"Christianity is stupid! Communism is good!": IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU, WHAT WILL HORSES DO?

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)
Directed by Ron Ormond
Based on the writings of Estus W. Pirkle
Starring Judy Creech, Cecil Scaife, and Gene McFall

While Ron Ormond might not be as famous as Ed Wood or Herschell Gordon Lewis, he occupies a very curious place among schlock auteurs. A hacky B-movie director in the 50s, Mr. Ormond found religion and decided to devote his "talents", such as they were to spreading the word of Jesus Christ, specifically as preached by Reverend Estus W. Pirkle. Of course, Ormond's talents did not improve despite his conversion, and, in conjunction with the very "fire and brimstone" preachings of Reverend Pirkle, produced some very odd movies aimed at the religious "market", to be shown on 16mm projectors at churches. The best way to describe If Footmen Tire You, is to imagine if Red Dawn were being done as a Christmas pageant by your local Baptist church, and the whole thing were directed by Ed Wood.

The first thing that might strike the viewer as odd is the year given as the release date: 1971. But with the exception of brief mentions of inner-city riots and campus protests (and one hilariously out-of-touch "sex education" scene), this might as well be a colorized version of INVASION USA (the 1952 propaganda film, not the 1985 Chuck Norris action film). Most of Pirkle's broadsides against youth culture are so vague, and Ormond's dramatizations so clueless, that they could be criticizing beatniks or rockers in the 1950s. And the gore effects (and yes, there are gore effects) could have come out of BLOOD FEAST... caro syrup drenched over "dead" people who are clearly still breathing.

The story, as much as there is one, is that Reverend Pirkle is giving a sermon to his flock one Sunday. Judy (played by Judy Creech), a rebellious teenager, comes to mass and realizes that her dead mother was right about believing in Jesus. And every so often, Ormond cuts away to dramatize Pirkle's vision of Communist-controlled America.

If this film has any cultural currency outside of a select film buff community, it is as the source of the sample for experimental rock group Negativland's track "Christianity is Stupid" (which is also the source of the post title). There is something absurdly thrilling about hearing a Southern Baptist preacher, in stentorian tones, yelling, "Christianity is stupid! Communism is good!" over and over again. And, if this movie has any value beyond historical footnote to Christian pop culture & exploitation cinema, it is the absurdity of a evangelical sermon that tries to scare the congregation with misunderstood facts and half-remembered anecdotes about the counter-culture and Communist countries.

On the most basic level, the movie fails because its image of a Communist take-over and its consequences are so absurd. While Pirkle, at several points, buttresses his arguments with claims that these events are inspired by true events that happened in Russia, China, and Vietnam, but without understanding the context or widespread nature of these events. Pirkle only talks about Christian persecution, but he doesn't say anything about the state-sanctioned persecution of other religious minorities, ethnic minorities, intellectuals, artists or business owners, or the starvation of millions of peasants in the name of industrialization.

Furthermore, Pirkle's vision of a Communist take-over, while barely believable in 1952, is absurd in 1971. He shies away from specifics, but the few hints he drops are big enough whoppers. He anticipates a 5th Column-esque takeover, claiming that within 15 minutes of a signal, a legion of shadowy Communists will murder the President, Congress and most state governors. Even Joseph McCarthy would have blanched at that claim!

Remember, this movie was released seven (!) years after DOCTOR STRANGELOVE,  but there is no discussion of a nuclear war of any extent. Pirkle envisions a Fifth Column takeover, which results in total subjugation of the U.S. by Communist Cuba!

That's right, not China, not Russia.

Cuba.

If Ormond was a good director, this movie would be offensive. But since he's a schlock auteur, it's hilarious.

Except for the occasional Pirkle whopper, the sermonizing is pretty static and dull. Even the extras playing congregation, which one would assume might include members of Pirkle's own congregation, look bored and on the verge of yawning throughout the film.

