#swiss reformed

[apilgrimpassingby]

Roman Catholics and Orthodox have got to knock it off with "Protestants have brutalist corporate churches". A particular modern strain of Protestantism has hideous modern churches. It's a depressingly common strain, and arguably the dominant one in America, but it's either ignorant or dishonest to pretend as though all Protestants have ugly churches.

Behold:

Clockwise from top left:

St. Peter's Church, Geneva, canton of Geneva, Switzerland (Swiss Reformed)

Barnes Methodist Church, London, England, UK (Methodist)

Dutch Reformed Church, Newbury, New York state, USA (Dutch Reformed)

St. Jude's Church, Glasgow, Scotland, UK (Presbyterian)

[montyshistoryblog]

I found a quote of a Hutterite yelling at a pastor in 1525, and I couldn't stop myself turning it into something. Sloppy as fuck cause this is like, 10 minutes work.

[tmarshconnors]

“Only fools, pure theorists, or apprentices fail to take public opinion into account.”

Jacques Necker was a Genevan banker and statesman who served as finance minister for Louis XVI. He was a reformer, but his innovations sometimes caused great discontent.

Born: 30 September 1732, Geneva, Switzerland

Died: 9 April 1804, Geneva, Switzerland

Swiss Origins: Necker was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1732. His Swiss background made him a foreigner in the French political landscape, and this sometimes influenced the perception of his policies.

Self-Financed Publication: Necker was known for his publication titled "Compte Rendu," or "Report on the Finances." This document, which detailed the state of France's finances, was unique in that Necker personally financed its publication. This move aimed to showcase transparency and gain public support.

Resignation through Illness: In 1781, Necker resigned from his position as Finance Minister, citing health reasons. His resignation was accepted, but he continued to influence French politics from behind the scenes. He was later recalled to office in 1788.

Criticized by Revolutionaries: Despite being initially celebrated for his efforts to improve financial transparency, Necker faced criticism from revolutionary figures like Maximilien Robespierre. They accused him of being too sympathetic to the monarchy and not fully supporting the revolutionary cause.

Exile in Switzerland: After the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the escalation of the French Revolution, Necker resigned once again. Fearing for his safety, he sought refuge in Switzerland. His departure marked the end of his active political career.

[mllytll]

Sometimes you have a meme in your heart that no one around you will understand.

[rabbitcruiser]

On 11 March 1421 construction began on the Bern Minster under the direction of the Strasbourg master builder Matthäus Ensinger.

[allegriana]

I know I just reblogged this but I came back to say that in a galaxy chock full of evil corporations and crime syndicates eluding the justice of the Republic, the Jedi needed to do more Heists and Scams. Give me Jedi grifters who use their heightened insight and persuasion to sell a con. Jedi hackers with astoundingly precise control of Force lightning and an entourage of one-of-a-kind helper droids. Jedi hitters who learned every form of lightsaber combat but specialize in nonlethal damage and rendering people unconscious. Jedi thieves who can pick a pocket after they've already walked away from the mark and unlock a safe from across the room. And one Jedi Master(mind) to keep them all working together as a team.

What I'm saying is, the rich and powerful, they take what they want. Jedi steal it back for you. Sometimes bad Jedi make the best good guys. We provide...leverage.

Jedi as serial scammers though. Every mission includes a sidequest to sabacc table for extra cash. Padawans on their first outing be like ‘but I thought the senate was funding this mission’ yes little one but they will ride our arses for every cent so let’s go fleece some rich asshole. He won’t even notice. You know how cops were invented to protect private property? Well jedi are here to protect your everything except your private property. *force tricks an atm into printing free money* that, my very young padawan, is something we call a victimless crime.

[batnomadblog]

Switzerland, Day 1 - Zurich

Switzerland, day 1, Zurich. Though Zug would be my base in Switzerland. A small town 30 minutes train ride from Zurich in the canton of Zug. Not really a base; my friend has been living there for over 15 years, Kim. Having no plans whatsoever for Switzerland (nothing new), Kim had kindly invited me to stay with her. Heading back to Europe it felt like going home, going back to familiarity. Having…

[trungles]

Cross-posting an essay I wrote for my Patreon since the post is free and open to the public.

Hello everyone! I hope you're relaxing as best you can this holiday season. I recently went to see Miyazaki's latest Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron, and I had some thoughts about it. If you're into art historical allusions and gently cranky opinions, please enjoy. I've attached a downloadable PDF in the Patreon post if you'd prefer to read it that way. Apologies for the formatting of the endnotes! Patreon's text posting does not allow for superscripts, which means all my notations are in awkward parentheses. Please note that this writing contains some mild spoilers for The Boy and the Heron.

