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[peakwealth]

The Will of the People (2)

 The Public Against the Public Interest

                                      “To the fool-king belongs the world.“

                                              (Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805)

 January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Day one of the new age when reality turned liquid. (Screenshot)

Of all the canaries twittering away in the coal mine of Western dystopia, the one that chants about infant immunizations must be among the loudest. The other day I noticed a picture taken during a demo of people opposed to the compulsory immunization of their children. One of the so-called antivaxxers held up a printed sign that read

 STIFLE

UNCOMFY

SCIENCE

The words have shock value for they capture the present revolt against reason and empiricism, against what is perceived by many as the unsettling, uncomfy nature of science -- as if it were a stained old IKEA sofa to be dragged onto the sidewalk and disposed of before dawn. The notion has taken hold that if science makes you feel bad, if it doesn't resonate with your inner self, or your religious faith, you can simply reject it. Opt for 'science' you are comfortable with, be it pseudoscience or complete bogus. Or no science at all.

There is of course nothing new about the discomfort caused by science or by any other sort of manifestly rational knowledge. The late German philosopher Norbert Elias (1) explains, as have countless others, how the human species, once it has domesticated the forces of nature, ends up feeling disenchanted. When the world is no longer revealed through religious myth but through reason, it turns out to be a thoroughly unsettling place. Existence itself, stripped of magic and fantasy, is a sobering affair. And the closer nature is examined, the less it shows any sign of making sense. It seems to lack the deeper logic that humans have always craved to give purpose to their short, insecure lives.

In other words, when reality does not match our hopes and dreams, many of us will reject it out of hand. But, says Elias, we have to grow up, we have to get over it: the universe is neither good nor bad, it is blind and doesn't care about us.

There we have it. In a blind universe, not only is there no god and no devil, there is no Santa either.

To make matters worse, observable reality isn't what it used to be. Ever since it came up with the story of Adam and Eve, authority has looked upon factual knowledge with suspicion. Knowledge was and still is equated with arrogance and transgression. For thousands of years, religions have ignored or contradicted rational thinking and have instead provided comfort to those terrified by the unknown as well as to those who revel in it.

But as science is not compatible with religious dogma, so empirical knowledge necessarily challenges ignorance. When science expands as rapidly as it does today, the world inevitably becomes a more disorienting place to people who are suspicious of the modern age and of all its complexity. Rather than bending their convictions to accommodate the evidence before them, they resent science for failing to provide the reassurance that will allow them to sleep at night.

Rational thinking can only go so far. Lacking transcendence and being a purely human enterprise, science is 'only' a process based on the best available evidence and therefore liable to change over time. It does not provide absolute answers and is therefore as powerless as ever against the rigid beliefs suggested by tradition and sanctioned by society.

The quest for unscientific answers never ends (Jehovah’s witness, 2016, Buffalo, NY, USA)

Again, such stubbornness is hardly new. Back in 1801, Friedrich Schiller wrote the famous line that "against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (in the somewhat less elegant German original: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens).  This leads me to surmise that today's problem is perhaps less with the discomfort produced by scientific relativism as with the word stifle, the aggressive readiness to sweep reality under the rug, to look the other way, claiming it is 'part of a vast cover-up'.

In this respect I may be behind the times. A few years ago I started hearing the argument that reason and science were evil ploys used by the elites to keep the people down. (Tellingly perhaps, the same was said about literacy or correct spelling as another tool of oppression).

Uninhibited anti-intellectualism like this has gained traction. It was adopted by right-wing extremists around the time when hooliganism morphed into political revolt, when the ultras, the heavies, les casseurs emerged from their soccer stadiums and moved into politics - identity politics.

But why? It is easy to point at the effects of capitalism or the intuitions of steamroller materialism (impulse shopping, binge watching, uncontrolled eating...) which in turn have given rise to impulse politics and gut-based decision making as exemplified by Donald Trump. I persist in thinking that at least some of today's populism finds its roots in trash culture, the unrelenting cult of celebrity, in computer games, spectator sports and so-called reality TV, all of which spread symbiotically in the late 20th century.