Where the film comes alive is in the flashbacks to Judy's (inoffensively) rebellious life and the flash-forwards (or visualizations) of the aftermath of the Communist takeover. Judy's scenes with her mother and un-named boyfriend are hilarious: watching Judy & her mother woodenly over-emote in each other's general direction as they deliver awkward dialogue is a delight, as is Ormond's depiction of Judy's whitebread rebellion, as she and Mr. Boyfriend drink beer and smoke cigarettes!'

But even better than that are the torments the Communists devise. They sound pretty gruesome:

- Soldiers sticking nails through the ears of children;
- Soldiers forcing children to lower their father onto a series of rakes stuck into the ground;
- A boy getting his head chopped off with a machete after refusing to step on a picture of Jesus.

But when all the depictions are as inept as the one below...


Next they made him wear a headband with an arrow on other side.

Well, you can't help but laugh.

Adding to the hilarious incompetence is the fact that all the Communists wear costumes that were made by a high school theatre department that can't do a hammer-and-sickle, while the actors playing the Commisar (Cecil Scaife) and the Deputy Commisar (Gene McFall) seesaw between a broad Russian accent and a Deep Southern accent, sometimes within the same word!


Oh, and the Commisar looks like he should be coaching the Sweathogs.


If you're someone who actually suffered under Soviet totalitarianism, this movie would make you want to pound nails into the makers' eardrums. But if you think evangelical Christianity and fear-mongering are absurd, well, this movie might prove rewarding.

The past is a foreign country...

I recently watched the two hour pilot of Showtime's The Borgias (I know, welcome to 2010, Mr. K) and the first two episodes of Roberto Rossellini's Age of The Medicis, which was produced as a three part miniseries on Italian television in the 1970s.

Both shows dealing with politics in the Italian Renaissance, both helmed by talented directors (Neil Jordan serving as the show-runner for the Borgias, as well as director for the pilot), and the two could not be more dissimilar.

The Borgias wavers somewhere between crime drama and sumptuous, sexy costume melodrama. It certainly has its moments (Irons is a little uneven, but he plays Pope Alexander as a charismatic, corrupt man who is utterly sincere about his belief in the power of the Church and God), but, as my Lovely Girlfriend put it, "well, at least during the boring parts, there's something pretty on screen to look at."

Which definitely sums up the aesthetic of The Borgias. Lots of beautiful naked bodies, lots of beautiful clothing, artwork and architecture, plus lots of sex and blood (which is usually deployed in beautiful ways). But also frequently boring.

And while it's never easy to figure out how accurately a pilot represents the rest of a series, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that The Borgias is going to totally do away with the Bloody Sexy History. What's most disappointing about the approach is the way that it just sort of flattens the lechery, venery and blood-lust, when it's all sex and violence, all the time.

In contrast, Rossellini's Age of the Medicis is a much more austere and glacially paced production. Rossellini's favorite device is to stage scenes like tableaus out of Renaissance artwork, with the actors merely an element of mise en scene. Unlike The Borgias, where everyone is usually manipulating or murdering or making love, but rarely working, the majority of the action in Age of the Medicis takes place while people are going about their daily work.

Even as Cosimo de Medici is making his triumphant return into Florence, for example, someone still has to go down to the local pawn shop and redeem his supporters' goods from the pawnbrokers. At one point, the Weaver's Guild commissions an assassin to do away with someone in a nearby town who is infringing on their patents. But that only happens after a scene where they analyze what production technique is being used, who had patented it, examining the recordbooks to see who could have passed along the information, etc.

The Age of the Medicis often feels closer in kinship to one of Peter Watkins "You Are There"-style faux-documentaries, where he approaches hypothetical or historical situations with the austerity and impartiality of a modern-day documentary film-maker.

That's not to say The Age of the Medicis doesn't have beauty. Rossellini's Florence is less ornate than Jordan's Rome, but Rossellini has a better eye for detail in the positioning of groups of actors, the atmosphere of their settings, and he is more adventuresome with his camera, sending it roving through a workshop, or panning across the various factions attending a funeral.