Hayao Miyazaki’s 2023 feature animated film The Boy and the Heron reads as an extended meditation on grief and legacy. The Master of a grand tower seeks a descendant to carry on his maddening duty, balancing toy blocks of magical stone upon which the entire fabric of his little pocket of reality rests. The world’s foundations are frail and fleeting, and can pass away into the cold void of space should he neglect to maintain this task. The Master’s desire to pass the torch undergirds much of the film’s narrative.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold Böcklin. 1880. Oil on Canvas. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist(1) painter, was born on October 16 in 1827, the same year the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought a plot of land in Florence from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, that had long been used for the burials of Protestants around Florence. It is colloquially known as The English Cemetery, so called because it was the resting place of many Anglophones and Protestants around Tuscany, and Böcklin frequented this cemetery—his workshop was adjacent and his infant daughter Maria was buried there. In 1880, he drew inspiration from the cemetery, a lone plot of Protestant land among a sea of Catholic graveyards, and began to paint what would be the first of six images entitled Isle of the Dead. An oil on canvas piece, it depicts a moody little island mausoleum crowned with a gently swaying grove of cypresses, a type of tree common in European cemeteries and some of which are referred to as arborvitae. A figure on a boat, presumably Charon, ferries a soul toward the island and away from the viewer.

(Photo of The English Cemetery in Florence. Samuli Lintula. 2006.)

The Isle of the Dead paintings varied slightly from version to version, with figures and names added and removed to suit the needs of the time or the commissioner. The painting was glowingly referenced and remained fairly popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting used to be inescapable in much of European popular culture. Professor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a philologist (someone with a deep interest in the ways language and cultural canons evolve)(2) observed that the painting, like many other works in its time, was itself iterative and became widely reiterated and referenced among its contemporaries. It became something like Romantic kitsch in the eyes of modern art critics, overwrought and excessively Byronic. I imagine Miyazaki might also resent a work of that level of manufactured ubiquity, as Miyazaki famously held Disney animated films in contempt (3). Miyazaki’s films are popularly aspirational to young animators and cartoonists, but gestures at imitation typically fall well short, often reducing Miyazaki’s weighty films to kitschy images of saccharine vibes and a lazy indulgence in a sort of empty magical domestic coziness. Being trapped in a realm of rote sentiment by an uncritical, unthoughtful viewership is its own Isle of Death.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

The Boy and the Heron follows a familiar narrative arc to many of Miyazaki’s other films: a child must journey through a magical and quietly menacing world in order to rescue their loved ones. This arc is an echo of Satsuki’s journey to find Mei in My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Chihiro’s journey to rescue her parents Spirited Away (2001). To better understand Miyazaki’s fixation with this particular character journey, it can be instructive to watch Lev Atamanov’s 1957 animated film, The Snow Queen (4)(5), a beautifully realized take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1844 children’s story (6)(7). Mahito’s journey continues in this tradition, as the boy travels into a painted world to rescue his new stepmother from a mysterious tower.

Throughout the film, Miyazaki visually references Isle of the Dead. Transported to a surreal world, Mahito initially awakens on a little green island with a gated mausoleum crowned with cypress trees. He is accosted by hungry pelicans before being rescued by a fisherwoman named Kiriko. After a day of catching and gutting fish, Mahito wakes up under the fisherwoman’s dining table, surrounded by kokeshi—little wooden dolls—in the shapes of the old women who run Mahito’s family’s rural household. Mahito is told they must not be touched, as the kokeshi are wards set up for his protection. There is a popular urban legend associated with the kokeshi wherein they act as stand-ins for victims of infanticide, though there seems to be very little available writing to support this legend. Still, it’s a neat little trick that Miyazaki pulls, placing a stray reference to a local legend of unverifiable provenance that persists in the popular imagination, like the effect of fairy stories passed on through oral retellings, continually remolded each new iteration.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

Kiriko’s job in this strange landscape is to catch fish to nourish unborn spirits, the adorable floating warawara, before they can attempt to ascend on a journey into the world of the living. Their journey is thwarted by flocks of supernatural pelicans, who swarm the warawara and devour them. This seems to nod to the association of pelicans with death in mythologies around the world, especially in relationship to children (8). Miyazaki’s pelicans contemplate the passing of their generations as each successive generation seems to regress, their capacity to fulfill their roles steadily diminishing.

(Still from The Boy and the Heron, 2023. Studio Ghibli.)