They ended up infantilizing a broad section of the population and unmooring them from evidence-based thinking. The resulting narcissism of the selfie generation and their lack of empathy then went on to infect the internet (2). Add the rising incidence of educational failure in 'advanced' societies and a new age of ignorance, superstition and triviality has emerged.

With his ample background in reality TV, Donald Trump quickly came to epitomize a post-political age where elections were popularity contests or open invitations to insurrection. The ballot box must look increasingly quaint in an age of web manipulation and click-farming where "influencers" gather vast constituencies of "followers" on Twitter or Instagram.

‘DEUS OMNIA VIDET’: from an all-knowing god to an all-seeing internet. (London,UK, 2018)

The internet has thrown everything wide open. Without reliable gatekeepers to police the discourse or to catch post-factual nonsense, it has given free rein to people who distrust reason and dislike complexity. It also suggests that, just as there is convenient and inconvenient science, there is a good truth and a bad truth, and that one is free to choose between them.

Before the internet became universal, factual reality was better shielded from manifest unreason or scientific deviancy. All kinds of people held all manner of wild ideas, as ever, but there was a cordon sanitaire around them that kept them at a distance. In order to publish scientific findings, for instance, you needed academic credentials and peer reviews. Getting any book published was a big deal. Access to the old media, far fewer in number and therefore more influential, was similarly restricted, ring-fenced, filtered by professionals whose job it was to check and double-check information. Such a system of checks and balances may have been perceived as censorship or elitism by some, but it kept the madmen out of the room.  

Not any more. The unmediated democratization of access has meant that anyone with an easy onscreen manner, no matter their lack of qualifications, can build up a following of millions. What works for make-up tutorials on YouTube can also do wonders to subvert the political process.

Liberated from restraint and social control, it wasn’t long before the web turned toxic. It was overwhelmed by conspiratorial fantasies, doublespeak and torrents of resentment.

Conspiracy thinking derives from paranoid disbelief, the haha! suspicion that things are not what they appear to be, and seems to be as intuitive as belief itself. It can be argued that one is indistinguishable from the other.

Belief in alternative medicine, in magic and miracles has been around for ages, as have religious practices such as the refusal to accept life-saving blood transfusions. Sometimes reason and paranoia actually intersect as in the perfectly rational distrust of big pharma. Generally, though, amalgamation is central to conspiracy thinking, as is the malicious disregard for observable reality.

The world changed two days after Donald Trump's was sworn in as president of the United States when photographs showed that the crowds along Washington's National Mall were much smaller than those at Barack Obama's inauguration. Not so, said Kellyanne Conway, a member of Trump's inner circle, they had 'alternative facts'. The photographs were not to be believed, your eyes deceived you. It was a historic moment. Trump's assault on reason, irrefutable facts and the media who report them hasn't stopped since that day.

Needless to say, post-truthism or postmodern disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump. Born-again George W. Bush was famously disconnected from reality, perhaps never more so than when he mistakenly declared war on Saddam Hussein in 2003 or when, standing on the deck of an American aircraft carrier only a few weeks later, he declared 'mission accomplished'.

But Donald Trump has created a matrix of all-out lies, disinformation and utter incoherence that is unprecedented and stands in the way of meaningful governance. Trump declares white to be black, only to reverse himself two minutes later and when confronted with the evidence of what he just said, turns around and says it's fake news. And his political constituency doesn't seem to mind.

Defactualization and magical thinking are now around every corner. Farcical as it may seem, some people continue to embrace the belief that mass shootings in the US are inside jobs staged by actors, that 9/11 was an obvious fabrication or, more insidiously perhaps, that European Union bureaucrats in Brussels are to blame for anaemic vacuum cleaners or dim light bulbs forced upon the United Kingdom.

Facilitated by social media, regression has corrupted politics and fed an us-against-them narrative. After moving into the mainstream with Donald Trump, it was embraced by populist imitators such as Italy's Movimento 5 Stelle (Five-star movement). They swept the elections in Italy's underprivileged, undereducated Mezzogiorno earlier this year. As a result, conspiracy theorists are now part of the ruling coalition in Rome and the incidence of measles is on the rise as unvaccinated children spread the disease. Politics in Poland and Hungary have similarly been upended by paranoia, anti-establishment rhetoric and outright anti-Semitism.