Perhaps the one aspect in which The Age of the Medicis suffers compares to The Borgias is, oddly enough, in its treatment of the female characters. The Borgias' female characters are not given as much to do or as much depth as the male characters, and too much of their characterization depends on their sexual desires. But women are really only extras or bit players in The Age of the Medicis. My guess is that, given that Rossellini's script seems heavily based on primary sources and focused on day-to-day business, it's bias towards the masculine sphere is understandable. At the same time, given the effort put into portraying not only the power-brokers but also the common men and bourgeois, it is disappointing.

Religion in the Marvel and DC universes

So, the wonderful and talented Wizera has decided to enter the internet blogosphere, and her post about modern-day depictions of the Olympian underworld as a Hell-equivalent reminded me of how weird the Marvel and DC universes are, where religion is concerned.

For example, in the Marvel universe, you've got the Norse and Greek pantheons, who have their own afterlives (Hel running Valhalla, Pluto running the Olympian underworld) and own special cosmology. At the same time, there is also a group called the Eternals who are clearly the basis of many of the Marvel universe's legends (and, by extension, ours) who were created by a group of alien intelligences called the Celestials who exist on a cosmological plane with a lot of other vague cosmically powered beings such as the In-Betweener, the Beyonder, the Watcher, and Galactus.*

See, he's a Norse demi-god fighting the forces of Hell with a machine gun. 

Makes perfect sense, right?

On top of that, there are various supernatural planes, deities and forces such as Nightmare, Dormamu, Cyttorak (which is a dimension as well as a god, I believe), and the Darkforce/Living Light duality. These have frequently been shown as capable of interacting with both the mythological gods and the cosmic forces.

And there is still a Judeo-Christian cosmology and afterlife, since, for example, Doctor Doom's mother is a gypsy trapped in Hell who he frequently tried to rescue**. These afterlives might co-exist/be the same aspect of the occasional place-holder concepts meant to avoid literally saying the words Hell and/or God, etc in a mainstream publication aimed at kids. So, therefore, you have characters like Mephisto (who is clearly the Devil) at the same time as having a character whose name is Son of Satan who is the son of the actual (Judeo-Christian) Satan.***

Bet you didn't know you could defeat the Devil if you just combined science & sorcery!

Now, this kind of confusion is not intentional. A lot of the problem goes back to the fact, originally, that a lot of these comics were written in an age where Judeo-Christianity was assumed to be practiced by most people in America WHILE, at the same time, it was considered offensive or improper for low culture especially to name or reference religion. And more importantly, a lot of these characters were supposed to be aimed at kids or teenagers, and very few people want a young person's religious education to be from a SILVER SURFER comic (though whether their normal religious education is actually any better thought out or put-together than a given SILVER SURFER comic is a question rarely asked.)

See, you can trust him because he's definitely not the Devil. Definitely not.

But around the end of the 1960s/beginning of the 1970s, some writers and artists started wanting to explore the morality of comics with some level of complexity. At the same time, the Comics Code Authority started lifting some of the bans they'd had on supernatural characters, which led creators to stretch their boundaries some more.

At the same time, however, comic fans had matured. They'd grown up with characters who got their powers from Heck or fought the powers of Hades. And while they wanted to see their characters get more complex, the morality of the characters get more nuanced and adult, they also believed in the sanctity of the stories that came before.

So, while still toeing a Judeo-Christian line (as that's the ethic that pervades Western superhero comics, so that even Supergirl, after being erased by a cosmic meta-fictional entity, could show up and tell a ghost created by a pseudo-Hindu god what the meaning of Christmas was...)

 They really couldn't have timed this for Makar Sankrati instead?

Both DC and Marvel have quietly become polytheistic universes, without quite admitting or understanding it. It's like how pagan gods got co-opted by early Catholics, transformed into non-canonical saints and martyrs, or how even real saints took the place of sprites/demons/fairies/household gods in the minds of the medieval peasantry.

But hey, as a result, we can have comics where a magician gets almost killed by Satan's bastard son and then learns the secrets of the Druids from some Tibetan lamas.  So there's that.