As Mahito’s adventure continues, we find the landscapes changing away from Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead into more familiar Ghibli territories as we start to see spaces inspired by one of Studio Ghibli’s aesthetic mainstays, Naohisa Inoue and his explorations of the fantasy realms of Iblard. He might be most familiar to Ghibli enthusiasts as the background artists for the more fantastical elements of Whisper of the Heart (1995).

(Naohisa Inoue, for Iblard Jikan, 2007. Studio Ghibli.)

By the time we arrive at the climax of The Boy and the Heron, the fantasy island environment starts to resemble English takes on Italian gardens, the likes of which captivated illustrators and commercial artists of the early 20th century such as Maxfield Parrish. This appears to be a return to one of Böcklin’s later paintings, The Island of Life (1888), a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the overwhelming presence of Isle of the Dead in his life and career. The Island of Life depicts a little spot of land amid an ocean very like the one on which Isle of the Dead’s somber mausoleum is depicted, except this time the figures are lively and engaged with each other, the vegetation lush and colorful, replete with pink flowers and palm fronds.

(Island of Life. Arnold Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1888. Kunstmuseum. Basel, Switzerland.)

In 2022, Russia’s State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg acquired the sixth and final Isle of the Dead painting. In the last year of his life, Arnold Böcklin would paint this image in collaboration with his son Carlo Böcklin, himself an artist and an architect. Arnold Böcklin spent three years painting the same image three times over at the site of his infant daughter’s grave, trapped on the Isle of the Dead. By the time of his death in 1901 at age 74, Böcklin would be survived by only five of his fourteen children. That the final Isle of the Dead painting would be a collaboration between father and son seemed a little ironic considering Hayao Miyazaki’s reticence in passing on his own legacy. Like the old Master in The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki finds himself with no true successors.

The Master of the Tower's beautiful islands of painted glass fade into nothing as Mahito, his only worthy descendant, departs to live his own life, fulfilling the thesis of Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 book How Do You Live?, published three years after Carlo Böcklin’s death. In evoking Yoshino and Böcklin’s works, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron suggests that, like his character the Master, Miyazaki himself must make peace with the notion that he has no heirs to his legacy, and that those whom he wished to follow in his footsteps might be best served by finding their own paths.

(Isle of the Dead. Arnold and Carlo Böcklin. Oil on canvas. 1901. The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia.)

INFORMAL ENDNOTES

1 - Symbolists are sort of tough to nail down. They were started as a literary movement to 1 distinguish themselves from the Decadents, but their manifesto was so vague that critics and academics fight about it to this day. The long and the short of it is that the Symbolists made generous use of a lot of metaphorical imagery in their work. They borrow a lot of icons from antiquity, echo the moody aesthetics from the Romantics, maintained an emphasis on figurative imagery more so than the Surrealists, and were only slightly more technically married to the trappings of traditionalist academic painters than Modernists and Impressionists. They're extremely vibes-forward.

2 - Okulicz-Kozaryn, Radosław. Predilection of Modernism for Variations. Ciulionis' Serenity among Different Developments of the Theme of Toteninsel. ACTA Academiae Artium Vilnensis 59. 2010. The article is incredibly cranky and very funny to read in parts. Contains a lot of observations I found to be helpful in placing Isle of the Dead within its context.

3 - "From my perspective, even if they are lightweight in nature, the more popular and common films still must be filled with a purity of emotion. There are few barriers to entry into these films-they will invite anyone in but the barriers to exit must be high and purifying. Films must also not be produced out of idle nervousness or boredom, or be used to recognise, emphasise, or amplify vulgarity. And in that context, I must say that I hate Disney's works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience." from Miyazaki's own writing in his collection of essays, Starting Point, published in 2014 from VIZ Media.

4 - You can watch the movie here in its original Russian with English closed captions here.

5 If you want to learn more about the making of Atamanoy's The Snow Queen, Animation Obsessive wrote a neat little article about it. It's a good overview, though I have to gently disagree with some of its conclusions about the irony of Miyazaki hating Disney and loving Snow Queen, which draws inspiration from Bambi. Feature film animation as we know it hadonly been around a few decades by 1957, and I find it specious, particularly as a comic artistand author, to see someone conflating an entire form with the character of its content, especially in the relative infancy of the form. But that's just one hot take. The rest of the essay is lovely.

6 - Miyazaki loves this movie. He blurbed it in a Japanese re-release of it in 2007.

7 - Julia Alekseyeva interprets Princess Mononoke as an iteration of Atamanov's The Snow Queen, arguing that San, the wolf princess, is Miyazaki's homage to Atamanoy's little robber girl character.