Wave after wave of primitivism and voter rage are destabilizing Western societies. Some of that anger has been a long time coming. Politics has lacked credibility for decades. Europe's leadership has been weak and often asleep at the wheel. In failing to assert its historical legitimacy, the gilded bureaucracy in Brussels has become an easy target of popular fury, no matter how uninformed or ill-advised.

The big, ugly question has become this: what to do, in representative democracies with universal franchise, when the will of the people is increasingly at variance with the public interest?

How can governments be expected to govern when hostile voters support irrational, counterproductive governance? How does the British government go about implementing Brexit, a decision imposed by a belligerent electorate against the country's manifest interest? How can the European Union continue when so many members of its own parliament oppose the very idea of a united Europe?

The Roman empire took centuries to unravel. We live in speedier times.

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Norbert Elias (1897-1990): Humana conditio (1985)

(2) ‘They Laughed at Berlusconi’ http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/146399295392

See also:

‘Let he RulingClasses Tremble’ http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/148844598007

'Autumn in America'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/152990750537 'In Bad Faith (3)'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/137980050202 'In Bad Faith (6)'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/141479058437

[areturntoland]

Late Summer on the Land

I have been here one month since my late summer return. M has joined me for a month more and we have made considerable progress in digging out the kitchen of the house and clearing the land. Bush cutting is physically exhausting but kind of addictive at the same time. You just keep going that little bit further and eventually the tank runs out of petrol.

Using a pickaxe on stone is not as satisfying as bush cutting, in my opinion. Hard work and progress only where the stone is soft, though eventually it all gives. The next phase is building the forms for the concrete slabs of the flooring and ordering the concrete. Unlike my desire for concrete experimentation on a smaller scale the work involved in pouring the floor ourselves is daunting. Doable, but still only something I want to get done so we can move on to the next phase, building the wood house frame.

For whatever reason this publishing platform, Tumblr, is hard to deal with from my phone, and charging the laptop requires the generator, which I try to avoid. I do find myself posting much more often on instagram.com/areturntoland, and hope to sort out a way to auto post to tumblr from there as the insta app seems more receptive to the spotty internet I have had up here.

The summer heat continues here where it fades across the north, both east and west. While autumn is coming to my friends across the globe we still have 90˚ days for the next week or so. It tends to stay warm through October here, something that will help my time schedule in building as I am over a month behind schedule to to my hand accident earlier this year.

The world someplace far from this mountain seems to be going mad again, madmen running the world to ruin, idiots and sycophants abetting crimes against humanity on scales micro and macro. Warned by those who know of our impending defenestration on this planet we wring our hands and hope someone will come to save us from the bad men we have ourselves given power.

But here on the mountain, in the villages and terraces, the world exists much as it had in previous decades, only petrol vehicles and mobile phones have changed this place, but without them the people here would survive as easily as they always have. Growing what they eat, working for and with each other to accomplish the very act of existing.

In the cafe the owner gives us eggs from her "biological" (organic) chickens. She just has them, and wants others to have them as well. The neighbor gives us cabbage, and with it we make a meal. Life here isn't lacking in the moderninities of society, nor is it a utopia, it is simply the rural part of a socialist European nation that knows the dangers of political conservatism and has no taste for it.

As we bare down into the hard work of housebuilding I am already beginning to plan and plot our garden and growing spaces. There are two upper terraces that face well into the sun and have open area with the few small trees having died in the fires. I am planning a tarp greenhouse along one area and a set of garden beds outdoors nearby. At some point I will need to deal with the water situation on the upper portion of the land, for both irrigation and water for the Crow's Nest.

The church bells in the town below chimes that I should start making dinner. The day, though hot, is cooling now and ideal for making a meal. The Portuguese generally eat late in the day for a reason - It's too hot to do so otherwise.