* OTOH, Galactus was supposed to be from some sort of higher plane of existence, which was destroyed by entropy, and was transformed by the shift in planes. So he actually does have a start and end date, being co-terminal with the Marvel universe instead of preceding it. And if any of you have ever read anything of Medieval philosophy and theology, you know why that's a big deal.
** For those of you new to this aspect of Dr. Doom, his mother ending up in hell had more to do with an actual deal with the devil rather than some sort of high-handed "how dare you not go to the right church" kind of thing.
*** Yes. He was a superhero in spandex and a cape, who fought evil with powers he got from being the son of the Devil. Which has to be the worst superhero origin story ever.

Because Eve Tushnet always has such interesting posts...

Eve challenged her readers to think of Christian films and atheist films for hypothetical film festivals. Apparently, it's been easier for her readers to think of atheist films than Christian ones.

For the purpose of this post, she's talking about films that represent those worldviews, not necessarily films made by Christians or atheists.

Christian films

The Trial of Joan of Arc (d. Robert Bresson) - Not just because the subject is Joan, but because Bresson is focused on the suffering and humility of Joan, even her very human weaknesses, and her faith enables her to endure and transfigure those elements of her life. That transfiguration is the miracle we see in the film, not some fantastic magic trick (which is how film usually defines them).

Love Exposure (d. Shion Sono) - Actually, this film can probably be interpreted multiple ways. And while there is a fair amount anti-religious material here, it's notable that the worst behavior is of people who turn religion to their purposes. The hypocrites and those without humility are those that cause the most suffering, and it is love (both secular & religious) that gives the male protagonist the strength to struggle on against a world that is turned against him. It's also about the way that outcasts can find fellowship & express Christian brotherhood for each other. I'd love to see Eve's reaction to all the complex & weird ideas about religion, love, gender & sexual orientation that overflow this film.

Terri (d. Azazel Jacobs) - This film, focusing on an intelligent, perceptive but troubled boy & his attempts to reach out to the world, deals with the injustice and pain of engaging with a flawed world and the broken, foolish people who inhabit it. Despite all the heartache and pain that engagement brings, the movie shows us the need to reach out to our fellow sufferers and sinners, since only that outreach can shape our suffering and pain into something better.

That's all that I can think of, off the top of my head, at the moment. But there are two relatively recent films and one older film that promote a Christian humanist worldview, to balance out all those despairing films Tushnet & her readers have thought of so far.

"Woyzeck" (Vesturport Theatre) at Brooklyn Academy of Music

If I made it to heaven, I'd have to help out with the thunder. "Woyzeck" by Georg Buchner

So I wanted to visit friends in NYC and I decided to schedule it around the production of "Woyzeck" playing for one weekend at the BAM, because Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (not the comic book writer but the violinist behind the Dirty Three and a member of the Bad Seeds) had written original music for it.  I'd already seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform live within the past month, but I figured that this music was unlikely to be recorded any time soon and wanted to see how it would fit into the context of the play. 

First, a caveat: its been a while since I've read "Woyzeck", so I remember the broad plot and the fact that Buchner never finished the play before he died (or at least, there is no "finished" version of the play) and so different productions will rearrange the scenes in different orders.

For those of you unfamiliar with the play, Woyzeck is a poor soldier who supports his lover Marie by participating in strange medical experiments. Marie has an affair with the Drum Major in his unit and Woyzeck kills her over it.

The story sounds like it should be the basis for a Nick Cave song anyhow (like "Where the Wild Roses Grow"), so I figured it would be a good fit. And it was. The four or so songs that showed up in the piece were a brilliant mix of absurdity and emotion, whether an off-key Tin Pan Alley love song Woyzeck warbled for Marie (underlining his instability and insecurity) or the swaggering blues rock of the Drum Major's entrance (that has him bragging about being six foot seven in bare feet!), the songs made sense of a play that sits on the razor's edge between Dreiser and Beckett. And the cast had some good (or at least appropriate to the character and song) voices. The Drum Major (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) occasionally ventured into the territory of bad heavy metal vocalists, but otherwise could have been a (non-annoying) Broadway singer.