8 - Hart, George. The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods And Goddesses. Routledge Dictionaries. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge. 2005.

[hdslibrary]

Eclipse(s)!

We are pleased to be positioned on Earth like one of figures in the first picture and will get to experience the 2024 solar eclipse!

These diagrams illustrating solar and lunar eclipses are from a 16th century book of astronomy. For more on this interesting little book (including its volvelles, and an inscription by Swiss Reformed theologian Simon Sulzer) see earlier post here.

Sacro Bosco, Joannes de. Libellus de sphaera : Accessit eiusdem autoris computus ecclesiasticus, et alia quaedam, in studiosorum gratiam edita...Vitebergae : Per Iohannem Crationem, 1558.

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

why can't you just say Calvinist

[cliozaur]

It’s a well-known fact that Hugo was deeply invested in reforming the penitentiary system and led a lifelong campaign against the death penalty. He first saw the conditions of imprisonment for those condemned to death and hard labour while visiting the prison of Bicêtre with his friend David d’Angers (a sculptor) in 1828. Their main intent was to preserve the gothic past and explore the ancient prison building. It was easy to get inside the jail because prisons at that time were open to the public. David Bellos explains:

“jails and dungeons were considered picturesque, and tourists in Paris visited all kinds of places that modern visitors shun. A prim Swiss student who came to Paris in 1830, for example, whiled away a Sunday afternoon at the women’s ward in a lunatic asylum and then dropped in at the morgue, just to see. Fashionable interest in ruins and medieval remains and a widely shared taste for the quaint and the bizarre — the main components of Romanticism when reduced to a statement of style — provided respectable cover for interests now served by the noirest genre of film.”

[whencyclopedia]

Grossmunster

Grossmünster (“large cathedral” in German) is a Romanesque ex-cathedral situated in the heart of Zürich, Switzerland, which was built over the course of the 11th and 13th centuries CE. According to legend, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne founded Grossmünster around c. 810 CE to house the bones and relics of the early Christian martyrs St. Felix, St. Regula, and St. Exuperantius who were believed to have fled to Zürich and died in city during the 3rd century CE. Grossmünster is Zürich's most recognizable and famous landmark by virtue of its iconic twin towers, and it retains a place of prominence in Protestant Christianity due to its role in the Protestant Swiss Reformation, which began at the direction of Ulrich Zwingli in 1519-1520 CE. Along with Fraumunster, Predigerkirche, and St. Peterskirche, Grossmünster is one of the oldest and largest churches in Zürich. Its triple-aisled crypt is also the largest in Switzerland.

Legends & Medieval History

Legend has it that the patron saints of Zürich - Felix, Regula, and their servant Exuperantius - were once members of the Christian Thebaic Legion, which had its base in what is now the Swiss canton of Valais. Due to the intense persecution of Christians by Roman authorities in the region, Felix, Regula, and Exuperantius fled to Zürich at some point in the late 3rd century CE. When Roman authorities in Zürich discovered their Christian beliefs, the Roman governor of Turicum - Roman Zürich - forced the three Christians to be boiled in oil and drink molten lead. Soon thereafter, he ordered the three Christians beheaded. Folklore has it that after their executions, Felix, Regula, and Exuperantius calmly picked up their severed heads and walked 40 paces - or about 27 m (30 yards) - to the place where they wished to find eternal rest and ascend to heaven. About 500 years later, Charlemagne (r. 800-814 CE) came to Zürich in pursuit of a large stag that he had seen while out hunting around Aachen, Germany. Upon arrival in Zürich, Charlemagne's horse stumbled over the graves of the three saints, and it was there that Charlemagne ordered the construction of a new church along the Limmat River: the Grossmünster Cathedral.

The basilica of Grossmünster was constructed in six stages from c. 1090-1230 CE and was erected over a 9th-century CE Carolingian building of similar dimensions. Architects made periodic renovations and structural alterations to Grossmünster in later centuries; most notably, increasing the cathedral's southern tower to match the height of the northern tower in the late 15th century CE. Grossmünster's organization and activities were overseen by the bishopric of Konstanz, Germany until the advent of the Reformation in the 16th century CE, and Grossmünster was both part of a secular canon's monastery and a parish church until that time too.