[interwebsfamous]

My Review of Todd VanDerWerff’s Review of Kong: Skull Island. SPOILERS GALORE for both.

I went to see Kong: Skull Island this weekend and loved it. It was not the world’s greatest cinematic triumph. It wasn’t even the best movie I saw in the last two weeks, which was Logan. However, having sat through a significant amount of films about giant robots and/or monsters punching each other, I can say definitively, that it is at the height of the genre. So, it surprised me to read Todd VanDerWerff’s review of Kong: Skull Island this Monday.

VanDerWerff is someone whose work I have been reading since his days at the AV Club. I frequently agree with his takes and find his writing style to be clear and concise, yet almost luminous and lyrical in its artistic quality. What I mean to say is that VanDerWerff is one of the greatest journalistic writers working today. However, I had such an odd reaction to his review that it compelled me to write a review of his review.

I have recently been following Alex Jones on social media. It has given me the stereotypical insight into how the other side thinks. One of the things I’ve noticed is the number of takes Jones provides that are simply accurately describing something I would be pleased with or disappointed in and then providing the exact opposite emotional response. In that sense, and only that sense, VanDerWerff’s review struck me as oddly Alex Jonesian.

IF YOU READ FURTHER, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! GIANT, END OF THE MOVIE TWIST-TYPE SPOILERS!

I don’t know what VanDerWerff was expecting from this movie, as he accurately lists movies that I would compare it too. He notes Gareth Edward’s Godzilla, which is vastly inferior to Edward’s movies Monsters and, of course, Rogue One. He also compares it to the previous King Kong films, particularly the 2005 remake, and Apocalypse Now. I think Kong: Skull Island compares favorably to all those movies.

VanDerWerff’s primary complaint is that this particular version of King Kong is not really faithful to the original story of King Kong. I’m not really sure why VanDerWerff makes this complaint. I’m sure that there are plenty of movies VanDerWerff has seen that he thought were improved by playing loose with the source material.

I absolutely loved the 2005 movie Kong. I have admittedly not seen the original 1933 film. However, the 2005 movie felt to me like it was about something, specifically, show business. In that movie, Kong was the pitied victim of the greed and voyeurism of the show business industry. Kong was a romantic lead in that movie. However, he was churned up and spit out by the modern entertainment industry.

What I’m saying is that this story has been told. We do not need another reboot or remake rehashing the details of King Kong’s rise and fall in 1930s Manhattan. We most certainly do not need yet another version of What About Eve, Gypsy, or Showgirls walking us through the rapacious apathy of the entertainment industry towards its subjects. Also, in terms of robots and/or monsters punching each other, we’re getting a Pacific Rim 2, Transformers Infinity?, a Power Rangers reboot, and whatever the Cloverfield monster is up to next. That genre is being fully exploited.

While I agree with VanDerWerff that the character of Kong was compelling in this movie, it is precisely because he does not get much screen time. The filmmakers wisely leave us wanting more. The glimpses we get of this monster are awe-inspiring. The scene where a downed American chopper pilot watches Kong take a drink from a lagoon was to me the most amazing use of special effects and a simulacrum of the normal laws of physics to both humanize and exaggerate a monster.

The biggest problem with movies about robots and/or monsters punching each other is that, by the third act, we frequently get bored of watching them fight. The traditional solution to this problem is to create even more ridiculous fight scenes involving even yet more preposterous monsters. What Kong: Skull Island did is that it told a relatable and thematically unified story about people that occasionally has fight scenes between monsters. The fact that this movie is holding back more details about Kong for inevitable sequels merely forced it to do better story-telling. Also, by showing us the corpses of Kong’s parents, we are reminded of both his mortality and his ultimate loneliness. Additionally, the final fight scene was really cool.

VanDerWerff, in fact, identifies the thematic unity of the movie in his review.

“Thus, Skull Island deliberately takes much of its central idea from perhaps the best Vietnam movie ever made: 1979’s Apocalypse Now. Like that movie, this one is about a long trip into the jungle to find a legendary figure…

“Jackson plays a very human monster, a man who gradually comes to be obsessed with having his revenge, which makes for a potentially intriguing flip of Apocalypse Now: Instead of having to find a monster in the jungle, what if the monster was in the search party all along?”