Unfortunately, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' music really only shows up in the first half.  And the show only clicks when everyone is singing. Because (oh god!) this play was directed by a pretentious European director with A (cough*bullshit*cough) CONCEPT.  There is nothing more dangerous in the world of theatre than a director with a bit of acclaim and A (cough*bullshit*cough) CONCEPT.

See, Gisli Orn Gardarsson decided to set his production of "Woyzeck" at a water factory that looks like a cross between playground equipment and the Nostromo in Alien. Oh, and there are also water tanks that the actors will swim in, like people would if they were making drinking water.  And a trapeze and a climbing rope, just like in all water factories. The design is well-executed, but I never felt that this set, even in the abstract, was a place where people worked. It was a cool-looking place that the actors could do circus tricks on.

You know, I am breaking my "No Snark" vow, but geez, High Concept directors must be stopped!

Moment of fairness: water is talked about a lot in "Woyzeck". But except for a bit of inconsistently altered dialogue (Herr Gardarsson also "adapted" the script), three vague lines in the director's notes and the water tanks to play in, there wasn't a sense that the water factory itself was that important to the world of the play that Herr Gardarsson conceived.  It could have been any factory or any physical labor site or even the army.  So perhaps someone could still do a water factory "Woyzeck" that would work, but it would at least have to use the concept to inform the actual play.

Unfortunately, there were no performances that suggested even that charitable view. Every character spoke/shout (in English) in the exact same inflection. In all fairness, I'm not sure if it was the fault of acting in the performers' non-native language or a directorial choice, but I will say that when they sang, the performers seemed to use the proper kind of phrasing you would expect from an American pop song. I was sitting in the balcony, so I might have missed some physical subtlety, except the default setting for physicality was clumsy slapstick. Woyzeck (Ingvar E. Sigurdson) pissed on the Doctor's face (Harpa Arnarsdottir), the Captain (Vikingur Kristjansson) tried to rape the Doctor, etc. (In retrospect, a lot of brutality was visited on the Doctor, played by a woman, in a way that is not borne out by the play. It had no place in the play and it added undertones of misogyny where none existed before.) "Woyzeck" is not a comedy, but if it must be, it shouldn't feel like one of those sub-Three Stooges comedies that PRC films cranked out by the dozens in the 1940s.

These are just the major issues that struck me during the play. It is hard to believe that this company performed a critically acclaimed Romeo and Juliet at the RSC and in New York!

The one thing I will give this awful production is that it illuminated a religious side of "Woyzeck".  The frequent references to water, the Captain's bourgeois discussion of morality, Woyzeck's disbelief that sin should leave no mark on Marie's face, and the quote that starts this post seemed increasingly significant in this tonally dissonant piece where finding a director's meaning was like reading a hack detective novel missing half the pages. I thought that "Woyzeck" focused on the dehumanizing ways of the modern world in the manner of Georg Kaiser or Arthur Schniztler. But in my state of alienation, it seemed to represent the dehumanization of the poor in a world where bourgeois conceptions of religion consider morality to rely on money.  Thus the Captain can say Woyzeck is good but not "moral", the Doctor can conduct cruel and manipulative experiments on him, and the Drum Major can take his wife with no consequences. Woyzeck is without friends to help him (Andres is merely a gossip, Marie is his betrayer, the other men watched the Drum Major beat him without helping) and there is no chaplain or priest to offer comfort. As such, he can only commit a brutal murder against the one person less powerful than him. 

I'd need to read the play again to verify if this could be a valid interpretation. But other than Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' compositions, it was the one interesting thing I took from the evening.

Jesus was no zombie, God was no necromancer

Okay, I have no idea if anyone finds my MBotF liveblogging interesting, but this post is just using that as a starting point. So bear with me and I'll be in broader territory soon enough...