During the Middle Ages, Grossmünster's fortunes were intricately connected to those of Fraumünster, which was the nearby Benedictine convent located only 180 m (551 ft) across the Limmat River. These two churches stood facing from one another, dominating Zürich's skyline as the two largest structures in the city and as pillars of the influence and power of the Catholic Church in northern Switzerland. The two churches were, however, in perpetual rivalry with one another for control over the relics of St. Felix, St. Regula, and St. Exuperantius. The two churches shared and publically showcased these relics in an elaborate urban procession held annually on September 11th. (That day is the feast day of the three saints; this day is still celebrated as a holiday in the city of Zürich.) Zürich emerged as an important pilgrimage center by the late Middle Ages as the faithful visited the relics of the three saints while en route to other pilgrimage centers like Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the Vatican in Rome, Italy, and the Benedictine Abbey in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, which lies only 40 km (25 miles) to Zürich's southeast.

Continue reading...

[artandthebible]

The Last Supper

Artist: Hans Holbein the Younger (German-Swiss, 1498–1543)

Genre: Religious Art

Date: circa 1524-1525

Medium: Oil on Panel

Collection: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

The Last Supper is the final meal that, in the Gospel accounts, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Last Supper is commemorated by Christians especially on Holy Thursday.

Holbein painted his version of the subject under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, which he may have seen on a visit to northern Italy or have known from prints. Only nine of the apostles appear in Holbein's picture, because the outer boards of the painting, which was part of an altarpiece, were lost during iconoclastic riots by reformers in Basel. The head of Christ was sawn out of the picture at one time, and dents from hammer blows are visible on the work. According to the 16th-century inventory of the Amerbach collection, the damaged painting was "coarsely" (aber vnfletig) glued back together. It was often repainted over the centuries and has only been restored to Holbein's work since 1988, though some paint and subtle glazes have been lost.

[moltengoldveins]

ALRIGHT. I don’t usually do politics on this website but it’s a special occasion and I Know people are struggling. So, with the preface that I’m praying for yall, and praying for the new president (Lord knows he's gonna need it and we’re gonna need him to have it) - Here are the survival rules for the next four years:

None of you are allowed to die or disappear. I have in fact made it illegal. You start slipping, you Tell People. You remind yourself of something to hold onto and you keep doing that.

We Pray Every Day Now. Every Hour. Look, sometimes the ‘all powers and princes of the world are put in their places by the Lord’ means He has allowed us to make our own dumbass decisions. Free will is still a thing so here we are. But what is ALSO true is ‘God works out all things for good’ so until we can see it with our eyeballs, we walk in faith. This will be worked out for good. We have a promise.

We Pay Attention. We don’t watch the Cheeto man give speeches, it will just cause rage bc he doesn’t know how to talk like anything other than a NYC monopoly man. That includes the dang Instagram and Twitter clips, none of that shit is helpful and most of it is out of context. instead we keep track of every reform, every law passed. If regulations are loosened, we stop consuming the product. If pay is cut we stop buying from the company. The thing he cares about more than anything is the economy, your money is a second smaller vote you use every single day to tell his supporters they were right or wrong.

Yea you can take a job he creates or a handout he gives, if there are any. people who voted for him certainly will, and at the end of the day you will not change things by refusing help based on a sense of Justice that will save nobody.

if you suddenly have to wait four years for something you had planned, be that whatever it may be, I’m sorry. That’s frustrating and difficult. I’m sure you’ve heard ‘just wait a little longer’ a thousand times, so I won’t say that. I’ll just say, fill this time so full of good you don’t have room to wallow in the bad. Make a friend, join a club, start a hobby, play an instrument, learn to sing, write a book, learn to code and make a video game. Do something worthwhile, so when you look back on the time, you don’t feel like the years were wasted, because that more than anything will Ruin the way you feel and live in your body and mind.

when you’re talking to family about this who are happy about it, focus on love. Focus on the value of human life, the value of charity and kindness, use language they’re going to understand. Don’t say crap like “he’s a greedy capitalist who’s gonna fund a war-“ say “I’m concerned that he talks a lot about Christian values but doesn’t actually care as much about charity and helping the poor as he does getting richer.”

Read the Bible. I don’t believe it matters if you’re not a Christian, you should still read it, and you should go into it with at least a little willingness to learn. It’s not misogynistic, it’s not racist, it’s not classist, and it’s very VERY anti-the capitalist system we use in America today. YES the church often supports those things today, WE KNOW. We’re fallen people in a fallible system with a cultural upbringing that sometimes conflicts with the Bible while insisting it doesn’t. Understanding the values and beliefs of the people this administration SAYS it supports will be helpful later, when it starts doing things directly against those values and beliefs. And, more important than any political ideology, I want you to read the Bible because it’s true. Whether you believe it or not, you are loved and valued by a God that is so much bigger than anything happening in this nation and nothing will ever compare to that knowledge. Certainly not a president.