I would agree with everything VanDerWerff says here except for “potentially.” What he sees as a lost potential, I see as a potent retelling carrying a powerful critique of the original. The problem of Apocalypse Now, and, its source material, Heart of Darkness, is that both works attempt to understand the problems of imperialism and colonialism by “othering” the imperialists. Both Colonels Kurtz are seen as madmen who have lost touch with the civilizing forces of white civilization. They have lost themselves in a jungle, literally, becoming the savages they seek to rule.

This Eurocentric and patronizing view of colonialism merely buys into a racist narratives of the colonized as inferior and deserving of their suffering. If they were stronger and more civilized, they would have driven the Europeans away. Instead, they are unable to avoid the predation of the most savage of white men. Therefore, it is up to the superior white man to restrain the impulses of their own fellow whites. If you need more arguments along these lines, just Google “noble savage.”

However, Kong: Skull Island flips this narrative on its head. Jackson’s Packard is totally powerless in the face of Kong. Kong swats the helicopters from the sky as one would swipe away a particularly bothersome insect. Toward the end of the film, where Packard seemingly has Kong in his grasp, Kong is shown to be perfectly capable of protecting himself. He does not need the noble white man to save him. By naming Tom Hiddleston’s character Conrad, presumably after Joseph Conrad, author of the Heart of Darkness, the movie makes this implicit critique almost explicit.

Instead, it is the various good liberals who are problematic here. Every one of them plays a role in this hopeless journey of colonization. The scientists are doomed by their curiosity that does not carry with it a respect for the lives and feelings of those they are investigating. Conrad suffers from a lack of forcefulness in confronting Packard throughout the movie. Additionally, there are a number of moments in the film where the “good” characters inadvertently make Kong’s life harder, by lighting a cigarette or informing Kong’s adversaries as to their location.

Weaver, the photographer played by Brie Larson, is depicted as hopelessly naïve about the power of media to defend the powerless. Hiddleston critiques her for being a “war photographer,” which she reframes as being an “anti-war photographer.” Also, at a crucial moment in the film, Weaver herself fires a flare that alerts Kong’s adversary to their presence, endangering Kong and all the people left alive on the island. At the end of the film, Weaver appears to agree that she will never share any of the images that she has taken on her journey.

The reason why Kong is the most sympathetic character is because he’s the one hanging out at his house mostly keeping to himself and the humans are the ones that invade his homeland either for science, military aggression, or pure noxious curiosity. None of the people is quite as bad as Packard, whose brooding cruelty Jackson has a blast projecting onto the screen. These other characters are bad precisely because they are bland. All of them are depicted as simply going along with the mission even though they knew it was a bad idea because they did not have the guts to say no. To the extent these human characters suffer in this movie, it is clear that their own ignorance and lack of humility is the cause. VanDerWerff’s critique that they seem to be left with nothing to do ignores the fact that they are doing something important with that nothing.

However, the second best human performance of this movie belongs to John C. Reilly’s Hank Marlow, a sort of anti-Kurtz pushing a further ciritique of Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness. Marlow has learned to survive on Skull Island for decades by becoming humble. He made friends with the Japanese pilot who shot him down. He shows respect for the customs and traditions of his adversaries and the population of the Island. While he longs to escape, his considerable wisdom is ignored.

He is ignored precisely because he is somewhat out of touch with Western manners. He plays his character’s unhingedness with the kind of deft touch that Reilly brings to any portrayal. Reilly is at the same time both heavy handed and compassionate toward all his characters. The fact that Marlow is somewhat insane keeps the other humans from listening to his good advice. However, Marlow has actually gone somewhat saner than all the other humans by learning and respecting the world in which he was trapped. To the extent VanDerWerff thinks Marlow resembles Dr. Steve Brule, he has it backwards. Brule is a goofy know-it-all who doesn’t really know anything. Marlow is full of goofy humility, but actually understands what is going on.