Right now in Toll the Hounds, there is a lot of to do over a newly created God called the Redeemer. A few books back, a human soldier basically took all the sins of one of the undead demihuman races upon himself, died in the process and was reborn as a good.

However, since this is a fantasy novel, filled with cruel, distant, vengeful, whimsical or semi-retired gods, some of the characters are wondering what sort of god takes all his followers' burdens upon himself without demanding anything of them.

This is a weird development, since the universe these characters exist in is unrelentingly pagan in outlook. A few people get a pleasant afterlife, but a lot of them (including some of our heroes) end up as ghosts, or chained to an endless rolling wagon pulled by the souls of the dead or utterly annihilated from existence (even in a metaphysical sense). Just like the tragedy of King Lear is worsened by the fact that, in pagan England, Lear and Cordelia won't even face a better fate in the afterlife, so much of the death and destruction in the Malazan Book of the Fallen becomes more powerful. 

This is also a strange step because when I think of sword and sorcery or epic fantasy, there is either no religion or a bunch of pagan religions that might superficially resemble modern day faiths (but only superficially).

I wonder how much of this is down to the influence of Tolkien. After all, despite his deeply held faith, he refused to inject Christianity into Lord of the Rings (or at least overtly). Contrast this to C.S. Lewis, his contemporary and sometimes friend, who has Santa Claus show up in Narnia to accompany Thundercats Jesus. [I'm sorry, I think Lewis is a enjoyable writer and I have fond memories of the Narnia Chronicles, but only a child would find Aslan a subtle stand-in for Jesus].

I'm also sure that some of this is fallout from the 80s, when anything that smacked of darkness and magic (heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons) was accused of satanism. I doubt that it was only religious parents that felt this way (even some agnostic or mildly religious families probably thought Ozzy Osbourne and Gary Gygax were encouraging suicide or the occult) but you merely have to surf the RPG blogosphere for five minutes to hear stories about church ladies taking Keep on the Shadowfell away from high schoolers. And as for metal (or punk or anything that wasn't "She Loves You") ...just watch a couple Behind the Music segments on Ozzy or Judas Priest, or listen to Jello Biafra's monologues on the PMRC.

I think it's pretty apparent that people suffered scorn from other sources than adults (parents, church leaders, teachers) for their hobbies, but bullies or girlfriends or peers can't actively keep you from playing a game/reading/listening to music. I also think that this is why so many people involved in speculative fiction or RPGs or alternative/metal/punk are dismissive of religion in general. Their development as adults and fights for independence are tied up in what they see as a struggle against religion. There's nothing like over-bearing, un-Christianlike Christians for creating overbearing, contemptous atheists/agnostics (and vice versa, I'm sure). 

And frankly, I think it has hurt both sides, poisoning discussion, turning bright and creative people against their faiths, and depriving lonely and misunderstood people of a place that is supposed to be a shelter for the lonely and misunderstood. 

I know I didn't feel the sting of this so much, personally. I didn't get into RPGs until college and my parents were fine with me checking out whatever books I wanted from the adult section at the age of 10 (including Stranger in a Strange Land). I have had conversations about the music I listen to and (weirdly enough) the Simpsons, but they've usually worked out well. *

It probably also helped that I was Catholic and our church (i.e. St. Francis of Assisi in NC) was not obsessed with the Bible as a literal Word of God.  I get the impression that all the Evangelical churches that obsess about the Earth being created in six days forget the fact that the Bible is full of metaphors, allegories and parables. 

More later, probably...

*I still remember getting Nas' Hip Hop is Dead and Sweeney Todd: The Original Cast Recording when I was home for Christmas a year ago. I was listening to Nas in my old bedrom when my mother came in to ask me something. She immediately said something along the lines of, "I can't believe you like that". I put in Sweeney Todd and she was fine with that.  Once again, Nas album about rap moving beyond drugs, violence and acquisitiveness = no. Musical about cannibalism, murder, and rape that suggests the world as a charnel house untouched by God = yes. The medium is the message, I guess.