(Don’t read the KJV, it’s got more mistranslations than Swiss cheese has holes, I personally like the NIV, but there are plenty of options. Find one translated by a woman. A good litmus test right in the beginning is if the creation story makes Eve sound barely important and a slave to Adam: if it does, you might have a scuffed translation. She’s made completely equal, and the word describing her translated as ‘helper’ is translated ‘warrior’ everywhere else.)

LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Hold onto what really matters, stick up for your disabled and minority friends and peers and don’t let their accommodations slip an inch further than you absolutely have to. Pray for one another if you do, even if none of your friends believe. It’s worth it more now than ever. Do not let despair turn you towards sin and hate and blank apathy, remain strong in the Lord if you’re a Christian and if you aren’t, the advice honestly still applies. Stick up for what is right. Work for what you believe in. Don’t let anger make you stupid or impulsive. Love those around you, even if your first impression leads you to think they don’t deserve it. In the end, this will pass, and you will live on with whoever you were over these four years. You, as you one single person, are more powerful to affect the future than this entire presidential administration, because you will be IN the future, and it will only be a paragraph in a textbook. Live like it, and love like it. I love you all, and I’m praying for you.

[mariacallous]

As an ex-Soviet myself, I am baffled by the renewed global fascination with autocracy. According to Freedom House, 8 out of 10 people now live in a partly free or not free country. In the United States, surveys show that a substantial number of people would support authoritarian rule and do not consider the decline of democratic institutions a mortal threat. In China, Russia, and elsewhere, the winds of change seem to be blowing in the wrong direction.

Given this shift, HBO’s miniseries The Regime, whose finale aired on April 7, could not have been timelier. With Emmy Award-winning Kate Winslet and Succession’s Will Tracy at the helm, along with all the trappings of prestige television, The Regime was poised to explore some of the 21st century’s heftiest political questions: the allure of demagogues, the slide into unfreedom and tribalism, and the mechanisms a society can employ to reverse this slide.

Instead, The Regime provides only vague winks to the tendencies of the world’s strongmen that fail to rise to the level of serious critique or analysis, deployed with a naivete that feels distinctly American.

Winslet stars as Elena Vernham, a middle-aged chancellor of an unnamed fictitious country in Central Europe who is obsessed with the black mold she believes is invading her palace. To fight it, she summons Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hunky army corporal from a province that grows sugar beets. Prior to his arrival at the palace, Herbert was thrust into the national limelight for his role in gunning down 12 protesters at one of the country’s cobalt mines, earning him a gruesome nickname: “The Butcher.”

Elena and Herbert quickly develop a Beauty and the Beast kind of attraction (postmodern, of course, with no clarity about who is the beast—capricious and delusional Elena or self-loathing, bullied-turned-bully Herbert). After a brief falling out, resolved by Herbert saving Elena from an assassin, the two begin to rule the palace through a Rasputin-style combination of hysterics and nativism.

For the next five episodes, we follow Herbert’s zigzagging ascent through Elena’s wobbling realm, from a walking humidity monitor to a trusted political advisor and lover. Herbert witnesses, engages in, or directs various antics that, according to the show’s description, depict a “modern authoritarian regime as it unravels.” Scenes include cabinet meetings that Elena conducts from an ice-filled tub and bizarre conversations with her dead father, preserved in a glass coffin in the palace’s basement. Herbert, a man of rural origins, caters to Elena’s paranoia by cleansing the palace’s supposedly poisonous air with the steam from boiled potatoes (a folk remedy popular in my Soviet childhood).

Of course, no leader can outrun geopolitics. The country’s rich cobalt reserves attract international interest, and after chasing out a deal that would have given the United States mining rights on the cheap, Elena cozies up to China, promising it a free trade deal and a cut of the mining profits. Together, Elena and Herbert then navigate their way through the illegal annexation of a sovereign neighbor, a half-baked flirtation with nationalization and land reform, and the sting of Western economic sanctions.

All this chaotic politicking unfolds against Elena’s droning on about love, which she constantly either bestows on or demands from her people. Ever the shrewd economist, Elena proclaims, “The American beast and its client states try to strangle us, but petty sanctions will always fail because our love cannot be sanctioned.” Having shipped her subservient, poetry-loving French husband, Nicky (Guillaume Gallienne), to Swiss exile, Elena, who has regained her sex drive, passionately makes up for lost time with Herbert—and fails to notice the unrest growing among her populace over the country’s economic downturn and crude handling of protests.

By the final episode—spoilers ahead—it seems that Elena’s ruling model is no match for revolution. She is chased out of the palace and must run for her life through a land it’s clear she knows nothing about, despite the “special connection” she often claims to have with its people. For once, someone in this world other than Herbert has managed to outmaneuver her delusions. But soon enough, Elena bends the knee to the very oligarchs she once vilified. A would-be coup is undone with the snap of a U.S.-backed finger.

“What was that all about?” Nicky asks his wife at the end of the show. He is offered no conclusive answer—and neither is the audience.

Tracy, who created the show, has compared The Regime to a dark fairy tale, which may explain Elena’s look—a cross between an aging Sleeping Beauty and Madonna’s Evita—and the glass coffin. One could also see it as a love story, in which two broken individuals find a semblance of happiness by tormenting each other in their own make-believe reality. It may even be a dark comedy, as HBO describes it, if one can have comedy without a single funny joke. (Her cabinet member’s quip, “His profits are fucked like a spring donkey,” is certainly rude, but rudeness isn’t necessarily funny.)

One thing the show isn’t is satire. For that to be true, it would actually have to satirize something. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels derided the rigid mores of 18th-century England. Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin poked fun at the brutality and hypocrisy of Joseph Stalin’s flunkies in the postwar Soviet Union. Making Elena’s regime a pastiche of autocracies was a fatal choice because those regimes are products of their unique, often brutal environments. Because the show nods to a little bit of everything, it takes aim at nothing.

Instead of real people, The Regime offers us walking cliches: a delusional woman with hot flashes and daddy issues; cowering and corrupt ministers; greedy Americans pining for other nations’ resources; the dull, kerchiefed masses who look like props recycled from last century’s movie sets. It’s not that we can’t care for bad people. We did for the Roys in Succession because they were nuanced characters, at once tragic and funny, with clear agendas that drove the plot. But The Regime’s characters feel generic, simply dropped into the set, stirring no feelings from the viewer, sympathetic or otherwise. The only character with an identifiable interest is the U.S. senator, Judith Holt (Martha Plimpton), who just wants the country’s cobalt. The rest merely float through the episodes, as though searching for a good scene to act out but coming up blank.

This is a shame because the show has no lack of talent. Winslet does her best with the material she is given, but there isn’t much she can do with lines such as, “I like a bit of spice. Spice is nice,” in reference to Herbert’s “spicy” dreams. She has no real antagonists, no articulated desires, and no emotions. Viewers are left to blink at the screen, admiring her outfits and waiting for something substantive to happen.

Schoenaerts, who plays Herbert, is more plausible, if cliched: a tortured warrior prepared to kill—and die—for love. Andrea Riseborough, playing Agnes, the palace manager, is less lucky. Having shined as Stalin’s daughter in The Death of Stalin, here she is reduced to a brittle, peacoat-wearing loyalist who has an unexplained co-parenting arrangement with Elena and yields her maternal rights the moment Elena demands it. Her epileptic son doesn’t seem to mind, as long as he gets new toys. Hugh Grant as Edward Keplinger, the country’s imprisoned opposition leader, is charming, but his cameo feels like a checkmark on the celebrity cast list. With his carpeted cell, steady supply of sausages, and access to the prison’s keys, Grant’s performance lacks the gravitas that the suffering of real imprisoned political figures, including the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, deserves.

And then there is Mr. Laskin (Danny Webb), the head of Elena’s security service. In real dictatorships, the requirements of this job are gruesome and attract rather monstrous personalities—think Lavrentiy Beria of the Soviet Union or Heinrich Himmler of Nazi Germany, both of whom orchestrated horrendous mass murders. Yet in The Regime, Laskin speaks politely about his duty to his country and that he “believes in a principle, the legal transition of power.” Unlike in a real dictatorial regime, we see no blood on his hands. There’s a difference between a temporary suspension of disbelief, which viewers will happily grant, and constantly being asked to accept improbable things.

Herein lies The Regime’s fundamental problem: It fumbles what seems to be the primary point of the show—the portrayal of autocracy. The issue with autocrats is not that they’re narcissists who force others to listen to their off-key singing, as Elena does at seemingly every banquet and celebration she can, but that they are ready to sacrifice millions of people to their delusions. Their subjects, including their inner circle, live in constant fear because the autocrat’s government and law enforcement apparatuses are weaponized and can be turned against them at any moment.

But there is no fear in Elena’s kingdom. Her out-of-grace oligarch is not dispossessed and jailed but simply ordered to clean up chairs at a press conference. Her ministers plot for her downfall in a downstairs bar before mockingly denying her a seat on the rescue helicopter. The rebels take the palace in a span of an episode. (If only real dictators were toppled that easily!) The Regime makes Elena look stupid and pathetic. We do not flee from her in terror; we shrug her off.

Despite her European aesthetics, the portrayal of Elena as a ruler reflects an undeniably American attitude toward autocracy. Even after four years of a Donald Trump presidency, many Americans still don’t take his threats seriously, unable to believe that his cartoonish personality and ineptitude could translate into a real assault on their democratic rights and liberties. With the memory of World War II fading away, others may simply underestimate the difference between living in a free society and living under tyranny.

At some level, plenty of Americans may even hanker for a strongman because he offers simple solutions to complex problems, blind to the fact that—like Elena—he is animated not by public service but by his own vanity, enrichment, and survival and occasionally those of his cronies.

As a creative project, The Regime is free to be whatever it wants to be—a fairy tale, a dark comedy, a saga of human vices. But any serious work of art must be about something, some pressing aspect of human existence, and should be evaluated on those terms. What, then, is The Regime’s message? That love is an exchange of perversions? That the United States is a colonizer propping up authoritarian regimes because it wants their assets? That nothing ever changes and we should resign ourselves to endless inevitable iterations of the narcissist-in-chief?

Cynicism doesn’t win battles—or make for very good television. Perhaps HBO’s next meditation on authoritarianism will give us substance on the topic rather than winks.

[random-thought-depository]

""Moreover, it turns out that the United States is not all that tightfisted when it comes to social spending. “If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s,” Desmond tells us. Why doesn’t this largesse accomplish more?

For one thing, it unduly assists the affluent. That statistic about the U.S. spending almost as much as France on social welfare, he explains, is accurate only “if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line.” To enjoy most of these, you need to have a well-paying job, a home that you own, and probably an accountant (and, if you’re really in clover, a money manager).

“The American government gives the most help to those who need it least,” Desmond argues. “This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.” Americans who benefit from social spending in the form of, say, a mortgage-interest tax deduction don’t see themselves as recipients of governmental generosity. The boon it offers them may be as hard for them to recognize and acknowledge as the persistence of poverty once was to Harrington’s suburban housewives and professional men. These Americans may be anti-government and vote that way. They may picture other people, poor people, as weak and dependent and themselves as hardworking and upstanding. Desmond allows that one reason for this is that tax breaks don’t feel the same as direct payments. Although they may amount to the same thing for household incomes and for the federal budget—“You can benefit a family by lowering its tax burden or by increasing its benefits, same difference”—they are associated with an obligation and a procedure that Americans, in particular, find onerous. Tax-cutting Republican lawmakers want the process to be both difficult and Swiss-cheesed with loopholes. (“Taxes should hurt,” Ronald Reagan once said.) But that’s not the only reason. What Desmond calls the “rudest explanation” is that if, for whatever reason, we get a tax break, most of us like it. That’s the case for people affluent and lucky enough to take advantage of the legitimate breaks designed for their benefit, and for the wily super-rich who game the system with expensive lawyering and ingenious use of tax shelters.

And there are other ways, Desmond points out, that government help gets thwarted or misdirected. When President Clinton instituted welfare reform, in 1996, pledging to “transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence,” an older model, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or A.F.D.C., was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. Where most funds administered by A.F.D.C. went straight to families in the form of cash aid, TANF gave grants to states with the added directive to promote two-parent families and discourage out-of-wedlock childbirth, and let the states fund programs to achieve those goals as they saw fit. As a result, “states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars,” Desmond writes. “Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.” Between 1999 and 2016, Oklahoma directed more than seventy million dollars toward initiatives to promote marriage, offering couples counselling and workshops that were mostly open to people of all income levels. Arizona used some of the funds to pay for abstinence education; Pennsylvania gave some of its TANF money to anti-abortion programs. Mississippi treated its TANF funds as an unexpected Christmas present, hiring a Christian-rock singer to perform at concerts, for instance, and a former professional wrestler—the author of an autobiography titled “Every Man Has His Price”—to deliver inspirational speeches. (Much of this was revealed by assiduous investigative reporters, and by a 2020 audit of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services.) Moreover, because states don’t have to spend all their TANF funds each year, many carry over big sums. In 2020, Tennessee, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the nation, left seven hundred and ninety million dollars in TANF funds unspent."

- The New Yorker: "How America Manufactures Poverty" by Margaret Talbot (review of Matthew Desmond's Poverty by America).